ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
The series will run every Tuesday afternoon. Each week we will highlight different voices and stories.
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Narrated by Ronald Reagan
Genevieve Tyrrell
In a smooth, lowered voice, Lyons name-dropped in the tone of a phone sex operator, pointing out pictures on his wall, and even the framed artwork I sent him. He smiled in photographs with Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and even former presidents. He had been a decent-looking man fifty years ago, but he could still rock a dark gray suit and tie. At delighted memories, his voice became almost song-like, as if calling a puppy. He locked his arms around me and tried to stick his tongue down my throat.
Moments earlier I was honored to pull through the gates of Paramount Pictures. I was twenty-two. I’d never been on a studio lot.
The man in the booth asked to see my driver’s license, found my name on the list to see Producer J.C. Lyons, and handed over my visitor’s pass. He smiled. Even men in booths respected the industry and stood in awe of it—a shared enthusiasm, for old Hollywood and the continuing reign of cinema—from the walls and gates, to the sign itself, down to cityscape sets used over the span of many decades of filmmaking, and 1930s and ‘40s buildings overseeing the lot like wise old men or gods.
I hadn’t anticipated that Lyons would have the entire floor to himself, his assistant at the far end of a hallway. We walked through one door, closed it behind us, and then walked through another door and closed that behind us, all alone.
Let’s be honest: I wanted a job. Anything to do with film. I showed Lyons my art portfolio and photographs of my family and myself, just for conversation’s sake. I thought that was schmoozing. I thought I was building a work relationship.
But now I can’t get him off me. For an eighty-five-year-old man he seems as strong as someone a third of his age. I point to a picture of Elvis behind Lyons and yell, “Look! It’s Elvis!” And he falls for it, releasing his grip enough for me to jump back, but I’m so naïve and polite, I don’t know to leave right away.
He tells me that we can have sex on his desk and glides his hand across. I say that wouldn’t be a good idea, but we get into a discussion about how even though he’s eighty-five he can still show me a good time. I realize I must take the direct route.
“Look, though I’m flattered, I wouldn’t care if you were twenty-five years old, and the richest man in the world. The way you came onto me just now was completely not classy. There’s no way I’d ever have sex with you on your desk. I’m just not that kind of girl.”
“Fine!” Lyons’s voice grows gravelly and loud. “I’m completely turned off now!”
“Good, that’s sorta the point,” I mumble. Fear sweeps across me. Did I just piss off someone important in Hollywood? Am I now getting kicked out of his office? What about my career? My awkward attempts to correct the situation cloud the room. I stumble through “I don’t mean to offend” and “I hope we can get pass this” statements. My head is spinning. And then—
Lyons says he’d like to show me a film. I’m stunned but relieved that the awkward moment has passed with an abrupt plot twist. I have no idea how to handle this situation. I’m in over my head. I agree to the film.
He sits me down on his chocolate leather couch and pops in a VHS tape hooked to a clunky monitor.
Ronald Reagan appears on-screen at his desk in the oval office, folding his hands and grinning. The camera slowly zooms in as he says, “Hello there, I’m Ronald Reagan and I’d like to tell you a little bit about my good friend, J.C. Lyons…”
What. The. Fuck.
Documentary footage reveals Lyons with Reagan, with other friends, waving for flashing cameras, other times walking through Paramount. Lyons beams, pointing at the screen when he appears. “I’m one of a few people that’s sat in the president’s chair.” Reagan was his best friend while they climbed the ladder in Hollywood.
Lyons pulls the old stretch-turns-to-arm-around-the-shoulder move.
I blurt out, “Gosh, it’s gotten so late and I have things I need to get done.” His mood changes again. He sighs and gathers up his things. He asks me to walk down with him to his car. He was supposed to show me around the lot. I oblige, still hopeful not to piss off such an influential man.
Inside the elevator, Lyons grabs the handle bar behind him and looks over at me, smirking. For a moment, his voice turns smooth again.
“I guess you’re not an elevator kind of girl, huh?” Lyons says.
“Nope,” I answer with nervous laughter.
Ford “gave” him a silver remake of a classic Thunderbird, and we eye its shiny curves, its circular back windows. Lyons hugs me one last time, pulling back just enough to look deep into my eyes and say, “Oh sweetheart, the things I could have done for you.”
I can’t speak.
“You’ve got a day pass. You’re welcome to walk around if you want.”
I watch him get in his car and drive off.
My legs take me somewhere. The sun is setting. I wander until I reach New York City set, vacant and fake.
All quiet.
I walk down the city street and take in the history, lonely, confused, and yet still excited by film. I pray to God and all the Hollywood ghosts that I haven’t just made a terrible mistake. For years, I’ll wonder if sex is the answer—if putting out is what women have to do to work their way up the ladder in the film industry.
*
On Forgetting and Believing
Annalise Mabe
At fifteen, I worked at a mom-and-pop ice cream shop scooping homemade ice cream into cake cones and dipping waffled cones into melted chocolate. My manager, Mike, was in his forties and was often stoned, trudging in and out of the walk-in freezer in a coat and thick boots. He also wielded a chainsaw on the daily, making poorly crafted ice sculptures out front on the hot sidewalk.
Inside he’d tell us girls: “Go wipe that table down,” even if it appeared to be clean. In the store’s windows, we could see his reflection, his eyes, focusing in on our bodies bent over, leaning to reach the edge of the table.
