Always

by Nicola Griffith

  She did.

  “Imagine he’s got me, arms around my chest or shoulders. Now I wrap my arms around his waist, too, and drive my knee between his conveniently open legs.”

  I demonstrated, pulling down hard and fast with my arms, and snapping my knee up.

  “Voilà,” said Nina. “Balls for earrings.”

  Katherine giggled.

  “Practice it. Just the stance.”

  They did that for a while, with lots of grins.

  “Next from the list: Protect your neck. When I threw Suze on the floor, she knew instinctively to protect her neck and head. That’s what you do. If you are ever about to go down, protect your neck. If you get grabbed, protect your throat. I’ll talk more about the neck and head another time, when we do falling. For now we’ll focus on the throat.” And I would add to that something else on the list: Where there’s a joint, there’s a weakness. “Christie.”

  She stepped onto the mat.

  “No more throwing until next week,” I said, to reassure her. “Someone give me a suggestion as to how Christie should grab me around the neck.”

  “One-handed,” Sandra said, “with her other hand grabbing you by the wrist.”

  A very specific scenario, not one that came to mind out of thin air. The class understood this, and stirred uneasily at the implications they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, consciously grasp.

  “Christie?”

  She was left-handed, so I lifted my left wrist for her right hand to grab, and lifted my chin for her left. Her hands were cold with nerves, and her grip tentative. Perhaps these women would never feel confident.

  “See how I tuck my chin down,” I said, my voice deep as vocal folds stretched over my larynx. “It’s the first thing you do. Protect your throat. Now, Christie, tighten your grip around my wrist without gripping too hard on my throat.” She tightened obediently. “What should I do?” I asked the class.

  “Knee to the groin?” Jennifer said.

  “Kick him on the shin,” Katherine said.

  “Good,” I said. “Lots of nerves on the shin. Good distraction.” I still remembered the pain of a kick I’d received on my shin from a fellow beginner in karate. I’d ended up in Accident & Emergency, thinking my bone was broken. X-rays had shown extensive bone bruising. I’d limped for months. “Now we tackle the stranglehold. How?”

  Blank looks.

  “Where there’s a joint, there’s a weakness. Watch.” I reached up with my free hand and peeled away Christie’s left little finger, bending it back, until she let go. “Even the biggest attackers have little fingers.” I gestured for Christie to renew her stranglehold. “There’s also her wrist.”

  “Wait,” said Pauletta. “I can’t remember all these details.”

  “Then don’t. But we can forget the wrist for now. The best thing to do in this situation is focus on the elbow.”

  “The elbow.” She looked rebellious. She wasn’t the only one.

  “Yes,” I said with blithe cheer. “If your attacker’s arm is straight out, like this, then a move very similar to the one we learnt last week would be appropriate: a twist and forearm slam. In this instance, on the outside of the arm.” I demonstrated in slow motion. “Try it.”

  Southern women can’t resist cheer. They gave it a go.

  I went down the line. Jennifer hadn’t remembered to strike with the outside of her forearm. I reminded her. Therese was managing a little less neatly than usual. Tonya was frowning with concentration and muttering to herself. Sandra was red-faced.

  “Remember to breathe.” I gestured her aside and took her place. Katherine draped her limp hand around my throat. “Like this. Tuck the chin, kick the shin, twist, noise with the slam.”

  “Chin, shin, twist, and hiss,” Pauletta said to Nina, next to us.

  “Or maybe chin, shin, slam with a blam.” Nina liked blam.

  I wondered what it had been like to be my mother and patiently teach me to tie my shoes, hold a knife and fork. Kind but stern. I plowed on. “Now, if the arm is bent, like Nina’s, Pauletta might want to come up inside the bent joint, up the center line of your attacker’s body, and then out across the joint with the forearm.” I demonstrated. “Practice that.”

  I walked the line again, this time showing them how to pivot in the opposite direction.

  “Chin down. Down,” I said to Nina.

