Mistaken for a Mirage

I was standing at a table folding clothes, when a voice behind me said: “I thought you were Marilyn Monroe.”

Startled, I turned and stared at the face of a stranger. 

“She’s dead!” I said. “You mistook me for a dead woman?”

The stranger grinned. “I’m used to seeing celebrities in Aspen…but Marilyn Monroe is dead! That’s why I was surprised!” He shrugged and raised his hands and the grin persisted. 

 Unimpressed by his hapless routine, I returned to my folding and never saw him again. 

I was a tall, skinny blond, a migrant from a sorority house in Texas, looking younger than my twenty-two years when I moved to Aspen, Colorado. The family of my long-time boyfriend had included me on their ski vacations for several holiday seasons, so when I dropped out of college in my senior year it was the only place I knew to go. 

Carrying my laundry home in the bright mountain sunlight, I laughed off and on and when I met my best friend, Polly, I told her the story of the pickup line. We chuckled as we made lunch while her two-year-old son, Scotty, played beside us. 

That night I had a disturbing dream. I dreamt I was riding up a ski lift, carrying Marilyn Monroe’s body in a box. In my dream, I was looking for someone to help me bury it, but I was alone.  

The move to Aspen, Colorado had been the boldest action of my life. It was a reckless and deplorable choice to my relatives.  

I grew up in a family where fear-mongering was a recreational activity. My mother and aunts gathered in our living room after Sunday dinners, telling stories of moral decay and leveling judgments on anyone they believed deserved it.  

 “That old man, Higgins…”, my mother said, as she spooned out the banana pudding, “…you know about his daughter?”  

“That no good girl…”, my aunt remarked, lowering her eyebrows as her right index finger wagged in the air.  “She’s gonna turn up P.G! You mark my words!” 

Doom wafted through our living room with the aroma of pot roast and black eyed peas. It sapped my energy like a pernicious disease. 

Once I had a horse waiting in a paddock, I set off on Sunday afternoons to chase my freedom. Racing bareback on my beloved black mare was a trance dance with a nine hundred pound partner, galloping into the wind. 

At age fifteen I inherited my mother’s old Ford and on Sundays I filled the car’s bench seats with friends and sped down the blacktop, chasing dreams and leaving misery in the dust. 

By 1970, Aspen, Colorado was the destiny of my dreams. Polly, my closest new friend, was a boundless, free spirit. We immediately became pals. She had recently left her husband, taking her two-year-old son with her. His Dad was the chef at the famous Four Seasons Restaurant, which made him one of Aspen’s hip elites. 

I baby-sat each morning while Polly served breakfast at the Hotel Jerome. Scotty improvised songs from his toddler seat while I peddled Polly’s bike through Aspen Valley,  carrying him to the Four Seasons Resort to visit his Dad. We ate at the buffet and swam in the pool, then I peddled Scotty back to meet his Mom. Nestled in the cleavage of Red Mountain and Aspen’s famous slopes, the town was lyrically beautiful and life as a local was nothing like anything I’d known, not even as a tourist. 

When Polly realized that she couldn’t support an Aspen apartment on waitress wages, she announced that she would never pay rent again and moved with Scotty into a tent in the National Forrest. Polly had never gone camping. She grew up on Cape Cod, riding and showing her horses with the Kennedys. When the snow fell, she moved into a tepee in a high valley and snowshoed in and out.  She was fearless. 

The sexual tsunami had crashed into Aspen years earlier while I had been on a campus in Texas, living under a curfew. I had shared my affections exclusively with the boy I began dating at age fifteen. Free for the first time, I played the field like a teenager. Any date I accepted might get a goodnight kiss or, at most, a make-out session. For me, freedom meant holding off until I met the next illusive one with the indefinable qualities that would deserve my true love and unleashed sexual response. 

I watched Polly steer her libertine love boat through the breakers of desire, loving them and leaving them, frequently and guiltless. We were single young women, seeking adventure in a liberated land. 

The following night, like many others, I went out dancing with my friends. Late in the evening, I accepted an invitation from a man with whom I had a passing acquaintance. He worked at a clothing store where I sometimes shopped and he rented a room in a friend’s home.  Aspen’s youth culture felt safe and friendly, like my college campus, so when he asked me to ride up Aspen Mountain in his Jeep and gaze at the stars, I accepted the date and told my friends I’d see them later. Stargazing into the summer sky from the mountain’s summit sounded thrilling and I had never ridden in a Jeep. 

