Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Rape
RAPE
A Love Story
Joyce Carol Oates, a National Book Award winner, is the author of numerous works of fiction including
We Were the Mulvaneys
which was an Oprah Book Club Choice and
Blonde
which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her books have been translated into many languages and her short stories widely anthologized. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.
Praise for RAPE
A Love Story
âAn extraordinary writer⦠she should be widely read: she writes about violence in a way that can make Michael Moore seem a hit-and-miss buffoon. Her writing is dainty yet macho â it won't allow you to smile. And she never misses her targetsâ¦
Rape: A Love Story
, is as powerful as anything she has produced. It is written with contained fury, fiction in the service of polemic⦠Right from the start, the narrative is skilfully interlaced with its ugly aftermath⦠but the author's way of developing the story is anything but usual⦠a remarkable book⦠She is interested in the difference a single day, or a single violent night, may make.' Kate Kellaway,
Observer
âJoyce Carol Oates continues her remarkable investigation into America's emotional landscape⦠Each of the brief chapters is a kind of detonation⦠Only when you have finished the novel do you realize quite what Oates has reached for and achieved. The effect is troubling and remarkable.' Lavinia Greenlaw,
Daily Telegraph
âA brutal distillation of Oates's obsessions⦠The characteristically interrupted rhythms of her prose, inflected by a fiercely controlled lyricism, are refined to a point of rebarbative perfection.' Jonathan Derbyshire,
Financial Times
âOates's drip-drip feed of chilling information is perfectly balanced between revelation and suggestion⦠With her characters Bethie and Teena, Oates illustrates how such a traumatic event can change lives forever and how the effects of a crime like this radiate from the central victim to affect everyone involved.' Edel Coffey,
Sunday Tribune
âAn important book⦠all men should read it.' Lewis DeSoto,
Literary Review
âThe title⦠is as simple and as shocking as the story itself⦠As with Lionel Shriver's Orange Prize-winning
We Need to Talk About Kevin
, it seems tailor-made to trigger debate and fuel book group discussions.' Natasha Tripney,
New Statesman
âOates at her darkly enthralling best.' Andrew Ervin,
New York Times Book Review
First published in the United States in 2003 by
Carroll and Graf, an imprint of the Avalon
Publishing Group Inc.
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2005 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
This paperback edition published by
Atlantic Books in 2006.
Copyright © Joyce Carol Oates 2003
The moral right of Joyce Carol Oates to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
1 84354 413 X
eISBN: 9781782395256
Printed in { } by { }
Atlantic Books
An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd
Ormond House
26â27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
Contents
“That Girl, Teena Maguire's Daughter”
RAPE
A Love Story
Part I
She Had It Coming
A
FTER SHE WAS GANG
-
RAPED
, kicked and beaten and left to die on the floor of the filthy boathouse at Rocky Point Park. After she was dragged into the boathouse by the five drunken guysâunless there were six, or sevenâand her twelve-year-old daughter with her screaming
Let us go! Don't hurt us! Please don't hurt us!