  The only one who seemed to be getting this up-inside-the-guard, outwards strike was Sandra. It disturbed me, though I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  “Good,” I said. “There’s a fourth possible response to this one, which involves—”

  “Whoa,” Pauletta said. “Overkill. Seriously. Just tell us the best one.”

  “There is no best one,” I said. “That’s the point. I’ll explain later.”

  Stubborn silence.

  I ignored it. “This last technique is a trapping move. Take your free arm and point your hand at the ceiling.” Five women hesitated, then pointed halfheartedly. “Point hard. Stretch for the ceiling. No,” I said to Jennifer. “Without going up onto your toes. You need to maintain your balance. Keep your legs very slightly bent—as the list says. Always keep your knees slightly bent. It aids balance, and reduces reaction time. Keep your weight over your feet—Kim, pull that knee back a bit until it’s over your foot. Good. Now stretch up, up, that’s right, Therese, good, without lifting your chin—keep protecting your throat—”

  “Jesus,” Pauletta muttered.

  “—point, point, then pivot inwards and swing the whole arm scything down, also inwards . . . No, move the arm as a unit, the whole thing.” I demonstrated again. “Pivot, breathe out, a loud out breath, as you swing your arm down, and you trap the strangling arm under your armpit. Then you can whip your elbow back into his face when you pivot the other way, by which time—”

  “Nope,” she said. “Too much to remember.”

  “Just try it.”

  “Besides, how will I remember what to do when he’s strangling the life out of me?”

  “Just try it,” I said again.

  She lowered her head, like Luz preparing to get really stubborn. Good practice for my visit out to Arkansas next month.

  “All right. Try the other things I’ve already shown you.”

  “I can’t remember them.”

  “You can remember one, I bet. The little finger.”

  She nodded grudgingly.

  “Practice that one, then. Everyone else, give the pointing a try, then run through each of the other techniques, once each, then swap partners, then come and sit down.”

  I went around the circle giving pointers, and then sat as the first few did. Christie and Suze were the last; Christie patiently kept showing Suze how to do the trapping move. As soon as Suze got it halfway right, I clapped and gestured them into the seated circle.

  “Some of you think that the things I’m showing you won’t work in the real world. Some of you think I’m throwing too many things at you at once and want me to show you just one thing for each situation, to show you the best. But there is no best. There are literally hundreds of moves I could show you for each situation—”

  “Not helpful,” Pauletta said.

  “Shut up,” Suze said. Tonya and Nina nodded. Pauletta shut up.

  “—in a stranglehold situation, all of them would involve protecting your throat, distracting your attacker, and aiming at a weak point. Today I chose joints.”

  Jennifer bit her lip, trying to remember everything.

  “There is no best technique. There’s only what’s best for you. Remember the first lesson? Katherine.” She came to attention with a jerk. “Remember how you didn’t like punching but thought kicking was all right?” She nodded. “I’ve been showing you several ways to deal with every situation and, no, of course you don’t need to know them all. But you do need to try them all. I’m showing you so many so that you get some notion of patterns— chin, shin, twist, hiss, as Pauletta would say—but then also you get to fin
d what fits your particular body type and emotional response. For example, my favorite strike is the back fist.” I showed them, the sharp, uncoiling, snakelike back-of-the-knuckle strike that came as naturally to me as turning my face to the sun. “It’s not as powerful as many other strikes. I could tell you it’s a perfect, always-retain-your-balance strike, how it’s unreadable until you do it, how it’s hard for your opponent to catch or trap, and that’s all true, but the real reason is that, to me, it just feels good.”

  Funktionslust, the handy German word for enjoying what you do well. “I showed you four ways to deal with a one-handed front strangle, and you’ll have found that one of those techniques feels better to you than any of the others. Jennifer”—she straightened—“liked the little-finger move.

  And Christie was good with the arm trap. Therese also liked the little-finger, but Suze preferred hitting the outside elbow. Sandra, on the other hand, liked coming up inside the elbow. The rest of you probably need to practice all four a few more times until you find the one that works best, the one that will spring instantly to mind if someone wraps his or her hand around your neck.”

