My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

It’s a stupid rumor. Those liars.”

      Though sometimes her voice quavered: “It’s her word against theirs! That’s what everybody says, and that’s a legal fact.”

      Near-inaudibly Mom would speak into the phone, in the kitchen. Seated, hunched over, pressing the avocado-plastic receiver against her ear as if trying to keep the words inside from spilling out.

      If Katie asked what was going on Mom said, scolding: “Never mind! It’s no business of you girls.”

      You girls. Often we’d hear from Mom’s mouth.

      Her gaze avoiding us, skittering away across the linoleum floor.

      We were mystified but we knew better than to persist in questions. We knew better than to ask our brothers who were the ones in trouble. (And if we asked Rick he’d shrug us off—Don’t ask me, ask them.) No possibility of asking our father who was the custodian of all secrets and didn’t take kindly to being questioned about anything. And eventually we learned what had happened, or some version of what had happened, as we learned most things not meant for us to know, piecing together fragments of stories as our mother sometimes, with a curious sort of self-punishing patience, fitted together broken crockery to mend with glue.

      The girl whose word was against theirs was a fourteen-year-old special-needs student at the middle school where Lionel was in ninth grade. Jerr was sixteen, a junior at the high school.

      Liza Deaver was the name. Liza Lizard she was called for her face was splotched like a turtle’s shell.

      At fourteen she had the body of a mature woman, fattish, slow-moving, with thick plastic-rimmed glasses and lenses that magnified her eyes. She wore slacks with elastic waistbands and plaid shirts that billowed loose over her big soft breasts and belly. We’d overheard our brothers imitating her speech which was slow and stammering and whining like the speech of a young child.

      Liza’s mental age was said to be nine or ten. And it would remain that age through her life.

      Liza was physically clumsy, poorly coordinated, and often made her way swaying and lurching with one eye shut, as if seeing with both eyes confused her. Oddly, unpredictably, Liza sometimes burst out in anger and tears and had to be sent home from school by the special-needs teacher.

      We’d heard that, in the special-needs classroom at the school, Liza had some talent for drawing. Except her drawings were of people with large round balloon-faces on small stick legs—just faces, legs.

      Retards, they were called. Special-needs was the adult term, retards what others kids called them.

      Liza Lizard was a cruel name. Yet sometimes it seemed, if boys called this name after her, Liza misheard it, and thought it might be something else, and turned to them with a peculiar squinting smile, a childish sort of hope.

      I did not—ever—utter aloud the name Liza Lizard. But like other girls I may have sniggered when I heard it.

      It is shameful now to recall—Liza Lizard. You did not—ever—want the attention of the crude coarse cruel boys to turn upon you and so possibly, yes—you did snigger when you heard it.

      No news item about the incident in Patriot Park would appear in the South Niagara Union Journal. Only minors were involved, and the (alleged) victim so unreliable.

      Sometimes in Liza Deaver’s confused telling there were just five or six boys involved. Sometimes, many more—ten, twelve.

      Sometimes Liza Deaver remembered a few names. Sometimes, just one or two.

      What would come to be generally known was that a loose group of boys between the approximate ages of fourteen and seventeen, not a gang, not even friends had cajoled Liza into coming with them to Patriot Park after school. One of the older boys, not a Kerrigan, had been friendly with Liza, or rather had pretended to be friendly with Liza, so Liza would boast that he was my boyfriend.

      The Kerrigan brothers Jerome Jr. and Lionel were not the ringleaders in the assault—if there was an “assault.” This was much-reiterated by my brothers. All they’d done (they would claim) was follow other boys tramping through muddy playing fields and past skeletal trellises in the municipal rose garden to the swimming pool, to the weatherworn stucco building where refreshments were sold in summer and where there were foul-smelling restrooms and changing rooms. In the off-season the building was deserted, dead leaves blew about the cement walk. But the restrooms were kept unlocked through the year.

      The boy who was Liza Deaver’s “boyfriend” led Liza into the men’s room saying they had “nice surprises” for her.

      It was so, Liza Deaver liked “surprises.” Usually candy bars, snacks in cellophane wrappers from a corner store, cans of sugary soda pop. Sometimes these were given to her by kindly persons who knew her and her family and sometimes by others who were not so kindly.

      Questioned afterward by parents, school authorities, Family Court officers the boys would claim that Liza had “wanted” to come with them. Going to the park had been “her idea.” Into the men’s restroom, her idea. She’d told them that she had done such things with her brothers and other boys and sometimes they gave her “surprises,” and sometimes they didn’t.

      Liza Deaver denied this. Liza’s parents denied it, adamantly.

      Liza Deaver had not been injured enough to require hospitalization but she’d been examined in an emergency room and treated for cuts, bruises, bloodied nose and teeth, “chafings” in the vaginal and anal areas. Clumps of hair had been pulled from her head and (it was whispered) the boys had “grabbed and pulled out” pubic hairs of which (it was whispered) Liza had many.

      Still the boys insisted that it had been Liza’s idea. They’d been “nice” to her, they said. These gifts they’d given her: a Mars bar with just a small bite missing, a plastic bead necklace found in the trash, a small stuffed puppy with button eyes, a perfumy deodorant. (Liza Deaver was notorious for her strong, horsey odor.) It was not clear how long Liza remained in the restroom with the boys for Liza lacked a firm grasp of the passage of time but the boys insisted that it had been for “only a few minutes”—“definitely no more than a half hour.” It was 5:40 P.M. by the time Liza limped home, a distance of about a mile; it was estimated that the boys had led Liza away from school at 3:30 P.M., though accounts differed about who exactly had been with Liza from the first, and who had joined later. The fact that Liza had brought home with her the “gifts” the boys had given her seemed to suggest that she’d been happy to receive them, for otherwise—wouldn’t she have thrown them away, in disgust?

      If she’d been victimized by the boys, and not a willing companion, wouldn’t she have called for help as soon as they’d released her, and she was able to run out into the street?

      (Though it wasn’t clear that the boys had kept Liza in the restroom against her will. She hadn’t been a captive, they said; she’d wanted to stay, and only left because it was suppertime, and she suddenly remembered that her parents would be angry with her if she was late.)

      Eventually, it was established that there were at least seven boys involved in the incident. These included Jerome Kerrigan Jr. and his brother Lionel but not (it seemed) Les. (Certainly not Rick.) No doubt there were more boys but the seven who were named refused to provide the names of other boys—they were not rats.

      Poor Liza! Questioning left her confused about the boys’ names but she could (more or less) identify them by other means, descriptive means and by studying pictures.

      Yes she’d gone into the park and into the restroom with them willingly but when she’d wanted to leave they had not let her leave. Yes she’d been held captive by them, in the restroom. No she had not wanted to do the “nasty” things they did to her.

      Yes she had told them she wanted to go home. Yes she had started to cry but they just laughed at her. No no no she had not told them that her brothers had done these nasty things to her,