In the past, on these drives, I had focused on the buildings; I liked the stair notches in the sides of the remaining row houses, seeing them as the fossils of former lives. Now, my focus shifted. So did my mother's. In the car behind us, I would realize soon, so had my father's. It shifted to the people on the streets. Not the women, not the children.

It was hot. Hot in the humid, dank way of Northeastern cities during summer. The smell of trash and exhaust fumes seeped through the open windows of our un-air-conditioned car. Our ears perked up at random shouts. We listened for menace in the greetings of friend to friend, and my mother questioned why so many men were clustered at street corners and slouched in front of buildings. This part of Philadelphia, excepting a diminishing Italian population, was black.

We passed a corner where three men stood. Behind them, two older men sat in rickety folding chairs, brought out onto the sidewalk to escape the heat inside their homes. I could sense my mother's body tense beside me. The bruises and cuts on my face stung. I felt that every man on that street could see me, that every man knew.

"I feel sick," I said to my mother.

"We're almost there."

"It's weird, Mom," I said, as I tried to stay calm. I knew the old men hadn't raped me. I knew the tall black man in a green suit, sitting on a bus-station bench, hadn't raped me. I was still afraid.

"What's weird, Alice?" She began to knead her knuckles into her chest.

"How I feel like I've lain underneath all these men."

"That's ridiculous, Alice."

We had stopped at a light. When it turned green, we accelerated. But we were going slowly enough so that my eyes lingered on the upcoming corner.

He was there, back from the street and squatting on the cement, leaning against the clean brick of a newish building. I met his eyes. He met mine. "I've lain with you," I said inside my head.

It was an early nuance of a realization that would take years to face. I share my life not with the girls and boys I grew up with, or the students I went to Syracuse with, or even the friends and people I've known since. I share my life with my rapist. He is the husband to my fate.

We passed out of that neighborhood and into the world of the University of Pennsylvania, where my sister lived. Doors were open in the houses that rented to students, and U-Hauls and Ryder trucks were double-parked along the curb. Someone had come up with the idea to throw a move-out-day keg party. Tall white boys in muscle tees, or no shirts at all, sat on couches on the sidewalk and drank beer from plastic cups.

My mother and I made our way to my sister's dorm and parked.

My father arrived a moment later and parked his car nearby. I stayed in the car. My mother, trying to hide a flap from me, had gotten out and was pacing nearby.

This was what I heard my father say before my mother shot him a warning look.

"Did you see those goddamn animals hanging off of every post and-"

My mother looked quickly at me and then back at my father. "Hush, Bud," she said.

He came over to me and bent down into the window.

"Are you okay, Alice?"

"I'm fine, Dad," I said.

He was sweaty and red-faced. Helpless. Afraid. I had never heard him refer to blacks like this, or to any other minority by condemning them as a group.

My father went in to tell my sister we had arrived. I sat in the car with my mother. We didn't talk. I watched the activities of move-out day. Students used large canvas bins, like those to shuttle mail in the back rooms of post offices, to heap their possessions in. They rolled them across the parking lot to their parents' cars. Families greeted one another. On a scrubby patch of lawn two boys played Frisbee. Radios blared from the windows of my sister's dorm. There was freedom and release in the air; summer like an infection, spreading across the campus.

There she was. I saw my sister emerge from the building. I got to watch her walk all the way from the door, which was maybe a hundred feet away, the same distance I was from my rapist when he said, "Hey, girl, tell me your name."

I remember her leaning down into the car.

"Your face," she said. "Are you okay?"

"It sure took me long enough," I joked to her, "but I finally figured out how to wreck your straight A's."

"Now, Alice," my father said, "your sister asked you how you are."

"I'm getting out of the car," I said to my mother. "I feel like an idiot."

My family was uncomfortable with this, but I got out and stood there. I said I wanted to see Mary's room, see where she lived, help.

I was not hurt badly enough to notice immediately. If you weren't looking my way, you wouldn't have known I was different. But as my family and I walked back toward my sister's dorm, faces at first took in a family like anyone else's-mother, father, and two girls-but then their eyes lingered, just for a moment, and caught something. My swollen eye, the cuts along my nose and cheek, my bloated lips, the delicate purples of bruises blossoming. As we walked, the stares gathered in number, and I felt them but pretended I didn't. Beautiful Ivy League boys and girls, brains and nerds, surrounded me. I believed I was doing all this for my family, because they couldn't deal. But I was doing it for myself as well. We took the elevator up and in it I saw vivid graffiti.

A girl had been gang-raped at a fraternity that year. She had filed a complaint and charges. She was trying to prosecute. But the fraternity members and their friends had made it impossible for her to stay in school. By the time I visited Penn's campus she had withdrawn. In the elevator of my sister's dormitory was a crude ballpoint drawing of her with her legs spread open. A group of male figures were waiting in line beside her. The caption read, "Marcie pulls a train."

I was crammed in the elevator with my family and Penn students going back up for another load. I stood with my face to the wall, staring at the drawing of Marcie. I wondered where she was and what would become of her.

My memories of my family that day are splotchy. I was busy performing, thinking that it was for this that I was loved. But then there were things that hit me too close to the bone. The black man squatting on the sidewalk in West Philadelphia, or the beautiful boys at Penn, throwing a Frisbee, the bright orange disc arcing up and down into my path. I stopped abruptly, and one of the boys ran recklessly to pick it up. As he stood back up, he caught sight of my face. "Shit," he said, looking at me, stunned for a moment, distracted from the game.

What you have after that is a family. Your sister has a dorm room for you to see. Your mother a panic attack to attend. Your father, well, he's being ignorant, and you can shoulder the burden of educating him. It is not all blacks, you will begin. These are the things you do instead of collapsing in the bright sun, in front of the beautiful boys, where, rumor has it, Marcie pulled a train.

The four of us drove home. I rode with my father this time. Now I realize that my mother must have been telling my sister everything she knew, the two of them bracing for what might be ahead.

Mary brought her essentials inside the house, and went up to her bedroom to unpack. The idea was that we would all have an informal meal, what my mother called "seek and ye shall find," and afterward my father would go back into his study to work, and I could spend time with my sister.

But when my mother called for Mary to come down, she didn't answer. My mother called again. Bellowing family names upstairs from the front hall was common practice for us. Even having to do it several times wasn't unusual. Finally, my mother went upstairs, only to come back down a few minutes later.

"She's locked herself in the bathroom," she told my father and me.