Always

ONE

IF YOU WALK INTO A BAR AND THERE’S A MAN WITH A KNIFE, WHAT DO YOU DO? Walk out again. If you can. In Atlanta it had been a kitchen, and a woman, and I couldn’t.

It’s a five-hour nonstop flight from Atlanta to Seattle. I had slept the first three hours, but I didn’t want to sleep anymore. If you don’t sleep, you don’t dream. I pressed my forehead against the vibrating cabin window and stared down at the Rockies, visible only as winks of snow in the setting sun.

Next to me, Dornan stirred and put his guidebook facedown on his lap. He peered over my shoulder at the scenery below. His T-shirt was still very white and his eyes very blue, but his hair, just long enough to hint at waviness, was flat at the back. “Looks like Mars,” he said.

I nodded. There were places there where no one had walked. Perhaps one day I would go exploring.

Dornan leaned back. “You missed dinner.” It was unclear from his tone whether he thought that was good or bad.

“I can eat when we get there.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and tapped the book on his lap. “I’ve been reading the tourist guide. The good restaurants mostly seem to shut at ten.” Right around when we’d be landing. “There’s always room service.”

You can’t learn much about a city from a hotel room, and I needed to hit the ground running. My mother would arrive in two days. “Let’s talk about it when we get there.”

Books were all well and good—I’d already read several histories, maps, and guides to Seattle since deciding on the trip—but I preferred somatic information to extra-somatic. I would know what I wanted to do when I smelled the air and tasted the water.

“So,” Dornan said. “You haven’t told me much about the new bloke.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Your new stepdad.”

I looked at him.

“Well, he is, technically. So what’s the story? You haven’t even told me his name.”

I opened my bag—once again I resented the nasty ripping sound of the Velcro flap, and missed the bag I’d given away—and pulled out the report.

“Eric Loedessoel,” Dornan said, reading over my shoulder. “Wait.” He pulled back. “You researched your stepdad?”

“It wasn’t difficult.”

“That’s not…” He shook his head.

I leafed through the list of sources: medical bills, brokerage accounts, limousine service, phone records, grocery bills, restaurant bills, and so on. Then the data itself. There was a photograph of Loedessoel taken last year in Washington, D.C., and a photo of his new wife, dated two months ago.

She was wearing a hacking jacket and turtleneck, a riding hat tucked under her left arm. I wondered what the photo opportunity had been, and why she looked happy. She hated horses. Her hair was dark honey streaked with grey, and cut in a soft, chin-length bob. It looked all wrong; my mother had had long hair for as long as I could remember. She had gained a few pounds. She looked younger and softer.

“Thumbnail sketch,” I said. “Male Caucasian, mid-fifties, five feet eleven, hundred and seventy-eight pounds, grey hair, grey-blue eyes. Born in Bergen to Norwegian parents; two sisters, one brother. Parents deceased. First year of medical school in Oslo, where he married a Danish woman, and the remaining years in Seattle, at the University of Washington. Graduated in the top third of his class. Never practiced, though.” No hint as to why. “Divorced the Danish wife a few months after graduation.”

“Children?”

“No.”

“Thank heaven for small mercies.”

My stomach squeezed. The possibility of step-siblings hadn’t occurred to me. “Job in Washington, D.C., with the Norwegian trade delegation. Climbed the ladder. Directorships in several pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Financially stable. Current residence in London.” Chelsea. I wondered if and when he would move into my mother’s official ambassador’s residence. I wondered if she still actually lived there.

I read some more. Dornan returned to staring out the window.

Loedessoel’s net worth was nearly four million dollars. Well matched with my mother’s assets. It would have seemed a lot to me four years ago. I started skimming. Clothes, hair, and manicure spending about what you’d expect for someone in his position. Cars: many purchases and resales. In the last three years, a Porsche Carrera, a Jaguar S-type, a Maserati, a vintage Bentley—that one had been sold after numerous high bills for replacement parts.

“He likes cars,” I said.

“Lots of men do.”

I skimmed the list of affiliations, memberships, and subscriptions: Mystery Guild Book of the Month Club, local wine society, the American Museum of Natural History, chamber of commerce, the local Gilbert and Sullivan Society. “He likes operetta.”

“That’s not exactly sinister.”

“Well, no.”

“But you’re frowning.”

“I’m trying to imagine my mother beaming fondly at a man dressed as the lord high executioner.”

“Giggling behind a fan.”

I stared at him.

The seat belt light went on. “Look at that,” he said, and busied himself with the tray table and footrest.

WE WALKED past the tired people in baggage claim and to the man holding a sign saying Torvingen.

“I’m Aud Torvingen,” I said.

He didn’t bat an eye at the Norwegian pronunciation but said, “Jeff,” and led us to the town car.

I fastened my seat belt and opened my window, and we pulled smoothly past the hordes waiting for taxis.

“Maybe you aren’t potty after all,” Dornan said, leaning back on the grey leather. He’d thought I had lost my mind when I’d first suggested FedEx-ing the luggage. Then I’d offered to pay, and suddenly it hadn’t been such a bad idea.

Traffic was light. The cool air, heavy at first with jet fumes, then the scents of late cherry blossom and second-growth conifer, reminded me of Oslo last year. It had been May then, too.