After she'd been chased by the guys like a pack of dogs jumping their prey, turning her ankle, losing both her high-heeled sandals on the path beside the lagoon. After she'd begged them to leave her daughter alone and they'd laughed at her. After she'd made the decision, Christ knows what she was thinking, to cross through Rocky Point Park instead of taking the longer way around, to home. To where she was living with her daughter in a rented row house on Ninth Street around the corner from her mother's brick house on Baltic Avenue. Ninth Street was lighted and populated even at this late hour. Rocky Point Park was mostly deserted at this late hour. Crossing the park along the lagoon, a scrubby overgrown path. Saving ten minutes, maybe. Thinking it would be nice to cross through the park, moonlight on the lagoon, no
matter the lagoon is scummy and littered with beer cans, food wrappers, butts. Making that decision, a split second out of an entire life and the life is altered forever. Along the lagoon, past the old waterworks boarded up and covered in graffiti for years, and the boathouse that's been broken into, vandalized by kids. After she'd recognized their faces, might even have smiled at them, it's Fourth of July, fireworks at the Falls, firecrackers, car horns and whistles, the high school baseball game, festive atmosphere. Yes she might've smiled at them, and so she was asking for it. Might've been an edgy, nervous smile the way you'd smile at a snarling dog, still she smiled, that lipstick smile of Teena Maguire's, and that hair of hers. She had it coming, she was asking for it. Guys who'd been drifting around the park for hours looking for trouble. Looking for some fun. Drinking beer and tossing cans into the lagoon and all the firecrackers they had, they'd set off. Throwing firecrackers at cars, at dogs, at swans and geese and mallards on the lagoon sleeping with their heads neat-tucked beneath their wings, Christ! It's hilarious to see the water-fowl wake up fast and squawk like they're being killed and flap their wings like crazy flying away, even the fat ones. The AllâNiagara Falls High School game went into extra innings, now the brightly lit baseball field was darkened, bleachers emptied, most of the crowd gone. Except these drifting packs of guys. The youngest just kids, the oldest in their late twenties. Neighborhood guys whose faces Teena Maguire would know, maybe not their given names but their family names, as the guys knew her, at least recognized her from the neighborhood though she was older than they were, calling out
Hey! Hey there! Mmmm, good-lookin'! Hey foxy lady, whereya goin'?
After she'd smiled at them not slackening her pace. After she'd reached for her daughter's arm like her daughter was a small child and not twelve years old.
Show us how your titties bounce, foxy lady! Heyheyhey whereya goin'?
After she'd gotten herself trapped. After she'd teased them. Provoked them. Bad judgment. Must've been drinking. The way she was dressed. The way Teena Maguire often dressed. Summer nights, especially. Partying over on Depew Street. Party spilling out onto the street. Loud rock music. That kind of behavior, she had it coming. Where's her husband? Doesn't that woman have a husband? What the hell is she doing out alone with her twelve-year-old daughter, in Rocky Point Park at midnight? Endangering the safety of a minor? Endangering the morals of a minor? Look: Teena Maguire probably was having a few beers with the guys. Smoking dope with the guys. Maybe she was hinting at something she'd like to be paid for? In cash, or in dope. A woman like that, thirty-five years old and dressed like a teenager. Tank top, denim cutoffs, shaggy bleached-blond hair frizzed around her face. Bare legs, high-heeled sandals? Tight sexy clothes showing her breasts, her ass, what's she expect? Midnight of July Fourth, fireworks at the Falls ended at eleven. Still there's partying all over the city. How much beer has been consumed in Niagara Falls tonight by residents and visitors? Better believe it's a lot. Like, the volume of water rushing over the Horseshoe Falls in a minute! And there's Teena Maguire, drunk on her feet, witnesses would report. One of her boyfriends, guy named Casey over on Depew, a
keg party at his place spilling out into the backyard and street and neighbors complaining, wild weird bluegrass music Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder for hours. This Casey, he's a welder at Niagara Pipe. He's married and has four kids. Separated from his wife, must be Teena Maguire's doing. That woman! What kind of a mother would drag her young daughter with her to a drunken party and then on foot through Rocky Point Park at that hour, what kind of poor judgment, she's lucky it wasn't worse what happened to her, and what happened to the girl, couldn've been a lot worse if they'd been black men, coked-up niggers invading the park it would've been a hell of a lot worse, the woman had to be drunk, high on coke herself, partying since early evening and by midnight you can figure the state she was in, how the hell could Teena Maguire even recognize who had sex with her? And how many?
Some of the things that would be said of your mother Teena Maguire after she was gang-raped, kicked and beaten and left to die on the floor of the filthy boathouse at Rocky Point Park in the early minutes of July 5, 1996
.
Rookie Cop, 1994
H
E WASN
'
T THAT YOUNG
. He didn't look young and he didn't act young and most of the time he didn't feel young. He was a rookie, though. A damn rookie almost thirty years old and just out of Police Academy.