There’s a trick I sometimes play when I walk alone at night. If a car slows beside me, or if I notice a man ahead in the shadows, then I stop in my tracks, turn toward a nearby house and wave as if at someone waving back at me. Of course, it feels a little foolish, even in this central Wisconsin city of only 50,000 people, to wink, blink and nod at a row of drawn curtains, but who wouldn’t rather feel foolish than scared?
Not long ago I followed a route I hadn’t walked at night before. It was a route that surprised me because of its darkness. There were no street lights, and the houses seemed farther apart then they appeared in daylight, the front lawns more vast and crowded with trees. Ahead was the lake with its sweeping, pulsing signals so familiar that I felt as comfortable walking beside it as through my own back yard, but between me and the reflected embrace of its crystal light lay a half-mile stretch of ghostly suburbia, the pale trunks and black lawns offering only a moist, territorial silence.
Soon I noticed the van.
It was pulled to the side of the road. The back doors were wide open. From inside came a dim yellow glow. There was an upended carton of books and a rolled carpet remnant, behind which lay an unidentifiable, angular clutter. As if testing my young sons’ acquired litany of safety tips, I asked myself: “What now? Should you simply walk past? Should you go back the way you came? Should you poke your head past the carton of books in case there’s something interesting going on in there? Exactly what will you do if somebody claims to need help?”
From the open doors of the van, a ramp led down to the level of the street. When a man in a wheelchair appeared at the top of the ramp, I steered myself away from the camouflage of the sidewalk to follow instead the exact center of the road. “A lot of women do this at night,” I had once remarked to my friend Lynn. “There must be something to it, like carrying a can of pepper spray.”
Lynn told me she once carried a hand-held siren, and that she’d never once used it except for the time she set it off by mistake while hunting through her coat pocket in a crowded supermarket. She was 8 months pregnant. The wail of the siren seemed to be coming from inside her. Around her the other shoppers gazed curiously at the ceiling, then at Lynn’s belly, then at the walls, then at Lynn’s belly again. Not even Lynn recognized the high-pitched throb of the sound. Several shoppers abandoned their carts and escaped the store. Even after a couple of years had gone by, Lynn still laughed at how she’d gone through the checkout, then loaded her groceries into the trunk of the car, bewildered to find the noise still so shriekingly close.
In retrospect, she admitted, while offering me the little siren one night before I set off on one of my walks, the thing with the siren was more embarrassing by far than when her water broke in the same supermarket three weeks later. With a toss of my hair, I declined the little siren.
Now, just as I came abreast of the rear doors of the van, the man in the wheelchair called out. What he said was no surprise: “Excuse me, ma’am. Can you give me a little assistance?” For a moment I wished I was one of my sons. “Run away,” I had instructed them. “Just scream as loud as you can, and run as fast as you can, no matter what.” But how could I, a healthy, strong woman, run from a man in a wheelchair?
For the moment I simply stopped walking and turned to look directly, sympathetically at him. His square shoulders sagged, weary of maneuvering the chair. His hair was messy with sweat. In their boots on the metal footrests, his feet were splayed too heavily for words. “Ma’am,” he repeated, “I’m having trouble getting these books into my house. I can’t seem to get the garage door to open.”
“I’m really sorry. I can’t help you,” I heard myself recite, in the high, careful voice of one of my children. I knew the words by heart but my heart wasn’t in it. Suppose, I thought, he really does need my help? Perhaps I might lift the books onto his lap, ease the chair to the curb, follow him to the recalcitrant door and open it for him but not step inside.
But I am just barely over 5 feet 2 inches tall, I reminded myself. I weigh a few pounds less than my two young sons combined. Nearly anyone could roll me up in that carpet remnant in less than a minute. Besides, it was nearly 11 o’clock at night. What was he doing out there without a friend to help him? Surely he wasn’t waiting for some bespectacled night-gazer like myself to come strolling out of the pitch-blackness eager to steady a tower of books across his dewy lawn.
“You won’t help me?” he asked as incredulously as if I’d knocked the ramp to the pavement. “I’m really very sorry. I don’t know you,” I said resolutely, not wanting to have to say to him, “I don’t know if you need that wheelchair or not. Even if you do, how do I know you’re not quicker and stronger than I am?”
After I’d turned and walked off, half expecting the van to catch up along the lakefront so he might glare his disbelief through the rolled-down window, I schooled myself in the way I’d glare back. Half defiantly. A little sadly.
By now, I was angry as well. How I treasured these nighttime excursions, these misty adventures, the sky so near that it made me feel bigger than I felt in the daylight, bigger even at heart. How irksome it was to have been thrust into the heartless position of having to refuse help to a person in a wheelchair. Surely, having read all those books, he read the newspaper as well and knew the night wasn’t as sweet as a nursery rhyme even for those of us able to explore wherever we wanted. Yes, I would rather look foolish than scared, but never foolish enough to step into that van, wheelchair or not, books or not, incredulous or not.
Next evening, still feeling a little regretful, I told this story to Lynn and a few other friends, hoping that in the telling I might see it as if from a distance, with a clearer, more objective eye, to make better sense of it. Probably the man did need my help, I wistfully concluded. Because of my irrational hyped-up fears, he might have spent the whole chilly night on the sidewalk, locked out of his house, too exhausted to make the climb into the van and drive back where he’d come from. I told my friends how many times I had said I was sorry, my feet in the middle of the road as if treading the middle ground of apology, half way between the act and its avoidance, wishing I didn’t need to be so loyal to the lessons we’d all chanted into the sleepy heads of our children. Perhaps the man is an angel, I worried. Perhaps he’s so pure, so good, so innocent, that he truly believes that everyone else is, too.
Lynn spooned a little secret whiskey into the twinkling foam of our mugs of hot milk. “Or maybe he was a killer,” someone else said. The room fell silent. On the table before us lay the little hand-operated siren. If my two sons had not been dreaming in their beds just on the other side of the wall, one of us might have reached over and pressed the button.
