by Ellen Datlow
Later, at the dinner table, my mother told my father what we’d witnessed. He widened his eyes but said nothing. “She’s like sixty-six now,” said my mother. “I guess since Rolly’s gone this is her idea of stepping out. While he was still alive, I never saw her do anything but sit out on the glider with her hands folded in her lap and her hairnet squeezing her head too tight.”
For the rest of the summer and then autumn and through the winter, we spotted Rita at every and any time of the day or night riding that old bike—high, wide handlebars, pedal brakes, reflector on the back, basket in the front, one of those bells you worked with your thumb instead of a horn. She pedaled fiercely, undeterred by rain or snow, as if the work of her legs was responsible for the motion of the sun and moon and stars. In the winter, she put on a woolen Rangers hockey hat and wore a padded, insulated jacket, black rubber boots over the moccasins. More than once during this time, I heard my mother say, “Well, I gotta hand it to her, she’s getting in great shape.” When I looked down at her yard through the leafless branches, I’d see her shovel the snow from the concrete drive to her garage, and once it was clear, she’d go back and forth the length of it, sideways, doing the Karaoke step, like they made us do in football practice. At other times, I’d see her on the cold cement, her knuckles pressed into it, doing push-ups.
This was all rather odd for the late 1960s, especially for a woman closing in on seventy. To tell the truth, though, as entertaining as watching Rita was, she was low on my list of real interests. The way I experienced her was more like brief bouts of surprise. She’d pop into my field of view and as quickly pop out and my teen head would backfill and obscure her. There was one incident, though, that happened in early spring and made an impression. I was in the car again, this time with my father. We were heading home down our block and we had to creep along because there was a guy, running right in the middle of the road in front of us. My father, in situations like this, just chilled. He didn’t beep the horn, he didn’t get pissed off, he just drove slowly. He’d told me once it was a way of being he’d learned in the army, since you always had to wait on lines for everything.
Eventually, the runner, dressed in a sweatshirt with the arms cut off, sweatpants, grocery store sneakers, realized there was a car a few feet behind, and moved out of the way. We passed him, and lo and behold it wasn’t a guy after all, it was Rita, but she had her dark hair cut into a crew and the mustache that had always been poised to happen wasn’t waiting any longer. Her biceps were impressive for such thin arms. She wore a red headband and a whistle on a string around her neck. “Who’s that?” said my father. “It’s Rita,” I said. He drove a few yards, checked the rearview mirror, and said, “Yikes.”
It seemed she stayed with running for a year. My mother, working on her fifth glass of cream sherry, cigarette in hand, opined from her spot in the dining room, “I saw Rita yesterday. I think she’s getting younger.”
“Crazy is obviously good for your health,” said my father. “She doesn’t stop long enough for Death to snatch her.” The two of them would be dead in fifteen years, at sixty and sixty-one. Rita was moving toward seventy, looking like Charles Bronson. You could see she was old, but she was ripped, and she moved with agility and speed. Not grace, though, as she had a slight limp in her gait from the time Rolly set the cannon off just as she walked in front of it and it gave her a great and lasting punch in the thigh. Her movement side to side, the motion of her arms when she ran, was like a crab playing a violin.
As summer came on again, the first Saturday after the start of vacation, I took my bike early in the morning over to the grade school around the corner. There was a lot of concrete there that was good to ride on. When I crossed the basketball court and looked toward the school, I saw into the alcove created by the giant brick box of the gym jutting out from the main building and the lower wall of the cafeteria. There was Rita, playing against herself in handball. I stopped my bike to bear witness. She had on a pair of black gloves with no fingers, a black leather biker vest over a white, man’s T-shirt, her red headband (her hair had grown out frizzy), a pair of gym shorts with the local high school’s iconic lion on the left leg, and those crappy sneakers. She moved around the asphalt, suddenly jumping side to side, talking to herself. I think she was celebrating her best shots. “Here we go,” she’d say and slam the ball against the wall with her left hand. At least in her mind, the game was on. I took off before she spotted me.
In all the time I had been intermittently, half unconsciously, charting Rita’s changes, there’d never been an instance when anyone in our family had spoken with her. Sometimes my mom would wave and beep the horn when driving by, while Rita was either running or on the bike. Never once did she acknowledge the gesture—which was odd because before Rolly died, although she’d been quiet, she often stood on her side of the back fence and chatted with my mom on the occasions both would be hanging laundry.
In late June, my mother came home from the grocery store one day and told us Rita had been on the warpath there. Apparently, she’d had the manager of the deli department up against a wall and was threatening him because the cold cuts scale didn’t show the shopper what the weight of their purchase was. It had long been broken and an issue at the store, but the deli guy, who was tall and broad, was such a bully no one did anything about it. My mother said, “Rita had him by the tie and was pulling his head down to her level. She was shouting at him, spit flying from her lips. She had on her Hell’s Angels outfit.” I’m pretty sure my mother meant her leather vest and black handball gloves. The police were called, and when my mother saw them pull up outside, she walked over to Rita and took her by the arm. Softly, she whispered, “It’s okay. I think he’s got the message.” She led her down the aisle and took her out the back door as the police entered through the front. She told us, “Rita never once said a word to me, but the minute she hit fresh air, she took off running at a dead sprint. I’m telling you her arm was hard as a rock.”
