Frog (47 page)

“She's coming home from shopping. Two shopping bags—too much to carry—but it was a nice day so instead of ordering by phone and getting perhaps not their best produce and paying a five dollar service charge, she went to the supermarket and of course bought too much. A man comes up behind her as she starts down the steps to her brownstone. She turns around quickly, says ‘Yes?' He says ‘Nothing, lady, what's with you? I'm only going inside.' ‘May I ask what your business is in this building? You don't live here.' ‘No, I'm visiting a friend.' ‘Who?' ‘A man—a guy I know.' ‘What's his name? I know all the tenants here.' ‘This one just moved in,' and he goes past her, into the vestibule and rings several bells. She puts down her bags, opens the vestibule door and keeps it open with one foot and says from the outside ‘You rang more than one bell. That doesn't seem as if you're ringing your friend.' ‘He told me his bell's not working so to ring a few others to get in.' Someone on the intercom says ‘Hello?' ‘I'm looking for Bob,' the man says. ‘No Bob here,' and the person cuts off. ‘I know he's there,' the man says to her. ‘Maybe he's in the bathroom. I'll go in with you and knock on his door.' ‘What floor is he on?' ‘I know what floor. The one above this one or the next. It has a little peephole in it, I think.' He thinks a moment. That's right, it has.' ‘There's a law in this city that every apartment's front door has to have a peephole in it, not that every landlord complies with it. This one has though. And there isn't any Bob in the building. No Robert, Rob, Bobby—no name like that. I even know the men who live with the single women in the building, and the names of the two sons of the married couple. No Bobs. I'm sorry but I'm afraid if you don't leave I'll have to summon the police.' He punches her in the face, pulls her into the vestibule by her blouse and grabs her pocketbook as she's going down. She goes down and holds on to her pocketbook and tries to pull it back while she's screaming. He gets over her and punches her in the head and face and then kicks her in the stomach. She lets go of the pocketbook and he runs outside with it. She said she tried to scream again but started blacking out. She said she was afraid of blacking out for she thought the man, thinking she could identify him, might come running back and kick and punch her till she was dead. She said she knew, even while she was saying it, that she shouldn't have said she'd summon the police. She also regretted mentioning there were single women in the building and that she had spoken sarcastically to him about the city law on peepholes. A delivery boy passing the building sees her in the vestibule, comes downstairs and opens the vestibule door and asks if anything's wrong or maybe she's just a homeless lady resting. She can't answer, tries to lift a finger, just stares at him. ‘Are these your bags out here? That's what made me see you. I knew no one would just leave them there like that. Something you want me to do for you like bring them in? Are you hurt? Now that I see you close, you look it. But I don't have much time.' She said he kept looking up to the sidewalk as if to make sure nobody was taking his shopping cart filled with orders. Her mouth's full of blood and a tooth or two is broken and a temporary bottom bridge also broke loose and is in her mouth somewhere and she's afraid of choking on it. She starts swallowing blood, spits it out and the boy runs upstairs and quickly pushes the cart past the building. She said he probably was revolted by the sight of such an ugly old woman spitting like that and what she was spitting and must now look like. She lies there. People pass on the sidewalk but none look her way. No sound comes out when she tries screaming. A tenant leaving the building opens the door into the vestibule. ‘Mrs. T?' he says. He sits her up. She points to her mouth and starts choking. He says ‘Something inside your mouth?' She nods. ‘Is it the blood,' he says, wiping her mouth, ‘or you want me to take whatever it is out?' She nods. ‘You can't spit it out?' She tries to, shakes her head. She said she felt the bridge was getting more lodged in her throat and she was starting to panic over it. She starts gagging. The man didn't want to stick his hand in her mouth, he later told her. Not because he was squeamish but that he was afraid she