Girl, Alone

Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of female writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find here each week, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.

It was 1979, my driver’s license was less than a year old, and we had a crappy little Pinto that my mother allowed me to use whenever I liked. Back then, relatively few teenagers — in my cohort, at least — had such free access to a car, and I spent a lot of time tooling around Nashville by myself, feeling independent and liberated.

One day I drove to 100 Oaks, which was still a fairly thriving mall then. I didn’t have much money to spend, but it was a good place to kill time. On this day, I’d bought something — a pair of shoes, I think — and I was feeling happy as I headed back to my car. As I unlocked the door, a man suddenly popped up from behind another car a few feet away and moved quickly toward me. 

My survival instinct kicked right in — I managed to jump into my vehicle and get the door locked just as he came up to it. He tried the handle, then put his face up against the window and spoke a stream of obscenities so rapid and unbroken it sounded rehearsed. The day was sunny, and I remember he cupped his hands around his eyes so he could see past the glare on the window. He didn’t want to miss his effect on me, I suppose.

I was terrified but somehow managed to start the car and put it in gear. He immediately moved away, and when I got the car backed out of the parking space, he was a few yards in front of me, walking fast. Anyone who happened to glance at him would have thought he was just a shopper headed into the mall. I felt a powerful urge to run him down. It shocked me, but at the same time, the thought brought a kind of comfort. 

I didn’t run him down, of course. I drove home, my hands shaking so much I could barely steer. And I didn’t say anything to anybody. I did eventually tell my mother, years later, but telling her at the time was out of the question, and calling the police never entered my mind.

If you’d asked me then why I kept silent, I don’t think I would have had an answer. But I suspect now that it’s because of something my mother did when I was about 8 years old, and we lived in a house that sat near many acres of woodland. I loved to explore those woods. They were magical to me. But when my mother realized how far I was wandering, she ordered me to stop. I was forbidden to leave our property by myself. “I don’t want you running into anybody out there,” she said. “You don’t know who might be in those woods.”

I resented the hell out of the restriction, but her warning scared me, too. It had never occurred to me that there might be anybody bad in the woods. My mother’s alarm wasn’t entirely misplaced, and I think it made me aware for the first time that simple freedom comes with risk, and safety has a price. The lesson was clear: A girl alone is always vulnerable. Fear is her normal state.

If I’d told my mother about the man in the mall parking lot, she probably would have put a stop to all my solo gallivanting around Nashville, but I don’t think that’s exactly why I kept quiet. It was her fear I wanted to avoid. I knew it would infect me, just as it had before, and take away all my pleasure in feeling free. It’s not that I didn’t see the wisdom in being cautious. I just didn’t want to be ruled by caution, to let it convince me to shut gates I’d barely had a chance to open. 

It’s an insidious process, the internalizing of the world’s dangers. For girls, it starts early, and you’re barely aware it’s happening until the day comes when you realize there’s something you’d really love to do, if only it were safe. If only you didn’t already hear the chorus of voices saying, “What were you thinking?” in the aftermath of whatever close call or outright assault you were unlucky enough to encounter. Once the process is complete, you don’t need your mother to fence you in. You do the job yourself, and feel smart for refusing your freedom.

I am well on my way to being an old woman now, and there’s no one to forbid me from doing what I like. I travel by myself. I hike alone in the woods almost daily and enjoy being out there as darkness falls. Though I’m far from being the most adventurous woman I know, fear is an enemy I mostly manage to keep at bay. That’s partly the benefit of good fortune, I’ll admit. In spite of all the pervs and would-be predators I’ve run into since that day at the mall — and there have been quite a few — nothing truly terrible has happened to me. My decades of resistance would likely be undone by one ugly event. I’ve seen that happen to so many women, and I never forget it might happen to me.

But the truth is that none of us has any say about joining that sisterhood. And for me, there’s no better answer to a woman-hating world than to wander it freely, defiantly alone. 

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