Whenever I rode through the schoolyard on my bike on a late summer afternoon, I’d stop for a while and watch the handball games in the alcove by the gym wall. The guys and girls who played there were pretty much in gangs and were the black-leather-wearing, Colt-45-drinking, cigarette- and pot-smoking, knife-fighting, bottle-busting crowd. If someone like me stopped to watch, usually they got beaten up and rolled for whatever money they had. I was an exception because the head tough guy there, Bobby Lennon, protected me. It seems my father had picked him up hitchhiking one day and taken him all the way to Bayshore. Because of that kindness, nobody at the handball court messed with me.
Lennon was a long-haired tough guy, strong but a lot of fat at the same time. His handball attire was a dirty white wife-beater T-shirt, black jeans, and black boots with steel toes for when kicking the beaten. He was a sloppy drunk, and when he’d be two 40s deep and losing at handball, it wasn’t unusual for him to stumble over and punch his opponent viciously in the face. Imagine this scene and then Rita showing up, which she did one evening, ready to play. I had an advantage over the others present since I’d been tracking her changes. The assembled kids didn’t know what to make of her at first. “Is that like a kid or an old lady?” I heard someone whisper behind me. There was snickering and quiet laughter.
She arrived in between games and, instead of figuring things out, she stepped onto the court and said she was there to take on whoever had just won. It was the first I’d heard her speak in years. Her voice was high pitched and had a quaver to it, completely different than the retiring hush of her past. What she’d proposed wasn’t the way things usually went down. Games were planned out in advance for almost the entire afternoon and evening. I watched Lennon push off the wall he’d been leaning on, put down his bottle of beer, and walk slowly toward her. “’Scuse me, Granny,” he said, blowing his cigarette smoke on her. “But you’re not playing.” He got close and leaned down. “What the fuck are you supposed to be, anyway?”
She grabbed a s
hock of his hair with each fist and jerked his head down to meet her kneecap, which was thrusting upward. Lennon went over like a sack of rocks and was out before he hit the ground. Rita’s mouth hung open, her eyes wide with a distant stare, a wooden mask of both age and fear polished to a thin veneer of vibrant health. She looked down at Lennon, who lay face-up, and blew her whistle. Kids crowded around him as blood gushed from his nose. A moment passed, and when I looked for Rita, she was running in the distance across the baseball diamond.
I lost track of her for a while, busy in my last year of high school. We didn’t see her jogging past the house anymore or on her bike down by the library. The once or twice I looked from the upstairs bathroom window down through the branches at the snow, there was no sign of her. Nothing until the winds of April brought news of an attempted robbery at the pizza place in town. Two guys walked in with stockings over their faces and guns drawn. Rita happened to be sitting at the counter. It also happened that she was carrying a Browning 9mm in her coat pocket. She turned to catch the action, and Phil, the pizza guy behind the counter, who was interviewed afterward, said he could tell the gunmen were stunned by a glimpse at her face. He described it as “haggard, yet smooth, the wrinkles shining and waxed like a car.” One of them even cried out, “Jesus.” She pulled out her gun and blasted both of them in the head. One fell. One kept walking, though dead, and got off a shot at the ceiling before tumbling onto a table. Phil told the cops he’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for Rita. They wanted to question her, but she was gone.
Years passed and there was no more about Rita save for her popping up in a nightmare once or twice. It’s not that I never thought about her, but life was coming at me fast—school, marriage, kids. One night, my wife asleep on the couch next to me—we must have been in our late thirties because I know, within the boundaries of the memory, the kids were asleep upstairs in their rooms—I watched I was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. In it, Paul Muni is on the lam from a prison breakout and being hunted constantly. There’s a scene at the very end at night where, outside her apartment, his girlfriend asks him how he lives. He hisses, “I steal,” and then falls backward, swallowed by shadows. For some reason I thought of Rita and felt a sense of closure about her weird saga. Then time came down like a blizzard, burying the whole crazy thing from my notice.
Until, in the early 2000s, I was teaching a creative writing class at a community college in mid-Jersey. I would end up teaching English there for about twenty-five years. It was generally a good gig, but there were a shitload of papers to read and mark. In this particular semester, they’d booked my fiction writing class Tuesday, late at night (it didn’t get out till 10.30 p.m. and I had a two-hour drive home) in a weirdly shaped room on the top floor of a three-story building out by the last parking lot. It was known as the Sank Building, named for some freeholder, Bradley Sank. The students called it the “stank” building because you could get high there and the campus police never patrolled it.
* * *
It was a spring semester, so the class started in winter, and that year there’d been a pile of snow. All the walkways were covered with ice, and the wind shrieked across the big open parking lots at night. The evening classes on campus usually had quite a few older students along with the usual eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds. I’d gone around the room and read off the names, and they all seemed pretty eager to get started. I asked them, in honor of the first night, to write me their life story in three handwritten pages as a way for us to get to know each other. The class was three hours, and I told them they could take the first two writing and then we’d read a few of them out loud. They set to it, and I opened my notebook and made believe I was writing.
