That Takes Ovaries! (31 page)

Stella and I began to run. “Wait a minute,” she shouted as we turned the corner. “Stop or they’ll know it was us.” We stood together catching our breath, fighting the urge to bolt. My knees shook and my face was frozen in a grin.

“You liked that, didn’t you?” Stella teased.

The next day Kevin turned up for breakfast. I felt exhilarated, and gestured wildly as I told about the coach, the chair, the
racks of magazines. He listened quietly, then said: “I read the morning paper. It said you did thousands of dollars worth of damage.”

I felt my jaw drop. “Yeah. To
pornography.
We did thousands of dollars of damage to pornography.”

He wasn’t impressed. “What do you think you accomplished by doing that?”

“I feel empowered,” I said. “Like I’m not a victim anymore.” My voice sounded high and tinny. I felt my eyes fill up.
Don’t,
I told myself.

“Yeah, but you victimized someone else.”

“No. I fought back.”

“The paper’s headline says
Feminism Breeds Violence.
Was that your goal?”

This time I met his stare. He seemed flat, colorless, and a vein was bulging on his forehead.

“You destroyed property, broke the law, and violated the First Amendment. Are you proud of that?”

The word
violate
rang in my ear. He was using it incorrectly.
Screw it,
I thought.
Judy can have him.
“I think you better go,” I said.

That night I called Stella to see if she had seen the papers. She hadn’t.

“It says there were a hundred of us,” I told her.

She laughed. “The shop owner had to say that. He’s probably embarrassed he couldn’t handle fifty women.”

“How do you feel now?” I asked. I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. It sounded slow and steady. I wanted to be that calm. “Do you feel okay with what we did? Do you think we made a difference?”

“Well,” she began, “it depends on what kind of difference you mean. If you mean, did we put a pornography shop out of business?— then no. They’ll file an insurance claim and reopen in a week. But if you’re talking personally—did that action make a personal difference to me?—then yes. It changed my world.”

I sighed loudly. I felt relieved, as if a thick root had been pulled from my spine.

“It’s not about destroying them,” she continued. “It’s about not letting them destroy you.”

That night, images of my father bled into my dreams. The rage, the beatings. The way he stuttered, red-faced, as he whipped his belt from his pants. The choice was always the same—his belt or his dick. Either way, I usually got both.

The women from the rally were there, off to the side, reading my name over and over. My father was above me, hand raised in the air, belt wrapped tightly around his fist. Blood and fury gathered in his face. “You said my name,” he roared.

I watched the arc of the leather strap as it cut through the air. But I was not afraid. I clenched my teeth and raised my arm to meet the belt. We struggled, but I took the belt from him. With a knife, I cut the belt in pieces and let it fall to the floor.

“You don’t own me anymore,” I told my father, my face pressed up against his. “You can’t destroy me now.”

He disappeared, evaporated into his own rage. And in my dream, I joined the women in the park.

I confronted him in the street yesterday, with neighbors looking on: “You’ve been screwing her since the week you got back, you insensitive bastard!
You have no respect for me.”

True, meeting him for part of his tour through Europe had been a disaster, ending with us traveling in different directions and seemingly split. But I had written off the hellacious
encounter as simply some weird travel dynamic. After all, he was one of my best friends. It was a friendship that had evolved so beautifully into a romantic relationship just a few months before our trip.

Now he started bumbling around for an excuse, so I continued, “You’ve been treating me like crap for weeks!”

“The thing with Sarah,” he said, “just happened.”

I slapped him across the face. “Another one of your pathetic excuses.”

He jumped back. “That was uncalled for.”

I walked right up to him. He looked nervous, even afraid. “You’ve been slapping me in the face over and over,” I shouted. “You’ve been
spitting
in my face. You’ve been treating me like dirt, and you want to be my
friend?”
I spit on the ground. “Forget it!”

He got on his bike and started to leave. “I’m not going to sit around and—”

I interrupted and hollered, “I curse the memory of you in my life!”

Girl, I was yelling. Finally. It felt so good. I was just totally feeling, in my body, letting out everything that was all pent up, letting him hold and absorb the pain of two months of crying myself to sleep, transferring it from me to him, where it belonged.

I felt amazing afterward: so light, so free. I started laughing and dancing. When I turned around, I saw the three little girls from next door staring at me in wide-eyed wonder. I leaned over toward them, and said, “He deserved that.” They got these huge grins on their faces and started giggling.

