My roommate Adrienne and her dog are a few paces ahead of me as we round the curve at the far end of the wetland trail loop. We’re on a long run, part of our Saturday morning routine for half-marathon training and decompressing from the week, and I’m midway through a story about my mom and stepdad. We run past a man sitting on the wooden swing where the trail widens out, jog around the wooden bench a few feet past him, and head back toward the way we came in. As we pass the man again, either he says hi and I respond, or I say hi and he responds; he makes eye contact with me, and that’s when I see that his penis is out.
He holds his phone in one hand and his erect penis in the other, stroking the top of the shaft slowly with his thumb.
“Ewww!” I say, so sharply that Adrienne half turns her head to look back at me, thinking — she will tell me later — that I’m reacting to something she’d said. “He’s masturbating.” I reach for my phone and dial 911. We break into a sprint toward the trail’s entrance as my call connects and rings through.
The dispatcher sounds impatient with me, interrupts me multiple times as I try to explain our location. I need your location. What city, ma’am? I’m not familiar with the area; I need a street name. At some point I say, “I’m trying to explain it to you, but we’re running in case he comes after us.”
* * *
Here is a memory that does not belong to me but to my older sister: It’s a morning during her senior year of high school, and she hasn’t left the house yet because she’s doing some kind of work-study program, working in a business office the first half of the day and going to school to finish her few remaining credits in the afternoon. Her bedroom is in the basement; there is a stairway leading down there from the family room, with a door at the bottom. When she opens that door to go upstairs, she hears the unmistakable sounds of pornography, registers the TV being turned off quickly, sees our stepfather scurry from the couch to the kitchen, the flaps of his bathrobe trailing behind him. She hears the rush of water from the kitchen sink.
It’s those last two parts I’ve internalized as if they had happened to me as well. His open robe billowing out like a cape, the moment of understanding that he must be washing semen off his hands.
* * *
I come to running late in life, or at least later than the other runners I know. At thirty-three years old, I download the Couch to 5K running podcasts because I feel like I’ve hit an exercise plateau. I am fit, though I’ve struggled with weight, with my own body and its powers and betrayals, all of my life. At 33 ½, I decide that it’s time to get over my hatred of running, my insistence that I can’t do it because of asthma. I can spend an hour on an elliptical machine, easy. I do intense yoga and pilates classes. I ride my bike around my deep Midwestern college town more than I drive my aging Corolla. I should be able to run, I reason. Besides, I’m worried about how my impending mid- and late-thirties will combine with my pre-existing hormone imbalance to turn my metabolism even more lethargic. I want to get out ahead of it; I want to be in control.
* * *
I am still on the phone with 911 when we spill back out into the open of our neighborhood’s lake-park area. The dispatcher wants to know what street we’re on. I try to explain why I can’t tell her exactly: that the road curves around the lake and becomes another road, but I don’t know the exact point where one’s name turns into the other. She interrupts before I can finish: I’m not familiar with the area; directions don’t help me.
“Can you just connect me to the police department here?” I ask. It’s a small, almost hidden city within the suburban mess of metro Atlanta, fewer than 400 homes. “They’ll know exactly where I’m talking about.”
She says that she needs a street name when she calls it in. I see a woman I know walking her dog. I stop her to tell her not to go down the trail and ask if she knows what the street name is at the exact point we’re standing; she doesn’t know either. Finally, I say something to the dispatcher like, “I hear that you need a street name. What I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t know, but it’s either Lakeshore or Park, and if you tell the police officer that and tell them we’re at the entrance to the Western Wetlands trail, he will know exactly where we are.”
She asks for my description, and my roommate’s. I give her numbers and colors: five foot four, five foot eight, brown, blonde, green shorts, black shorts, gray tank top, black tank top. She asks whether we can stay where we are until the officer arrives. I say, “We can stay here, unless this guy comes out after us, in which case we’re running.” But I don’t want to stay. It makes me anxious that we wouldn’t be able to see the guy until he’s fairly close if he does decide to come out after us. I don’t like having my routine interrupted. I want to go back to running.
The phone call lasts four minutes and twenty one seconds. By the time I hang up, Adrienne and I have stopped four more women from walking or running on the trail.
* * *
Here is a memory that is mine: I’m in seventh grade. News crews had been at my school earlier in the day or earlier in the week, filming my class for a feature on the county’s magnet programs. My sister, brother, and I always arrive home before our mother and stepfather, so we are in charge of setting up the VCR with a blank VHS to record the news segment featuring my class. There is already a tape in the VCR, and when my sister presses the play button, an image of a woman’s naked backside looms onto the screen. She is on her hands and knees, no face visible, while a long, wide, orange-ish penis pumps into and out of her.
