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Published in Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, (University of Missouri-Columbia), Volume 5, 2006 Copyright Debra Anne Davis 2006 This thing walked into the room. It was about seven feet tall, bullet-shaped, bulky and padded. Its painted face, red and blue, had huge round eyes and a sideways crescent moon grin, which made it resemble a gigantic, live Pacman. But a Pacman with a body; the body was a cylinder, like an overgrown, smooth fire hydrant, with arms. His arms were thick and flattened. His hands were gloves with eight inch fingers. We knew, because we’d been prepared for this, that he was the Space Invader. Pam, now officially the only instructor in the room, led us through the various activities that had been explained to us in the earlier part of the class. We, a group of ten women of all ages, yelled at the Space Invader. We stood in a circle and took turns pushing him around. We told him, “Stop! Go over there!” and pointed across the room, our eyes glaring, our arms thrust decisively out. Everyone in this Saturday self defense class participated with animation and intention. But I took it all particularly seriously. I knew it was really Robert, the other instructor, who was in that huge, ridiculous suit. But for me it wasn’t the instructor I shouted at and punched. And it wasn’t the Space Invader creature, either, who made me angry and afraid. It was the man who’d come into my apartment, held a knife at my throat, and raped me four months before. He was the thing that came at me each time, the thing I cursed and hit, the thing that scared me so much and made me so mad. It was he I now attacked with my fearful, violent strokes. He was the thing I was trying to get away from, trying to deter, trying to hurt. Home I have a big book, “coffee table” sized, though I wouldn’t want to display it on my coffee table, not because it’s a bad book but because it has a huge eye in the center of the cover. It’s a beautiful eye, with a green, almost aquamarine iris, a woman’s eye—interesting you can tell this even though so little of the face is exposed—with a neat bowed brow, lashes like dark cacti spikes. This eye is as big as my palm. The book’s title, Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behavior, is in very large letters across the top, above the eye; the author’s name, Desmond Morris, just as large, is below the eye. The “man” of “Manwatching” is meant to denote “humans.” But I wonder. The eye on the cover is female. Is she watching (male) men? If so, what does she see?
“Hi.” I’m smiling. I hope he isn’t offended that I don't remember who he is. Hey, what the hell? He just pushed the door in, shoved me against the wall, slammed the door, and locked it! What the HELL? I can feel my shoulder blades slapping up against the wall. He’s shoving his face at mine. It only took him one second to step in and close the door. Wow, this is really weird. “Where’s your boyfriend?” He is demanding to know. Who is this asshole? Morris says that crossing a “conspicuously displayed boundary-line,” such as a garden or a fence, puts “any visitor or intruder at an immediate disadvantage. As he crosses the threshold, his dominance wanes, slightly but unmistakably. He is entering an area where he senses that he must ask permission to do simple things that he would consider a right elsewhere. Without lifting a finger, the territorial owners exert their dominance. This is done by all the hundreds of small ownership ‘markers’ they have deposited on their family territory: the ornaments, the ‘possessed’ objects positioned in the rooms and on the walls; the furnishings, the furniture, the colours, the patterns, all owner-chosen and all making this particular home base unique to them.” The visitor respects the wishes and the property of the hostess. A visitor is careful, polite; the hostess—the good hostess—is gracious, accommodating. The intruder, though, is not respectful. But: the intruder knows he has intruded. He knows he is overstepping boundaries. He does not apologize for this, but he does take it into consideration. We’re at the end of the entryway; the living room and dining area open out in front of us. “OK.” He has a plan. “I’m going to put you face down in a room while I look around for the money,” he explains to me, as if there is nothing strange about such a notion. “OK,” I say. “You go into one of the rooms and just lay face down.” He is ordering me.