The next time they saw me, two minutes later, they were all excited and beaming up at me, cheering, “He deserved that!” That made me happy.

I like to ride my bike because I can go anywhere at any time. This is important in Boston, where the public transit trains shut down at 12:30 A.M., or something ridiculous like that. Once, I found it was important in Boston for another reason, too.

Late one summer night, after some dumb loft party, I was heading home. I was twenty-two and living in a tiny apartment in the North End, Boston’s historic Italian neighborhood. To get home, I often took a shortcut through Haymarket. By day it was packed with vendors and shoppers, and carts and tents filled with fruits, vegetables, and all kinds of smelly fish. At night the tents were empty. Only scraps of whatever wasn’t sold that day would be left—tomatoes, cabbages, and onions strewn about the street. Traveling over the discarded tomatoes and old cobblestone roads, I could access an underpass—a little tunnel big enough for pedestrians and bikers, but not cars. Once through, I’d come out facing the North End, my neighborhood.

On that particular night, when I was almost at Haymarket, I slowed down to cut across traffic. There were only a few cars in the area at that hour and I kept pedaling, sure they knew to pass. Suddenly I got this creepy feeling that something was behind me: You know, when you can’t tell if you’re getting freaked out over nothing, or if something actually is about to happen, and then when it does, you feel dumb that you hadn’t looked to see if your instinct had been right in the first place. Well, before I could turn around to check, I felt this hand—yes, a hand!— reach out and squeeze my ass.

Someone had grabbed my butt.

Before I knew it, I fell off my bike and onto the street.
Oww.
I looked up to see the offending car pick up speed and drive ahead.
Some jerk had knocked me off my bike to feel my ass,
was all I could think as I jumped back up. I couldn’t let someone do that and get away with it. I pedaled to catch up. I didn’t want to lose sight of the car. I was so angry I was shaking with rage.
What if
there had been more cars behind me when I’d fallen?
I could easily have been hit.

I looked around as I pedaled and realized there was a traffic light ahead. I pedaled faster, thinking,
Turn red, turn red.
I gained speed and was now almost to the car. As I approached, I saw the scumbag guy in the passenger seat. Then I saw something that both freaked me out and bummed me out at the same time: There was a girl in the driver’s seat.
Why would a girl do that to another girl?
The fact that she had slowed down just so some guy could pinch my ass was pathetic. My anger grew into a hateful disgust toward those two losers.
Screw them,
I growled as the traffic light changed from yellow to red. Their car slowed, then stopped. My heart was beating hard. I got closer, and from between my legs I pulled my kryptonite lock out of its holder. I lifted it as high as I could and brought it down hard before jerking my hand back. One fell swoop. The glass of their rear window sprayed into the backseat.

Knowing the underpass was just to my left, I darted across the street without even looking for cars. I was in that tunnel and under cover in a matter of seconds. I flew as fast as I could, even though I knew they couldn’t catch me now unless they got out of their car to chase me. I was too scared to look back and check. Yeah, scared stiff … but exhilarated at the same time! I had never done anything like that before. When I reminded myself for the second time that there was no way they could have followed me, I relaxed and realized I was still gripping the kryptonite lock in my hand. I also realized that in my haste I hadn’t looked to see the shock register on their faces when I had done my deed. One thing I’ll bet though, the next time a guy asks that girl to slow down so he can squeeze some other girl’s butt, she will think twice about whether or not she wants to replace another rear window.

My husband was having a voicemail romance. I found out one night when I heard him pick up the phone downstairs; I listened in on the upstairs extension. Their messages to each other were stupid and breathy, childish. At first I didn’t know how to react to such a quirky sophomoric affair—but in the end, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

I got their mailbox number from the phone company’s records. The “other woman” had unimaginatively used my husband’s birth year as their pass code. I listened daily to their intimate little exchanges. I discovered they rarely saw each other; she lived nearly three hours away. He tended to call her when he was drinking and feeling lonely and rejected (which was every time he got drunk, because I wouldn’t tolerate his sloppy, alcohol-impotent sexual advances).

The more I listened to their forlorn little soliloquies, the more my sense of betrayal was replaced by contempt at his poor taste and her gullibility and pitiful desperation. He sighed like a lovesick poet while she urged him to decisive action, suggesting he seize our pets and daughter (actually,
my
daughter from my previous marriage, although he neglected to tell her that part) and make a break for happiness-ever-after.