“A story. Like a Dick and Jane type story?”
“No. I don’t remember, exactly. I just talked and talked, and then he wavered, because he was young and he needed his drugs, and his arm dropped, and I took the razor away from him.”
“Did you hurt him?” Suze said.
“No.” But there had been a moment when I considered cutting his throat, watching his blood gush out and down his chest. It would have been black in the faint city light among the trees. “No. I left.”
“Don’t tell me, no hospital, right?”
“Right. A plane, to North Carolina. Then healing. There was some… some blood loss.”
“No shit.”
“But not everyone’s like you,” Kim said. “We can’t let someone shoot us, stab us, slit our throats, and then go home and take an aspirin.”
“The human body is very strong, very difficult to kill, unless you’re facing an expert.” If I put a razor to someone’s throat, they’d die. “And they, I, you heal. Look.” I sat down and pulled up my left pants leg, past the two-inch white scar just below the back of my knee. “This happened when I was nine. Or eight, something like that. A nail sticking out of a piece of wood. I was running around in the garden, jumped over something, felt a little scratch, then—”
“Blood for days,” Nina said, nodding. “Cuts on the plump parts, near a joint, they just gush. ’Specially if you’ve been running. See this?” She flexed her right arm, showed a very similar scar just above her elbow. “Barbed-wire fence. And this”—she showed us four neat indentations across the tops of the fingers on her left hand—“a steel tape measure. We were running around on this construction site when I was a kid, three of us holding the tape, only I tripped over my own ankles and fell over and, zzzt, they ran on and the tape cut me open.”
“I have a burn scar,” Katherine said, and then they were all rolling up or unbuttoning or pushing down something and showing scars, and saying, “You’re right, it didn’t hardly hurt to start with,” or “It bled like crazy,” or “I had nineteen stitches! Hurt like a motherfucker the next day.”
Sandra talked about her crooked middle finger, how it got caught in her sweater sleeve when she was trying to take it off and running to catch the school bus when she was eleven, how she’d tripped and fallen and her finger was broken to pieces. She didn’t mention the burn on the back of that hand that looked much more recent. She didn’t point out the damaged thumbnail. Nobody asked her about those things, either, though Pauletta did say to Kim, “So, that scar on your chin. That’s from when you bashed your own teeth out on the pavement?”
“This? Nah. That was from going facefirst down a slide and forgetting to put my arms out.”
So then the conversation became about playground mishaps, and I was struck by the fact that none of them talked about being hit or strangled or knocked down with malice by the school bully; though Pauletta admitted to having been a bully when she was a kid. “That was my momma. She told me I needed to take care of my business, so I did. And then I started to take care of business that wasn’t mine, you know? You look at me crosswise and I slam you against the lockers. You don’t ask me to your party and I trip you up and kick you in the stomach and take your lunch money.” She saw the way Therese was looking at her and shrugged. “Hey, I was a kid. I don’t do that now. You never hit somebody?”
Therese shook her head.
“What, not ever, not even as a kid?”
“I never did, either,” Tonya said.
“Nor me.” Jennifer. “Or me.” Katherine.
They stared at each other and I stared at them all. Sandra stared back. “You’ve hit people,” she said. “What’s it like? Does it feel good?”
“No.” But surviving did, feeling brilliant with life, huge, vital. Winning: one life between us and it is mine.
She nodded slowly, knowing there was more to it, knowing, too, that I wouldn’t talk about it. This was private, the way being hit and burned and cut and strangled at home was private. We could acknowledge it between us, as long as it remained unspoken.
“So what’s the broken-up cooler for?”
I stretched across the carpet and lifted a shard from the pile. “This?” It was a little over a foot long. “It’s a KA-BAR.”
“A what?” Jennifer said, clearly prepared to be frightened.
“A hunting knife. The blade is about nine inches long, partially serrated. ” I handed it to her. “This”—I picked up another piece, a bit shorter—“this is a broken bottle. Who wants it?” Tonya held out her hand. I picked up another piece, small and slim. “What should this be?”
“A razor,” said Sandra. “I’ll take it.” I wished I could read her mind.
I took two more pieces of polystyrene from the pile, which turned out to be a bread knife for Kim and an ice pick for Suze. “Everyone stand. Those with a weapon choose an unarmed partner.”
Several of them looked at the wall clock, but there were six minutes left. “Stand opposite each other. Attackers, move in until your weapon touches your partner on the chest. Now look at your feet. None of you are more than eighteen inches apart. Some of you only a foot or so. It’s not too hard to make sure you don’t get that close to someone, especially if it’s a stranger. If you’re paying attention to your surroundings, to what’s going on around you, no one will get that close to you. Unless it’s a public situation: a line at the grocery, a seat on MARTA, getting in an elevator.” It occurred to me that I had no idea what a PTA meeting was like, or singing in the church choir, or a ladies’ coffee morning. But from what I had gathered, these were not things that frightened them.
“You can’t watch everyone all the time,” Therese said. “You’d be stressed out of your mind.”
“But you’d be alive,” Sandra said.
I found I didn’t like being on the same side as Sandra. “You don’t watch everyone all the time. Not consciously. You don’t spend your life on red alert. More like amber, except in your secure home. You take simple, automatic precautions, like having your keys ready, taking the corner wide, parking under a light, checking the car before you get in, not giving out information you don’t have to, never unlocking the door without looking and putting a chain on first, and so on.”
“That’s a lot to remember,” Kim said.
“Not really. You’ll get used to it and eventually won’t even think about it. You all already remember to turn the gas off, to check both ways before you cross the road, to not pick up kitchen knives by the blade, to avoid broken glass, to not breathe water, to not pick up a roasting pan without an oven mitt, and a thousand and one other things. Checking your car and carrying a phone and locking your door are like that. Just sensible precautions.”
“You’ll have to make us a list,” Nina said. Jennifer nodded vigorously, forgetting the hunting knife she was holding at Therese’s breastbone. A list was something she understood, something she could master. Better than nasty knives.
“I will. And we’ll go through it together.” Because the best defense was to need no defense, to see them before they saw you. “Meanwhile, back to our weapons.”
They all straightened. The women with the polystyrene shards assumed vicious expressions and their partners looked nervous.
The clock clunked as the hour hand moved.
“We’ll have to pick this up next week.” I handed out Sharpies. “Write your name and weapon on the polystyrene and give them to me until next week. Meanwhile, everyone who had a weapon, decide what it is that you want. Money? Your victim’s car keys? Murder? Rape? A nice long chat about state politics? Are you hungry? Are you cold? Are you bored? Young? Smart? Angry? Frightened? Who are you? What do you want?”