Our mother is a nurse; from an early age, we’ve all known the proper names for sex organs and the mechanics of intercourse, explained to us in no-nonsense terms. But, at twelve years old, this is the first time I have seen it. It looks to me like violence, like something that would hurt. The penis is just so wide. It bothers me that the woman has no face.
My sister is outraged but also, I notice, exhilarated. She can’t wait to tell Mom. She thinks it’s the evidence she needs to convince her to divorce our stepfather. I’m not thinking so strategically; I only know that what’s on the tape seems like a betrayal of my mother. I’m worried about how her feelings will be hurt. Neither of us predict how she will excuse the tape, excuse her husband, tell us one more time that there’s nothing abnormal or unsafe about him.
The scene on screen switches, or perhaps my sister fast-forwards the tape, and there is a woman lying naked on a bed, alone. I don’t know if it’s the same woman; she is on her back and I can see her face, though I won’t remember it. She holds what I will years later recognize is a vibrator. It looks to me like some kind of weird arrow-tipped wand, and she is rubbing it against her vulva, legs spread open. Meanwhile, two men emerge from a van or truck emblazoned with the words Sperm Busters and a symbol like the Ghostbusters logo but with a big white sperm in place of the puffy white ghost, parked outside her building. They stand outside the woman’s window and watch through the blinds.
* * *
Just when I’ve worked up to 27 minutes without a break, I have to stop running because of an asthma flare-up. I also, in the first six months of officially writing my dissertation, gain almost 20 pounds, and I hate that I hate it so much. I hate that I still think of weight gain as failure. But after I graduate and move back to Atlanta for a teaching job, I do the Couch to 5K program again, and then again a few more times after I’ve had more asthma flare-ups and need to start over. My body just goes to seed so quickly, I lament.
By the end of my first full summer back in Atlanta, I’m running at least three and sometimes almost four miles with a friend I’ve met in my neighborhood, Amy. We talk about writing and teaching and eventually the other parts of our lives outside of work, and I barely notice how long we’re running. Then, my second summer back, I work up to five-mile runs with her. Meanwhile, Adrienne, a close friend from my time in the southeast Ohio town where I’d done my first graduate degree, moves into the spare bedroom of my apartment. She convinces me pretty easily to train for a half marathon with her. I still haven’t lost the dissertation weight — It’s like baby weight for academics, I sometimes joke — but that’s no longer the only point. Running with these women becomes bonding, becomes a space for us to work through whatever is on our minds. It stops being a chore and turns into a way to reconnect to my body’s strength. I feel powerful.
* * *
Within moments of my hanging up with the 911 dispatcher, she calls back and asks for the masturbator’s description. I tell her his approximate age, what we can remember of his clothes, his build: probably twenties, athletic pants, slim. She asks: Race? White, Black, Latino, Asian? “Black,” I say. I understand that because he is black and Adrienne and I are white, we are more likely to be believed. I understand that this is an unearned privilege.
Before filming my seventh grade class that day, the news producers had rearranged the desks in the classroom so that they all faced the chalkboard, disturbing the pods of four or five or six our teacher had set up around the room. They re-sat us in pairs, alternating students by race: white, black; black, white. The message was clear and calculated, even to my twelve-year old mind: Atlanta, Georgia — doing diversity right. But we weren’t. We still aren’t.
What if we’d been calling from just over the zip code line, where the property values are lower? What if we’d been calling from an area that wasn’t predominantly white?
I don’t want the message here to be that the 911 dispatcher is the problem. Her interruptions frustrated me, but that’s not the point. The point is that the protocol isthe problem. All of these steps designed to avoid sending help right away. All of these opportunities for not hearing victims’ stories.
* * *
Another memory: my stepfather sitting in the armchair in the living room in just a bathrobe, no underwear, legs just un-closed enough that I can see his limp penis, red like that one brand of cheap hot dogs, stuck against his leg. How I felt ashamed for having accidentally seen it, like I should have known not to look in his direction. I was almost, I realize now, embarrassed for him. I’d assumed he didn’t know it was visible.
I never saw him masturbating, but here is a memory from my adulthood: I am visiting home on a break from graduate school. My mother is at work, and it must be his day off. I let myself into the house, and as I walk into the combined living room/dining room and toward the stairs, I see the flash of his naked body darting across the hall from the office into his and Mom’s room.
