Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  Pammy had practically grown up in them.

  Her father had trained her to fight alongside her brothers. He had started her training at age eight, seemingly on a whim. Her brothers abandoned the fighting and sparring by the time they reached their teens, but Pammy never did, even though her mother had objected because it wasn’t ladylike.

  Pammy didn’t care about ladylike. She was good. She could take on the men at her father’s favorite gym, and she actually made a bit of money by betting someone bigger and stronger that she could take him down.

  She had never been wrong. By the time she graduated from high school and left to attend college on the other side of the country, she was one of the favorites at the gym. Regulars bet on her as well, and were never disappointed by her show of strength.

  So she was surprised to get to liberal Berkeley, only to find that no one wanted to help an athletic girl retain her athleticism. She finally found a gym in a bad part of town that needed her money more than they wanted to exclude her. It didn’t hurt that the day she arrived, she elbowed one of the regulars so hard in the gut that he couldn’t catch his breath for nearly an hour.

  She had smiled sweetly at him and said, Try grabbing my ass again, and I’ll hurt you worse. Since he was still gasping for air at the time, he believed her and never tried to touch her again.

  Pammy couldn’t remember exactly when she had gotten the idea for a women-only gym, but she had realized early that the city needed one. She had tried to bring a female friend to the men’s gym once, and the woman had fled in terror. Pammy then realized that her willingness to take on male harassment in a male environment was unique.

  Pammy chewed on her now-cold piece of sausage pizza. Val had wound her way around the rows of shoes and gloves until she got to what had initially been the practice dummy.

  Pammy had made the dummy so women had something with a face to hit. But the dummy wasn’t very effective, and within a few weeks, she retired it.

  Shortly after that, she had arrived at the gym one morning to find the dummy sitting on a chair, with a nightshirt on over its cloth body. Someone had drawn a calligraphy treatise on the shirt in magic marker:

  I am not a different species, yet people call me chick, bitch, and cow.

  I am not something good to eat, yet people call me cookie, honey, and tart.

  I am not a mindless sex object, yet people call me cunt, whore, slut, and tramp.

  I am not something other than an adult, yet people call me baby, girl, hag, shrew, doll, and old maid.

  I am a woman.

  I am a person.

  Treat me like one.

  Pammy loved it. She had tried to thank whoever it was who made the shirt, but no one confessed. She later learned that the poem came from a poster, but she could never find out who originally wrote it. Or who copied it onto the shirt.

  Women who were new to the gym always stopped in front of it and read it. Some commented on it. Others walked away as if they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

  Val was staring at it now, too far away for Pammy to see her expression. But Val had grabbed her own elbow again, holding her arms in front her body. Not quite hugging herself, like she had done before she arrived, but still, protecting herself.

  The poem had stirred something up in Val. Pammy wondered if she would ever find out what it was.

  “Hey, Pammy?” someone said.

  Pammy turned.

  Shirley leaned forward. “I know there’s no classes scheduled this afternoon, but would you be willing to run a sparring class?”

  Pammy looked around the room. Most of the women here had not graduated to sparring yet. And Pammy didn’t feel like running a class.

  She couldn’t quite refuse, though. They had hours to kill.

  “Not a sparring class,” she said. “Not everyone’s qualified. Um, maybe…”

  “I’m the one who is new.” Val had returned to the group. “I could just go, and then you can run your class.”

  Pammy stood. She didn’t want to be sitting down to have this conversation.

  “No,” she said. “A sparring class is pretty specific, and only a few women here are ready for it. Maybe Jill wouldn’t mind leading another Tai Chi class…?”

  Jill was gathering grease-covered paper plates and stuffing them into that open box. “I don’t mind.”

  “Wonderful,” Opal said. “I’ll help you clean up and then we can start.”

  Pammy smiled just a little. She’d be able to get her accounts done after all.

  “Nonetheless,” Val said from beside her, “I think I’m going to go. Class is at eleven tomorrow?”

  She had spoken so softly that the others hadn’t heard her.

  “Eleven,” Pammy confirmed. “Wear some loose comfortable clothing, and if you have Keds or sneakers, wear those as well.”

  Val nodded, and smiled. “Thanks for everything.”

  “You’re welcome,” Pammy said. She was going to add that Val wouldn’t have trouble with Tai Chi, but Val had already turned her back and was heading toward the door.

  Pammy watched her go. Val’s arms were at her sides now, and she wasn’t scanning the room for hazards. Pammy hoped that was a good sign.

  She wanted Val to come back.

  6

  Val

  The street seemed dusty and dirty after the interior of the gym. I’d been in a dozen gyms over the years, always with Truman, and I had never seen one so clean. Everything had a place, and the places seemed organized to the point of obsessiveness.

  I liked it more than I probably should have, but the thing I liked the most was the punching bags. I could reach them. I’d never been able to reach punching bags before—not and maintain what Truman called “proper form.”

  I’d never really punched one without someone handing me a stool or holding me up, and I’d always wanted to.

  I’d always wanted to spend time in a gym.

