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Three in the afternoon. Sun’s out, sky’s blue, and enough people make the streets feel safe. I walk north to 51st, take a left, and head west to my father’s auto parts shop on Eleventh. Six months ago I got permission to ride the subway alone; now, every other week I take the A train from 181st to 59th Columbus Circle, then switch to the C. The rules of the subway are clear. Stay in the middle car with the conductor. He’s behind a locked metal door, but still, he’s there. Don’t catch anyone’s eye. Don’t stand too close to men. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t take out your wallet. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Blend in.

Same rules apply to the street. Especially if you’re a girl. It’s 1972, I’m thirteen, and Manhattan is dirty and dangerous, but it’s home. And now that I’m free to ride the subway, my best friend Jenna and I explore record stores and shops selling tie dye shirts and bell bottoms in the Village. We don’t mind the junkies.

West 51st Street is grungier than the Village: more potholes, broken sidewalks, and litter; fewer women and children. Threatening shadow figures move inside gutted buildings. I keep my sights on the end of each block; 3-2-1, I count, crossing the wide avenues.

It’s warmer than it’s been in months. When I get to the shop, I’ll finish the signs I outlined two weeks ago. One reads: When You Want the Parts Yesterday. The other: Fast, Free Delivery Circle 6 – 7392. Today I’ll fill in the stenciled letters.

I reach the small grocery store on the corner of Ninth and think about getting a Ring Ding or maybe Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda. Too much sugar’s not good for the skin, Jenna told me, though I have no pimples. Yet. My mother says no one in our family has pimples. But maybe she’s wrong and I’ll wake up one day with a blanket of pink bumps on my face. I stand outside the grocery and calculate what I can buy with fifty cents.

“Hey sweetness, need some money?”

Startled, I turn and see a man about my father’s age grinning at me. He’s got one foot in the street, the other on the curb. My heart beats hard. I pull my eyes away and run across Ninth. 3-2-1. Now I walk fast. No more stops. No treats. Fewer people, more garbage on the way to Tenth. A graffiti-covered phone booth stinks of urine, its black phone box smashed open for the change once inside. A metal cord hangs down, its handset long gone.

A two-tone whistle flies by me.

I keep walking.

It comes at me again.

I am afraid. And angry.

The whistle is louder. Closer.

I start to run, hoping he won’t come after me. His laugh tracks me all the way to Tenth, where a red light stops me. I want to turn around but don’t. Never show fear.

Every time I walk from Eighth to Eleventh men say stuff. That I’m pretty. That I want some. Or they whistle to get my attention. Luckily no one’s ever touched me. Yet. Maybe it’s enough that they see me squirm. See me run.

I know what it’s like to be touched. Two years ago, in sixth grade, a boy who liked me got mad that I didn’t like him back. When the school bell rang, he pushed me against the fence and put his hand between my legs. (Luckily girls had just won the battle to wear pants.) His cold eyes, his sneer said he’d do whatever he wanted with me. Ashamed and terrified, I didn’t tell anyone, fearing he would do worse. But he ignored me after that. Maybe he felt his honor had been restored.

What might the men on the street do to restore their honor? The light’s green. I cross Tenth. 3-2-1. My fists clench and unclench.

Right after that incident at school, Jenna went with her mother, Carol, to a demonstration on Fifth Avenue. Fifty thousand women marched for equality and peace, demanding an end to the war against the Vietnamese and an end to the war against women all over the world. I wanted to go, but my mother wouldn’t let me, said I was too young. But I wasn’t then and I’m not now. I understand what’s going on. Jenna’s always telling me what Carol talks about in her articles. Carol was also with the protesters at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. They crowned a sheep Miss America and burned what Carol calls patriarchal contraptions: bras, girdles, high-heeled shoes.

I pull the zipper of my jacket all the way up, full armor, even though I’m not even close to having breasts, but the stretch between Tenth and Eleventh is the worst. Almost no apartment buildings. Those still standing are scorched shells with drunks and junkies wasting away in doorways. Truck drivers park here to rest. Taxi drivers too. And men from the warehouse on the corner hang out in small clusters. This block Is the ultimate battlefield before Eleventh and the safety of the shop.

“One, two, three.” I count steps. Three hundred thirty paces to the corner. “Four, five, six, seven.”

I step around an old dog and his old man walking very slowly.

“Twelve, thirteen.” I keep my eyes on the sidewalk.

At two hundred it begins.