And this, from the year before I moved to Ohio, when I lived at Mom’s again and took care of my young niece and nephew during the week: Every other week, my stepfather has a few weekdays off, and I dread these days but only, at first, because of the residual discomfort from my adolescence, the fact that he and I have only ever tolerated each other at best. My childhood bedroom is now half my niece’s room and half his “office.” One day when the kids and I go into the room so I can change my niece’s diaper, he has to close out many, many open windows on the computer screen before his back-up screen of The Weather Channel is visible. I see only flashes: naked women in contorted positions, a glaring header that says Mother and Son. As I change my niece’s diaper, he talks to me about the weather. I am too shocked, too preoccupied with finishing my task quickly and getting my babies out of that room, to do anything but play along.
* * *
It takes me a long time to be comfortable exercising in front of other people. By the time I’m back in Atlanta where I run with friends and train for a half marathon, going to gyms and fitness classes has become such a part of my normal routine that people who met me in grad school know it as one of my defining characteristics. And yet even now I often have to squelch my own self-consciousness about using my body for exercise in public. I am not a natural athlete, and so it feels like a revolution when I finish my first road race: a four-miler. It feels like empowerment when I go to an actual running store instead of the clearance section of Kohl’s for new running shoes for the first time, when I ask to run outside on the sidewalk in five different pairs, in front of people, before deciding which ones to buy.
* * *
It’s a new officer, at least new to our little city, who arrives a minute or two after I get off the phone with the dispatcher the second time. His face twists in disgust when we tell him what happened. He apologizes to us for having had to see what we saw. He says something about people being sick or crazy. He tells us that he needs to wait for some other officers to arrive for back-up before he can go down the trail to see if the man is still there but then walks it alone anyway. He carries himself with confidence but not bravado or cockiness. He has olive skin and dark hair and sharp bone structure and tattooed arms and, because I love him for believing us and being angry on our behalf, I wish I could set him up with my sister, who is in the midst of divorcing a man who never showed her empathy but did, so he told their babysitter, expose his penis to a woman via webcam.
The officer comes back and tells us the man is gone. He apologizes again for what we saw. He tells us that he and some other officers will check out the neighborhoods that back up to that trail. “Just don’t run on this trail for awhile,” he says, but not like it was our fault.
* * *
At first, I don’t tell Mom about Bob looking at porn while the kids and I are home. I assume he’d be more cautious after it happened once, and I want to avoid upsetting her. But it happens a second time, and so I have to tell her, yet even then, I go straight to justifying why it’s a problem, saying things like, It’s Teresa’s bedroom; I change her diaper in there and If DFACS knew, the kids could be taken away from us. For the first time in my memory, she doesn’t make any excuses for him. She actually seems wounded, saying I thought he had stopped looking at porn. He told me he had stopped.
Several years later, just before I turn 30, I am home for a few weeks in the summer. I stay at my sister’s house some nights, but others I stay at Mom’s. One morning, Mom is at work and I’m doing something in the kitchen — fixing myself breakfast or washing dishes — when Bob trudges in to place more plates in the sink. Minutes later, I’m at the dining room table with my laptop open, working on a syllabus for my fall classes. I have a clear view of the upstairs hallway, so I know from the slice of light coming from my old bedroom that Bob is in the “office” with the door open. I hear a woman’s moaning, heavy breathing. At first I think I’m mishearing, but then it gets louder. I grab my keys and cell phone and go outside, begin walking around the neighborhood in my pajamas and flip-flops. It is an hour before I go back to the house to get my clothes and drive to my sister’s.
It happens again a few days later. After Mom is home from work, she asks me what I want for my birthday dinner. Homemade pizza? Linguini with clams? I remind her that I don’t eat pasta or pizza anymore. How about salmon? she says, and Bob pipes in, something about how he has a good salmon recipe from Publix. I say that I’m not ready to decide, and that I need to talk to her privately later. When I tell her about the porn incidents, how it seemed unmistakable to me that he was doing it to run me out of the house, or at least to remind me that he doesn’t want me there, she cries. She says, again, that she thought he had stopped. He had told her he’d stopped. I don’t know what I’m going to do, she says, but I have to do something. I tell her that I won’t spend the night at her house again so long as Bob is there. Her home is no longer my home.
* * *
Adrienne sets our training schedule, and I follow it like homework. We run for mileage on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and the weekends. Wednesdays we do hill runs or speed drills or timed endurance drills. Sometimes I cheat and do additional long runs with Amy. All three of us run a 5K in September, and I get mad at myself when the asthma starts acting up and I have to take my inhaler again, have to slow my pace and take walk breaks. But when I get the printout at the end, I see that my average time per mile has improved since my first race.
