I WOULDN'T MIND IF SHE GOT PREGNANT

by Kathleen Hoy Foley

My beloved sister-in-law is talking about her sixteen year old granddaughter who was gang raped last night. Brutalized by three, maybe four boys in the back seat of a car for three hours. Three hours.

"I wouldn't mind if she got pregnant," Marie said.

I listen to her, the phone clamped to my ear as I pace back and forth, back and forth across the carpet. Outwardly, I am calm, not even breathing hard. But that is because I am practiced. If I can claim nothing else remarkable in my life, I can fully acknowledge my accomplished skill at behaving graciously while concealing rage so frantic I want to gouge my own skin, hack it off in thick, bloody chunks and hurl the putrid clods directly at somebody's head.

Now my dear sister-in-law, who does not know that as a teenager I was impregnated by rape, reveals herself as a grandmother would not mind if her first-born grandchild got pregnant from rape. I must, I must right now, push myself to unleash my outrage against her heartless, savage statement. Speak the ugly directly to her. Challenge the cruelty, the blindness of her viewpoint. But I am terrified, too ashamed to expose my past, to show the filth that clings to me still, filth that can never be scrubbed away. And so I stay huddled down inside my own darkness and ignore the screams, capable of curdling blood, roiling there.

In a supreme nod to good manners and my own cowardice because I simply cannot force myself to strip naked before Marie, a steward of Christian faith and godliness, I betray myself along with this much-loved teenager and every single victim of sexual violence.

"Oh, Marie," is all I say, offered as a low moan.

Phil's sister is a good woman, a devout Catholic, a pillar of noble works. In Medugorje she crawled up a mountain on her arthritic knees to pay homage to the Blessed Mother. Her son is a priest. She goes to daily mass; prays incessantly. She tends to the sick and the unfortunate. She is a Consecrated Widow officially vowing to God and the Church to keep her intimate life pure. There is no abuse she would not endure for God or the Catholic Church. And now, apparently no abuse she would not subject a loved one to so she could uphold the laws and wishes of her God and her church.

"She was drinking," Marie continues. "She got into the car."

"She didn't ask to be raped, Marie," I whisper.

That is all I can damn say; it is a spineless, pathetic defense for a girl who less than twenty four hours ago was brutalized by monsters; my words are meaningless drivel against the viciousness that child endured.

Yet I cannot, just cannot pry loose the truth hiding, petrified inside my fright; even though I know of the grace that only disclosure of first-hand experience can offer. Every second I listen to my sister-in-law, I battle panic that has overtaken my sanity and is screeching at me to run! Freakin' Jesus, just run!

In times of calm logic I completely understand I have no reason to be ashamed of what happened to me, that my own body mocked me by growing the seed of a rapist. But logic has little power over panic driven by such shame and humiliation, and all these decades later I am still trapped in its grip.

I want to, desperately want to speak to the horror of my own degradation. Shout, I know what it's like! I know what's it's like! But I don't. I don't. It is all I can do to keep my legs from folding beneath me and dropping me to the floor where I can curl up into a knot and disappear from Marie's beliefs, from her granddaughter's nightmare, from the ordeal in my own past.

There are places so dark even God does not hear your screams. I am never surprised by the deafness of His followers.

She must have been so terrified, this teenager who looks like she strolled out of the California surf with her long, shining, blonde hair and eyes a match to its blue. Her willowy beauty surely creates envy from less fortunate girls, who from just looking, might want to be her. But would never think the trade would include unspeakable terror.

There would have come a moment, a fierce crashing of her heart against her ribs, when she knew with excruciating certainty that she was in eminent danger. If that split second had form and structure, it would have looked like a fiend exploding from a pit, dripping blood from its fangs. This young girl's heart would have thrashed so violently it would have choked her, seized her breath as it delivered with acute terror the of knowledge of what was about to happen. That she was going to be raped. She would not escape. No one would rescue her.

Maybe she screamed, no! no! no! Maybe she begged them not to hurt her, not to kill her, until one of them shouted shut the fuck up and punched her in the face with a beefy fist, giving rise to purpled bruisings on her cheeks.

Maybe her bowels, her urine loosened and she suffered the personal disgrace of soiling herself.

Their penises, three, four of them, would have been swollen, rigid as they tore off her jeans, yanked off her underpants and spread her legs wide.

Did they laugh then? Joke that her cunt smelled like rotting fish and who the hell would even want to bother fucking a white girl whose sweat stunk like sour milk?

When they stripped off her shirt, did they ridicule her too small tits?

Did they bite her nipples and suck until the skin was nearly ripped from her breasts?

And what of those engorged, angry penises pounding into her tender flesh, their testicles slapping, slapping against her stretched opening?

This granddaughter's vagina surely had to split and bleed from the incessant hammering. Her genitals had to be on fire, scraped raw by the penises and filthy fingers digging into her, tearing her in two.

What would have stopped these boys from stuffing their rancid cocks into her mouth and humping into her face until she gagged, strangling on their ejaculate?

Did one or two pull out of her just in time to spray her face, her breasts with foul liquid, the same spunk, that given the correct aim and timing, might fertilize an egg her grandmother would celebrate?

While God was busy dreaming about populating dwindling Catholics registries, did the monsters flip this young girl over, prop her rear end high enough to gain good entry and slam one, two, three, four penises into her anus until she was mad with fright and convulsing pain?

I wouldn't mind if she got pregnant. I cannot get those words out of my mind as I hang up the phone. I do not understand why God and the pious mortals at his behest would tyrannize further a young girl with an already butchered body and spirit in name of holiness.

No egg was fertilized that dreadful night. So Marie's granddaughter was spared the sanctimonious requirement of the Catholic hierarchy, fervently believed by the faithful that a female must surrender her body and her mind always to the possibility of conception. Rape is no exception.

It does not matter if being forced to breed condemns a girl to a lifetime sentence to hell. It does not matter, not even if a granddaughter was the victim of gang rape.