I don’t recall the small talk we must have made riding up.  I well remember, however, that when he parked and turned out the lights, he pulled me into a hot, heavy embrace. It was not what I expected and I pushed back. 

I felt relieved when he said: “Let’s get out of the car.” 

We stepped onto the wooden deck, where the number one lift ended, where skiers  jumped from lift chairs. There was no snow and no chairs; only a bare platform with towers supporting cables stretched above us. 

I had no time to reflect on stars, for he immediately pushed me down. His hands were on my breasts and under my jeans. I shoved him away, gently at first, then harder, and soon my resistance became a full-out fight. 

Desperate, I put my hands between my legs to stop him and grabbed his penis to keep him out of my body. It was then that he laughed, repeating: “Let go of my penis! Let go!” 

When he choked me and hit me across the face, my mind cleared through the chaos and seized a single, silent thought: 

‘I could die here.’ 

“You’re miles above Aspen.”  Said the rapist. “No one can hear you scream.” 

He was right. 

I stopped fighting. 

It was over fast and a voice spoke from somewhere inside me: 

‘Nothing happened…’, it said, ‘...nothing.’

‘It wasn’t like sex with my boyfriend’ it said. 

‘It was nothing!’

My next thought was:  

‘Get down the mountain alive.’ 

I walked about the deck in silence, gathering my clothing, looking for an earring which had flown who knew where.

It was perfunctory.

I felt distant and oddly calm. 

Still the refrain: ‘Get down the mountain alive!’ beat a steady rhythm in my head.  

“I guess I had too much to drink.”  Said the rapist.

I didn’t answer. 

“You shouldn’t have fought me.” He said. 

His words floated, unchallenged, into the night.

I rode in the passenger seat of the open-topped Jeep, saying nothing, focused on not threatening the rapist with words or gestures. 

Nobody could hear me.

I was silent.   

In that long dissent through darkness, I recall seeing nothing;

no trees, 

no stars, 

no green, snowless runs,  

no bare moguls with grass sprouting. 

We hit the level ground of Aspen and he stopped the Jeep in front of my apartment.  

“Do you want to go home with me?”  he asked. 

The question ricocheted inside my skull, but I didn’t flinch. 

“No!” was my one syllable response. 

I stepped from the Jeep and didn’t look back. 

I don’t remember if I slept that night. I only know that I wrote in my journal because I still have that frayed, fabric-covered book with my cryptic allusion to what happened on the mountain. 

“I  heard her name.” I wrote in a code only I would understand. I wrote “It happened.” and “where is love?”

In even my own journal, I couldn’t write the word rape or tell the story of the hapless stranger. My journals had always been found, read and even mocked by my mother. A thousand miles away, shame and fear sealed my silence. 

When Polly arrived at five a.m. to drop Scotty off, I told her. 

“That sounds like a Marilyn Monroe story.” she said, for the day before I had told Polly of the dream. 

I was terrified of becoming pregnant and she suggested I see her doctor, so, that afternoon, when her shift ended, I did. 

The doctor was professional and gave me the first gynecological exam of my life. He removed the festering splinters from my back and buttocks, the ones from the Redwood platform, forced into my skin while the rapist was forcing his body into mine. I hadn’t known they were there. 

“Are you going to report?” The doctor asked bluntly.

“No!” I answered. 

Who was I to be believed?  I didn’t even feel like an adult. The idea of talking to police or testifying in court caused me to incinerate inside. 

My greatest fear in reporting was that my mother would find out and I would certainly be blamed. Since puberty, my mother had lopped insults at me regarding suspected sexual activity.   She told me she knew what girls like me were up to, the first time a boy invited me to a party.  She called me a whore before I ever had a first date, before I knew what sex was about and before I knew what the word meant.

“If you were raped it wouldn’t be rape.” she once said to me. The whole idea of sexuality seemed to make her crazy and my close friends remarked that I must be from Mars or adopted because they felt sure my parents never had sex.

I feared losing my new, untethered life as much as I feared pregnancy.  I knew my mother would demand I return home, where my freedom would be history and I would live monitored by the sisters of pain. 

The doctor offered me an injection to prevent pregnancy and stuck the needle in my battered backside, temporarily relieving my fear. 

I was supposed to start my period right away, but nothing happened. Weeks passed, and each time I sat on the toilet and scanned the cotton liner of my underpants I begged a God I hardly knew that I would find blood. However, when I wiped, all I saw was white paper.  

