ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women, trans, and nonbinary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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Lock Me
I am not afraid of crocodiles. Whenever I’d seen crocodiles they were held captive behind glass or at a safe distance. It would be irrational to be frightened by something that lives so far from my home. Black vultures, anacondas, jaguars, and other carnivores prey on Orinoco crocodiles. Normally docile, female crocodiles can become aggressive while nesting.
*
My neighbor begins the group text. She sends a screenshot of a map of the sexual predators who live in our neighborhood. I didn’t even know such a site existed. I’m driving more than 70 miles to Indianapolis twice a week to teach creative writing as an adjunct. There is a pile of laundry that may never be folded, and my daughters are fighting. I stop putting away the dinner leftovers and scroll the screen. The map is lilac. Tiny yellow cones mark where predators reside. A friend’s message guts me: The guy in the blue house, three down from you, is on the list.
*
Alan Lee Litman’s earliest creations were far from successes. In his basement laboratory, surrounded by chemicals and notebooks, he invented a waterless egg cooker in 1963. He’d also placed his hopes on an infrared nursing bottle heater, but then a young female teacher from the high school where his wife taught was mugged. Litman and his wife began to discuss products a woman might use to protect herself.
*
The first few days after my neighbor’s text, I meet my daughters at their bus stop. I don’t want to overreact, but here I am. Normally they walk home alone. They don’t question my presence.
*
The dreams begin my sophomore year of college. They are all the same. I am walking alone when someone grabs me from behind, smothers a hand across my mouth, and drags me into a dark alley. What happens next is less clear but there are always hands groping, holding me. Try as I might, I am unable to break free.
*
Alan Litman experimented with kerosene, Freon, and sulfuric acid—chemicals that act as severe irritants and could be sprayed into eyes and faces. He ultimately chose chloroacetophenone, a chemical the U.S. military used as a tear gas during WWII to create his “Chemical Mace.” Since it was already a known irritant, he did not receive a patent.
*
“Which one do you want?” asked Dad, pointing to the display of Mace near the cash register. After I told him about the feeling that I would soon be harmed, he took me to a gun shop during a weekend visit home from college. The store looked like any other gun shop I’d visited with him. The aisles were low and stocked with ammunition and cleaning supplies. Gun cases and rifle holsters hung from racks, the floors wrecked linoleum. A glass case lined the length of the wall. Inside, handguns splayed on shelves like bones. There were pink canisters of Mace that fit perfectly in your hand and camouflage ones that I assumed were used while hunting in the woods. I pretended to look through the different varieties and checked in with my fear. It followed me everywhere, its jagged edges piercing my chest.
*
During the dry season, female crocodiles retreat to riverbanks where they dig holes in the sand and lay 40–60 eggs. The incubation temperature during the first few weeks determines the sex of their offspring. Warmer temperatures produce males.
*
I secure a sticky note above the knob of our back door with sticky transparent tape that says, Lock Me! The paper is magenta, my words printed in permanent marker. Still, my husband, who works late hours, often fails to lock the door. When I wake, stumble bleary-eyed toward the coffee pot and see that the door has remained unlocked all night, I feel a rush of fear and fury. I lift the kitchen shade an inch and peer at the park. I can see the two picnic benches where I sat with the girls the day we moved to Indiana. The girls had awoken just as we pulled into our new driveway. I offered them bowls of Goldfish crackers and sippy cups of juice. They were dazed from their naps, but stared at the two swings, the play structure that looks like a castle, a mini surfboard on springs. Back then I had imagined games of hide and seek with neighborhood playmates, hours spent swinging, popsicles on the porch. Now I’m not even sure if I should let them go to the park alone. When I do let them go, I stand at this window. I imagine him lumbering up the sidewalk, lurking beneath the ancient oak, a hand fingering the callused bark, and then I see myself rushing out the back door, chest heaving, blood rushing, standing in front of him waving an outstretched finger like a poker that’s been roasting in hot coals for days.
*
Litman received a patent in 1969 for the spray bottle he invented to hold the Mace that could fit into a pocket. Litman then opened the General Ordnance Equipment Corporation, a business that to created nonlethal weapons like Pepper Fog, a tear smoke detonator, and an aerosol container of tear gas called the Chemical Baton.