might lose control of her reflexes and chomp down hard and bite off his fingers. He'd heard where that had happened. Or read it in a newspaper. “‘Good Samaritan Gets Fingers Chewed off by Person He Saved” or something,' he joked about the headline saying, ‘if it was a paper where I'd learned of it.' She later told her son the man probably gave that excuse to spare her feelings and that he really didn't want his hand in her ugly broken mouth. He lies her flat on her front, slaps her back, raises her to her knees and forearms and slaps her back, when that doesn't work he grabs her ankles and holds her upside down and keeps bouncing her on her head or in the air till the bridge and two teeth come out. ‘Is that it?' he says, still holding her upside down. ‘Yes.' ‘All there is? The isolated little teeth and the connected ones?' moving them with his foot below her face so she could see them. ‘Please. I feel vomit coming.' When she's being wheeled on a stretcher to the ambulance she overhears him say to one of the medical crew ‘I still can't believe I actually did it. I just took a chance, thought I might even be making things worse, but it worked. I've been in a position to but never helped anyone that way before or ever had such physical strength. I felt I could have held her up and bounced her up and down for hours, and it was such fucking ecstasy after her teeth came out.' Later in the hospital one of her sons says she should think about moving. ‘The neighborhood's getting too rough.' The neighborhood's never been better,' she says. ‘The best boutiques, good restaurants, fancy bars and bookshops. Landlords are getting two thousand a month for one-bedroom apartments, fifteen hundred for studios. People are doubling and tripling up in studios just to afford living in them. It's all fair-market value now, once a rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartment becomes vacant and the landlord puts in an air conditioner and splashes on a little paint, and those are the going fair market rents. It's crazy to pay it, but the whole area's been vastly upgraded with all these young hardworking people moving in and brownstones being converted almost everywhere you look.' ‘But with all this so-called nicer clientele more and more druggies and ripoff artists are coming in to rob them. You're elderly. They think you have money because you live around there. Or else they jump you for the few dollars they think you might have on you, if you happen to be wearing your knockaround clothes on the street, because you're an easy target. There's got to be some solution. No old age home or moving in with Jerry or me, since you're much too independent for that and for your age still pretty healthy. Maybe a building with a doorman or guard always downstairs and elevators and that's monitored in the laundry room and places and everything's safe and well run and clean. If you want, in the same neighborhood but not in a small unprotected walkup where a thief can just lean on the front door to open it.' ‘I've lived in that building—what are you, fifty-three?' ‘Two.' ‘Then for fifty-one years and I'll never get the same space I need and like anywhere else for the rent I can pay. It happened once, this beating, and mostly because I had a big mouth, but it won't happen again. I'll get my locks changed at my own expense, walk the other way, as your dad used to say, from possible muggers, and only go out when I'm next to sure the streets are more crowded than yesterday.' ‘And if, despite all these precautions of yours—an alarm system on your windows, for instance. That's a must anywhere in New York on the ground and second floor. But if some nice-looking, well-dressed mugger or two, for that's what I read how they often appear these days, to fool you, besides being well-spoken and with a couple of books under their arms too But if one does come up behind you as you're going into your building, what'll you do?' ‘If I don't recognize him, male or female, and there's even an inkling he's suspicious, I'll say “Oop's, wrong building—not you, me,” and walk back to the sidewalk and call the police from the callbox at the corner, not that it'll work and if it does, that they'll come in time to catch him. But please don't think you're going to keep me locked inside all day and turn me into a hermit only reading books and baking cookies and breads. My life's empty enough.'”

