I pay strangers to torture me. I invite them into my home. I open the door with a smile and invite them in, and I bring them downstairs to the basement, or up to the attic, or show them the spot below the sink where the pipes are leaking. These are cramped, intimate spaces where I huddle near the body of a person I do not know, asking them to please fix whatever is broken inside my private world.
I was abused as a child, and sometimes I’m hypervigilant. It has lessened over time, mostly disappeared. But there were months, maybe years, when I could not walk down the street and see a man without my heart quickening. Any man. Any man, any race, dressed any which way, alone, or with others. Others who were men, or others who were women. A man offering an arm to an elderly woman was not sweet. That man was about to attack me and she was his accomplice.
I did not see my attack coming the first time, so my body remained ever ready to not make that mistake again.
Sometimes I still cannot sit with my back to a busy restaurant. Or an empty one. I always want to have a sightline. There are red flags everywhere.
I lived in the City years ago, when I began to actually deal with my history. The City is not a great place for hypervigilance because already you are trained to be vigilant, to not talk to strangers, to fear the men who will unscrew the bars on your windows at night, to walk loopy arches around the people on the street who are yelling and mumbling somehow simultaneously. I was afraid of those identified as dangerous, but that was just a baseline. Scarier were the people who would smile at me on the street, or squat down to speak to my children in their strollers, or the well-dressed men in my office. Long ago, The Man Who Hurt Me was the kind of man who you would choose to trust.
When you can’t trust anyone, you start to feel a little unstable and overly worried. Your alarm bells, which are built in to tell you if there’s danger, just keep ringing and ringing. Eventually, you learn to block them out, just the way you try and fail to block out the memories of what happened to make you so scared.
One day when I lived in the City there was a knock on my front door. The man standing there was about six foot four, two hundred pounds. He asked to wash my windows. At first my radar went up because in the city people always want money when they knock, and this was most likely a scam. But I didn’t want to believe that it was a scam, I wanted to have faith in humanity. That’s what I was working on learning to do again.
Not trusting anyone is a life of misery.
So, when the man kind of nudged his way into my house and pulled his license from his wallet to show me who he was, I let him convince me that he was a good guy.
“You can’t know who to trust,” the man said, showing me his ID. “This way you know I’m legit.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that having a driver’s license isn’t any proof that you won’t do a crappy job washing windows. I didn’t bother noting that people you can trust rarely lead by telling you they are trustworthy. In fact, in general, I’d say, whenever someone volunteers that you can trust them they are delivering very important information about the fact that you should never trust them.
I did not argue. Instead I nodded.
“I just did your neighbor’s windows,” he said, vaguely pointing across the street.
We needed the windows washed, and I had literally just had a conversation with one of my neighbors about her window washer. I assumed they were one and the same.
He named his price, which was fair and I agreed. I asked him to start on the upper floors so that he’d be out of my kids’ rooms before naptime. Not that they were home. No one was.
As he lumbered up the stairs I realized how large he was, especially compared to my little five foot three self, and I knew that if he attacked me, there’d be no way to escape.
I reminded myself, He is so unlikely to attack you. He probably just wants to make some cash.
Almost in the same moment though, the logic was being overridden by fear. People aren’t always what they seem to be. I didn’t know this man. And he was so big.
I walked up the stairs determined to ask him to leave. He stood in the family room, finishing the last of the three front windows. He turned to me and said, “See how dirty this cloth is? See how much I’m sweating? These windows really needed to be cleaned.”
I smiled and nodded and walked back down the stairs. But then instantly realized that sweat and a dirty rag had nothing to do with how dirty my windows were. I wanted him to go.
I trudged back up the stairs. By that time he’d moved to my bedroom, down the hallway. To approach him, I’d need to walk in there, be near him. It would put me really far from the front door. Us.
That was no safer.
I perched myself out on the front stoop, waiting for the man to leave. I saw dog walkers, neighbors, passersby.
Twenty minutes went by. Thirty. Finally I heard him moving towards the family room, and I called to him that I had to go get my children from school and he’d need to leave without finishing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize it would take you so long.”
“When will you be back?” he said. “I’ll meet you back here.”
“No,” I said. “That’s okay.”
I paid him, and he left. Crisis averted.
He did not attack me, but it was most certainly a scam. The windows were horribly washed, it was too much money, and he tried to make me pay him for more windows than even existed in the house. When I said I didn’t have that much money, he suggested walking me to the ATM. I declined. When I came back with my kids, he was at the corner of my street, waiting, saying he was going to call the cops on me for cheating him out of money.
I knew he was wrong and I was right, but also, I was scared. I gave him more cash just to get him to go away.
My determination to not be paranoid made me shut down legitimate sensors which should have stopped me from getting into that situation in the first place.
I’m not the only woman I know who vigilantly waits at the edges of the house, or rooms, or by the door when there are strangers in the house. It seems absurd, but also right. Right because if something happens to us, people will demand to know why we made ourselves so vulnerable. Absurd because those strangers are not as dangerous, statistically, as trusting the people you know.
Comments