The engine hummed. I’d never driven a Lincoln, but I suspected it would handle like a squashy pillow. The interior wood trim, black bird’s-eye maple, was so heavily varnished it looked like plastic.

If I’d done my research correctly we were on Highway 99, which ran north and west into the city along the waterfront. I could sense the empty horizon stretching to my left, but I couldn’t see or smell it; there was a steady offshore breeze and the moon was hidden behind dense cloud. In Atlanta it would be twenty degrees warmer. In Oslo, twelve degrees closer to the Arctic Circle, the sky would still be light. There would not be so many cars on the road. My mother and new stepfather would be in the United States by now, in New York, or possibly Vancouver.

From a distance the Edgewater Hotel looked like a warehouse building, but as we approached, it became clear that what had seemed to be corrugated iron was in fact massive vertical timbers. Fir, I thought. Very Scandinavian. It was just after ten-thirty when we pulled into the parking lot. “Wait,” I told Jeff. “We’ll be out in ten minutes.”

The lobby was all exposed wood—definitely fir—and polished slate. I handed my Total Enterprises credit card to the woman behind the desk. She handed me two keys.

“They’re not next to each other. I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem,” I said, and gave one to Dornan. “Don’t unpack if it will take you longer than ten minutes.”

In my room were two faxes, and a large FedEx box. I put everything on the bed and opened the window, which was less than eight feet above the water. I listened a moment; all I heard was the slap and slip of Puget Sound against the pilings driven deep into the muck of Elliott Bay. I closed the window. Being so close to the water was less than optimal, in terms of security. I took a dime from my wallet and balanced it against the glass. There were a dozen portable intruder alerts on the market, but low-tech worked well enough.

One of my credit cards wasn’t plastic but specially sharpened ceramic. I extracted it from my wallet and slit the tape on the FedEx box. The clothes were still on their hangers. I hung them in the wardrobe, and my toiletries bag above the mirror in the bathroom. I set up my laptop but didn’t connect to the local network—security precautions took time—and glanced at the faxes, one from Laurence, one from Bette, both of which could wait. After a quick visual check of the room I shut the door, rattled it to make sure it was locked, and headed for the lobby.

Dornan was four minutes late. He had changed his T-shirt and put a sapphire in his right earlobe.

“Belltown,” he said. “That’s the only place we’ll be able to get anything to eat at this time. Belltown,” he said again to Jeff as we got in the car. “Somewhere called the Queen City Grill?”

“On First,” Jeff said, and turned left out of the parking lot.

“First and what?” I tried to visualize the city plan, which was a confused mix of the original diagonal and later north-south grids. If you could believe the maps there was even a spot, north of here, where “First” intersected with “First.”

“First and Blanchard.”

Blanchard. Between Bell and Lenora. A little north and east of downtown, a little south and west of here. “Why are we heading north?” Northwest.

“If I take you south there’s no cross street for a while.”

“Thank you.”

We turned right, heading northeast, and then right again, finally moving south and east.

“After all these years I still can’t believe how early Americans eat their dinner,” Dornan said, as we passed dark storefronts. “Look at that. Can you imagine a U.K. city the size of Seattle shutting down at ten?”

“No.”

“It makes no sense.”

It did to me. The city was full of Norwegians and Swedes who had formed the backbone of the fishing and shipping industry and a large part of the paper and lumber industry, and then settled back to work hard, live quietly, and grow. They would write back to relatives dug into their fjell-side seters, or boiling and freezing in sod houses in the Midwest, and tell them about the good life, the teeming salmon and the miles of trees, and how it hardly ever snowed. Inevitably, the children of the brothers and sisters left behind would come for a month in summer to visit. And here I was.

AT THE Queen City Grill we were shown to one of the dozen or so booths running alongside the bar, a huge expanse of mahogany that looked as though it had been there a hundred years. It was enhanced by a double handful of the young urban gorgeous. One woman with long glossy hair and skin the color of toasted flax smiled and tipped her head back to laugh. Her companions laughed, too. She sipped her martini, and when she leaned forward, the cream silk of her dress pulled tight across her hips. Her lips left a red print on the rim of her glass.

“See anything you fancy?” Dornan said, studying the menu, which was very short and specialized in steaks and seafood with an Asian tang.

“Crab cakes look good.”

The wine list turned out to be heavy on Washington and Oregon vineyards I’d encountered only in travel guides. I put it down. The woman at the bar laughed again, and the server appeared.

“What do you have on draft?”

I settled on something called Hefeweizen, Dornan ordered a kamikaze, and we asked for oysters to start. The Hefeweizen came with a wedge of lemon in it, and looked like cloudy lager. It tasted better than it looked. The oysters were cool and slippery and tasted like the beach at low tide. We focused on the food for a while.

The woman at the bar slid from her stool and stood, gathering purse and wrap.

“It’s good to see your appetite returning,” Dornan said. He was concentrating on squeezing the last drop from his lemon onto the oyster on his plate. I let him tip it into his mouth and swallow, then nodded at the last remaining half-shell.

“How’s your appetite?”

“Let me put it this way, Torvingen. For once, I think I’d be prepared to fight you for it.”

We ordered another dozen.

Two intense twenty-nothings took a seat at the bar and started arguing about whether cyberpunk owed its attitude more to Materialist philosophy or to a misguided interpretation of Descartes’ interpretation of Aristotle.

