She stood in the dining room, out of sight of the living room, and tried to set her mind on violence. Could I deliberately cut somebody? A closeup image of a deep slice in an arm filled her mind, blood running everywhere. She told herself that this was a satisfying thing to happen, not something to avoid. She tried to imagine stabbing him with the broom handle, a nasty bruise on the shoulder, the ribs, in the solar plexus. Yes, and a crack on the side of the head. And if he stood up, she could use the long pole to trip him, whack him in the shins. Okay, she could enjoy that. She expected that he would try to take the weapons away from her. Well, she would watch for that. She wouldn’t let him. Okay, ready? Yes, ready. Okay, go. Yes. Go. Now? Okay. One more deep breath and hold onto the resolution, she told herself, hold onto the weapons. With Mimi behind her, she walked into the living room and faced the man on the sofa, keeping the coffee table between them.
He pointed the remote control at the TV and silence returned. Carol thought he looked annoyed with her for interrupting.
“Get up,” she told him.
“Why should I?”
“Get up, I said.” She swung the broom handle toward his head. He ducked and dropped his feet to the floor.
“I want you to go away!” Carol said. She swung the broom handle sideways again, this time hitting the man on his left arm.
“Ow! Hey, goddam, lady, watch out with that thing.” Leaning to his right, he got to his feet. She waved with the knife to indicate that she wanted him to walk around the coffee table and toward the dining room. As he did so, she stepped back toward the wall to give him room. As he neared the dining room, he suddenly lunged and grabbed the broom. Startled, Carol took another step backward and felt the wall behind her. The man jerked on the broom and twisted it easily from her grasp.
Carol gave a small cry as Mimi started barking again from the middle of the living room.
Carol passed the knife to her right hand and swung it in a wide circle in front of her. The man was just out of her reach. She took a step forward. She was frightened of stabbing the man, and frightened of getting close enough to do it, but she knew she had no choice.
The man was holding the broom in both hands, and as Carol took her second step toward him, he swung it so that it hit her in the hip, knocking her off balance. He hit her again and again, sweeping her sideways into the dining room.
Carol was overwhelmed. She couldn’t try again to stab the man, but in the dining room she could back away from him enough that he couldn’t reach her with the broom. She pulled a chair out from under the table and tumbled it between them. She turned and threw open the back door and rushed out. Mimi ran under the dining room table and followed her.
It was cold outside, a fact she only noticed after she had crossed her own carport and entered that of the next door neighbors. The shrubbery along the property line screened her from the view of the man in her house. She couldn’t hear him following her. Mimi was still with her. She stood listening and breathing white vapor while she tried to decide what to do next. So far she had not accomplished much. Maybe she should wait for the phone man to show up, but that could be as late as five o’clock. And it was cold. Maybe she could phone the police from a neighbor’s house.
Carol tried to decide which neighbors to ask for help. She didn’t know very many of them, even though she had lived there nearly four years. She had shared the house with one roommate during college, then another, and when she’d graduated and gone to work, she found she could afford to keep it alone. Between her shyness and her school, then her work, she had never joined in the daily neighborhood socializing she remembered her mother’s engaging in. Now she wished she had.
She did know the couple who lived at the end of the block with their four-year-old daughter. The wife stayed home with the child, and maybe she would help. But Carol looked at their house and saw that the car was not in the driveway. That meant the wife was not home.
The empty carport she was standing in belonged to an older couple who both worked days. Their children were grown and gone. The couple didn’t like Carol much. They were always complaining about the dog barking or about the trash cans sitting on the curb the day after the trash was collected or about Carol entertaining gentlemen callers without a chaperone. She thought they might have helped her with the intruder, since he was so much more clearly a rulebreaker in this instance than she was, but they wouldn’t be home for hours.
The only other people on the block that she knew at all were the woman across the street and her two children. That woman was a nurse named Ellen and she was divorced. Her boy was in high school and the girl in junior high. They, too, were all gone for the day, but Carol had watched their house for them when they went on vacation last summer. Ellen kept a plastic piece of fake granite in the flowerbed that held a hidden key in case the kids locked themselves out.
Carol and Mimi trotted across the deserted street. Carol looked back over her shoulder at her own small house, but in the bright sunshine she couldn’t see into the dim living room. She didn’t know if the man was watching her or not.
Carol scanned the edge of Ellen’s flowerbed for the only rock that wasn’t white chalky limestone. The black and white speckled fake granite was easy to spot. She turned it over and slid it open. There was the brass key. Carol began to feel some hope that she might be on the road to help. She closed the granite and set it on the step before opening the door with the cold key. She called Mimi to stop sniffing the yard and come in with her.
Carol had intended to walk directly to the phone and call 911, but forgot that plan when she saw a tiny old black woman sitting in Ellen’s living room watching television.
“Oh, excuse me,” Carol said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I’m... I’m a friend of Ellen’s. She told me where she keeps the key. I hope I’m not bothering you. I just wanted to use the phone. Uh, is that all right?”
“Don’t make me no never mind, dearie. You just can’t make no long distance calls or they’ll know, you know what I mean?” The woman was a little hard to understand, perhaps because the game show was turned up so loud, perhaps because many of her teeth were missing. “And you got to clean everything up real good, too. See, when they’re clean housekeepers, they notice more if you been there. You got to wash everything and put it back just where you found it. That’s when they’s clean housekeepers, you know. They notice if something’s out of place. I wish I had one of them messy housekeepers sometimes, ’cause then it’s easier, but it’s not so nice, you know? But them clean housekeepers, you know, you got to clean up before they come home.”
Carol noticed that, indeed, the house was tidy, the rug vacuumed, tabletops cleared off except for lamps and short, neat stacks of magazines. She was very confused about who the old woman was. Ellen had not mentioned any relatives coming to visit, although she might not, of course, but then again, the woman did not look like a relative. Ellen and her children were clearly Caucasian and the old woman was clearly not. An old family retainer? Carol realized she was grasping at straws. A horrible thought occurred to her. “I’ll just go use the phone, then.”
“You do that, dearie, but if you bring that dog in here, you got to vacuum, ’cause they’ll see them dog hairs on the carpet, you know. And I be too old to go vacuuming up for you, you know. You bring in that dog, you got to vacuum.”