How to Talk to a Widower

fingers down the side of her face.
    “I was raped.”
    She tells me this with no preamble, in the middle of the movie, a zombie flick that is a remake of some other classic zombie flick, because, apparently, there are no new zombie stories to tell. Brooke picked it, and we’re the only ones in the theater.
    “What?” I say.
    “You wanted to know my secret,” she says nonchalantly, reaching over to take a sip from my soda. “I was raped. About two years ago.”
    I turn to look at her, but she’s staring resolutely at the screen, where the zombies are pressed up against the glass doors of the mall where the last surviving humans are holed up.
    “You want to get out of here?” I say. “Go somewhere and talk?”
    “No,” she says. “Here’s fine.”
    “It’s hard to hear you above the machine guns.”
    “I like it that way.”
    “What happened?”
    “It was this guy from my yoga class. Benny. He was one of those big weight lifter types, you know? He used to walk me home after class if Greg couldn’t pick me up.”
    “Greg?”
    “My fiancé.”
    “Oh.”
    “Benny was always flirting with me, but in a harmless way. I thought he looked at me more like a kid sister, always looking out for me and being protective. I mean, he was practically twice my age. And he’d been doing yoga for years. Not that that matters, but you just don’t think of people who practice yoga as closet rapists. Then one night he walked me home and asked if he could come up to my apartment to use the bathroom. I didn’t think anything of it, but as soon as we walked through the door, he pushed me up against the wall and told me he loved me and he needed to show me. When I told him to stop he ignored me, and when I tried to push him off of me he smacked me, not too hard, but with the threat of hardness behind it, you know? Like the next one could take my head off. I mean, he was a big guy, bigger than most of the trainers. And then he looked me right in the eye and smacked me again, to let me know that the first one hadn’t been an accident. And then he took my hand like a boyfriend and led me into my bedroom and raped me.”
    “Jesus,” I say.
    She nods. “You wanted to know.”
    “So, what happened to Greg? He couldn’t handle it?”
    “Oh, he was okay with me getting raped.” She turns to look at me. “Not okay, but he was ready to deal with it. What he couldn’t deal with was that I didn’t fall apart over it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    She sighs. “I guess I just wasn’t a very good rape victim. I was supposed to have all these as-seen-on-TV symptoms of posttraumatic stress: nightmares, crying jags, weight loss, paranoia. But I got over all of that pretty quickly. I wasn’t in denial. I knew what had happened to me. But I hadn’t gotten hurt or pregnant, I had a lot of good friends, I was in love, and life was good, you know. I was sad for a few days, then I chalked it up to bad luck, like a car accident, and moved on. I thought that was a pretty healthy attitude—I still do—but Greg couldn’t handle it. It was like he was being cheated out of his role as the supportive boyfriend. And then he became angry, and decided that I must have enjoyed it on some level, that maybe I’d even seduced Benny into raping me. And it became this big thing where he wouldn’t sleep with me, acting like I’d somehow betrayed him, and after a while I actually found myself wondering if he might be right, which was like getting raped all over again. We just became trapped in this downward spiral of inescapable irony. The only way he could get over my being raped was if I couldn’t get over it.”
    “So you broke up?”
    She nods. “And of course, only after the fact did I figure out that I had, in fact, been traumatized, that I was furious with Greg for not being there to protect me, and my great attitude had actually been his punishment because I knew it would ultimately drive him insane. And once he was gone, the reality of what had happened to me kind of hit home, and that’s when it all happened, the nightmares, the crying for days on end, all that good stuff. I had a little breakdown, I guess.”
    “So what brought you to New Radford?”
    “He owned the apartment and I couldn’t afford to rent my own. So I moved back home.” She grins. “Twenty-seven and still living with my parents. Aren’t I a great role model for the kids?”
    “Has there been anyone since Greg?”
    She shakes her head. “A few false