“Smile!” someone calls out.

“Hey,” someone else calls out.

“She’s not smiling,” someone says.

“Hey girl,” the other voice yells.

Two hundred thirty steps.

“Hey, we’re saying hello to you.”

Two hundred fifty steps.

“You don’t wanna talk, baby?”

Two hundred sixty steps.

“Damn, they learn early how to be bitches.”

Both men laugh.

Two hundred eighty steps.

The shop is close, the corner closer. I wish I had a hand grenade. I would draw out its pin and throw it so hard it would land by those someones. Bam. Damn. Bitch knows how to throw. Who’s laughing now?

By the time I make it across Eleventh to the shop, I want to firebomb the neighborhood back to hell where it belongs. I step inside. The pressure of combat fades. Shop smells instead: grease, metal.

“Hi,” I say to John and Vic working the catalogs behind the counter. I see my father carrying a muffler in the back.

“Hi, Sara.” John smiles.

“Hey.” Vic winks kindly.

I’ve known these men since I was a kid. I go into the office, dump my bag on the floor, and look at the posters.

“Hi, Sara.” My father walks into the office. “I’m making tea. Want some?”

I meet him by the electric urn. He fills a mug with hot water and adds a teabag.

“Two sugars?”

I nod.

I take the tea and go sit by my desk. He sits by his. I’m surprised he’s taking a break ‘cause he’s usually on his feet, preparing an order or brainstorming with a mechanic, his favorite part of the job. He says he’s like a doctor: hearing symptoms, reaching diagnoses. He’s still trying to get me or my brother interested in the shop. It’s not going well. But I have to give him credit. My being a girl doesn’t put him off. When I was nine, he explained how combustion engines worked, and today I know how many parts function. I help put together orders. But cars, motorcycles (his love before that), boats (his love before that) don’t interest me. I’m a book girl, always reading and imagining scenes. In fact, machines frighten me. There’s so much that could go wrong.

“How was school?” my father asks.

“Fine.”

We sip tea.

“I hate men,” I say.

He laughs.

“It’s not funny.”

“What?”

“The way men talk to me on the street.”

“They don’t mean anything.”

“They do, and I hate them.”

He gets up from the desk and places the cup carefully by the urn. “Working on the posters now?”

I do not answer. That’s that? Maybe he’s tired of my complaints. Well, I’m tired of being hassled. So there.

“I need to get back.” He hesitates, a hand on the doorknob, a foot ready to walk away from a pain he doesn’t recognize as pain.

“It’s not okay!” I give the posters a dramatic push.

“The men are stupid. Just words. No one touched you.”

“Like no one touched me in the elevator?”

My father pales. When I was eight a man in our elevator took out his penis for me to look at. I wasn’t afraid because he was smiling and didn’t come close. But when I told my parents they freaked. Called the police. My father searched the building and backyard. A few weeks later we moved around the corner to an apartment complex with doormen and guards.

“I’m sorry you go through this.”

“Exactly,” I say and pick up a black marker, lean into the poster, and carefully start filling in the capital letter F of Fast.

  It’s 1975. Now I work at my father’s shop every week, but no longer making posters or organizing shelves of smaller parts like spark plugs, gaskets, hoses, valves. My great aunt Alice has decided I am old and bright enough at sixteen to be the bookkeeper, and she is old and tired enough to retire.

On Wednesdays I take the train down from Music and Art in Harlem to the gauntlet of 51st Street. Now that I have breasts the comments are outrageous. One man wants to lick me. Another will take me home and turn me round all night like a hog on a spit. That’s when they’re being nice. When they’re not, they say they’ll teach me my place in this world. Or bitches like me make men’s lives hell.

I walk with keys lodged between my fingers, a makeshift weapon Carol learned in her self-defense class. Sometimes simpler methods are called for. Like the other day when we were on the subway and Jenna pinched the hand on her ass so hard the man squeaked with pain and, more likely, surprise. She resisted! She struck back! When he started to turn towards us, the word cunt in the tailwind of his breath, we pushed our way through the crowd to the other end of the car.

Hand on the ass: a not unusual attack on a weekday afternoon. Not so common is the subway exhibitionist. On the street, sure, flashing from a stairwell, or in the elevator. Or those who play with themselves high up in their trucks when you walk by. But a few months ago, a bunch of us decided to skip last period to go to the Bandshell in Central Park. It was cold, and we assumed that, except for the homeless, junkies, drug dealers, muggers, garbage, and graffiti, we’d have the place to ourselves.

