Helen's World

Helen's dead mother trained her to live in fear. Psychological noir, 4850 words

Helen’s grip on the can of Chase & Sanborn failed, and the container clattered to the bottom of the shopping cart. Her jowls quivered as she closed her mouth and stole a glance over her right shoulder.

Her long-dead mother’s voice rang out in her mind: He’s following you, and he only wants one thing.

The man stood there, not ten feet away, selecting tea bags and dry creamer. She watched his broad shoulders as he turned and receded down the aisle. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, and his arms looked strong, like those of an athlete or laborer.

Strong enough to hold you down while he has his way. Strong enough to choke the life out of you when he’s through. He seemed unaware of Helen’s fumble and continued down the aisle toward the cooking oil, not looking at Helen or acknowledging her presence.

Helen turned her cart in the opposite direction. She needed chocolate chips and shortening for cookies, but she would wait until the man was out of the aisle before picking them out. She noted his features and general description: dark brown hair that covered the top half of his ears, brown eyes, over six feet tall and about one hundred eighty pounds, maybe Hispanic. Clad in jeans and one of those dark work shirts men wear in garages and factories. Helen made these observations, because she might need them for a police report.

She passed two other men in the dairy aisle, but they were older and not dangerous, both shopping with their wives, and rapists never went about their dirty work with a wife in tow. One man used the cart as if it were a walker, his liver spotted knuckles shined white from gripping the handle.

She sorted through her coupons as she waited in the check out lane. Movement in her peripheral vision alerted her, and she looked up to see the brown-haired man in an adjacent lane, loading his items on the belt. Her scalp tingled with sweat.

Helen paid, buttoned her gray coat, gathered her four plastic shopping bags, and hurried through the exit toward the bus stop at the corner, some twenty yards across the parking lot. In the evening’s gathering darkness, the floodlights on poles had begun turning on, bathing the striped asphalt in a green-white glow.

She swallowed her anxiety and quickened her pace as she walked a straight line to the bus stop shelter. The brisk winter air felt refreshing after the too-warm heat of the grocery store. She wanted the lights on, because nobody would dare attack her in the light. They preferred the darkness, and she would never give them the opportunity.

Helen felt protected in the bus stop shelter, the overhead fluorescent light shining bright as day and the curb less than two steps away. Nobody would dare rape her here. The man had emerged from the store and busied himself with loading shopping bags into the trunk of a middle-sized car.

Helen’s bus arrived as the man closed his trunk. She gathered her bags and showed her monthly pass to the driver. The doors hissed shut as she settled into a seat, safe and protected.

Mother often railed long and loud about Father, between tall glasses of boxed wine or vodka mixed with Kool-Aide. Father had raped Mother, then abandoned them. Helen never knew if he had left before or after she was born and never dared to ask.

They only want one thing, and they’ll take it from you. Mother drilled this into Helen over the years. Helen feared all men as a girl, all males older than twelve were potential rapists. She experienced it for herself at fourteen, when Donny Malone jumped in front of her to block her way, then Alex Parker grabbed her from behind, his hands groping and kneading her breasts, his erection, contained in his pants and pressed into her backside.

After that, Helen had forced herself to eat extra desserts. The extra weight accumulated around her middle, erasing the natural curves from shoulder to hips. She used fat as camouflage, lest some man see the contours of her body and decide to have his way with her. At first, downing the extra sweets had been an effort. After years of practice, food and sweets had become a comfort and something to brighten her day as she watched her fish circle the aquarium. She baked brownies from grocery store mixes, fortified with extra chocolate chips, and she learned to bake toll house and oatmeal cookies from scratch. She bought the rest of her sweets at the bakery thrift store, surplus goods with expired pull dates, because the price was half of what the grocery store charged. The texture of creme filled cupcakes had become an old, trusted friend. Some of the goods had actually improved with age, the glaze on doughnuts and honey buns drying and crystallizing to make a satisfying crunch when she bit into them.

Because Mother was often too drunk to be much use in the kitchen, Helen had begun cooking for the two of them before she turned ten, beginning with easy things like canned soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. From there she mastered the more difficult meat dishes and was expertly frying chicken with home-made batter by the time she was twelve. As the cook, she could prepare as much as she wanted. The aromas rising from a hot skillet reminded her that food was her best friend. She subscribed to Better Homes & Gardens and Good Housekeeping for the articles on cooking and new recipes.

Helen kept her hair collar length, nothing fashionable. Mother used to cut her hair in the kitchen when her hands were steady enough. Nowadays Helen went to a nearby beauty college, where apprentice hairdressers practiced by trimming her shapeless locks. Over the past decade its topsoil brown shade had acquired streaks of gray after Helen’s fortieth birthday came and went. In public, she sought invisibility, head down and blending into the background.

