Instead of the untrained, instinctive move to pull my hands down to protect my belly or breasts and groin, I exhaled and slid them smoothly forward along the mat, wrists first: Spider-Man shooting web at the wall. Therese started to topple forward.
“Now if that’s all I did, she’d just fall on me.” I turned my face slightly and said to Therese, “Get off for a moment, please.” She did. I got back into my initial position. “What I do is tighten my abdominal muscles and jerk my knees up underneath me”—I showed them in slow motion, pulling into a tight mushroom, then down again, then bunching again—“and I shoot my hands forward at the same time as bucking.” I showed them. “Now watch while I do it at full speed.” I nodded to Therese.
Even though she was expecting it, she went over. This time she smiled as she came up, a small smile but definite.
I smiled back. “You want to throw me this time?”
“You weigh a lot more than I do.”
“True. But it will work.” Using exactly this technique, on a gravel road in Arkansas last year, I’d thrown a man weighing close to two hundred fifty pounds.
“All right.”
She lay down like a woman going to her execution. I sat on her sacrum. “Remember to protect your face.” She did. I pinned her wrists firmly. I could see her pulse thumping madly in her carotid arteries and felt her rib cage swell and shrink, swell and shrink. Then she stilled, and with a cry of despair and rage, she threw me off. She threw me far harder than necessary and I flew seven or eight feet.
The class clapped and Pauletta whistled and stamped. As I rolled to my feet, Therese sat up, looking pleased.
“Man, you practically sent her into orbit,” Pauletta said to her.
“You can’t do that from a mattress,” Sandra said.
“You can,” I said. “It’s more difficult, yes, but possible.”
“Well, I couldn’t.”
“Perhaps you haven’t, yet, but you could.”
“I can’t. I’m speaking from experience.”
“Yes,” I said. “But that was before you had me to teach you.”
She glared at me. “And an attacker wouldn’t pin you like that, anyway.”
“All attackers are different,” I said. “But I’ll be happy to show you a way around any pin. What would you like to try?”
“I want you to tell me what to do when they break down your bedroom door and grab you from behind around the throat with their forearm and pin your arms to your body with their other arm and then push you facedown into the bed so you’re suffocating and while your hands are trapped by your own body they pin you down with one hand on the back of your neck and you can’t breathe, can’t think, and then they have their whole body weight and they have a hand free. Can you picture that?”
“It’s very clear.”
“Tell me how to get out of it.”
“Think of first principles.”
They all stared at me. First principles when in their heads they were all about to be anally raped in their own beds?
“First principle: make sure you can breathe. You have time to think, you can keep your head clear enough to think, if you can breathe. Christie”— she seemed to be the least inherently frightened person in the class, perhaps it was a generational thing, “lie facedown on the mat, please.” She did. I sat on top of her. She started to push her hands into the face-protection position. I’d taught her that. She’d absorbed it as naturally as limestone does water. “Very good,” I said, “but let’s pretend for a minute that your arms are trapped down underneath you. Good. Thank you.” I brushed her hair gently out of the way so that I wouldn’t trap it and put my hand on the back of her neck. So small. I felt the sixth vertebra under the web between my thumb and index finger. I knew three different ways to displace it, to sever her spinal cord, to snuff her life between one breath and the next. “If I started to press here, her face would go into the mattress.” I looked at Sandra. “Yes?”
She nodded.
“And your attacker would probably be expecting you to try and lift your head to breathe, yes?”
Again I waited until she nodded.
“So you would do the unexpected. The opposite of lift. What would that be?”
“Tuck,” Nina said. “Chin down, try get your forehead to the matt, mattress, and make an air pocket.”
“Good. Do that, Christie.” And my bright swelling of pride at Christie’s bravery was tinged now with streaks of anger at Sandra. “Now, Sandra, tell me what you’re afraid of in this situation.”
She shrugged.
“Are you afraid your attacker will strangle you to death? Tickle you until you’re crazy? Sing Barry Manilow? No? Then what?”
“What do you think?” Now she was angry, too.
“I have several guesses, but tell me exactly, specifically.”
“Rape,” she said, and something in her voice, some solidity in tone, reminded me of con artists I had met who looked you in the eye and spoke firmly, and I knew she was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth. She was less afraid of rape, something that had probably happened to her dozens of times, than of… what? I found I didn’t care enough to force the issue.
Rape was what everyone else was frightened of, so that’s what I would address.
“All right. So if you’re tucking and bending your spine to protect your breathing, it means you’re also reaching down with your hands. Christie, try that please—just bend and reach down. Reaching down means two things. You’ll have extra leverage—you can use your arms as well as your legs to push against the mattress—and you can reach down far enough to protect your anus and vagina. Christie, can you reach down as far as between your legs?”
“Yes,” she said, surprised.
“But he’ll just push the hand away,” Sandra said.
“All right.” I leaned back and reached down. “But see how that shifts my weight? You could find some leverage now.”
“Not if he’s breaking your fingers. You won’t be thinking about leverage if you’re in pain.”
I knew then, as surely as though I’d just watched video, how it would be for her when her spouse started to beat her. She would probably never think of leverage; she would probably not think at all. Maybe she had the first dozen times it happened but now, as with so many people who are habitually abused, she would simply relax when it began because at that instant she could stop waiting, she could stop worrying what form it would take, this time; it would begin, and she would know. It would be a strange kind of relief.
Most of the class were not habitually abused and I addressed them. “For most people, being in this kind of situation usually leads to a huge gush of adrenaline. We’ve talked about this before. You’ll either panic or your automatic pilot takes over. Either way, it’s unlikely you’ll be thinking or feeling much at this point. You’ll be doing, probably unconsciously. You’ll be focused, as both Tonya and Nina have said, on making your attacker stop, get off, get away from you any way you can. Once you commit to that, once you begin, you’ll do almost anything to see it through. He might break one or more of your fingers, yes, but you’ll feel his weight move. You’ll be on that like lightning—”
“Well, you might,” Sandra said.
“Yes,” I said. “I would. Christie, I’m leaning back now, to get at your hands, so what can you do?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see which way you’re tilting.”
“Backwards,” Suze said.
“Sshh. Christie, you won’t have anyone to see for you. Feel it, feel where my weight is, which way I’m leaning, feel how easy it would be to tip me one way or another, or to hit me with something.”
“But you’ve got my hands!” she said. I waited. “Oh.” And she kicked up and back with her heels and thumped between my tipping shoulder blades, and as I twisted to grab her ankles, she yanked her hands from between her legs and, weight on her knees and palms, hurled herself backwards and literally sat on me.