I flew back to Texas to be a bridesmaid in a friend’s wedding. My former boyfriend picked me up at the airport and, shamefully, I told him the story. I asked him to run a pregnancy test on me at the lab where he worked so I peed in a jar before he drove me to join the bridesmaids at the Corpus Christi Hilton. 

A hurricane was approaching from the Gulf, but the wedding party ignored it, as I pretended all was normal with me.  The wind threw palm fronds against the glass of the high-rise hotel while I laughed with my friends, enjoying what would be the end of our stories together. I was of another tribe now, exploring other cultures and churning invisibly with fear, counting the weeks in which I had not started my period. 

My ex drove me back to the airport ahead of the storm and reported that, thankfully, the test was negative. It was, sadly, the end of our time together, too. 

I flew anxiously into Denver on turbulent tail winds.  I had become fearful of flying, but the low-altitude connecting flight on Aspen Airways thrilled me. My heart opened to the sight of the lush, summer valley and I knew I wasn’t ready to let it go. 

A month later, I began bleeding and I bled for three months. I didn’t see the doctor. I just worried and pretended. My habits changed. I stopped going out dancing, something I loved more than skiing. In fact, I stopped going out. I stopped accepting dates and became cool and illusive toward anyone I had dated. 

I started watching nighttime TV and I bought my own baggie of weed, which I smoked alone, something I had never done. I worked erratically, as a waitress. I rarely skied and never again went up Aspen Mountain. My forays into town were with my girlfriends and I was haunted by my fear of seeing the rapist.

Once, in the Aspen Grocery, I saw him down an aisle and he smiled. Adrenalin surged like lava through my veins and I headed for the door. 

I put my rape story away and told no one else.  A year later, on a train from New York to Texas, I lay alone in the darkness of a sleeping berth and watched the moonlit panorama from my Pullman window. Rivers shimmered below me and passing lights blinked from distant towns. It was then that the entire assault replayed in me, like a movie.  I recall an odd feeling that I was faking, “putting it on…”, as my mother would say, as I sobbed, alone, into my pillow and never cried over it again. 

Six months following the assault, I met and later married a man who was six-foot-five, a former sheriff’s deputy, and a Vietnam Vet. When it ended miserably, five years later, I rebounded into a marriage with a man who was similar in stature and appearance and no better suited for marriage than the first. The violent undercurrent in each man, which I had originally read as strength, was turned on me in the form of physical and emotional violence. I had needed to feel safe. It was protection I was seeking.

When I left my second marriage with two young children, it was the beginning of my true freedom. I had feared my mother throughout my teens and my boyfriend had been my refuge.  In my third decade of life, I gained the courage that motherhood awakened. It was my children’s protection that was paramount. Finally, I wasn’t afraid. 

I’ve been a life-long learner and courage has been an ongoing pursuit.  I will never feel as fearless as my friend Polly or the other trailblazing super-women who I have made my closest friends. When people call me brave, I compare myself to them and always come up short. 

Two decades after the assault, one of my daughters, then a young teenager, became fascinated with Marilyn Monroe. I was unsettled when she cut photos of her from magazines and taped them to her walls. Most were of the young Marilyn, Norma Jean Baker, when she was just a girl. Her sun-streaked curls bounced against her cheeks and she looked truly happy, although everyone knew that happiness was a mirage for Norma Jean. 

One day, as I sat on my daughter’s bed and looked at the images smiling down from her walls, I asked her why she collected them. Quietly, almost whispering, she answered: “They look like you, Mom.” 

My stomach churned. I had never disarmed the odd conversation with the hapless stranger who “mistook” me for Marilyn or the dream of carrying her body up the chair lift in a box. Neither had I numbed the memory of being beaten and raped on the mountaintop and I had never retold it. 

The years rose before me like a mirage and time bent like rays of light between me and my beautiful, dark-haired daughter, whose soft face and figure now resembled Norma Jean’s. 

-Jane O'Shields-Hayner

Jane O'Shields-Hayner is a writer and visual artist, living in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains in Southern California. Inspired by the wild nature of the earth and the human heart, her work spans the distance between her back yard and the universe, traversing cultural, political and spiritual terrain. Jane writes creative non-fiction, fiction and poetry. Her recent work has been published in Tiferet, Friends Journal, Lady Liberty Lit., Western Friend and The Manifest Station. She has recently completed a trilogy of short-stories written in homage to Kurt Vonnegut and she is working on a memoir of her pilgrimages inspired by Woody Guthrie’s famous ballad, Deportees.