The subway car was really crowded because an earlier train had broken down. Jenna, Michelle, and I leaned against the door separating train cars. When we reached 110th Street, Jenna coughed dramatically and her eyes moved exaggeratedly to the right. Michelle and I looked down at the woman reading a brown-paper-covered paperback. I looked at Jenna and again the eye roll and head tilt. The mystery book wasn’t the point. A man sat next to the woman. His winter coat was open. His woven fingers rested in his lap. His eyes were closed. Michelle and I looked at Jenna again. She gritted her teeth, puffed out her cheeks, widened her eyes, and did the head tilt yet again. Obedient, we looked down. The woman turned a page. The man was still, eyes closed, fingers… and then I saw it. Eleven fingers in the weave. Just as I clocked this, he opened his eyes and looked up into mine. Green-grey eyes, an expressionless face, and a penis out of his pants, camouflaged by his rather thick fingers. A building worker? A sculptor?

Michelle finally saw the penis and started laughing.

“You’re a sick motherfucker,” Jenna said and slid open the door to the next car.

“Hey, maybe someone should beat this dude up for showing his dick to kids,” Michelle yelled.

Jenna gave her a hard look. “This is New York. People do shit, remember, a murder every four hours. Kitty Genovese?”

At the park, we told our friends about the weave. A man with eleven fingers. Like a punch line of a joke. Only it wasn’t funny. It was an ambush.

Of course, I don’t tell my parents about the weave or roaming hands of rush hour. They might restrict me. Except for Jenna, all my friends live downtown, and I’m on trains a lot. Over time, I even stop complaining to my father about the assaults of 51st Street.

As I walk west on this late spring day, I step over the lines dividing the sidewalk’s concrete squares. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

I open the shop door. “Hello,” I say to the mechanics waiting this side of the counter. “Hello,” I call out to my father, John, and Vic behind the counter.

Hellos back as I glide into the office and decide a cup of tea is in order. Holding the mug carefully, I dip a teabag in hot water, and stare at a new calendar tacked to the wall above the electric urn. A woman with an enormous chest, nipples barely covered by a taut white button-down shirt, leans back on a car hood.  She’s wearing a wisp of a black bikini bottom and high heeled shoes. A total cliché right out of the Playboy magazine my cousin Danny gets monthly, one of his outstanding bar-mitzvah gifts. Danny lives in the building next to ours, and those messages from the adult world are like holy writ to him.

Now Playboy has penetrated my sanctuary in Hell’s Kitchen, a place always and only filled with men except for me (and old Aunt Alice before me). Now another woman, only she’s practically naked and inviting men to climb on and consume her.

I walk out of the office and look for my father. He isn’t by the counter. He isn’t in the back. I walk down the old wooden stairs to the cellar and see my name and the names of everyone in my family written in my seven-year-old handwriting on a concrete column. Marking territory with letters. The ceiling is low and the space crowded with shelves of automobile parts in all shapes and sizes. I find my father in the third aisle.

“There’s a new calendar in the office.”

“Yeah. John put it up.”

“Please take it down.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause John put it up. I’ve got to bring this radiator to the counter.”

I follow and wait for him in the office. He comes in a minute later.

“This is your shop,” I say. “You decide.” I stare at the calendar.

“It’s not like that.”

“Then ask John to take it down.” I don’t usually demand things of my father, but this is different.

He hesitates. This is hard for him, but my feelings are more important than his right now.

“Either that calendar comes down, or I leave and don’t return until it’s gone.”

There’s a pleading in his look. He needs me. He needs John.

“I’m serious.”

My father clicks and unclicks the pen in his hand. “If you tell John that it disturbs you, I’m sure he’ll take it down.”

I don’t bother saying that it’s his job as my father to protect me.   

“Bill,” John calls to my father from the counter. “Line 4 for you.”

My father walks to the counter and again I follow, this time I wait for John to finish up with a driver from a nearby garage. I notice his hair is turning gray, that he’s tan. Maybe he plays golf. The moment he hands the driver his change I say, “John, can I talk to you?” I speak softly, trying not to give away how nervous I am and how angry.

He turns to me. His face is clean-shaven and a little plump. His brown eyes are soft. He smiles at me. “Sure.”

“In the office?” I walk towards it.

“Okay,” he says hesitantly.

