Protectors Page 2

  In his shoes, she wouldn’t have been calm. She would have been utterly terrified. She was just a little terrified right now.

  If the lunar lander crashed into the moon’s surface, no one could do anything to help, not even the men in Mission Control. The entire joyous event would end in a gigantic disaster.

  The moon landing party hadn’t even been her idea. The suburban women who (surprisingly) made up the bulk of her clientele decided it would be more fun to watch in a group.

  Pammy had apparently had a moment of crazy, because she had agreed, thinking that the landing would be over and done with in less than an hour. Instead, the group had arrived two hours ago, and there was no end in sight.

  She wanted them to leave, and she couldn’t tell them to go. She had agreed to this, after all.

  Everything about the entire day felt out of Pammy’s control.

  Including the woman standing outside the plate-glass window, staring in. No one else stood on the street. Just the woman, leaning forward slightly as if she were trying to get a better look inside.

  The woman stood with her arms wrapped around her torso, hands gripping her ribcage. She seemed unnaturally thin. Her collarbone stood out prominently, the dark skin pulled tightly across her chest. She had cropped her hair so short that it looked like she was wearing a stocking cap made up of tight black curls.

  She had an upturned nose and delicate, elfin features. Her large brown eyes weren’t looking at the television; they were peering in at the exercise circle where, up until an hour ago, Pammy had been teaching her Sunday beginners’ class the value of Tai Chi and being mindful.

  Pammy wasn’t always mindful. In fact, she wasn’t very good at Tai Chi. She found it boring. But her unofficial medic, June Eagleton, had insisted on some kind of stretching routine for the women who came to the gym, so they wouldn’t get hurt as easily. Eagle insisted that Pammy do more to keep the injuries under control. Eagle was terrified that the City of Berkeley would use the sprained wrists, black eyes, and occasional broken thumbs as an excuse to shut the gym down.

  Pammy felt that the City of Berkeley had other things to worry about besides one business just off Telegraph Avenue. As long as no one complained (and even if they did), she figured she was okay.

  But she had implemented the Tai Chi class anyway.

  Something beeped on the television screen. The women—all dressed in shorts and sleeveless blouses—remained motionless. Three had their fingers pressed against their lips. Two clasped their hands together against their breasts in an unconscious imitation of prayer, and one was biting her thumbnail.

  “Houston, Tranquility Base here,” Neil Armstrong said from hundreds of thousands of miles away, “The Eagle has landed.”

  The women burst into cheers. Pammy turned back toward the television, but couldn’t see the screen. Two of her students were hugging each other and jumping up and down.

  Pammy didn’t quite feel the elation. This was just the beginning of something incredibly dangerous. After the two men finished whatever they were supposed to do on the moon (and if they survived that), they would have to get the lunar lander back to the spaceship somehow, and then they all had to return to Earth. She wouldn’t feel elated until those men walked on Earth’s soil again.

  But she did know that what had just happened was momentous. In spite of herself, she felt the solemnity of it, as well as the sheer magic. She let out a small breath. Whatever happened next, Americans had landed on the moon. That, by itself, was pretty incredible.

  Then she glanced out the window again. The woman was now peering at everyone else, looking surprised. Hadn’t she known about the moon landing? How could she not have known that?

  But Pammy had a hunch. Women caught up in their own trauma didn’t pay attention to the street around them, let alone the world or, in this case, the universe.

  Pammy pushed past three of the women who were still staring at the television, and walked to the glass front door. She pushed it open and felt the warm summer air.

  “Hey,” Pammy said.

  The woman stepped back in surprise. She gave Pammy a sad, startled look, then started down the sidewalk.

  Pammy realized that the woman believed Pammy was chasing her away.

  “Wait!” Pammy said, louder. “I wanted to invite you in. We just landed on the moon. You have to see this.”

  The woman stopped, her back mostly to Pammy. Two blocks ahead, some cars passed on Telegraph Avenue, but this street was empty. No one except her and the woman.

