Don’t Go Out At Night

A woman ends her shift at CVS at 10 o’clock. She lives in a city where public transportation is only for the poor and busses are sparse. If she is lucky, she will only have to wait 15 minutes in the new shelter that METRO has decided is the improvement on which to spend its meager funds. She huddles on the bench in the shelter, lit up as if she were on stage. She can only peer out into the darkness where bushes are creaking gently in the wind. She wishes that she had 360-degree vison. When she boards the bus—which is ten minutes late—she tries to make herself invisible to the man across from her who, legs spread across two seats, has fixed his gaze on her. She has nothing to hide behind but her phone. As he watches, she quickly opens the 911 screen for easy access. She’ll deal with the text from her daughter later, although she would love to be able to write I’m a little uneasy here. If I am not home in twenty minutes call the police.  When she gets to her stop, he does not follow her down the steps. She allows herself to feel the relief, but only for moment as she speeds up into her night walk, which is almost a race walk, legs almost straight, a tiny softness at the knee, steps as big as she can make them. She was not taught this walk, but all the women she knows adopt it after dark. She has almost made it the seven blocks to her street.  Her home is not an entirely happy place, but when she sees it, she feels almost safe. Now all she has to do is find her keys so she can open the door quickly under the broken porch light that her landlord promised three months ago to fix. She can also, she always reminds herself, use the keys as a weapon, although she is not exactly sure how.

A young woman attends her evening class at college. At the end of the two hours she has stopped listening, partly because the professor is droning on, but mostly because she has to pee. She would never consider using the bathroom in the empty basement of the building after class unless some other woman were going to use it as well. She shifts in her seat. Does it look like anyone is going to use the bathroom? After class is over she gets up quickly and wanders to the door. She doesn’t know the other students well enough to ask them to accompany her. One by one, the women exit through the front door of the building. She lingers, hoping the professor will come out and maybe ask her if she needs anything. But no, the professor rushes past her, muffled in a large coat, with a large bag filled with books. She, too, wants to get out of here.  The young woman, the student, thinks she might ask her professor something about class, walk casually beside her to the parking lot, but the moment passes before she can think of something to say. It is hard to ask an intelligent question with a full bladder. Instead the student half-runs to the parking lot, following the figures of her classmates as they disappear into the darkness. She has waited too long. As she hurries to her car, she hopes she can remember exactly where it is. The huge parking lot has no numbered stanchions. She always tries to park under a light, but that strategy raises its own issues: something about the quality of the light changes the color of her silver car, rendering it, a strange purplish brown like dried blood. Tonight, she recognizes her car by its dented fender that she will never have the money to fix. She is still clutching the keys that leave faint marks on her palm.

The car is her sanctuary. She opens the door and experiences a familiar mixture of relief and fear. She remembers as she always does stories of rapists crouching in the back seat of cars, waiting until the driver turns her back to spring. Some days she checks the backseat with her flashlight, some days she throws her bag of books over her shoulder to see if it hits anyone. Tonight, she doesn’t want to know. She wishes she could pee into a bottle the way her brother and father do on their fishing trips.

At a residential university, a more expensive one, in which there is talk of the college being in loco parentis, there would be blue lights and emergency phones placed strategically—but with what strategy exactly?—across campus. Here comes another student, on a campus that looks like a park during the day, half-running through the night from the library to her dorm room. She cuts across campus, especially the wooded parts featured on the university’s brochure, from light to light, tracking her way across campus hoping no one will track her. In her first year she would call the oddly named escort service when she was out late, but she heard the whispered stories and has no idea whether they are true: one of the escorts turned out to be a rapist. The string of blue lights unspools before her as night walks. For the hundredth time she regrets that she has not practiced with the phone/panic button device so she could call quickly for help of someone came up behind her. For the hundredth time, she feels shame that she has not taken responsibility for her own safety. For the hundredth time she reminds herself that practicing would involve raising a false alarm and that she would be punished or, worse, made fun of.

She is a long-distance runner, which means she has to run long distances. Somewhere she read that being an athlete is the best thing a woman can do for her self-esteem. She tries to time her run so she leaves her house just as the sun is rising. This works better in the summer, although daylight savings time temporarily plunges her leaving into darkness. As she runs, holding her apple watch up to her face to note her heartbeat and her speed, she feels stronger than she does at any other time in the day. At forty, her body finally accedes to her will; in fact, although she is very much in that body, it feels as she runs as if parts of it disappear. Her hips and ankles that often ache in her daily life, stop calling attention to themselves and become part of something else, a whole body, a whole person, a whole person running. In mid-run—from, say mile two to mile six— she forgets everything, including a faint but persistent fear, a drumbeat of anxiety to which she runs. She never uses headphones because the music might drown out the approach of a car, another runner, an attacker.  It is the leaving and the coming home that remind her of her fear. As she turns the final corner, she slips once more into her ordinary body.

A woman, this woman, pulls into a gas station. Her gauge tells her the car is almost empty; only one bar remains and it is blinking. A picture of a gas pump has lit up blue on her dashboard. Although she sometimes is OK with pumping gas, often she is not, even during the day. The morning from 40 years ago is always there, the hot breath and the cold hands, the fumbling, the breaking away as dawn broke over her shoulder. She was not technically out late. She was not coming from a party. That car, the 1972 Chevy Swinger, did not have a working gas gauge, but she instinctively knew when Henry (this was her first car so she named him) needed to be filled. That day, in the pinkish light before dawn, she was filling her car for an early morning trip to the beach, gassing up before picking up her friends, one by one, for the two-hour drive. She had deliberately waited until the morning to go for gas, so as not to be out, alone, too late. She was, it seems too early.