“So,” he said. “How are you?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. It’s been nearly a year. And then the incident with your self-defense student. And now your mother is coming. Talk to me. Tell me how you feel, what you think.”

I thought Mr. Materialism was about to get lucky: Ms. Cartesian Dualism was leaning forward in the kind of unnatural pose that had been practiced in front of the mirror because someone once told her it made her throat look delicious, and holding her hand palm up while she talked, tilted towards him in a way that could be interpreted only as Touch me. And indeed, Mr. Materialism was beginning to stumble over the bigger words as his subconscious figured out what was going on and diverted blood from his brain to more important organs. Although Dornan’s degree from Trinity was in philosophy, I doubted that’s what he meant. I shook my head.

He drank off his kamikaze, sighed with pleasure while he refilled his glass from the cocktail shaker, and nodded over at the debating couple. “Did you ever argue philosophy with a girl in a bar?”

“There are easier ways.”

He nodded. “Buying her a drink always worked for me. So have you tried any interesting approaches lately?”

I looked at him.

“You could at least reassure me that since, ah, well…” He hated to mention Julia’s death. “I just don’t think it’s natural to be so—Look, I know how you are, what you’re like. You shouldn’t deprive yourself…”

“I haven’t.”

He sat back and looked expectant.

“Her name was Reece.”

His expectant look didn’t waver. Ever since I had let him help with the cabin in North Carolina last year he seemed to believe he deserved a window into my life. I had not yet worked out how to shut him out, or whether I wanted to.

“When I went back to the cabin last month Tammy had a party. She introduced me to Reece. We had a conversation that ended up in bed. She’s a very pleasant woman. It was a very pleasant evening. I doubt I’ll ever see her again.”

I had needed the animal warmth of the sex, had welcomed the familiar building heat of skin on skin, the harsh breath, the shudder that starts in your bones. The terrible urge afterwards to weep until I howled had been new.

“That Tammy. Isn’t she something?” It had been three months since she’d returned his ring, but his voice still throbbed with pride.

“She is.” She was a piece of work. He was better off without her.

SOMEONE HAD turned on the fire in the corner of my room. The dime was undisturbed. I turned off the fire, put the dime in my pocket, and opened the window.

I read the faxes. Details from Laurence about how my Seattle real estate revenues had fallen against local benchmarks, the addresses of my local real estate manager and my cross-shipping warehouse, and a list of leaseholders of that property in the last eighteen months—far too many. Bette’s fax was a detailed, itemized list of OSHA and EPA complaints leveled by person or persons unknown against either me, as the property owner, or various lessees, along with pages of definitions of various regulations, and the names of relevant people at both regulatory offices to deal with the complaints.

I turned to my laptop. The fan hummed and the hard drive chuckled as it ran its anonymizer software and automatically cleaned itself of anything but the most basic programs: no documents, no cookies, no automatic updates downloaded from the Web, no e-mails, no address book, nothing. Just an operating system unencumbered by experience or past history, lean and sure, memory constantly scoured and reset for instant, optimum efficiency. Stupid, to be jealous of a computer.

I set every firewall I could, then hunted for and matched the hotel network. I logged in to my e-mail account. Nothing.

I logged out, wiped all the cookies again, just in case, and checked my antivirus software. All my personal data was safe on the flash drive on my key ring.

It was late, according to my body clock. Nearly four in the morning.

I tapped the faxes into a neat pile and put them next to the phone on the cherry-veneered desk by the window. I’d study them carefully in the morning. On top of the pile I put my maps and two books about Seattle. Tomorrow I’d start learning this city the way I liked best, by moving through it.

I undressed and carefully laid my clothes over the back of the desk chair, easily to hand in case of emergency.

I stood naked by the open window. The water was black. Kuroshio, the Black Current, the vast ocean stream that poured past Japan and arced north, keeping the inlets of the Pacific Northwest from freezing. I could lower myself into the lightless water and slide beneath the surface, leave it all behind. Give it all away and never look back. I wish my father had left all his holdings to my mother instead. I wouldn’t have to be in Seattle to deal with a real estate manager stealing me blind. I wouldn’t have to meet my mother and brand-new stepfather. I wouldn’t have been at leisure to teach a self-defense class.

The room felt as warm and moist as the womb. I got dressed.

ON FOOT, I could head south. I walked through the night, swinging my arms, glad that there was nothing to my right but Elliott Bay. I could feel the open water, taste salt on the breeze. I walked up and down artificially graded hillocks of grass, avoided a tree. When I ran out of park I turned left, under the Alaskan Way viaduct; I saw traces of the homeless—a burnt-out trash can, a slashed sleeping bag—but the streets and train tracks were silent.

In Atlanta at one o’clock on Thursday morning I would have had downtown to myself, but Seattle’s center flickered with flashes of restless, contradictory life. As I walked down First, south of Queen City, I could have been looking at two different boulevards. On my left, the fifty-foot-tall sculpture of The Hammering Man banged away silently in cultural ecstasy outside the Seattle Art Museum. On my right, a man and a woman stepped into the street from the Lusty Lady, whose pink neon sign flashed cheerily, its letter board declaring VENI, VIDI, VENI. Peep shows for the classically educated.