  The woman turned slightly until her gaze met Pammy’s.

  “We didn’t land on the moon,” she corrected, with that earnestness so many of the University of California-Berkeley students had.

  “America did,” Pammy said. “I think that counts as we. C’mon. You have to see this.”

  The woman opened her mouth, and Pammy half expected her to say, as so many of those self-righteous students would have, I don’t need to see anything.

  Then the woman closed her mouth, nodded as if acknowledging something someone else had said, took a deep breath, put her head down, and charged forward.

  Her arms were still wrapped around her torso, and she was so thin, Pammy could probably break all of her ribs with a well-placed shove.

  The woman slipped inside the door, then stopped, saw the women still dancing to the news of the moon landing, and said softly, “I’m sorry. I don’t belong here.”

  Pammy wasn’t sure if the woman was saying that because she was black and everyone else in the room was white or because everyone was older than she was or because everyone was dancing.

  “Sure you do,” Pammy said. “This place is for anyone who wants to step inside.”

  The woman looked at Pammy sideways. The woman’s gaze moved slightly, as if she were trying to size up the situation. Pammy could feel the fear radiating off her.

  Pammy had learned in the years since she opened the gym that the actual situation here wasn’t what frightened women who came through that door. The women who came into A Gym of Her Own were often already terrified.

  Pammy had learned to treat them gently.

  “I’m Pamela Griffin,” she said. “I’m the owner of this place.”

  The woman looked up at her, then over at the other six women, who were now staring at the television again.

  “You own a gym?” she asked, not giving her name in return. “Why would a woman own a gym?”

  Pammy had encountered that question dozens of times before, but it still overwhelmed her. There were a thousand answers. Because I want to was perhaps the most accurate one. Pammy had combined her business and physical education double majors into something she actually believed in, something she was good at.

  But there were other answers as well. Because there was a need. Because women need to learn how to defend themselves. Because I can’t imagine doing anything else.

  And, of course, those were just the superficial answers. The real answers took a lot more time to explain.

  Pammy smiled at the woman, and didn’t give any of those answers—superficial or deep. Instead, she shrugged.

  “Come on,” Pammy said. “This is history.”

  The woman glanced at the television again, then at the door. Pammy could feel how hard the woman was fighting with herself just to stand inside the threshold.

  Then the woman gave that odd little nod again, lowered her chin, and stepped forward. She hovered near the edge of the group of women, in a place where she couldn’t see anything on the screen.

  Pammy let the heavy door close on its own.

  “Did you see this?” Opal Curlett turned toward the new woman as if she had been here all along. “You have got to see this.”

  Opal had been one of Pammy’s students almost from the start. When she had come here, she was heavyset and not athletic at all. She was still solid—she had probably never been thin—but now she looked strong instead of squishy. She wore her graying hair short, and she never wor
e makeup.

  The new woman looked at Opal with a bit of alarm. Opal grinned. She’d been through introductions like this before.

  Opal had never been one of the terrified ones. Instead, she had been one of the strong ones from the very beginning. She had fought her way through a terrible divorce and was slowly rebuilding her life. She had come to Pammy after finishing an automobile repair class. Opal had had visions of herself driving the interstates around the San Francisco Bay Area, stopping with a box of tools and rescuing women stranded at the side of the road.

  She had never done it, but just the fact that she had thought of it pleased Pammy.

  The new woman glanced at Pammy, then at the door as if measuring the distance to an escape.

  “Here,” Opal said to the new woman. “Take my spot. You can see better from here. I’ve got to pee anyway.”

  Opal had seen the new woman’s terror, then. Opal was doing what she could to put the new woman at ease, including the casual mention of peeing, as if she and the new woman were old friends. Opal walked away from the television to the locker room.