  Tonya and Christie both touched their necks.

  “I could show you two dozen variations on how to deal with a strangle-hold—”

  “Which is your favorite?” Christie said.

  Information is power. But I’d started this.

  “The trap, followed by an elbow drive to their nose or throat.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it works on a front or back strangle, one- or two-handed. It’s flexible, adaptable. But also . . . because being strangled is personal.” I had a sudden image of Sandra, coming up inside the strangle of a shadowy figure, with that upward strike, putting her face close to her strangler’s. “The pin traps them instantly, so they feel how I just felt.” Me, the imaginary Sandra said. See the face of the one you would hurt. The one who is fighting back. I am real. “The elbow strike is a very strong blow. It says, you can never do that to me again.”

  Sandra paled and her pupils expanded briefly. Fear, lust, hatred? I couldn’t tell.

  I tried to remember what I was saying. “No one knows everything. You don’t have to. In these weeks I want you to learn one or two things thoroughly, your own things, not mine. Things that you will practice until they are muscle memory, until someone can touch your throat, even by mistake, and your muscles know instantly what to do. No,” I said, as Katherine opened her mouth, “it doesn’t mean you’ll be attacking your hairstylist by mistake if she touches your neck. It means you’ll know how when you need it, that’s all.”

  Kim flicked her nails and Suze frowned.

  “It’s like mathematics.”

  “Oh, that’s just great,” Pauletta said.

  “Yeah,” Suze said. “Math sucks the big fat one.”

  “No. It’s part of how you think. It’s automatic. You use arithmetic every day. How many are there of us sitting here? It’s second nature. But do you remember how hard it was when you started in . . .” For a moment my brain stumbled trying to convert to the American educational system “. . . in kindergarten or first grade? Self-defense is like that. You don’t need to learn astral physics, you don’t need non-Euclidean geometry, you just need arithmetic.”

  “Or a calculator,” Nina said.

  “How many of you need a calculator when you’re in the supermarket? You look at the prices on the meat counter. You know whether you can afford steak or if you have to get hamburger. You know it without laborious calculation, because arithmetic is second nature. Now, on your feet.”

  Moans and groans. But they all stood up.

  “Partner with someone different. Try all four strangle breaks. Pick your favorite. Practice that three times, swap roles. Fifteen minutes.”

  I walked around the practice circle, reminding them about a tucked chin here, an elbow placement there. They were learning. Some, like Therese, were sucking up every physical technique I could throw at her. Some, like Tonya, were beginning to seriously connect the dots, but even those like Jennifer and Pauletta, who thought they knew nothing, were light-years past the place they had been two months ago.

  I walked the circle again. Everyone now had their favorite. Six of them liked the little-finger. It didn’t surprise me. It was a small move, a woman’s move, one for which no judge or police officer or spouse would ever blame or fear them if they had to use it against the bogeyman.

  After fifteen minutes, we were all sitting again.

  “We’ll finish with an item from the list. The last page. Yell fire, not help or rape. Studies have shown that bystanders, neighbors, are far more willing to call for help if they don’t think there’s malice involved. Fire is a natural disaster. They won’t feel as though they’re ‘interfering’ in a domestic dispute if you yell for them to call nine-one-one. Next: be specific. People in groups default to the lowest common denominator.”

  “More math!” Nina said, and they all groaned.

  When I was ten, Mrs. Russell, the equivalent of my fourth-grade teacher, had marched to the blackboard and written, in very large letters, The square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the opposite squares, then put the chalk back on the lip of the blackboard and waited. No one said anything. After about two minutes of silence, an eternity in the world of ten-year-olds, she said, “Does anyone know what that means?” We were used to Mrs. Russell being kindly and approachable, adapting her explanations to the meanest understanding, but that day she was terrifying. Perhaps she’d had a hard day, perhaps she’d been inspired by some new teaching theory to try an experiment. None of us dared say anything. “Your job,” she said, “is to find out what that means.”