Pioneer Square wasn’t really a square but a triangle, partially cobbled, with a totem pole and a drinking fountain. The buildings were old brick and wrought ironwork, painted to match the blue-and-rust paintwork on the Tlingit totem. There had been more trees in the guidebook photos, plane trees. I couldn’t think of any diseases specific to plane trees, and wondered why they had been taken down. It was still a picture-perfect vision of the heart of an established city whose industrious citizens slept well—or would have been without the thump of club music, and the homeless who lay on benches or leaned against the wall in knots of two or three, not unlike the hipsters at the bar earlier. Some of them were young and some smoked, but none wore white and none of them laughed; most had more tattoos than teeth. They stopped talking as I neared. I nodded. They smelled of tobacco and old wine, like old people in hot countries, which is not how the homeless in Atlanta smell.

Guidebooks never told you everything. Seattle was another country.

SELF-DEFENSE IS NOT JUST A SKILL, IT’S A WORLDVIEW. LIKE THE SCIENTIFIC method—or religion, or motherhood, for that matter—once you accept its method-or religion, or motherhood, for that matter—once you accept its precepts you see things differently. I didn’t intend to tell my students this. Just as you don’t try to interest six-year-olds in natural history by discussing physiology and adaptive evolution—but take them, instead, to a pond to watch tadpoles turn into frogs—on the first day of class you don’t tell grown women to change their lives. You show them how to punch a bag.

I parked outside Crystal Gaze, under the only streetlight. It was a long way from the side door. I turned off the Saab’s heater and got out. 5:56 on the second Tuesday of February. My breath hung in a cloud as I zipped my jacket. The sky was the heavy grey of unpolished pewter, shading to iron in the east. The still dark reminded me of Mørketiden, the days of Norwegian winter when you don’t see the sun.

Crystal Gaze is Atlanta’s alternative bookshop and personal wellness center, more comfortable with chakras than choke holds. My class, the advisory board had decided, could go ahead as long as it was in the basement space. It was a very nice space, they said, even without a window: newly painted, new carpet, and a room air-conditioner; big and bare, eminently suitable for physical activity. It also had its own convenient side entrance. In other words, sweaty women reeking of the body would not trample through the main floor and disturb patrons who were browsing their way to the next level of spiritual enlightenment. They agreed I could bring in four big mats and a punch bag and leave them for the duration of the course.

The stairwell smelled of concrete dust. My boots echoed. There were damp footprints on each tread, including one set of those pointy-toed, needle-heeled shoes that look as though they would leave the wearer utterly crippled. I peered more closely. Two sets of pointy toes. Or—no, one set whose owner had walked down, then turned and taken a couple of steps back, then decided to head back down and go through with it.

Americans rarely have the same appreciation of punctuality as Norwegians, so when I opened the basement door at precisely six o’clock I was mildly surprised to find nine women already sitting on the corded blue carpet. Nine pairs of shoes were lined up neatly under the bench. Second from the right were the pointy-toed spike heels: brown fake-alligator ankle boots. Several of the women could have owned them—lots of lower-tier business clothes and careful makeup—though I’d bet on the white woman with the curly hair in a powder blue blouse with a wide silver stripe. At least she was wearing trousers, unlike the woman in the brilliant green skirt and matching jacket.

“We will begin with the closed fist,” I said. “Please stand.”

They gaped at me, then a stout woman with wiry grey hair and sensible workout clothes stirred, said, “Don’t need names for that, I guess,” and hauled herself to her feet. One woman who had been sitting in full lotus position with her palms up stood with the ease of a dancer, or perhaps a yoga practitioner, though the muscles around her eyes were tight. Another—matte black dye job, who had sat with legs spread and weight tipped back on her many-ringed hands—rose with the awkwardness of a day-old foal, just a bit too quickly to match the boredom she was trying to project. There were several obvious cases of nervous tension, including Blue Blouse; one openmouthed possible breathing difficulty, which I hoped wouldn’t develop into asthma due to poor air quality; and one set of tilted shoulders that looked to be more the result of habitual bad posture than a structural deficit. On first assessment, the only possible powder keg was a white woman who jerked to her feet and kept her chin down; who didn’t lift her eyes from the floor, even when the door banged open behind me.

“Oh,” said the latecomer. Softball muscles played in her forearm as she shifted her gym bag from right hand to left, and through her warm-ups her quads bulged like those of a soccer player. “Sorry I’m late.”

I wheeled the punch bag and frame away from the painted breeze-block wall and into the center of the room. The heavy bag swayed. I dropped the stabilizer on each leg and slapped it into place.

“This bag is filled with sand. You can’t hurt it.” It couldn’t hurt them, either, because I’d had it fitted with a custom cover of latex over foam to protect their beginner’s hands. I nodded at the middle-aged woman with the wiry hair. “Come and give it a try.”

“Me?”

Basic rule of animal behavior: control the leader of the herd. For a group of women who had been together less than ten minutes, that meant the cheerful motherly one. “Stand here. Make a fist. No. Keep your thumb out of the way.”

I found their ignorance difficult to believe. Dornan had tried to warn me. He had watched me thumbtack my poster to the public board in one of his cafés and shaken his head. I don’t think you know what you’re letting yourself in for. Anyone could show up. Southern women with big hair, big teeth, big nails. Women with husbands and babies.