When two hours had passed, I asked, “So, who wants to read?” People smiled and shook their heads, but one arm went up, in the back, at the juncture of the room where it was impossible for me to see the entire student. The arm was clothed in a purple jacket sleeve. He scooted his desk to the left and into my field of view. It was an old guy, and he looked, no shit, just like Salvador Dali. His face was sagging and sad, his fashion style was low-key pirate—ruffles at the cuffs and down the front of a white shirt. His mustache was waxed and twirled at either tip. I asked him his name and he said, “Samzibar.”
“Is that a first name or last?” I asked.
“Only,” he said.
“Okay, have at it.”
He started reading from his pages, and two lines in he dropped the fact he’d been born with the name Rita, in a small, upstate New York town. The mere mention of her name, and my memories of her came up in the field of my imagination like soldiers from dragon’s teeth. The story went on through the thirties and came to where she met Rolly and they fell in love. She told about the children she tried to have, Mumps the dog got a mention, and then she told about a well on their property inside a little shed, and how she drank from it regularly. Rolly wouldn’t and warned her not to because of the strange glowing lichen on the inner walls of it, but all she could think about was the beautiful glow, the warmth of it. The water was ice cold and electric in its freshness. There was a buzz to it in more ways than one. She had just begun to tell about the changes it wrought in her when Samzibar stopped reading. “I ran out of room,” he said. “I think I lived too much.” The students clapped for his imagination. He nodded and leaned back in his chair.
A few more people read and we discussed their life stories. I called class after that. The students filed out, and as I put my papers and books in my bag, I looked up and saw Samzibar heading toward me. A chill went up my spine and through my right eye.
“You know who I am, don’t you?” I asked. We were alone on the upper floor and the wind howled outside.
He nodded. “You came through the fence to ride the glider.”
I looked to the door to see if I could make a break for it. I had no idea how Rita, aka Dali, had ended up in my classroom. I was pretty certain it wasn’t a dream. “Why are you here?” I said.
“I have a favor to ask.”
“You’re going to have to answer some questions first,” I said, surprised at myself for getting uppity with the one who took down Bobbie Lennon, not to mention plugging two pizza thieves.
He nodded and sighed. Taking the nearest seat, he settled in and I began. “The water, did it make you a man?”
She laughed. “The water filled me with energy. It built up over the years in me, and just about the time Rolly died, the power blossomed and I became something other than human. As for dressing like a man and growing a mustache, I’d long had the desire for it, well before I even met Rolly or tasted the water from the well. I never wanted to be a man, if I had I would have become one. What I wanted was simply to be my own kind of woman. The water had nothing to do with that. Some people, when they get old, all they can think about is dying. Some, on the other hand, find freedom.”
“The water seemed to have made you very physical, aggressive…”
She nodded. “I optimized my physicality. I was dangerous.”
“Why did you have a gun?”
“It had been Rolly’s. The ultimate personal means of aggression. And I’d begun traveling amidst unsavory elements.”
I looked at her in silence for a few seconds and thought I could almost see Rita’s face from a time before her change. “Why Dali?” I asked.
“What do you mean?
“You’re telling me you’re not trying to look like Salvador Dali, the painter?”
“Stop abusing me,” she said and appeared to be substantially upset.
“Okay, okay,” I told her. “You have my apologies. I misread you.”
“I’ve had a lifetime of that. Only since I stopped taking the water have I slowed down and begun aging again. I’ve shaken its overwhelming effects and settled back into humanity.”
“You should probably be like a hundred and twenty by now,” I said.
“Probably. I’m here to ask you to edit my memoirs. When I finish writing them
, I’m going to shoot myself. I’ve had more than enough. Who knows, I could go on living for another hundred years before death finally catches up with me.”
I couldn’t believe it. At the end of this great mystery, what the whole thing added up to was me reading and marking more pages of someone else’s writing. “Why me?” I asked.
“Because you know my story is true. And you’re a writer. Your work is published.” She reached into the bag she wore over her shoulder and took out a thin sheaf of papers. Holding them out to me, she said, “Here’s just a piece of it to give you an idea of what’s coming.”
I took the pages from her and she left. I don’t know if it was the result of one of her secret powers, but I was dazed for a minute, couldn’t move, overcome with memories of the door through the back fence, the glowing well, the boom of the cannon. When I finally got it together to stand, I staggered to the window and looked down across the parking lot. I saw her shadowy form trudging along, limping slightly, the white ruffled shirt catching the security light, glowing from beneath a long pirate coat. The figure never stopped at a car. By then, my car was the only one left in the lot. She just kept walking to the asphalt’s edge and stepped across the boundary into the woods.
Here, then, is what she handed to me and I read on the spot—
It was 1983. I was just about at the height of my powers and was working for gangsters, killing people they wanted killed. Mind, I never killed anybody but other gangsters, no women and children, but men? Shit, they hardly had to pay me. I had all sorts of methods, from strangulation to making blood spurt out their ears with a single punch to the forehead. And just think, I was in my late eighties.