In October, I run a 10K alone. Two miles in, I want to turn around and go back to the start of the race, just walk off the course and not finish. But I keep putting one foot in front of the other. I stop paying too much attention when my GPS chimes every half mile to tell me my overall time and distance, because I don’t want to obsess about my pace. I listen to a Florence + the Machine album I’ll sometimes blare and sing along with in the car when the weather is windows-down perfect, mouthing the words to help push myself up the hills. The next day I get an email with a link to the professional photos from the race and avoid looking at them for a few hours. Once I do, I love how strong I look.
* * *
Here is what I’d been telling Adrienne about when we saw the masturbator: The day before, I’d rearranged my schedule to help Mom run an errand because her car wouldn’t start. She seemed loopy, easily confused by the credit card reader, so I asked whether she’d eaten yet. She said at first that she had, but then said, No. I was going to fix myself oatmeal after I made Bob his breakfast, but then I must have forgot.
This wasn’t the first time she’d admitted to forgetting to eat in the months since my stepfather has become unable to care for himself and she, in her retirement, has taken on the role of his personal nurse. She looks much older than she did a year ago and acts so frail and confused sometimes that, for the first time, I worry that she will die before him. In the car, I told her, You worry me when you get like this. I start thinking you’re getting to be like Grandpa already, but then it’s just that you haven’t eaten. Mom, you have to eat. You have to take care of yourself.
I took her through a drive-thru to get some food, and as I drove back to her house, I said Look, Bob’s not going to let you forget to feed him, but I’m guessing it doesn’t cross his mind whether or not you’ve eaten.
She also mentioned that she’s worried he’ll find out about some financial thing, and then he’ll be really mad and stressed. I said, What can he do about it? He’s basically incapacitated. I’ve been saying things like that more often now; I don’t have it in me anymore to pretend sympathy for my stepfather, to pretend that I think he has any unselfish motivations.
So what I’d been telling Adrienne about was this realization: that so much of my mother’s life must have been about trying not to anger or upset my stepfather so that he wouldn’t nag or berate her. Through my late childhood and adolescence, that meant that she overlooked and ignored many of my and my siblings’ needs, disappearing behind their closed bedroom door once she arrived home from work. He’s ill now because he’s taken poor care of himself: forgetting to take his medications, ignoring all the dietary recommendations for Type II Diabetes. I’m convinced that without my siblings and me around as often to threaten my mother’s devotion to him, he’s made himself sicker to take her attention away from herself, from her own basic needs.
I am angry about it, how she’s so willingly given up her own power. I am angry that, in this situation, I have none.
* * *
Here is what happens for the rest of the day: Adrienne and I finish our run and go home. Usually after a run, when we’ve talked through the things we’ve talked through, I’m calmer, cleansed; I’ve processed. But this time I’m amped up, agitated still. We talk about the man, try to piece together what each of us saw, why we hadn’t noticed what was happening the first time we passed him. I pick up the cable remote control, demonstrate the motion of his thumb stroking the top. Like he’s fucking petting it? Adrienne says.
I text my fiancé, who lives out of state, and tell him what happened. He calls me, and we talk about it, and I’m relieved that he believes me and is disgusted too. It’s not that anything about our relationship or who I know him to be gives me reason to think he wouldn’t believe me, or wouldn’t think it’s a big deal. It’s just that I’m so conditioned to women not being believed, to being minimized, in situations like this.
Adrienne and I do the rest of our regular Saturday routine: we make a meal plan for the week, go to a few shops to look at things we won’t buy, go to a liquor store to get a growler filled, go to a craft store for Halloween supplies, and go to the grocery store. The weather is crisp and clear and neither hot nor cool. It would be a perfect Saturday afternoon except for this: I keep seeing the man make eye contact with me, the way he looked up at me from beneath his brow, and I keep seeing his penis. The exact shade of skin, the circumcised tip, the veins snaking over the top as he moved his thumb in a slow, almost nonchalant stroke.
I post about the incident on our city’s neighborhood watch Facebook page. People comment with what they would have done, what, they imply, I should have done: pointed and laughed, kicked the guy’s ass, carried a gun, carried wasp spray. Others want a description, and I hesitate, already knowing the response. But as soon as I affirm that the man on the trail was Black, a man comments that it must be the same guy who’d accosted him asking for money at the post office earlier in the week. I stop checking the thread.