All these women have been given a version of the talk, and many of them have passed the talk on to their daughters, their nieces, their friends. Like the talk parents have with their black sons, (keep your hands on the wheel, obey all police commands, don’t wear a hoodie, be sure you carry a backpack on campus, overdress for everything) this talk strategically reshapes social injustice as personal responsibility. Parents and others in both cases risk victim blaming as a desperate form of protection. This talk, the one about violence to women in the street, is shaped by negatives, even as it tries to suggest positive action. Our first women’s mother told her never to wear high heels in case she had to run. The second woman’s boyfriend said always to have her phone out but never to be distracted by it. The third woman was told always to include a boy in a group of friends going at night. The runner was simply told not to run.

The fifth woman was told by her parents she should never leave the house alone after 10 p.m.; this was downgraded (or is it upgraded?) to 9 p.m. after reports of a serial rapist operating in New York city in the 1970s. Years later, in her middle age, her husband and two sons insist, or perhaps just take for granted, that one of them always accompany her on dog walks when it is dark. She is grateful for that protection and for the protective love that prompts it. She acknowledges that she does in fact, feel some uneasiness walking her deserted neighborhood after dark where no one else seems to walk their dogs, who howl from behind fences as the little troup—four dogs, two adults, and sometimes a cat-- walk past. Nonetheless the dependence chafes. It means the woman often has to wait until her husband or one of her sons is ready to leave the house.  She cannot choose when to take the dogs out, when her day of obligations will be over, or when she can call it a day and change into pajamas. She cannot grab the four leashes and plunge into the soft spring darkness, or into the brief cold nights, or into the sweaty late twilights of summer. She cannot be alone on the street with the dogs, wh would, she is sure, look to her for protection should they sense danger. As she waits for her escorts, she reflects that for much of much of her life she has walked alone through the night, without boys, men, or dogs. She has endured catcalls, drive-bys, the sounds of footsteps, the terror of flashbacks. She is older now.

As these women approach me out of the darkness, as I write these small parts of their stories, I am filled with rage. Why have we forgotten, why don’t we notice how strange it is that so many women are afraid to go out at night? That so many women are told to be afraid, that they are blamed when they venture out no matter what the reason? That they are right to be afraid, but also right to decide they must ignore their fear: to run, work, dance, go to bars, walk their dogs? Why do we accept that the remedies for this problem that cuts like a knife across gender divide are almost always adaptive: the clutched keys, the mace, the low heels, the strategic parking, and finally the injunction not to go out without (male) protection, not to go out at all? After 30 years of Take Back the Night marches, how is it that the night still does not belong to women? Why is--almost inevitably male--violence accepted as a condition of life, a reality that cannot be changed?

We know, I know, this blog knows, that home is not for all women the safe space our culture asserts that it is. When we talk about the very real dangers of the street we return women to their homes, perhaps to violence, perhaps “only” to a lack of agency, exercise, or self-determination. I know also that it is not only women who fear and often brave the night, that other groups of people are also subject to systematic violence on the streets. I know that when women are told to “trust their instincts” when they feel endangered outside the home that these instincts are often racist. I know that less affluent women have less choice than affluent ones about whether to walk the streets at night. Mapping fears and vulnerability is a complex process. But I also know that our culture often forgets what it has accepted: that women are routinely subject to male violence and that they have been asked to make this fact invisible by changing their behaviors. All of us aid in this forgetting, this normalizing of thousands of small adjustments women make every day. 

I have chosen in this post to focus on fear rather than on crime. The women in these stories experience the accelerated heartbeats that are after all a sign of life; they walk fast, they half-run, they break into a sprint. These are not (yet) violated bodies, mutilated bodies, or dead ones. These are the bodies that have—so far—survived, with their full bladders, their anxious glances, their visceral terrors. Surely, though, the goal cannot be merely surviving? A man in a bus leers but does not attack or rape: the object of his aggression still feels the surge of flight or fight hormones, the raised pulse, the cold sweat, the nausea, the anger. She has survived, but at the cost of learning to live with her fear. This fear divides night from day (although of course many attacks happen in daylight); men from women (although of course men are also attacked on the streets); “safe” and “unsafe” spaces. We live our daily lives with these divisions; they have been laid down as tracks in our brains so we do not see them for what they are. We live with them because we are afraid of what will happen without them. Tonight, women in the Ukraine will take up their guns to defend their families against Russian occupiers. In my neighborhood women will walk the dark streets from their jobs and schools to their homes clutching their keys and perhaps their phones. A few female runners will make their way through the deserted park around the corner, speeding up as they pass the newly planted grove of trees. I will take my dogs out without human companionship, watching warily for cars that come up behind me. I will feel the fear that has snuck up on me in late middle age, and the privilege of class and family that keeps me—with this one exception—off the streets at night. My vow—for that is what it is—seems simultaneously brave and pathetic. Nonetheless, I will not stay home tonight.