One day, it was just Mike and me. He wanted to show me how to wrap our homemade brownies in cellophane—as if this was some complicated task that needed specific instruction. He peeled out the stretchy plastic and plopped a brownie down, beginning to wrap it.
“So, do you think you’ll ever have kids?” he asked me.
I knew he had two adopted daughters, but I wondered what prompted the question.
“I don’t know,” I said. I remember thinking, I’m only fifteen.
Mike continued to fold the cellophane over the brownie.
“Well, you don’t wanna get all torn up down there,” he said, ambling back to make another batch of ice cream.
Later, when carpooling to school with my neighbor, I mentioned the comment to my neighbor’s mom. I was mortified—embarrassed that anyone would think of that part of my body. It was easier, in this case, to tell someone’s else’s mother than to even think of telling my own. The shame surrounding my body, these unmentioned parts, these places we don’t talk about, swallowed me. But, my mother found out anyway when word traveled through the grape vine, and she reported it to the police who “took it down,” but did little else. I was embarrassed now, too, that the police were being called. My mother made me promise to quit the next day, and so I did, explaining to Kathy, my manager in her thirties, what happened and what Mike said.
“That’s just Mike,” Kathy told me, shrugging, wide-eyed. “That’s just how he is.”
I looked at Kathy, even then, at fifteen and was taken aback. Surprised at how her betrayal seemed to hurt more than Mike’s words themselves.
Perhaps I cannot recall all the instances of abuse and assault. It’s quite possible, in fact, I know it is, that I am leaving some of them out, not purposefully, but because they have been buried deep down, because I never want to look at them again.
In Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, he writes that forgetting “is experienced as an attack on the reliability of memory. A weakness, a lacuna… Forgetting indeed remains the disturbing threat that lurks in the background of the phenomenology of memory and the epistemology of history.” I wonder, though, why our forgetting renders us powerless. I wonder why our words can’t be taken as truth, and I want to know, to unearth the origin story of the unreliable woman narrator, because I am thinking now that she is a myth.
At fifteen, and at all the other ages, all the other times, I wanted to be believed. To be taken seriously—not shrugged off or simply “taken down” for “record.” At fifteen, I needed to be believed.
There are many reasons why we don’t believe women and survivors. The brain doesn’t like to do more work than it needs to. It likes its easy boxes for categorization. It likes to sort things, to save energy for more important processes. Done, we say, wiping our hands clean. Moving on. In Just World theory, it’s the idea that karma exists, that people get what they deserve—that fairness exists, and bad things don’t happen to good people. If they do, that person must have done something to deserve it. And there is fear in believing. Because if we truly believe that any person can be led to a bed by a friend, by a family member, can be touched when they do not want to be touched, then we must also believe that this could happen to someone we know, that this could happen to us.
Yet believing is necessary. We can’t live in denial. Humans are capable of terrible things. We can’t ignore the reality of the world we live in, where things are not always fair or just, and where sometimes, bad things do happen to good people for no reason at all. We must work to understand that when a person is inconsistent in the retelling of their story, that doesn’t mean they are lying—they may be in fight or flight or freeze where shock sets in, where perception is fragmented. We must understand that the body and the mind are complicated, and that sometimes, people simply do what they must to survive.
*
Alone Enough
Jodi Shepherd
He couldn’t have done that. He had a daughter my age. He didn’t remember.
Night shift. Alone. Not alone. Alone in the dock office. Dock worker loading trucks. Sorting factory on the other side of wall. Alone enough.
Pulled up in a sports car. Drunk.
He enters the office. I stand. He lifts his shirt. Presses me against the wall. He is big. Sweaty. Smelled like liquor. He knew what I wanted. He had seen me watching him all summer. He stumbles. I move toward the door. He blocks me.
He hears people on the other side of the door.
Pulls out his wallet. Scribbles his number on a dollar. Throws it at me. Leaves.
I try to do paperwork. Can’t focus. Go out on dock. Dock worker—male, kind—knows something is wrong. Takes me to floor manager.
I tell her. She says people make fun of her for being overweight. They call her “wide load.”
Dock worker finds out. He is outraged. He knows what to say.
I go home. It is early. 6 a.m. I am home for the summer after college. I wake up my mom. She is not quite awake. “You wear tight shirts,” my mother says.
A meeting with him and HR. He works for the buyer. Company doesn’t know what to do. He isn’t allowed on the dock at the same time as me. Coworkers must accommodate. Everyone knows.
I see him on the dock.
He looks scared.
I am scared.
Dear twenty-two-year-old self: call 911. There is a drunk driver in a sports car. They can arrest him for that.
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Rumpus original logo art by Luna Adler.
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ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for work by women and non-binary people that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence. We believe that while this subject matter is especially timely now, it is also timeless. We want to make sure that this conversation doesn’t stop—not until our laws and societal norms reflect real change.
We received over four hundred submissions to our initial call and will not be accepting additional pieces at this time. We may reopen for submissions at a future date. We also must acknowledge that the submissions we received overwhelmingly came from white, heterosexual women. While we are actively assessing how we can do better in our next call for submissions, we also believe this points to systemic inequalities that need to be addressed: who has access to healthcare and to therapy, who has been taught to speak up and who has been taught to be silent.
Many names appearing in these stories have been changed.
Visit the archives here.