“The thumb always goes on the outside of the fingers,” I said, and raised my hand to show them. They all nodded and flexed experimental fists. I got behind the bag and steadied it against my body. “Now hit it.”

The stout older woman glanced around, but didn’t seem to find any hints, so she stepped up to the bag, and gave it a tentative tap. Self-consciousness, the curse of Western womanhood.

“Again, only this time, say ‘Blam!’ ”

“Blam?”

“Like a cartoon. Pretend you’re in a Saturday-morning animation: Blam! Pow! Zap! You’re an invincible superhero. It’s not really you hitting this bag, it’s the character you’re playing.”

She pulled a face at her audience, moved half a pace closer to the bag, said “Blam!” like a ten-year-old boy waving a homemade lightsaber, and thumped it. The difference was audible. “Cool!”

Everyone grinned. I nodded at her to go again.

“Whap!” she said. “Zammo! Bam bam bam!” Her face got red and her hair stuck out.

“Okay. Good. Next!”

They lined up. The newcomer assaulted the bag with a flurry of ferocious punches, added a couple of elbow smashes, and finished with a “Whomp, whomp, you asshole!”

“Next.”

The yoga woman, light but competent, followed by Dye Job who shrieked “Fuck!” when her fingers got mashed between bag and ring metal, a lesson she wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Blue Blouse and Green Skirt surreptiously removed rings and pocketed them. Blue Blouse was clearly embarrassed but hit the bag anyway, after a fashion. Then, because it was her turn and it was expected of her, Carpet Starer came to the bag, managed “Bang, bang,” in a tight whisper, and poked it with her knuckles. I nodded and called “Next!” because I had seen so many women like her—in shelters, in hospital emergency rooms, bleeding bravely in their homes—and it was important not to let her know I was paying attention. Next was Green Skirt, who unselfconsciously hitched up her skirt, brushed back her bangs, and flipped her hair over her shoulders before beginning. Then Sloping Shoulders, then Breathing Difficulty.

Now that everyone had had a go, I made the line hustle.

“Run!” I said. “Faster. Hit it three times. And again. Experiment: stand closer, try the other hand, point the other leg forward. Shout when you hit it. Hit it five times. Don’t think. Do. And run. And again.” The air began to hum, and muscles plump, and just before the room kindled I clapped my hands and said, “Enough. Please sit.” They did, in an obliging circle, some smiling, and Blue Blouse scooted to her left with an ingratiating bob of her head—teacher’s pet—to make a space. I took it.

“I am Aud Torvingen. Aud, rhymes with crowd.” They waited for more, but I wasn’t interested in proving I was qualified to teach them, and the name of the class, Introduction to Women’s Self-Defense, was self-explanatory. I nodded to Blue Blouse that it was her turn. She told us she was Jennifer, and we went round the circle briskly: Pauletta, with the green skirt and a gold cross. Suze, the latecomer. Katherine, the bad posture. Sandra, the carpet starer. Kim, with long red nails. Therese, the yoga woman. Christie, the dye job. Tonya, the breathing difficulty with carefully straightened hair. Janine, the middle-aged woman, “Or Nina, I don’t mind which.”

“Pick one,” I said.

“Nina, then.”

“Fine.” I waited a moment. “Self-defense has only one goal: to survive.”

“And kick butt!” said Nina.

“No.” They blinked. “One goal, to survive.”

“Wait a second,” Suze said, “just hold on.” She leaned forward. “You’re saying we can’t fight?”

“I’m saying that from a self-defense perspective, the only goal is to survive. Fighting is neither here nor there.” Wrinkled brows. The flick-flick-flick of Kim’s long red nails, one by one, against her thumb. “Of course, once you’ve ensured your survival, kicking someone to death is an option.”

Therese lifted her shoulders, momentarily losing that Zen poise as nasty reality intruded on her nice, clean middle-class understanding.

Suze was still frowning. “So are you saying we should or shouldn’t fight?”

“You’re grown-ups. Make your own choices. My job is to show you the basic tools and techniques of self-defense: how to stay out of trouble, how to recognize it if it finds you anyway, how to deal with it using what’s available—whether that means words, or body weapons like elbows and teeth, or found objects.”

Therese probably thought of found objects as sea-etched glass and drift-wood from Jekyll Island. For Kim it might be a lottery ticket. Sandra, now, she would understand the concept: the heavy-buckled belt he pulls from his pants, the quart bottle of Gatorade he’s drinking from when she foolishly mentions she forgot to buy the mushrooms, the broom handle brandished like a quarterstaff when he sees a footprint on the kitchen floor.

“What you do with those tools is up to you. I can tell you what I might do in any given situation, or at least give you my best guess, but that doesn’t mean you should do the same.”

Pauletta touched her crucifix lightly. “So, okay, what would you do if you walk into a bar and there’s a guy with a knife?”

“Walk out again.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s one option. Prevention is better than cure.”

“But what if he’s threatening someone?” Suze asked.

“This isn’t Bodyguarding for Beginners or Heroism 101.”

“So you’d let him cut some girl, just walk out and leave her?” Pauletta.

“Depends.” It always depends.

“On what?” Suze, leaning forward again.

“Everything. How I’m feeling that day, what city I’m in—even what part of town in that city. What the assailant looks like, and the potential victim. The number of exits. The general mood of the bar.” They were not getting it. Women with babies… “Anyone here have kids?” Nods from Therese, Nina, Sandra, and Kim. “What would you do if your child came home from school crying?”