  I ran a hand through my close-cropped hair. My heart was fluttering, but for the first time in my recent memory, it wasn’t fluttering with fear. It was fluttering with excitement.

  I’d made a choice. I’d made a major choice.

  I had joined the gym. Pamela had told me to bring money for my fees tomorrow, but I could have paid her this afternoon. I think Pamela wanted me to think about it, see if I changed my mind.

  I wouldn’t change my mind.

  This was the most alive I’d felt in six months.

  All right, that wasn’t entirely true. This was the most alive I’d felt without terror being involved. It was amazing how terror focused down every sensation, from intake of each breath to twitch of an eyelid.

  It was also amazing how terror snuck up on you, even in the most mundane situations.

  Just walking through the door of that gym had so terrified me that I hadn’t been able to do it all week.

  When Pamela came outside and spoke to me, I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. I almost ran away.

  I almost ran away several times this afternoon.

  Just going inside was a major victory. Staying inside was even more of a victory. And eating lunch with women I didn’t know—white women I didn’t know—so far beyond a victory that I didn’t have words for it.

  They were kind to me; I hadn’t expect that. And no one asked me awkward questions, about myself or about my skin color or about my reasons for coming to the gym.

  The women simply assumed that I wanted to learn, like they did. Two of them were trying to sell me on Pamela’s classes, as if the women were afraid I would leave and never come back.

  I suspected a number of women had done that over the years.

  Still, I had to leave before the rest of them did. They felt like a unit, and I felt like an outsider, even though they were trying to convince me I wasn’t.

  And I wasn’t that interested in the moon stuff, not enough to wait around.

  I walked over to College Avenue. The streets were amazingly quiet. They
hadn’t been quiet since I got here two weeks ago.

  I usually craved quiet. But now that it had arrived, it bothered me. I knew it wasn’t normal.

  Berkeley was usually a hub of activity—and not activity that I enjoyed.

  If I had known what Berkeley was like, I would never have come here. But I’d stopped watching the news after he raped me. I couldn’t bear to think about all the pain and suffering in the world. I’d read books I’d read before, so I wouldn’t have to worry about how they came out.

  I had protected myself—I thought. Of course, I had been wrong.

  After I had gotten on the bus in Chicago, I had decided that Berkeley would be my destination. I’d heard about Berkeley over the years, how liberal it was, how it was all about education and thinking and study. Maybe, I had thought, I would go back to school, learn something new, make something of myself.

  Maybe.

  The bus terminal was in Oakland, not Berkeley. I had disembarked, thinking I’d catch a cab. Then I stepped outside the bus terminal into an area that made Chicago’s South Side look safe. I almost turned around and bought a ticket to somewhere else.

  But I had promised myself Berkeley, so I decided to give Berkeley a chance.

  Even then, I hadn’t paid attention to all of the changes. I’d been thinking I was going to a university town.

  I loved universities, I always had, and I knew that the University of California at Berkeley was one of the best schools in the country. I ended up with a lot of money when Truman died. I didn’t want it since we had been divorced when he was murdered, but I couldn’t say no to it either. And, as Marvella said to me, it wasn’t like I could work. Truman had died shortly after I was injured. I needed to recover—not just from the physical injuries, but from the emotional ones too.

  Marvella argued that the money would let me do that.

  Still, I knew how hard Truman had worked for every dime. Even though we were no longer married, I still cared for him. I wasn’t sure I had ever loved him, but I valued him, and his opinion.

  He had been a good man.

  At the very thought of him, I teared up. My emotions had been on the surface ever since I woke up in the hospital with the baby—and all the chances of other babies—gone forever.

  I turned onto College. I preferred walking this way, because it took me away from People’s Park and that gigantic mess. Even though the mess had ended by the time I moved here, it still reverberated.

  Which was probably why I had been able to get a furnished apartment so close to campus and relatively cheap. The neighborhood made me nervous, not because it was bad (it wasn’t. It was lovely), but because there was so much constant movement. People on the streets at all hours. Shouting, laughing, cursing. Partying.

  I was afraid it would get worse once school started.

  My walk from the gym to the apartment took about ten minutes. It was a lovely day—as far as I could tell, Berkeley didn’t get excessively hot in the summer—and no one was on the streets.

  They must have been watching the moon landing like everyone else. I would’ve thought that the silence on the streets made me calmer, but instead, it started my nerves again. I felt like I was missing something.

  The skin on the back of my neck crawled as I walked past Dwight toward the zigzag on Parker that would lead to my street.

  I’d spent enough Sundays in Berkeley to know that students should’ve been everywhere, sitting outside with their books, sharing their music, eating while sitting beneath the large trees that seemed to grow all over this part of town.

  But there were no students. I clenched my fists, glad that I had gone to the gym. I needed the classes. I needed to feel safe.

  Particularly in situations like this one. I had been attacked on an empty street right in front of my apartment building. He had shoved me through the doorway of the building and into the quiet hall, and the one thing I didn’t do, the one thing I was proud I hadn’t done, was let him into the apartment, even though he wanted me to. Even though he…

  I shook my head, forced my thoughts away from that night.