  The new woman watched as Opal opened the locker room door and stepped inside. Then one of the beginners—Pammy couldn’t see who—said, “C’mon, move up,” and for a half second, Pammy thought the new woman would bolt.

  Then she stepped into the very space that Opal had just vacated.

  “They just landed,” the beginner was saying, “and now they have this equipment stuff to do inside the lander. It’ll probably be hours before they walk on the surface of the moon.”

  “I’d be terrified,” said Celeste Boutelle, which really didn’t surprise Pammy. Celeste was also one of the beginners who had come to the gym after People’s Park in May.

  Surprisingly, Pammy had gotten an influx of suburban students during May and June. The entire city of Berkeley was under martial law, and people drove down to Telegraph to join Pammy’s gym. She had thought the armed military presence down here would discourage people from taking classes. Instead, everyone from students to professors to employees of nearby businesses decided they needed to learn self-defense, and they had all come to Pammy.

  Celeste ran a hand over her home-dyed red curls. She glanced at everyone, including the newcomer.

  “Can you imagine?” Celeste asked. “Being so far away from home, in a tin can, with no help nearby? We could’ve heard them die today.”

  We still might, Pammy wanted to say, but didn’t.

  The new woman was watching the television, a small frown creasing her brow. She had nodded just a little as Celeste spoke. The new woman could imagine, apparently, and probably had.

  She no longer hugged her own torso. She had lowered her arms, but she still held them in front of her, this time with one hand clutching the elbow of the other arm, a protective stance.

  Pammy lifted her gaze from the new woman’s posture to find Jill Woodbridge looking up at the same point. Jill had become one of Pammy’s de facto assistants. Jill was tall and athletic, with short-cropped brown hair and a hard jawline.

  She used to work in her husband’s business on Telegraph but he shut it down during the Free Speech Movement four years before. He hadn’t liked the chaos and disorder, the constant protests, and the coarse way the students had started speaking to adults.

  He had planned to move the business to one of the outlying areas but hadn’t yet completed the work when he fell dead from a heart attack, leaving Jill with life insurance, a paid-off house, grown children, and nothing to do with her days.

  She had said that finding Pammy was a saving grace. Sometimes Pammy agreed, especially as the number of women who used the gym grew in June.

  Pammy knew what Jill was thinking: the new woman was exceptionally guarded and deeply frightened. Jill would argue that they could help her.

  Pammy wasn’t sure. She never stepped into other women’s lives unless invited. And so far, the new woman hadn’t invited her, and maybe never would.

  “You know what?” Jill asked. Pammy braced herself for an inappropriate comment. That was the downside of Jill, who occasionally stuck her foot so deep in her mouth that you couldn’t even see her knee. “We need food.”

  Pammy let out a breath of air.

  A couple of women went to get their purses, which they had placed behind the counter. The new woman glanced at the door again.

  Jill saw that too. “Don’t worry, I got it. I’ll just take sandwich orders, and I’ll pay for them. My treat.”

  The new woman had stepped to one side and was going to leave. Pammy could feel it, but she wasn’t sure what she could do about it.

  Jill looked at the new woman and said softly, “I got it,” apparently thinking the new woman was going to leave because she couldn’t pay.

  Then everyone looked at the new woman, and she tilted her head slightly. It seemed like the assumption of poverty annoyed her.

  “I think orders are a great idea,” Pammy said to Jill. “You should probably start a list. I’m pretty sure Yale’s Deli is open today.”

  “We’ve got a menu somewhere,” Jill said. “That’ll make things easier.”

  Her cheeks were pink. She realized she had blown it with the new woman, but probably didn’t know how.

  The other women crowded the counter, although a couple kept their gazes on the television. Right now, the reporters were talking about the landing, while there was chatter in the background from Mission Control.

  Someone said, “You know, Kip’s is closer.”

  Pammy let her gaze meet the new woman’s, so she couldn’t just sneak out. But Pammy didn’t approach her either. When people were as terrified as the new woman was, talking to them head-on about anything could often make them run away.

