mandalay

Rules of the Road

Just now, as I was driving home from class, I turned onto my street a few blocks from my apartment. As I was driving I noticed a guy behind me in a little Honda: a non-threatening car, a non-threatening guy. When I approached my place, I tried to pull over quickly to do my parallel parking so as to get out of his way. But he backed up behind my landlord's car to the curb, and I completely panicked. I could see him in my rear view mirror. Should I pull back out and keep driving? Stay in my car until he does something? Leave my bag and run? Turn around and face him to show I'm not scared? Grab something large and heavy from my car to wield at him? All of these thoughts in a matter of seconds.

I tried to remain calm and quickly opened the car door, grabbed my school bag, left the bag of detergent and dryer sheets so as to have one hand free, closed the door, and quickly locked the doors from my keychain as I walked away without glancing behind me. I made it through the gate and made sure the latch was firmly shut behind me, then paused to see if he had followed. Took a moment to listen to whether my landlord was home and could hear me scream. The guy didn't cross my vision again. I turned and walked to my apartment. Probably he was just parking, visiting a friend in the neighborhood. And yet the threat of men when I am alone is so firmly ingrained in me that it sent chills up my spine.

When I was in high school I had a part-time job at Baskin Robbins. I worked nights after school and would get off sometime between 9 and 10:45, depending on the day and the crowd. At this time, clunky cell phones in your car were only for the rich, the businessmen, or in case of emergency. If I hadn't left BR early enough, I had to call my mom from the store and tell her when I was leaving so that she would know how long to wait until she called the police. The drive home was a 10-mile stretch of nothing—very few houses, no convenience stores or anything, just one straight country road without streetlights. Every passing car was a potential rapist. I'd been warned with stories of girls being murdered and disposed of on the side of the highway near where my mom grew up in Texas City. Always my mom would say "OK, be safe, lock your doors."

The worst part about this sense of fear is that it is not unfounded. More of my female friends have been raped than haven't. Just last week, one of my fellow grad students was terrified because while biking on a trail through the forest, she came upon a girl shrieking with her shirt unbuttoned, bra exposed, skirt askew, yelling that "He just raped me, he just raped me." She called the police, got help, gave a statement, etc. She won't go into the forest without her dogs again. So even when 10% of me thinks hmm, is my reaction silly? The other 90 is always there to validate the sick feeling in my stomach by saying, no, unfortunately not.

posted by amanda @ 8:09 PM