*
I lived in Daum, one of the older dormitories at the University of Iowa. Something about the tall dusty windows, the layers of white paint on the walls, the old cafeteria with its spindle-backed chairs and tables that was used as a study room. Shelves where dirty food trays were once stacked stood empty, and I’d think of the women who lived there when the dorm first opened in the 1960s. Girls the same age as I was but they wore dresses and stockings, hair set in rollers each night. There was an eerie emptiness to the place, like all the women who lived there left an echo of their younger selves, a strangled sound that seeped from the cobwebbed ceiling.
*
The Tippecanoe County Sheriff’s Office website says he is 5’9”, 132 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. He has been in and out of prison since he was 18 and first charged with child molestation. I enlarge the picture of his face, peer at the screen in my hand. He has long wavy hair and a heavy beard that laps his chin. It looks scruffy. He looks scruffy, the same name one of my twin daughters gave to the oversized stuffed puppy she cuddles with in bed. That night I make sure the doors are locked and implore my husband to do the same. In bed, I remain awake, wondering what the predator did and to whom.
*
When I was young I thought if you wanted to become a mother, you needed to tell God how many children you desired. Once I held up four fingers in the air for a whole night.
*
In one video a female crocodile lurks in murky water along the sandy bank where her eggs are buried. Six conservationists and handlers brace long wooden rods. When one of the conservationists uses his hands to dig for her eggs, the crocodile thrashes her tail and throws herself up on the bank, snapping her jaws. The other handlers wave their rods in front of her. “I’ve found them,” the conservationist says, pointing to the creamy speckled shells they will take to a government-run ranch. The men wave their sticks, and she retreats into the water where she watches them with yellow-green eyes.
*
I don’t know what happened to the Mace, but I can still recall the feel of it in my hand walking home from the campus library. It would be late and the streets absent of cars. Thumping music and laughter traveled from downtown bars as if through a tunnel. I buried my hands in the pockets of my barn jacket and in my right hand held the Mace. The canister was black and at the top was a flip top safety cap. Below this was a red pad that when pressed ejected the spray. I memorized the feel of this red button, moved my thumb back and forth across its four raised lines.
*
I hire a babysitter for the days I am teaching. She is a college student with a look as blank as a sheaf of paper. My daughters do not like her. When I tell the sitter there is a child molester down the street and ask her to keep the door locked, she looks me in the eye and says that she will. Yet each time I pull my car into the garage and step over the dog leash choking the stairs, I find the door unlocked.
*
According to the CDC, exposure to chloroacetophenone irritates skin, can constrict airways, and causes fluid buildup in the lungs. Persistent contact with the eyes can cause corneal opacity and even blindness.
*
Within hours of birth baby crocodiles must find water or they will die. Once hatched, the mother crocodile scoops the wriggling babies into her open mouth and brings them to a protected pool. She can carry as many as fifteen babies in her mouth at once. When she opens her jaw the young scramble out like wind-up toys.
*
I finally see him on an unseasonably warm day in spring bent over a rectangular grill. The grill is a rusty green box and stands just a few inches off his stoop. It is so small that he must crouch on the balls of his feet in front of it. Blue smoke funnels up. I can’t smell the food. I’m too fixated on him. He’s shirtless and wears cutoff black sweatpants; his hair drips past his shoulders. Air in my lungs constricts and it feels like I am being held underwater. If I were closer I might see his tattoos: the Batman and Robin on his right arm, the BatMobile with the text Pow! and Bam!, the Chicken Boba Fett on his left thigh. But his back is to me and I hesitate to linger. I don’t want him to realize that I have two daughters and that they live a few hundred feet from him. Now there is no denying it; he is real.
*
My daughters still play dolls, only now they do so secretly, draping a sheet over chair backs and tucking themselves beneath. They prefer the rag dolls they’ve had since they were five with their soft cotton skin and yarn hair, lips a painted red bow. They sit on bent knees and tug on ill-fitting sweaters and tunics that catch on their dolls’ lumpy heads. Then they stand their dolls upright, make them walk a few steps before placing them on their laps and undressing them. I never hear them telling their dolls that they need to finish their milk before they can have another cookie or that they must look both ways before crossing the street. They simply go through the act of getting ready for a day that never comes.