“She's on her way to shop when she sees, two buildings down from hers, something funny going on inside the vestibule. The door's all glass, little iron grillwork on the front but no curtains or anything to stop her view, and a man's on the floor with his pants half off and the top of his backside showing and going through what seems to be the sex motions. She doesn't want to look hard, since in this neighborhood sometimes it can be anything you think it is and often much worse. But his hands are hidden so maybe he's just doing it to himself, bad enough but not something threatening to her. Or maybe he's having heart seizures on the floor or whatever they are like that. But then she sees another pair of hands—different, a woman's or older girl's—shoot up around him and one of them tears at his shirt and the other reaches for his hair as if to grab and pull it but never gets there, his head always backing away when her hand gets close. Maybe they're both doing it together, high on drugs or something, not tenants there of course but from the outside, permanently or temporarily out of their right minds. No matter what it is someone should go to the door to see and possibly help, and she looks around but nobody is on the street up or down or if they're far away she can't see them, and if they're in the windows looking at her she also can't see them because of her bad long-distance eyes. She wants better to just get away. But then if the woman's unwilling in all this, and that those hands aren't part of the sex act but her fighting against it, she has to do something immediately like scream to attract attention or just to let the man know someone's watching and maybe he'll stop and get off her and go away. She walks down a step. He turns around—maybe he saw her shadow, because she thinks she walked too lightly for him to hear her—and sees her and pushes the door open a little with his foot and says ‘Mind your own business, lady, or you'll get the same thing to you.' Then he turns back to the woman he's on and starts pumping harder as if to get the thing over with right away. The woman yells ‘Please, don't go, stop him,' and tears at his clothes. He punches her and she's quiet and then he looks around again while he's pumping on her and says ‘See this?' and balancing himself on the door with one hand, picks up and holds out a knife. ‘I'll cut your head off if you don't get out of here. Go to your fucking place where you live and lock yourself inside it for the next ten hours and shut up forever about everything you saw.' ‘But you're on the street … doing it.' ‘You heard me?' and he swishes the knife in the air. She walks back to the sidewalk. The woman screams. The man's still on top of her, doing it harder and holding her face down with his hand it seems. She hurries down the steps, bangs on the glass with her keys while she yells to the street ‘Help, someone, fire, fire,' she heard she's supposed to yell if she wants people to really take notice and come. ‘Help, please, fire, a woman's getting raped, mauled, burned and raped. Fire, fire.' He gets up, turns to her, penis erect, grabs it and jerks it back and forth a few times and then points to her and laughs, zips up, opens the door as she reaches the top step, woman's on the ground pulling down her skirt and crying and clutching her neck, runs up the steps and grabs her from behind when she's gone maybe five feet, hits her head and she goes down. Then he grabs her head by the hair and smashes it on the ground. All she remembers. He must have done it several times by the injuries she got but she only remembers it that once. Later in the hospital her son says ‘From what the police suggested the man had finished raping the woman and took her wallet. Then after he knocked you out he took your handbag and must have spit on your head because there was saliva all over it, or maybe you got it from the sidewalk when he knocked you down and beat your head against it. No one from any of the buildings around called the police.' ‘That doesn't mean they saw and didn't call. It could mean nobody might have seen or heard anything.' ‘Really doubtful, but OK. The woman who was raped was the first person to come to you. She sat you up so you wouldn't choke from your bleeding and busted teeth and stopped a car to get the driver to call an ambulance and the police, both for you and her. Look, from now on no stepping in when you see something suspicious looking or terrible happening. Don't even call the police from a street callbox or from your home or anywhere. The attacker might know where you live or go to great lengths to find out to get even with you. You did enough of that in your life. Let others take over. Now do you understand me? Just no more, and Jerry tells me to tell you the same thing.' I can get a whistle,' she says. ‘One that's on a chain and looks like a nice pendant, so when I go out I can wear it around my neck without anybody much thinking about what it is. I've seen them advertised in the better jewelry stores—Fortunoff's and Tiffany's. If I don't blow it immediately when I see something wrong going on, I'll go down the street fifty feet to blow it. Every tenant on the block and maybe in the immediate neighborhood should have one or just carry a regular police whistle, but that I shouldn't expect. But just think of it. Suppose I blew my whistle, someone heard it and blew hers. Then someone else heard that whistle and blew hers, till on and on this whistling went till the sound of it, altogether or just a few of them or one or two last ones, reached a policeman walking his beat or in a car. It might for now be one of the best ways to beat these crime things. And the rapist or mugger, or just a car thief, by hearing the whistles will have to know he's a caught man if he stays. I'm going to bring it up at the next block association meeting. Or even contact the association's president to call a meeting to talk about the growing crime on the block and my whistling idea.'”