Hussies, sluts. Mother would spit the names as she saw images on the TV, women exposing cleavage and wearing tight clothing. They’re going to get raped, and they’re begging for it. Mother paid particular attention to news coverage of rapes, any rapes. They spent their evenings watching the TV news, Mother crying out in vindication at any broadcast or newspaper story of rape or sexual assault. Mother had made a habit of examining all the details of the weekly police blotter report in the newspaper, reading out loud the location, date and time of any sexual assault. None of the names were released to the press in those crimes, something that had always vexed Mother. She wanted to attach names and faces to those dry accounts of violation.

Back at her basement apartment with her groceries, Helen locked the door, set the deadbolt, and chained the door before she put away her purchases and turned on the TV for the last of the evening news. She paused at the aquarium to feed the fish and watch the swordtails, guppies, and neon tetras gather at the surface to snatch morsels and eat. Once they had their fill, the collection of fish resumed their random wandering. The fish were always peaceful, never demanding or threatening. The aerator bubbled through the filter, the heartbeat of an otherwise silent world contained in a ten-gallon glass box. She once tried to give the fish names, but they looked too much alike to tell Susie from Bettie or Maryann. Some nights Helen watched the aquarium instead of TV.

Mother had been gone six years now, and Helen had stayed on in their basement apartment homestead. For four decades it served as her sanctuary, the safest of all safe places. Not much light filtered in through the high windows, and Helen often left a lamp on to dispel the gloom. As Mother had taught her, she always kept the white curtains closed, lest a peeping Tom look inside to satisfy his perverted desires.

Mother’s chair still stood in its place in front of the TV, just a few feet to the right of a braided rug on the linoleum floor. Helen’s chair sat to the left, on the other side of the end table. Mother’s bedroom remained the same as she had left it, or almost the same. Helen had changed the bed linens after the ambulance attendants took Mother’s body away. Mother’s clothes still hung in the closet, and her powders and cremes still lay on top of her dresser, as if waiting for her to return. The air still smelled faintly of the talc she dusted herself with after bathing.

After a dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, Helen settled into her chair with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and watched a nature documentary on PBS. Mother used to prefer game shows after the news, but Helen had difficulties following the action, because of Mother’s tirades against the way the women dressed. The educational shows about animals and plants in exotic places always felt peaceful. Tonight’s program covered wildlife in Alaska and the Arctic.

Morning came early, as always, and Helen prepared her breakfast of coffee and sweets. Most days she ate doughnuts, but occasionally chocolate cupcakes, depending on what was on sale at the bakery thrift shop. She dressed in her work uniform: shapeless brown poplin slacks and khaki work shirt, equally baggy to accommodate her potato-shaped body.

Helen took the city bus to the school, and busied herself with unlocking doors and turning on lights in preparation for a new day. Mother had secured her this job more than twenty years ago, leveraging years of experience cleaning the courthouse to find Helen an opening in the public school system. Roosevelt Elementary first opened in the late 1940s, and the two story red brick structure felt solid and permanent with it’s ceramic tile walls and terrazzo floors. Helen first entered this building as a kindergartner, later as a janitor. Large, multi pane windows admitted plenty of light, no dark corners here, safe. None of the boys were big enough to be a threat, not like the high schools. The teachers were women, and that added to Helen’s sense of security in this place. Except this year.

A new teacher had come on board to teach third grade, a young man not too long out of college. He stood easily a head taller than most of the school staff, and the kids adored him, but Mr Ryan was a man, strong, easily capable of rape. He wore a ring on his left hand, one of those Irish heart rings and could have been married, but that didn’t change things. Mother saw right away and warned: He’s a man in his prime, and he’ll rape you as soon as he gets the chance. Helen made a point of avoiding his classroom.

Mr Ryan also took the city bus, and when he stayed late to grade papers, he often took the same bus as Helen. As they waited at the bus stop, he made small talk to pass the time.

“The apartment we found over on 34th and Central turned out to be a better bargain than what we first thought.” He looked at Helen, who didn’t look back, but instead gazed down the avenue for the bus. She recognized the address as being two blocks from her basement flat.

“The building’s pretty old, but the place is actually a lot roomier than it looks.”

Helen nodded to show that she had heard. She raised her hand to the incoming bus and climbed on first when it stopped. Mr Ryan’s stop was further down the line from hers, and she watched him from the corner of her eye as she climbed down and exited, wary that he didn’t follow her off.

You’ve got to keep your guard up all the time. You never know when they’ll strike, and they jump on the first sign of weakness.

Living alone, Helen had no choice but to venture out on her own, however she never stepped outside her front door after nightfall. The winter months were difficult, because sunset came so early. If she stopped for shopping on her way home, she had to race the sun. Rapists and criminals thrived in the darkness, and as long as she stayed in her sanctuary after sunset, she knew she would be safe.

Helen’s world between home and the schoolhouse teemed with threats, strange men who might simply be going the same way as she, or they might be following her. Men undressed her with their eyes as Mother said they always do. She kept her head down to not attract attention, while keeping an eye out.

Late that night, long after Helen had turned out the lights and gone to bed, somebody pounded on her basement apartment door.