*
My husband tries to teach the girls self-defense. He tells them to try and grab him. “Go on,” he says, grinning. One of my daughters charges up and grabs his wrist and he opens the hand of the arm she has grabbed and twists out toward the thumb, breaking her grasp. “Nice!” he says. My daughter laughs, covering her mouth with her fingers. “You don’t want to pull away if someone grabs you,” he says. “They’ll only hold tighter. You try.” I watch my husband clap a hand on my daughter’s wrist, his hand as still as a loaf of bread. She flings her arm out, freeing herself from his hold. We all cheer.
*
Neuroscientists believe that when we imagine something, we activate the amygdala, the same region in our brains set off by exposure to the actual thing. This is where emotional memories reside. That means the fear response can be activated even if you don’t interact with the real thing.
*
When I was young my mother used to tell me that I had an overactive imagination.
*
I’ll see him at our back door, letting himself into our kitchen. Our dog is old and sleeps soundly and somehow he will know this. He’ll tiptoe up the stairs and creep into my daughters’ room with the pink gingham curtains, the twin beds, the bookcase crammed with stuffed animals and graphic novels. Between their beds is a small side table with a lamp, its shade decorated with butterflies. I’ll see him standing over them. He’ll finger one end of the girls’ cotton blanket—
*
Doris and Alan Litman kept a pet Orinoco crocodile in their basement. They named it Ernst.
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It happened my junior year of college, second semester and more than a year after my dad bought me the Mace. Kevin had dark brown hair, nearly black, and I remember white flecks of dandruff peppering his navy pillowcase. We had gone out for beer.
*
In one picture of Ernst taken in the Litman’s home in the 1970s, he reclines in some sort of tank with his mouth open, snout tipped up, white teeth like spikes. Doris steadies her hand beneath his gaping jaw and leans in. She appears to be saying something to Ernst and he appears to be listening.
*
I know his name. I know his height. I know his previous address. I know the dates of his arrests for driving suspended and I know when he was convicted for failing to register as a sex offender. Maybe I know too much.
*
Alan Littman went on to specialize in safety and self-defense. He received patents for a burglar alarm and an “antipersonnel grenade.” But the thing that puzzles me is his transformation from basement inventor of domestic creations to “pocked-sized personal protection.” Something about that young female colleague of Doris Litman’s must have shaken him. Maybe he imagined his own wife mugged on the streets of downtown Pittsburgh. Maybe Litman climbed the steps out of his basement laboratory and into the bright lights of the kitchen, and over Doris’s meatloaf and mashed potatoes, he found he could not stop thinking about the woman who had been attacked. At night, while he brushed his teeth and in the morning as he sipped his coffee, he thought about the young teacher.
*
Alan and Doris Litman’s pet Orinoco crocodile is now a type specimen at the Smithsonian.
*
The one time I needed the Mace, I didn’t have it. Kevin and I had been fooling around. Kissing, groping, laughing, which is why I thought he was making a joke when he pinned me on my back, straddled me, and told me I couldn’t leave his bedroom. We’d gone out a few times before this and I laughed, tried to roll over. “You can’t go,” he said. “You aren’t leaving.” I scanned his face. He wasn’t laughing. “Let me go,” I said. I twisted my torso back and forth, tried to break free. “You’re staying here all night,” he told me. He held me by the tops of my arms and leaned his weight against me, a choking heaviness that scissored my breath. Around the door crept a faint purple hue from the fish tank in the living room. I don’t know what lived in the tank, but I remember the faint musty smell of cedar and urine, the hum of fluorescent bars, the canister of Mace in my dorm room. Mace only works if you have it in your hand.
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Rumpus original logo art by Luna Adler.
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ENOUGH is a Rumpus original series devoted to creating a dedicated space for work by women, trans, and nonbinary people that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence. We believe that while this subject matter is especially timely now, it is also timeless. We want to make sure that this conversation doesn’t stop—not until our laws and societal norms reflect real change.
Many names appearing in these stories have been changed.
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