“ OK,” I say. He crossed my threshold; I tried to slam the door in his face. He slammed me into the walls and floor of my entryway; I tried to hit him in the groin. Then he planned to invade the inner, private rooms of my home. Morris says, “The less private reception rooms…are the next line of defence”—defense of the bedroom against “intruders.” These are the rooms you show guests when you take them on a “tour.” These are not the rooms guests feel comfortable entering unbidden. Even he, this intruder, needed to discuss crossing this boundary. He said “one of the rooms”—not “bedroom.” In a few short minutes, it had come to this: The stranger was bossing the resident. His knife helped, of course. But I wonder if it had more effect as a prop than a weapon. With his words, he threatened to hurt me with the knife; with the knife, though, he told me, this is not a normal situation. He was not following the rules of etiquette. This helped him move me mentally away from the set of assumptions I had about how humans in society should interact with each other. I didn’t know what the new rules, his rules, would be exactly. But I knew, from his rude and violent behavior, his unreasonable demands and his weapon, that he was not following acceptable territorial behavior. And he knew this, too: He knew what the rules were and that he wasn’t following them. He acknowledged this in a hundred ways. He was consciously overstepping mores, deliberately invading my space. This was a two-bedroom apartment; I used one bedroom as an office, and my boyfriend and I used another as our bedroom. “Now, when I let you go, what are you going to do? Tell me
what direction you’ll go in.” But he doesn’t let me go, as he said he would. He’s changed the plan without telling me. He grabs my arm and pushes me, down the hall and to the right. He got information from me about my home’s floor plan. Then he tried to use it against me. I tried, though, to use my knowledge not against him but for me. I knew how the small apartment was laid out. He had everything else on his side. And here we are. In the office. Look, the sun glowing still in the window. There is the mat. I will lie down on the mat. The big open floor. Yes. Ahhhh. What? No, no. This is where I will lie down. Where are we going? My arm. He’s squeezing my arm. Ouch! He had seen the room, the desk, the wide open floor. No bed. The office is the first room I would show a guest on a tour. “Here’s my office,” I’d say. And then, of course, the bathroom. And then, last of all, I’d lower my voice a little and open the door a little less wide and tell my guest, “here’s the bedroom.” The intruder didn’t want a tour. Even though I didn’t, he knew exactly what he wanted. And it required a bed. So, our twisted tour continued. He saw that this room was an office, so he shoved me in the opposite direction, into the other room. This was not the plan at all. Why can’t I just lie down on the floor in the other room? I would rather lie on the dirty floor than on the soft bed. We have crossed the threshold. We are in the bedroom. I’m not standing any more. My face is being pushed now into the mattress. He shoved me down to my knees, very rude of him, very impolite. “Don’t move!” he’s yelling at me again. I’m not going to move.
But it was not just my relationship to my home that was attacked.
Body The floor exercises were the final activity with the Space Invader. When my turn came again, I got into position, as all the other participants had done: I lay face down on the mat and spread my legs. I wanted to get up right away. But I didn’t move. The Invader got on its knees, clumsily crawled towards me; pushed first my one leg then the other aside with his big puffy arms—spread my legs apart; and lay on top of me. The Invader waited, simply waited. What what? There was the rapist standing behind me, ripping my clothes from my body, shoving my face down on my own mattress. But my hands weren’t tied now, he wasn’t moving, and I knew what I could do. I bent my right leg up under me, pushed my foot on the firm floor, and raised my body. The Invader rolled off of me and lay flat on his back, unmoving. I stood up, stood over him, and kicked him as hard as I could, three times, like I’d been told to do. I stamped on his bulging abdomen, smashed my foot down on his bullet head, and stamped again on his abdomen. That was what we were supposed to do. But I wanted to keep kicking him. I wanted to jump, with both feet, all over his body. To get down on my knees and pound my fists from his head to feet. I wanted to kick his head in, kick his dick in, kill him. But instead I stood aside and smiled a little at my second round of applause.