“Oh,” said Therese after a moment.

“Right,” said Kim, nodding, “it depends.”

“I don’t get it,” Suze said.

Therese said, “If my twins come home at the end of the day it means one thing, if it’s at eleven in the morning it means something else—”

“If Carlotta’s crying because some girl stuck gum in her hair I have to do different things than if it’s because her teacher died in a car crash,” Kim said.

“But you always comfort them, first,” Nina said. “You make sure they’re safe—”

“And that they feel safe,” Kim said.

“Yes,” said Therese. “And you always try to find out what happened, make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“Basic principles,” Nina said. They smiled at each other, pleased.

Suze frowned and opened her mouth. I forestalled her. “Basic principles. That’s what I can give you. Any mother will tell you that if you take a favorite toy from a two-year-old he will scream. I can tell you that if you kick the leg with enough force at a particular angle you will detach the kneecap.”

Suze brightened. “So are you going to show us that kneecap thing now or what?”

I studied her a moment. I nodded at her quads. “You already know how to kick things. That’s not why you’re here. One of the things you need to learn is who to kick, and when.” I looked around the circle: different ages, races, classes. Different ways of looking at the world. “When do you hit someone?”

“Depends,” Nina said. Fast learner.

“Yes. On what?”

They all looked hard at the carpet, like teenagers desperate not to be called on in class.

“Everything?” Christie said.

I smiled. “Yes. Let’s go back to what Pauletta said earlier. Walking into a bar…”

Every student learns at school how to fake attention. I watched it start to happen now.

“Or a supermarket at night. Or an empty church.” Most of them came back. “How do you approach it? What do you do? What do you look for?”

“I walk in like, Don’t fuck with me!” Suze said.

No one said anything.

“Not looking like a victim is a good first step. But it takes a lot of effort to project aggression all the time.” I paused, trying to think of a metaphor that might mean something to all of them, something American. “You’ve all seen old westerns. The gunslinger steps through the saloon doors and stops.” Nods. “That is exactly what not to do.”

If gunslingers really had paused in the saloon doorway, conveniently backlit by the noonday sun and blind in the sudden interior gloom, their days would have been short. The unassuming ones would have lived longest, the ones who slipped through the swinging doors behind someone else, slid along a side wall, and looked over the room before ghosting up to the bar and ordering what everyone else was drinking. By the time the bad guys in the black hats at the card table had realized he was there, he would have known who was the ringer with the derringer in his pocket, where the exits were, and whether the gang leader might be delayed on his draw by the necessity of first dumping the pretty saloon girl from his lap.

“Imagine you’re walking into—Tonya, pick a place.”

“Kroger.”

“What time, what day?”

“A weeknight, after work, but late, maybe nine o’clock.”

“So it’s dark outside and bright inside. First thing: park near the entrance, under a light. Don’t unlock your door until you’ve looked around. Keep your eyes open and your hands free. If you have to turn a corner on the way to the door, take it wide.”

“Why?” Therese said.

It took me a moment to realize she was serious, she really didn’t know why. I had planned this lesson meticulously: an orderly progression of building blocks. We had already wandered off the road, out of necessity, and it was clear that sticking to the plan would be like digging a foundation in sand. I let it go. “Because then you’ll see anyone on the other side before they see you.” Therese nodded thoughtfully, filing away the information for further reflection. Suze said, “Huh,” but quietly. Jennifer looked worried. “So now you walk into the supermarket. It’s bright. What do you do?”

“Wait for your eyes to adjust,” Kim said confidently.

Like a sun-struck calf waiting for the hammer. “It would be best to keep moving. Head towards the grocery carts or baskets, and as you do, sweep the place visually. See them before they see you. You’ll grasp things instantly that you don’t consciously know you know. Your subconscious works a lot faster than your conscious mind. So let it do the preliminary work. Swing your gaze slowly from one side of the aisles to the other. If something or someone snags your attention, you can hang a mental tag on it to come back to later. That sweep should take no more than three or four seconds. Whatever you see, don’t stop.” No point spotting a guy in a black hat minding his own business at the other end of the bar if there’s some grinning idiot right next to you swinging an axe. “The trick is to not draw anyone’s attention until you’ve completed the sweep.”

“So what if there is a dangerous person?” Jennifer, for whom Kroger was suddenly looking like a jungle.

“Hey, I know the answer to that one,” Nina said. “Leave, right?”

I nodded.

Jennifer was not convinced. “But what if they follow you?”

“Then you get in your close-by, well-lit car and drive away.”

“But what if you trip or something and he catches you first?”

Suze stirred restlessly. “Then you fucking hit him.”

“Right,” I said to the group as a whole. “So let’s go back to the fist.” I stood and motioned for them to do likewise.

I lined them up, facing me, and held my right hand up, showing them how to make a fist again while I walked along the line, rearranging fingers and thumbs. “Think of your fist as the point of a spear. The forearm is the spear shaft. It has to be strong and straight, no weakness at the wrist. The wrist is where you want all your tension. Good. There are seven basic points to remember when hitting or kicking.” There could just as easily have been six or eight, but human brains find sevens and threes significant. “One, strike from a firm base. The firmer the better, because, two, most of your power comes from the torque generated by your hips. Stand with both feet firmly planted and swivel your hips as you punch—throw that spear forward, don’t push it. You can’t get good movement from a bad base. Three, strike on the out breath, preferably with a good loud yell.”