He must be wondering what’s up since I’ve never asked to talk to him. I imagine him shooting a look at my father as he follows. And knowing my father, he isn’t catching anyone’s eye but is sheltering inside the two-foot-long catalog.

I stand by the calendar. John stands near me. I don’t keep him waiting.

“The calendar you put up is sexist and I find it personally hurtful and offensive. I’d like you to take it down.”

His head kicks back a second, his eyes widen, his mouth opens slightly. Clearly not what he expected.  He gathers himself and gives me his best paternal smile. He too has a daughter, Connie, just a couple of years younger than me.

“Sara, it’s just a picture. Means nothing.”

“If it means nothing, then take it down.”

He hesitates. “Actually, if it means nothing, it can stay.”

His resistance startles me. “It may mean nothing to you, but to me it means the long history of women as sex objects. Feminism, you know, it’s 1975.”

John laughs. “Whoa. You’re taking this way too seriously.”

“And you’re not taking it seriously enough.”

John is a smart man. I need to appeal to his intelligence without lecturing him or, worse, letting him think I know better.

“From my point of view, that almost naked woman on the wall is me.” Beat. “Yeah, me,” I say to the look of bewilderment on John’s face. “She is me, she’s Connie, she’s every woman on the street being jeered at and worse by men.” He has relaxed and seems ready to hear me out. I am not naïve. He’ll listen to me not only because he likes me, has known me since I’m a kid, not only because he’s a dad, but because I’m the boss’s daughter. “She’s every woman in every home and family. John, you know what I’m saying.”

“Hey, I love the women in my family.”

“For sure, that’s why I’m asking you to see it from their point of view.”

“You’ve got it wrong. There’s nothing wrong about appreciating a woman’s beautiful body. And she’s paid. No one’s forcing her.”

“People working in salt mines for twenty cents a day are also paid.”

“This woman’s not suffering.”

I’m losing patience. My small window of opportunity is closing. I stand up straighter. “You can say whatever you want. But you don’t decide. The world already has.”

“I disagree.”

My voice rises. “I feel like I don’t belong here anymore. In my father’s shop, my second home.”

“You’re blowing this totally out of proportion.”

He gives me a patronizing smile, shrugs, and returns to the counter. I sit and put my head down on the desk. My heart beats hard. It hurts and tears well up: disappointment mixes with helplessness.

“Going for lunch, Bill.” I hear John call out.

When I hear the front door close, I go to the shelves near the counter where John and Vic leave personal items, including family photos. No one is around, and swiftly, nervously, I grab the picture of John and Connie standing in front of Disney’s Cinderella Castle.

Back in the office, I take out a pair of scissors from the desk’s top drawer and carefully cut around Connie’s sweet face and silky brown hair, leaving off the Minnie Mouse ears. I dab a little glue on the back of the paper and walk over to the calendar. Pressing down hard on Connie’s face, I’m happy to see it’s an almost perfect fit on top of the model’s.

I go back to the desk, open the financial books, and for the next hour enter last week’s earnings. Then I balance the bank statement and write out payroll checks.

John returns and Vic calls out that he’s going for lunch. My father never takes lunch but eats his sandwich in between diagnoses and filling orders.

I decide not to wait and ride home with my father. It’s not dark and some friends might still be in the park. Easy enough to walk north and east, easy, that is, if the men patrolling the streets let me be.

Hey baby

Smile

You don’t wanna talk

Have a beautiful day

What’s up, girl

Somebody’s acknowledging that you’re beautiful

Bitch

One Foot in the Grave

The Other on the Treadmill

Reflections from Over the Hill

by Mary Donaldson-Evans

    Unflinchingly honest, this collection of anecdotes treats the challenges of aging with clarity and wit. Here, the losses are diluted with laughter, the shiver gives way to a shrug, the OMG to LOL. Readers weary of the “how to” books that promise to reverse the aging process will welcome the dark humor of a self-described narcissist preoccupied with her mortality. From fears of dementia to hearing loss, cosmetic procedures to breast cancer, joint replacement, and heart surgery, the octogenarian author mines the comic potential of her humbling experience of the later years. The witty and sometimes poignant essays in this collection may not silence the ticking of the clock or slow the falling sand of the hourglass, but they are bound to resonate with readers from middle age and beyond. “A work that is moving, honest, funny and human.” — Bob Mitchell, best-selling author of 13 books Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble. Find out more about the author and the book at marydonaldson-evans.com

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