My cheek now, not my shoulder blades, my cheek now is smashed up against the wall, the wall of my own apartment. I feel the wall on my cheek. His hand, flat against my back, now is pushing me, hard, against the wall. My breasts, they are smashed up against the wall. I am being smashed. There is a knife at my throat, a knife at my throat. He is glaring at me now, so close; he is sweating at me, leaning on me, pushing a knife blade into my throat. “…no one can ever become completely immune to invasions of Personal Space. This is because they remain forever associated with either powerful hostile or equally powerful loving feelings. All through our childhood we will have been held to be loved and held to be hurt, and anyone who invades our Personal Space when we are adults is, in effect, threatening to extend his behaviour into one of these two highly charged areas of human interaction. Even if his motives are clearly neither hostile nor sexual, we still find it hard to suppress our reactions to his close approach.” And if the motives are clearly both hostile and “sexual?” The invasion is felt even more acutely. Invading someone’s personal space might mean standing too close to someone in line at the bank. A man touching a woman’s shoulder as he chats with her. A stranger allowing his thigh to touch yours as you sit on the bus. But what if the invasion is an actual invasion? Not an invasion of personal space but an invasion of person? Hands. “Put your hands behind your back!” Can’t put my hands, can’t, can’t put my hands behind my back. Then I won’t be able to push him away when I need to. I need to keep my hands free, or else…or else what, I don’t know. “I said, ‘Put your hands behind your back.’” I make fists. I bend my arms up. I need free hands. Everything now depends on free hands. Free hands. His fingers dig into my arm. He shows the knife. “PUT your HANDS behind your BACK!” As an infant, I gurgled and cooed. I burped and spit. I waved my hands in front of me. I remember none of this, but I know it’s true because that’s what infants do. I grabbed hair. I batted at toys. Eventually I held my own bottle. I learned to walk, and when I teetered over, my hands broke my fall. I fed myself with my hands, held my tippy cup. I drew with crayons, and then wrote with pens. Every day of my life I used my hands for thousands of things. Swatted flies, hitchhiked, kneaded bread dough, punched my friends playfully, shielded my eyes from the sun, cared for pets. My hands kept me alive, allowed me to create and defend. And now he was trying to take my hands away. I twist, twist away. I run down the hallway. Bam! I’m flat on the floor. He smashes me into the floor. My arm is under me, his knee in my back. My face in the floor. But my hands, yes! My hands are still free! “Put your hands behind your back!” “What do you want?”“I want your blood on this knife, bitch.” The knife at my neck now. My body is not moving. It is limp. I sacrifice my hands to save my body. My home, he’s invaded, uninvited, unwanted. Now he has taken control of my body. I have no hands, no strength to fight him with, no power to protect myself physically. He has the neck of my shirt in his fist. He is pulling up on my shirt. He rips my shirt off of me, pulls my pants off of me, tears my underwear off of me. Don’t scream; no scream, I say to me. “You knew this was what it was going to be all along, didn’t you?” My mind didn’t know until my body did.
Mind The bands are on my wrists. “How does it feel?” he asks. “Is it too tight?” Yes, the left one is too tight. I tell him this. As long as he’s asking. I tell him where the scissors are and he searches the living room for them. While he searches, he watches me, but he doesn’t need to. I am standing still. My two hands are tied behind my back and I stand obediently in my own entryway. I watch him search. I can’t get away. I am trapped. Trapped. A trapped thing acts differently than a free person. It looks like I am cooperating with his crime. Really my caged mind has shackled my body. He has convinced me, with his words and deeds and his knife, that I cannot escape from him. It is my own mind that holds my feet still on the floor. He is behind me again, with my scissors. “If I cut this, you aren’t going to try to run away are you?” He’s mad because I tried to run before. I smile, guiltily, back at him. “No,” I tell the intruder. “I won‘t run.” I don’t run. The band is cut. And I hold my wrist in exactly the same position, the position it was in when it was bound. Now it’s free…and now it’s bound again. It’s a little looser, yes, but actually it’s too tight again. But I won’t tell him. He likes to do things right, doesn’t like to be wrong. I don’t know his name, have been trapped with him for only some minutes, but I know a lot about him. I know what makes him mad and I know I don’t want to make him mad. It is very simple: If I make him mad, he might stab me to death. I tell him the bands are fine now. My goals had changed. Not flight not fight. I’d tried those. I was narrowing my focus. I stood with my hands behind my back and didn’t run. I’d tried to run. I’d tried it all. I stood and waited for the scissors. It took me ten years to purge this humiliation. We all took turns practicing the techniques Pam demonstrated with the Space Invader. She showed us practical self-defense techniques: how to stamp the foot of someone who’s holding both your arms; how to smash the nose of someone who has you pinned to the ground; how to knock someone in the head or kick someone in the genitals or punch someone in the abdomen. My turn came up, and I pulled on my own protective gear, chest pads and knee pads, feeling both nervous and excited. I