I called room service for some tea. Tomorrow I would deal with Corning. I saw myself tracking Corning to her hotel, backing her into a corner, flexing my hands perhaps, so that she bolted and I chased her, and brought her down like a lion with a young impala. I would take her throat, just hard enough to suffocate her slowly, and as her eyes rolled back, I’d rip out her soft insides. Her right leg would kick once. If I closed my eyes I could feel her skin under my hands, feel her pulse flutter and still, taste her fear. She would never be able to hurt Kick or anybody else again.
It wouldn’t make any difference. At eleven o’clock tomorrow, it, whatever it was, was coming to get Kick and I wouldn’t be there.
THEY HAD MY PHONE NUMBER, A LITTLE PIECE OF MY LIFE, AND STILL THEY UNDERSTOOD almost nothing of what I knew of the world. They were peering at it through a keyhole: I wanted them to open the door.
“The important thing to remember,” I said as they obediently lowered themselves to the floor and rolled onto their stomachs, looking scared, “is that there’s a kind of joy to all this.”
“Joy?” Pauletta said, sitting up again. “Excuse me, but are you insane? You get off on imagining someone’s about to pin you face-first in the dirt?”
“The mat’s quite clean,” I said. “Perhaps that’s not what you meant. Except it is, in a way. Lie down again. All of you, lie down. Facedown, arms at your sides.” I sat cross-legged so that I wouldn’t loom over them. “Those of you on the mats, can you smell that sharp scent? It’s vinegar. I wipe the mats down with it after every lesson. It’s a natural disinfectant. Feel the mat, how it pushes back at your hips, how you have to turn your head to one side to breathe comfortably, how that pulls at the muscles that attach to your jaw, that run down your neck, that connect to your arms. Feel it. Feel yourself, your body, your bone and muscle, the blood singing in your veins. Breathe deep. Feel your lungs expand, how your spine lifts another inch from the floor. Imagine your rib cage, what it holds and protects: your lungs, your heart, your spleen, all those blood vessels. It’s a fortress—very, very strong. Feel your knees, delicate and strong and indispensable. It’s all yours, every inch. Even when it feels bad, if you get a bruise, a graze, a cut, a break, a puncture, a sprain, it feels good because it’s yours. You are it, and it is you. Enjoy it at all times. Enjoy using it. Enjoy defending it.”
Someone had forgotten to wear underarm deodorant today. I tasted it, the tang of fatty apocrine sweat, full of much larger, more complicated molecules than the simple C2H4O2 of vinegar. It was faint, and it was healthy, clean sweat on a clean body wearing clean clothes, but unusual in Atlanta, where almost everyone equated any kind of body odor with filth and wrongness, where people liked to pretend the body didn’t exist.
“This is your body. Yours. No one but you has the responsibility to keep it, to keep yourself, whole. If someone pins you to the ground, what will you do?”
The underarm scent grew, perhaps, slightly stronger.
“So you’re facedown. The first thing you do is protect your throat, and neck, and your breathing. Turn your face forward again. Stretch the crown of your head towards the wall in front of you. That will stop your neck bending the wrong way, it will pull your chin down.”
“It puts my nose on the floor,” said Tonya.
“Bring your arms under your body. That will make it harder for an attacker to grab hold of them. But keep them bent, elbows down by your ribs, hands up between your breasts. If you can, while keeping your upper arms close to your body, bring your hands up, like this.” I made the international sign for vulva: palms out, tips of index fingers and of thumbs touching. “Keep your elbows in. Put your hands in front of your face. Put your face in the gap. If your attacker starts banging your head on the ground, it will afford you some protection.”
This time the strengthened body odor was definite.
“Everyone, sit up.” They did. I looked from set face to pale face to lightly sweating face. Katherine had carpet fluff stuck to her lip gloss. “Pick a partner. ” Katherine turned to Tonya, Pauletta to Nina, Christie to Suze; Sandra didn’t look at Therese, but Therese understood it was her job to be Sandra’s partner, and sat a little closer; Kim looked at Jennifer and sighed—though, to her credit, silently. “You’re going to learn this together. You’re helping each other learn. When you play the attacker, remember that your partner is a grown woman and needs to know the truth; she needs to know that you won’t let go immediately to make her feel better. She needs to know that in a real situation the techniques she learnt here will work. When you play the one being attacked, try not to panic. This is a controlled situation; you’re safe. We’ll begin with lying facedown and your attacker on top of you because that’s the worst position to be caught in. You’ll learn how to get away from that and then you’ll know you can do anything. A volunteer.”
No one.
“Therese.” She had been the most confident tumbler last week. “Come here and pin me. Everyone, move back a little.” I stretched out, facedown, put my face in its protected gap. “Sit on my back. Pin my wrists to the floor.” She sat on me, but carefully. I doubted she weighed less than 120 pounds, but she was keeping about half that on her feet, taking the strain on her quads. “No. Sit on me. The point is to pin me so I can’t move.” She did. “Now pin my wrists. Hard.” She leaned into it. Her hands were cold and slightly damp. “Think you can roll out all right if I throw you over my head?” I felt movement. “Are you nodding or shaking your head?”
“Yes, I can roll.” She sounded grim.
“All right. Like a Band-Aid. One rip and you’re off. Ready?” And I breathed out with a whoosh, shot my hands forward, and bucked her off. There was no crash, and she stood about the same time I did, so I assumed she’d landed well.
“Whoa,” said Suze.
“Ready to go again?” I asked Therese, and she nodded, though she wasn’t grinning, which surprised me. The first time I’d been thrown and had landed well enough not to get hurt, my exhilaration had been fierce, burning brightly enough that I could have thrown back my head, opened my mouth, and lit the sky. I would never understand these women.
I turned to the rest of the class. “This time it’ll be slow motion, so you can see for yourselves how easy it is.”
Therese perched back on top of me.
“What would an attacker be expecting from me in this position?”
“Panic,” and “Struggle like crazy,” Nina and Tonya said at the same time.
“And what would you do in a panic?”
“Curl up like a bug,” said Nina.
“Why?”
“Because I’d be panicking,” she said with obvious patience.
“And why would you, Tonya, struggle? What’s the ultimate point?”
“To get him as far from me as I could. Protect myself,” she said.
“Nina?”
She nodded. “Get him off of me.”
“Pin me,” I said to Therese. She did. Her hands were less cold and damp. Perhaps relief and lessening of stress were her version of exaltation. “Now look at her balance. Where’s her weight?”
“On your wrists,” Jennifer said.
“Yes. She’s leaning forward, thinking that what I’ll do is pull in like a bug, to protect myself. Or thrash about, to get her off me, away from me, somehow. The last thing an attacker will be anticipating is any kind of move that pulls them towards us, or that appears to spread us flatter to the ground and therefore make us more vulnerable. So that’s exactly what we do. It also happens to work to pull them further off balance. Watch.”