“Blam?” said Nina.

“Whatever you like.”

“What do you yell?”

“Probably depends,” Suze said to Christie, who giggled.

“Four, strike hard and fast. Power comes more from speed than weight.” More strictly, the greater the mass and acceleration, the greater the force. “Five, strike right through the target. There’s no point stopping on the surface. Six, you almost always need to be closer to the target than you think. Seven, be prepared to strike more than once. Let’s try it. Suze, hold the bag. Jennifer, you’re up.”

It was tempting, watching them flail at the bag one by one, to stop them, to show them how it’s really done, but although I would have enjoyed the whip of power, the hard ram of bone on compact sand, it wouldn’t help. They would try to imitate my stance, my noise, my expression; they would try to learn the lessons I had learnt, not their own.

They watched each other, subconsciously took note of what seemed to work: when Suze took her weight on her back leg, Jennifer, who was holding the bag, moved back a good inch; when Suze stepped into the punch, Jennifer moved five inches. When Nina tapped the bag, then moved closer by half a step and walloped it, they noticed. Gradually, they adjusted their stances, their speed, their noise, feeling out what worked for them and what didn’t. I wanted them to learn something unique to them, that came from them, not an artificial overlay that would evaporate in the first flash of fear adrenaline if they were ever threatened.

“Kim,” I said, the second time she hit the bag, “you can hit it harder than that.”

“I can’t.” She unfolded her fingers and held out her hand, showing me the four perfect crescent-moons on her palm.

“You’ll have a hard time with some of the finger strikes, too.”

“What can I do?”

“Cut your nails.”

“I’ve been growing them two years!”

“Your choice.”

She wasn’t the only one who gave me the withering look so many southern women—of any age, or race, or social standing—learn before puberty: a combination of scorn and the deep existential fear of being the one to stand out in a crowd and risk being pecked to pieces. They seemed surprised when I didn’t wilt.

By now, Suze—and Christie, copying her—were whaling satisfactorily on the bag. Therese had become efficient, and Pauletta and Nina were encouraging each other with whoops and catcalls. In a pinch, all five of them might throw a punch. The other half of the class—Katherine and Tonya, for whom the idea of punching anything induced agonizing embarrassment, or at least blushes and giggles, Jennifer, who looked away whenever she sidled up to the bag to hit it, and Sandra, who could not seem to make a sound—would probably never hit anyone with their fist even if their lives depended upon it.

I clapped my hands. “Some of you will find punching easy—fun, even. Practice when you can: at home, at work, in the garden. Some of you will find that punching doesn’t suit you; don’t worry about it; we’ll find something that will. Punching a person, though, isn’t the same as hitting a bag. Suze, where would you punch an attacker?”

“Right in the fucking nose.”

I nodded. “Noses are full of nerve endings; even a comparatively weak blow will cause pain and tearing. A stronger blow will break the nose. One problem, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Step in front of me. Imagine you’re going to hit me in the nose.” Suze was about five-seven, five inches shorter than me. “You need to be closer.” Clearly she had never hit anyone before.

She moved in another six inches. We were standing almost belly to belly.

“Now, in slow motion, throw the punch.” As her fist neared my nose I said, “Freeze there.” She stopped with her arm fully extended, at an upward angle of about forty degrees. I turned to the rest of the class. “She has to hit up as well as out, which reduces both power and accuracy. A fist strike to the nose of a standing opponent is not efficient when they’re taller than you.”

“What about his chin?” Jennifer said.

“Nearly as high up, and very hard on the knuckles. Never hit bone with bone unless you have to.” How did people survive long enough to reach adulthood without knowing these things?

“So knock him to his knees, then hit him,” Nina said, looking around for laughs.

“Fine. But how? Suze, you can put your arm down.”

“Solar plexus,” Therese said. Not gut or belly but solar plexus. Lots of time with a massage therapist, personal trainer, or individual yoga instruction.

“Good. Come out here and show me. Slow motion, like Suze.” She threw a slow, tidy punch targeted one inch below my xiphoid process. “Freeze it there.” I turned to the rest of the class. “See how she’s thrown the punch beyond the skin so that the fist would end up buried to the wrist? Assuming your assailant doesn’t have abs of steel, that would put them down for at least a minute.”

“One minute?” Pauletta said. “You mean like sixty seconds? That’s it?”

“Kick him in the nuts,” Tonya said, then blushed. Half the class hooted.

“Tonya’s on the right track. If you want a downed opponent to stay down, a kick’s probably the best choice. All right, a volunteer to pretend to be the attacker Therese has just put on the ground and Tonya’s about to kick to death.”

I wasn’t a bit surprised when Tonya looked at Katherine, who stepped forward. Always easier to kick the one you know, however slightly.

“On the floor. Curl up as though you’ve just been hit in the stomach— no, tighter. Where would your hands be? Right, curled around yourself. Now, think: you can’t breathe, so what would you be trying to do?” She struggled in mock weakness to sit up. “Good.” And it was. In my rookie police classes, the women had always been better at role-playing than the men. I made another mental note, to exploit that. “Good,” I said again. “Okay. Stay like that.” I turned to Tonya. “What could you kick?”