walked the short distance to the mat, knowing the rest of the class was watching me and hoping my anxiety didn’t show in my wobbly steps or tightly closed mouth and wide-open eyes. I stood in place. The Space Invader grabbed me from behind. I froze. He held me but didn’t move. I remembered. I jammed my shoe down his shin and ankle, turned and hit him, hard, on his bloated red blue face. Now he grabbed my wrists. Again. I felt again. My wrists were caught and held. The Space Invader stood, held my wristsbut didn’t move, didn’t tie them up. This is a class, I remembered, not the rape again. I thought. I followed Pam’s instructions: I faced him; I held both my arms together, tight, and twisted them up and around and out of his grasp; I kicked him, as I’d been instructed, in the groin. The Invader then turned to Pam and raised his right arm and tapped his hand on the top of his head. Pam told the class that that meant my kick had been “especially hard” and potentially “very effective.” She then started clapping and motioned for the rest of the women to clap for me, too. My mouth was smiling and my eyes, I had to blink my eyes. I heard the applause. And I could kick. I could kick hard. Yes, next time; Yes. As we learned and practiced these techniques, I couldn’t help berating myself for never having taken such a course before. Maybe, just perhaps, if only—yes, I could have prevented what had happened to me. There must have been a way. I did not blame myself; but I did allow myself to feel some regret. Blame and regret are not the same: I knew what had happened to me wasn’t my fault; but I sure as hell wished I could have gotten away. Sometimes when I express this feeling to others, they misconstrue what I mean. These well-meaning people tell me, “Don’t blame yourself; there’s nothing you could have done.” This is a death sentence. I don’t blame myself for what happened; I am not the rapist. I blame only the rapist. But here’s the thing: I tried, I actually tried to get away, but I couldn’t. I realized I was trapped and then began to deal with the situation with this realization informing all I did, said, and thought from then on. What I want more than anything in life is to never be trapped again. I want to be able to get myself untrapped if someone does try to victimize me again—and I want to know that I have the capability. I want, in short, to believe that there was something I could have done. “Of course, I can still be intimidated by a particularly dominant individual who enters my home base, but his encroachment will be dangerous for him and he will think twice about it, because he will know that here my urge to resist will be dramatically magnified and my usual subservience banished. Insulted at the heart of my own territory, I may easily explode into battle—either symbolic or real—with a result that may be damaging to both of us.” Next time, I want to explode. Pam and Robert asked us to respond to our experience with the Space Invader. I wrote on back of my Adventure Spirit Training Handbook: “I’m surprised I felt so angry at the stupid foam robot. I felt a lot of the same angry feelings as when I was being attacked. I wanted to kill him. I was even a little disappointed each time he went down for good because I wanted to keep hurting him. I see now how I could get away and even hurt someone who thought he could attack me. Also: the soreness and pain I feel in my joints and bones now feels similar to the day after I was raped. I must have fought more then than I remember. A few well-placed blows and a bit more aggression and I possibly could have gotten away. I feel more secure, safe and strong now. That’s probably most important.” But I ended: “I felt so nervous when it was my turn and when he growled at me.” A Body at Home, a Mind at Rest As I sat watching TV, a little pirate face popped into my home. I said, “Oh!” He was visibly embarrassed. I thought he might be just overeager for his candy. It turns out it was an accident. What interested me, though, was my own reaction. I did not panic. A male had come into my home uninvited. A tiny male, true. And it was Halloween, the one night of the year when would-be scary strangers knock and knock and knock and yet are too cute to frighten. But I was not alarmed. My stomach did nothing, no flips or flops. It was an unusually active Halloween, and I was home alone, watching TV and distributing Milky Ways and M&Ms. Between 7:00 and 9:00., there was a knock (or ring) at my door about every five minutes it seemed. The front door tends to stick, so instead of closing it entirely, I left it half closed, not ajar but not shut. That in itself was a step beyond for me. So when the little pirate’s head poked into the living room, I’d thought he was just making himself at home. I went to the door and grabbed my big purple bowl of candy. I offered it to him. He was chagrined. “It was this,” he said, five years old and already too polite to be barging in on strangers. He wanted me to know that he hadn’t meant to open my door and enter my private realm. He pointed at my doormat, about one inch high. He reenacted the scene for me. He had tried to lean across the doormat to knock on the door, but he had lost his balance and grabbed the doorknob to prevent a fall. A right triangle was formed, the two legs being the bottom half of my front door and my door mat; the hypotenuse was his body. So that’s when his little face appeared, black hat and eye patch, in my living room. I was impressed that he was embarrassed. I was impressed that I was not afraid. Twelve years, eleven months, and six days had passed since I’d been raped, and I was not afraid of this child! I gave myself a silent round of applause. |