They were waiting for me to continue. I forced myself back into their southern lady shoes.
Suze’s ice pick was traditionally a tool of men, or sexually predatory women in the movies. A bread knife was a tool of the home and hearth, something they handled every day, or that their mothers, at least, had. Not hard to guess which these women found more frightening.
“Next you have to ask yourself how expert the attacker is likely to be with the weapon. We’ve already seen how difficult many of them can be to wield. Bear in mind that very few people are experts with things like razors or bread knives or ice picks. Remember that a weapon has no power of its own. It depends entirely on its user.” And the magic the victim invests in it.
“What’s the point of all this thinking?” Pauletta said.
“Assessment. You can’t know what to do in any situation until you’ve assessed it. Keep your eye on the weapon and remember: It’s just a tool. Not magic.”
None of them looked as though she believed me.
“Once you’re breathing, we go on to other questions: What does your attacker want? Will you be in more or less danger in a few minutes? Pick your moment to act. When you do act, begin with a distraction.”
“Wait,” Pauletta said. “Can we go back to the part about—”
“I’ll take questions later. An attacker with a weapon will be concentrating on that weapon. It will be a kind of talisman, a psychological crutch. The armed attacker’s focus will be very narrow indeed.”
“I’m getting lost here,” Pauletta said.
“Sandra, give Pauletta your razor. Pauletta, come and stand here. Threaten me with the razor. Sandra, where were you, as the attacker?”
“Getting my oil changed.”
“And what did you want from Pauletta?”
“To make her weep,” Sandra said matter-of-factly. Weep. Very biblical. Very melodramatic. I’m special, her tone implied. My life is worse than anyone here can possibly imagine. Except you, of course. But I was tired of her nonsense.
“All right,” I said to Pauletta, who was staring at Sandra. “We’re in a garage. Pauletta, you’re going to try and make me weep.”
“I don’t… Okay.” She waved the polystyrene self-consciously. “Kneel down, bitch. Kneel right here.”
“Okay,” I said, putting my hands up in the universal “Hey, whatever you say” gesture. “Just tell me what you want.”
“I’m gonna make you cry.” Her hand went to an imaginary zipper. Always the same. Too many movies. “Get on your knees.”
“Right,” I said, pretending to be about to go down on one knee, and then started to retch.
“Eeeuw!” Pauletta said, and stepped back.
“There. That’s a distraction. Other distractions could include picking your nose…”
“Gross!”
“…drooling, shouting, acting like a crazy person. The point is to break your attacker’s vision of the event. Don’t let him orchestrate. Don’t, ever, buy into his world.” They weren’t getting it. “In this instance, as soon as my attacker gestured towards his fly, it was clear he wanted close personal contact. He was having some kind of power and sex fantasy. Vomit has probably never figured in them. Vomit is visceraclass="underline" wet and hot and stinking. Nothing like the vision he’s been constructing for months, years, decades. The point of vomiting or picking your nose is to break his vision of you. You are not a victim. Don’t act like one.”
Jennifer looked as though she wanted to cry. Tonya seemed confused. “Which part don’t you understand?”
“Me, I don’t understand why you’re so pissy today,” Nina said.
“Pauletta wanted to ask a question earlier and you just steamrollered over her.”
“Yeah,” Pauletta said.
It was true. I didn’t want to be here, in the closed basement. I wanted to be outside, bare feet in the grass, breathing fresh air. But I had agreed to teach these women. No one else would. “I apologize. Pauletta, what was your question?”
“I was wondering, when you said you have to know what they want and pick your moment to act. What did you mean? How do we know what he wants?”
“Yeah,” Nina said. “You said no one is a mind-reader.”
“That’s right. No one is a mind-reader. You don’t have to be. With an attacker with a weapon, you most probably won’t even have to ask. Just listen.”
They were nodding even before I could explain, taking my word for it. I said, “Most attackers who arm themselves do it because they’re nervous. If they’re nervous, they’re very likely to be verbal. They’ll be talking from the first second they threaten you: ‘Give me your purse, lady, give me your purse, put the fucking purse on the ground,’ and so on. That’s the simple situation; if someone says that, nine times out of ten the best thing to do is to give them the purse and they’ll go away. But you can’t always trust what someone is saying. For example, if your attacker is saying, ‘Don’t scream, don’t say a word, I’m not going to hurt you, keep quiet and I won’t hurt you,’ you might not want to believe them, because, generally, if someone is saying something over and over again, it’s for a reason. It means they’re thinking about it.”
“Even if they’re saying the opposite thing?” Kim sounded more puzzled than skeptical.
“Yes. You’ll be able to tell the difference.”
“How?”
“You will know. You’ll feel it.” The body always knows. “Feeling it, knowing it, is the easy part. The hard part is trusting that knowledge and acting on it.”
“I don’t understand,” Therese said.
“It’s women’s intuition,” Katherine said.
Suze snorted.
“Women’s intuition makes it sound like magic, and it’s not. In reality such knowledge, a visceral understanding of a situation—you could even say empathy itself—is based on a biological system. Your mirror neurons.”
They looked perfectly blank.
“Tonya, you and Suze and Christie, go get me three of those chairs, and, Pauletta and Nina, bring the bench. Chairs here, bench here, as though these are stools by a bar. Sandra, bring me my satchel, please, then sit opposite me. Therese, you sit there, you’re drinking quietly, idly watching me and Sandra talking while we drink.” I rummaged in the satchel, found a big flat-ended Magic Marker, and set it on the bench so that it stood up. “Imagine Sandra and I have shot glasses and this”—I gestured at the marker—“is a bottle of whiskey. We’re just drinking and talking. Everyone is relaxed. We’re talking quietly. Therese can’t hear a thing we’re saying.” I leaned confidentially towards Sandra, and she adopted a matching pose. “I pick up the bottle, like so, to pour. Then suddenly I stiffen, and start to hold the bottle differently.” When I changed my grip Sandra swayed slightly: a sudden, instinctual urge to move backwards, out of harm’s way, negated by her conscious mind. “What’s going on? Therese?”
“I don’t know.”
“Trust your first instinct.”
“Looks like you’re about to slam that bottle across his, her face.”
“Anyone disagree?”
None of them was ready to commit, either way, though it was clear from their body language—tilted heads, hands clasped in the small of the back—that they knew what Therese knew, they just didn’t understand how they knew and they weren’t ready to say so.
“Therese is exactly right. I was getting a better grip, getting ready to break this bottle on Sandra’s face. You all knew that, instinctively.” Sandra in particular, but she had also learnt from long experience not to fight back because she was never going to make her defiance permanent, never going to run away and get to safety, and in the long run, the more she resisted, the worse her beating would be. “You saw the way I changed grip, and the act of watching me do that triggered a cascade of signals in your inferior parietal cortex.”