  The new woman gave Pammy a hesitant smile, then glanced at the door. As the women got involved with choosing a different restaurant, the new woman took one step toward the door, then stopped herself.

  She put her head down, and Pammy was convinced she would walk out. Instead, the new woman walked toward her, watching her feet as she moved.

  Trembling, her hands clenched into fists. Pammy had seen only a few other women this deeply frightened come into the gym, and none of them returned.

  The new woman stopped in front of her. She was shorter than Pammy realized, maybe five-three, maybe less.

  “Do you really teach women how to defend themselves?” the new woman asked softly. She had an accent that Pammy didn’t quite recognize. Midwestern, long vowels, but with a cadence that was unfamiliar.

  Apparently, when she had been staring at the large plate-glass window for A Gym of Her Own, she had been reading the mimeographed class schedule that Jill had pasted in the corner. That was the only place which mentioned self-defense classes.

  “Yes, I can teach women how to defend themselves,” Pammy said, knowing simple was best. If she tried to convince this woman of anything, the woman would back away.

  “Even someone who looks like me?” the new woman asked, raising her head. Her brown eyes seemed even bigger than they had before.

  She wasn’t specific, but Pammy knew what she meant. Pammy had gotten the question a dozen times before.

  The new woman was referring to her petite build, not her skin color.

  “Especially women who look like you,” Pammy said.

  The woman frowned, then glanced at the cluster of women, still discussing lunch. None of them were as petite at this woman. Some of them were a little too heavy to exercise much, which was something Pammy wanted them to work on.

  “It’s a small class,” Pammy said, making sure her tone wasn’t apologetic, “on an unusual day.”

  The new woman didn’t nod. She barely looked at Pammy. But the new woman frowned, and took a deep breath, squaring her slight shoulders.

  “How,” she asked quietly, “can a woman like me ever defend herself? Really defend herself? I mean, I can probably take on another woman, maybe, but men…”

  Her voice had a thrum to it,
a deep emotional undercurrent, an intensity that Pammy rarely heard in these early discussions with other women.

  “I mean,” the new woman said, “men are so much bigger.”

  For this woman, all men were bigger. Some women could take on men, size for size. Those women just had to realize it.

  But some women were so small that even the shortest man could overpower them.

  “It’s not about size,” Pammy said, deliberately avoiding the old cliché that her father taught her. But she was thinking it. It’s not about the size of the woman in the fight; it’s about the size of the fight in the woman. She used to quote it to her students, making it clear that the cliché used to be about small men, but she had altered it.

  Too many women thought the cliché flip, though, and sometimes they even left after Pammy spouted something like that. Pammy later learned they thought they were going to get platitudes rather than actual help.

  “Well, let me restate that,” Pammy said. “In some ways, it is about size.”

  The new woman tensed.

  “Men don’t expect small women to be tough,” Pammy said. “No one expects small women to be strong. It gives us an advantage.”

  She deliberately included herself in that statement, so the new woman before her realized that Pammy didn’t have a lot of physical advantages either—at least, she hadn’t had them when she learned how to defend herself years ago.

  The new woman studied her, and Pammy could feel her uncertainty. The woman still wanted to bolt, but she seemed to be holding herself in place by sheer force of will.

  “I still don’t know what I could do,” the woman said. “I’m scared of guns.”

  “So am I,” Pammy said. “I know of too many people who don’t know how to use them or who drop the gun at the wrong moment or who get overpowered because they are too afraid to shoot. Guns are only good in the hands of someone trained.”

  The woman swallowed. She was so thin that Pammy could see the muscles in her neck move. Pammy had hit on something.

  “I would teach you what to do,” Pammy said. “First, though, we teach how to de-escalate.”

  “Huh?” the woman asked.

  “There are ways to confuse someone who is about to attack you or to get them to back down, ways that sometimes work before the physical attacks happen.”