March 6

from trial

haunted

by the woman who wouldn’t listen and announced that none could change her mind. I told the story to my class and to friends last night that she spent the full time of deliberations with her hands folded across her chest and making eye contact with the corners of the room. When she was addressed she made responses like, “Are you talking to me?”

I’ve said “angry”, but is it? Frustration? At the system? I was looking for a way to connect with her and ran out of time. My therapist cocked her ear when I mentioned my anger. She wondered whether I felt the anger directed at the woman herself in front of me. She asked whether I was angry at someone disagreeing with me or whether it was some part of the process. I said that, indeed, it was the process and I felt perfectly fine with someone coming to a different conclusion from myself.

what is the back story?

The same way that I look at people in airports or malls and immediately begin to imagine a lifestory behind the face or the posture or the movement of the person through the space. I feel guilty when I do that. I imagine that somehow I am reading something into the most fleeting of glimpses. At the moment I think about the cartoonist who portrayed the man and his dog walking through the streets of New York. I think it must have been from The New Yorker. That artist must have read much into the glimpses that he saw.


I also imagine that there may be something of the fiction writer in me. Perhaps it is just the rather developed empathy function that I possess.

why didn’t she sympathize?

My first thought was that the woman had been beaten herself and so traumatized by the event. Wrong assumption? Or that she was responding the way an abused woman acts when she can’t separate herself, physically or emotionally from the person who is abusing her. As the trial was in its early stages I had wondered about the gender makeup of the jury. It was approximately equal. It turns out that whether one is sympathetic to the man’s “less-than-credible-story” was not a matter of gender.