Tonya circled the reclining figure dubiously.

“Huh,” Pauletta said, “she’s sitting on her balls.”

A few sniggers at that. “Tonya?”

More circling.

Suze couldn’t stand it anymore. “In the face, right in the fucking face!”

“That would work,” I said. Tonya was no more likely to be able to kick a person in the face than punch them. “Anything else?”

“Lower ribs,” Therese said.

“Good, yes. The floating ribs are easily detached, from front, back or side. Anything else?”

“His spine,” Nina said unexpectedly. “Circle round and get his spine.”

“Or the back of his head,” Kim added.

“Or you could try a combination of spine and head: kick the place where the back of the neck meets the skull.”

Tonya liked that idea much better: he wouldn’t be watching her kick him. She stopped behind Katherine and took a deep breath.

“Slow motion,” I reminded her.

She tried. She would have missed by a couple of inches, she nearly fell over, and she blushed afterwards, but that didn’t matter: she did it, and she didn’t giggle.

“You can get up now,” I said to Katherine. In the next class I’d show them how to break someone’s spine even with bare feet, but right now I didn’t want them getting locked into one type of body weapon. Beginnings are delicate times. “Now we’ll move on to the fingertip.”

“Pretty anticlimactic,” Nina said.

“It’s certainly a different kind of tool,” I said. “Its target—its job, if you like—is different, too. Smaller, more vulnerable, like the fingertip itself. Think of the soft places: the eye, the hollow of the throat, the mouth.”

“The mouth?”

“Are you willing to be a guinea pig?” She lifted her hands, as if to say, How bad could it be? I crossed to her side in one stride, hooked two fingers into her mouth along the cheek, and stepped past her so that she arched back on her heels and my hand was on my shoulder as though carrying a sack.

“Jesus,” someone said.

Nina was wide-eyed and struggling and would have fallen, helpless, if I wasn’t supporting her against my back. “I won’t let you fall,” I said. “Are you all right with this?” She swallowed—her whole face moved—but nodded gamely. “From here I can throw her sideways, backwards, or rip half her face off. Not everything is about hitting.” I turned, eased her upright, and took my fingers out. “Thank you.” I walked to the bench and removed a packet of handiwipes from my jacket pocket.

She flexed her face a few times while I cleaned my hand. “That was… It felt so wrong.”

It was an important lesson: shock, the breaking of the social compact, was as difficult to deal with as being hit in the face with a shovel. But we’d go back to that another day.

“You could’ve bit her,” Pauletta said to Nina.

“I could not, not the place she had her fingers. Here, open your mouth—”

“Nah-ah.”

“Do it your own self, then,” Nina said, and for the next thirty seconds they all hooked their mouths with their fingers, like suicidal fish, all except Jennifer, who said loudly, “That’s disgusting!” and Therese, who, when she saw me noting her lack of participation, merely raised her eyebrows and held her hands out as if to say Not unless I wash them first, and shook her head. I nodded. I wouldn’t put my hands in my mouth without washing them, either.

“What else?” said Suze. “How do you get the eyes?”

“Like this,” Christie said, “ha!” and did an uncoordinated imitation of Bruce Lee doing bui tze, the shooting fingers.

“You could,” I said, “but it’s hard to be accurate with that move.” And if she missed, she’d break her fingers. “There’s an easier way. All of you: point your index finger at me.”

“Left or right?” Katherine.

“Whichever you’d use to point at something. Now bend it down a little. Tuck the tip of your thumb underneath your index finger’s middle joint. Keep your finger and thumb joined together like that and pretend to tap on someone’s window with it. Put some play in the wrist, whip it back and forth—like Jennifer—so your hand looks a bit like a chicken pecking at something.”

They all had it.

“Now peck the center of your palm. Go gently.”

They did, over and over.

“Now imagine what that would do to an eyeball.”

“Like popping gum,” Kim said admiringly.

“Eeeuw.” Jennifer flung both hands away from her. “I couldn’t do that!”

“Anyone else?”

“I’m not sure,” Therese said, troubled.

“I could do it, no problem,” said Suze. “Yeah.”

I considered them. “Self-defense isn’t magic,” I said. “In any kind of real fight, unless you cold-cock someone from behind with a pipe, you will get hurt. No matter how good you are, things go wrong. Adjust to that now: nothing goes to plan, ever. You’ll get hurt, and you’ll have to hurt them. But you mend. And what happens to them isn’t your problem.”

All rather disingenuous, of course, given the demographics of attacks against women, but at the beginning it’s important to keep things simple and not scare them to death.

“In the next class we’re going to role-play a little. We’ll learn how attackers think and what they look for, and what you can do about that. Meanwhile, I’d like you to do something for me before the next class. Make a list of all the reasons you wanted to learn self-defense in the first place. All the things you or your mother or your friends worry about. Put them in a column. In the column next to them put what you’d be willing to do to your attacker to stop it. So, for example, decide if you would rather be raped than feel the rapist’s eyeball burst all over your hand. Decide if you would rather blow someone’s head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun rather than let them pinch your backside. Decide whether you’d be willing to let a teenager torture your cat instead of dislocating her shoulder, whatever. It won’t be easy. But think about it as clearly and fully as possible, and decide. ”