  It was nothing like now. That street had been dark, the streetlight broken. It had been cold. It had been in Chicago. I had been alone.

  I was alone here too. But it was a beautiful sunny day. The sidewalk was wide and visible, despite the overhanging trees and the beautiful, unfamiliar blooming plants. Windows were open, and I heard voices, faint male voices. They had to belong to the announcers on various televisions.

  A few tinny notes of music came from some of the apartments, so some of the people on the block were ignoring the Big National News story. The music was so loud that they wouldn’t be able to hear anyone crying for help on the street either.

  I let out a breath, wishing I hadn’t had that thought. I was trying to control my mind, my panic. I’d learned that if I let thoughts like that escape, they became the focus.

  I made myself inhale. The air smelled faintly of the ocean, but over it was the dusty green scent of the willow trees I’d been walking under. Nice day. I had spent some time with nice people. The neighborhood was nice.

  But it was loud. That was one of the things I hated about it. People talked too loud when they were outside. They played their music too loud. There were a lot of transients—or so I guessed, since no one introduced themselves to me after I moved in.

  Although the introduction-thing, that might’ve been for other reasons. Even though Berkeley was liberal city, with an even more liberal college, it didn’t seem to have as many black students as I expected. Maybe that was just the summer. I saw a number of blacks, but not nearly as many as I had seen in Chicago.

  I felt out of place in Berkeley, and people watched me go by. There were a lot more Asian students than I expected, and a lot of hippies. The entire neighborhood smelled of pot sometimes. But only a handful of people looked like me.

  And usually when blacks were in short supply, anyone new seemed suspicious, not someone to say hello to.

  I finally reached my building. It was a lovely old house, built at the turn of the century. Someone had painted it an ill-advised lime green, but at least it had been painted. An apartment service my hotel recommended had rented it to me without a problem, so maybe my worries about discrimination were not an issue.

  Or maybe paying three months in advance, along with the security deposit and first and last month’s rent, did a lot to ameliorate any issues some rental agent might have with someone who looked like me.

  It didn’t matter. I had fallen in love with the apartment.

  The apartment was on the second floor of the old house. I looked both ways as I came up the walk, and checked to see if anyone was watching me before I ducked past the weeping willow tree in the front yard.

  I hated that tree at night. If there was the smallest of breezes, the fronds moved. They made a soft rustling noise, which scared the crap out of me.

  Today, though, they were motionless, and I could see through them. I walked up the concrete stairs to what had once been the above-ground entrance to the old house. (The lowest level had been built for either a carriage or an automobile, and if I had a car, I could have used my little section of it as parking.)

  I used my outdoor key to unlock the steel main door. It opened to reveal stairs on the left wall, which headed up to my apartment, and a door on the right that led into the other apartment. My neighbors were a Korean couple here on some kind of study visa. I’d only met them once. The wife was so unnerved by the neighborhood that she rarely left the building.

  I took the stairs up and unlocked the deadbolt on my door. I had installed a chain lock as well. Before I rented the place, the first thing I had looked at was the ease of access from the outside, and I felt reassured.

  Anyone who wanted to break in would have to go through a window on the lower levels. That steel door was unbreakable.

  All of the windows opened outward, and none of them opened onto a roofline or any kind of balcony. No
ne of the neighborhood trees were near the windows, and the fence that blocked off the tiny outdoor garden from the neighbor’s property wasn’t tall enough to allow someone to get purchase on the side of the building.

  Once I was inside my apartment, I was safe.

  And as important, at least to me, I felt like I was home. The door opened right into the middle of the apartment. To the left was the large living room and a large bedroom. To the right was the bathroom and an extra-large kitchen with a space big enough for a gigantic dining room table.

  The furniture was old student furniture, which the rental company would let me swap out for my own if I decided to stay past the three months I’d paid for. The bed was the first thing that would probably go. It sagged in the middle, and I tried not to think about the generations of students who had slept (and done other things) in it.

  What I liked best about the apartment were two things: the built-in bookshelves that lined the long hallway between the kitchen and the living room, and the fact that the unit had one of those new modern mini washer and dryer units that cost a small fortune.

  I didn’t have to go into a scary basement or an even scarier Laundromat to clean my clothes.

  That might’ve been enough to get me to rent the apartment right there, even without the space and the built-ins. Once I was in the apartment for the day, I was in for as long as I needed to be.

  I shut the door, locked it, and leaned on it. Somehow, on my short journey from the gym to the apartment, I’d managed to go from triumph back to terror. It was as if my body had rewired itself in the past year to be comfortable with terror.

  I hated that thought. I hated what I had become. In the past, I hadn’t been the most courageous woman on the planet, but I hadn’t been afraid of everything. I couldn’t have been a policeman’s wife if I had been.

  I made myself take another deep breath. It was warm up here. I had sun pouring in the windows on three sides, and it beat in during the afternoons. I usually didn’t mind; I found the sun healing.