My sister comes over. We watch movies and visit our uncle who lives down the street and I tell him and, though he’s disgusted too, later he teases me, implies that I’m overreacting.
All I want is to be distracted and then later to sleep, but there it is again: the eyes, the tip, the veins, the thumb. I’m angry. I’m so, so angry.
* * *
Here are some other things that bore into my mind in the days afterward, thoughts that edge their way into my consciousness, unbidden and hateful as the image of the man’s penis and thumb:
In the minutes between hanging up with the 911 dispatcher and the officer’s arrival, Adrienne and I try to reason out why the man would have been masturbating where he was. Our second instinct, after running, was to make excuses for the man.
As we’re talking to the officer, and again when we tell my uncle, we joke about it. Just keep it indoors. Should’ve taught the dog a sic dick command. By the time the officer got there to check out the trail, the man had already… come and gone. I realize that this is the adrenaline, the dissociation of survival mode. And yet I think about how, if the man were caught and the case went to court, the defense could call in the officer and my uncle to talk about how we were joking, how they could use that to argue that we weren’t traumatized.
Sometimes when I run, I wear a pair of shorts that say Hot Buns on the back. I bought them from a gift shop at a restaurant in Missouri that’s famous for throwing hot rolls to customers as they eat. I bought the shorts because, despite all my body insecurities, I’m not insecure about my butt, and I think they’re funny. A few months before we see the man on the trail masturbating, I’d gone for a run in the evening wearing my Hot Buns shorts, and as I walked home afterward, a man who lives a few houses down from my apartment, a man whom I’ll later learn has gained a reputation in the neighborhood for groping women when he drinks too much, said I can’t see those shorts and not say something. I didn’t respond, and he said that if his wife weren’t right there, maybe he’d say something that would get him in trouble. I didn’t look at him; I just kept walking.
I’d been wearing the Hot Buns shorts on the day we saw the man on the trail, and here’s something else I think about in the days afterward: How if the man had raped us instead of just exposing himself to us, the shorts could be used against me. How a different kind of police officer — like the one back in Kansas who’d come out to take fingerprints after a man had tried to get into my apartment at four in the morning and said to my landlord, within earshot of me, that sometimes these girls walk home in these alleys late at night wearing short skirts or tight pants and can’t figure out how they got raped — might have seen my Hot Buns shorts and Adrienne’s spandex and told us we were lucky not to have had more happen to us. I think about what that kind of officer might have said if we were running, as we sometimes do, in just shorts and sports bras.
* * *
For about a week before we saw the man masturbating, the internet had been blowing up with news about the sexual harassment and assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which quickly led to conversations about how behavior like that was an open secret in Hollywood. Of course a man in power took advantage of that power sexually. Of course that kind of stuff happens all the time. Meanwhile, I also learned that a man who’d worked as a professor for my university, a man who’d been on the committee that hired me, was arrested after a student’s mother had reported him to the police for groping her daughter. This happened during my second semester, and I learned about it a year and a half later because, despite the Clery Act, there was no official notification. I learned also that when it happened, people in the know had said things like, That’s just him. He’s been doing that with students for years. Female students shouldn’t be alone with him.
Everyone knows this stuff happens. People are disgusted, but no one is surprised. Young female actresses are supposed to know not to be alone with powerful producers. Young female students are supposed to make sure their professors never close the office door. Women should run in pairs, during the day, in safe neighborhoods.
But we did run in a pair, during the day, on a trail in our usually safe neighborhood. We ran with a dog, and we ran with cell phones in case of emergency. We did everything right.
* * *
Whenever I tell my fiancé that I’ve finished a run, he asks How were your splits? I know he asks this, know that he cares, because the breakdown of my pace per mile matters to me. As the humidity in Georgia has started to break and I’ve gotten stronger and built endurance, my average time per mile has gone down.
Even without checking my tracking app, I can feel it, how the route goes by more swiftly under my feet: the tree-dappled shade of the roads leading down to the lake, the mulched pathway that loops around the wetlands with the heron that sometimes lifts off into flight as I pass, the bushes that arc up taller than my head as I run along the paved path around the north side of the lake.
At the 10K, adrenaline and training fueled me through two or three of the fastest miles I’ve ever run. When the Florence + the Machine album ended and I still had about a mile left to go, I switched to Beyoncé — Now now a diva is the female version of a hustler, of a hustler — and deliberately slowed down in the last mile so that I could sprint once the finish line was in sight, the momentum of my own body like a piston.
What I hate most about that man on the trail is that I had just started to feel like nothing could stop me.