  I had responded by writing the sentence carefully in my blue-lined notebook, The square on the hypotenuse . . . and then staring at it, as though by focusing my mind I could get beneath the atoms of the paper surface—I had recently encountered the notion of atoms—and swim lusciously in the flow of understanding beneath. But all that eventuated was a headache.

  In retrospect, it was clear that Mrs. Russell had wanted to shock us into a state of inquiry, to lead us to the idea of looking things up: to open a dictionary, look up hypotenuse, ask her what “sum of ” meant, something, anything, but to just begin, to demonstrate that one of us had a particle of scholar in our blood, that her life had not been a total waste.

  Mrs. Russell had been disappointed that day.

  “Crowds,” I said. “Think of soccer hooligans, religious mobs, people gawping at car accidents. No one does anything. Why?”

  Therese folded her arms. She never liked it when I pointed out unpleasant human traits.

  “Groups of people need leaders. It’s a human response; most of us immediately want someone else to take responsibility, particularly in a new or frightening situation. So if you ever get knocked to the ground, or are in a car accident, and a crowd gathers and stares at you moon-faced, you’re going to have to direct them. You don’t say, ‘Someone, get help,’ you say, ‘You—yes, you—in the red shirt, call nine-one-one, and you, in the blue shoes—yes, ma’am, you with the barrette—please bring me a blanket.’ You pick specific people and give them specific tasks. You’ll find that once the crowd stirs to help, others will work out what to do on their own initiative. But don’t discount that initial inertia.”

  “You’re saying treat them like children?” Kim said. “Jimmie, carry those dishes to the sink; Junie, wipe the table. Like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “That I can do,” she said.

  For the first time this week, nods all round. “Good. What else? Nothing? ” We had five minutes left. “Stand up. We’ll work a bit more with joint locks.” They got up one by one. I realized it was warm. I went to the air-conditioning unit jammed high in the outside wall and thumped the plug. The fan started to turn reluctantly. “Joint locks are most—”

  “The thing on the list I don’t understand,” Sandra said, still sitting, “is the one t
hat says, ‘If they abuse you, make them stop.’ ”

  Everyone turned to listen.

  “And you say, ‘There is always a choice of some kind, always.’ Are you saying anyone who gets hurt is making a choice, that it’s our fault?”

  The air-conditioning now burst into a slow clatter that quickened as the motor warmed.

  “ ‘If someone abuses you, make them stop’ is the heart of self-defense.” Hypotenuse, square, sum. They weren’t going to get it in one gulp. “Let’s break it down.”

  Suze sighed out loud.

  “First of all, by ‘someone’ I mean anyone, everyone: parent, child, friend, relative, spouse, partner, boss, priest, police officer, stranger, casual acquaintance, member of Congress, the queen. Everyone. Anyone. Abuse means the trespassing on our basic rights as human beings. Make them stop means to leave, tell them to stop, or fight. Whichever is the most efficient.”

  “Are we talking basic assertiveness-training stuff here?” Nina said, crossing her legs so that her right foot rested sole up on her left thigh. I was always surprised by her hip flexibility. She moved so stiffly in other ways. “You know, you have the right to your own feeling and moods, you have the right to make mistakes, you have the right to change your mind. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “Yes.” Assertiveness training. I’d have to look that up. “Anyone else familiar with it?”

  Therese, Tonya, and Katherine nodded. Suze made a noise like a horse clearing its nose, and Christie said, “I’ve never even heard of it.”

  Nina laughed. “It’s a second-wave thing, honey. Your momma might know. Or maybe your grandmomma. There are seven basics.” She looked at me. I gestured for her to continue. “The three I already said, plus you have the right to say no without explaining, you have the right to go where you want—when, with whom, and wearing whatever—you want. You have the right to refuse responsibility for others—unless it’s your child, of course—and we have the right to act without the approval of others. That last one is tricky. It’ll screw you every time, least until you hit fifty.” She sounded cheerful about it.