“Yo, Rodney. Lemme in.” A drunken voice penetrated the door. “It ain’t too late to party.”

She stiffened with fright and pulled the blanket up to her eyes. Her stomach clenched and she forced a swallow to keep the remnants of tonight’s ice cream from coming back up.

A second voice murmured outside the door, baritone like distant thunder. “Come on, Rodney. Open up, man. It’s cold out here, dude.”

Despite the steam heat and the heavy blanket, Helen trembled and shivered in her bed, hoping that the men would go away and look for some other woman to rape this night. Sweat slicked her forehead, belly, and breasts.

The pounding on the door came again. “Rodney, don’t make me come in for you.” The second voice murmured again, louder. “Well, shit. I thought this was Rodney’s pad.”

Sounds of feet shuffling on the steps announced the departure of the men who had pounded on Helen’s front door.

Helen pulled the blanket over her head and waited for her heart to slow down. The air under the covers turned stale and sour as her perspiration soaked into the linens.

Defend yourself. Mother counseled her. Give him something to think about.

The following morning Helen sharpened a sandwich knife from the kitchen drawer in between sips of coffee and bites of chocolate cupcake. She ran the blade of the old knife against an equally antique sharpening steel until the blade could slice through the newspaper without effort. The morning news droned from the TV, traffic reports and the weather forecast. No word of any rapes occurring the night before.

She bit into a second cupcake and admired the knife blade as it gleamed under the light of a lamp over the table, the newly sharpened edge shining white. It might have been old, its steel dark gray with age, but still plenty useful, the four inch blade the right size for cutting vegetables or sandwiches. The slim hickory handle had turned a weatherbeaten shade over the decades but still felt solid and reassuring in her hand.

Helen put the knife down. Its overall length reached an inch less than her forearm. She rummaged through the trash and retrieved the empty cardboard core from a roll of paper towels. The junk drawer yielded a spool of leftover Christmas ribbon and a hank of heavy string. Helen pondered how to rig this and tie it to her forearm.

The news anchor announcing the time snapped Helen’s concentration from her project. She would be late for work. The knife and scabbard had to wait until evening. She turned out the lights, switched off the TV, and pulled on her coat.

At the door, she peered outside for any signs of Rodney’s friends. Three cigarette butts lay squashed flat on the concrete outside her door, one brown, the second white with a green stripe, and the third was filterless. There had been at least two here last night, because she heard a second voice, but the cigarette butts said more men had been gathered at her front door, ready to do unspeakable things to her if they had gotten in. They were here for you. Mother scolded. At your door with rape on their minds.

This time of the year, the sun didn’t clear the horizon until she was already at the school. The sky offered a slate-gray glow of impending morning twilight. The streetlights still shined, so she had something to see by. Helen hated having to leave the house while it was still dark.

She scrutinized the other pedestrians on the street in the morning gloom, most doing the same as her: hurrying to start an honest day’s work. She proceeded to the bus stop at the corner.

The day’s routine at the school comforted her in its predictability. Helen scattered a bucket of treated sawdust on the cafeteria floor after the last of the children finished their lunches and swept the tile floor with a push broom. As she turned to push the sawdust into a heap, she saw a large pair of feet clad in wing tip shoes.

“Didn’t sleep well last night?” Mr Ryan’s voice broke her concentration on her work.

Helen glanced up. He looked at her much the same way Mother did when she was ill or had done a bad thing. She spotted a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He must have been there, Rodney’s friends.

“You look a little peaked.” He pulled his lips back in a smile. “I hope you’re doing all right.”

“I can take care of myself.” Helen stared at the cigarettes in his pocket. Which of the three butts left by her door was his? Her grip on the broom handle tightened. She glanced up at his face, and Mother’s warning sprang into her mind. He’s undressing you with his eyes. That’s how they always start. “Right now, I need to finish sweeping the floor.” She narrowed her eyes to let him know that if he returned again in the night, she’d show him and his friends, like Rodney. She could fight back.

“Sorry.” Mr Ryan stepped aside, his smile gone. He looked like he had stumbled across something that smelled bad and wanted to be polite. He turned and walked down the hall toward his classroom.

That evening, Helen went back to work on her scabbard. She flattened the cardboard tube, creased it along its length to fold it again, and slid the knife blade inside. The scabbard fit the width of the blade well, and she could slide it in and out with little resistance. After she trimmed the tube to length, she used the string to tie the cardboard to her left forearm and loosened her watchband to secure the handle against the inside of her wrist. She dropped her sleeve over her left arm and went to the bathroom mirror to inspect her work. Her left sleeve showed a bulge, but only if she looked for it. Most people would have no idea that she was carrying a weapon. While she was in the bathroom she took a roll of white adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet to tape the string to the cardboard and reinforce the folds.

Helen practiced drawing the knife out of her sleeve. If Rodney’s friends and Mr Ryan came back again tonight, she’d have a surprise for them. After half an hour she had become adept at bringing it out in a single fluid motion, the handle gripped tight in her fist, ready.

Helen left her knife and scabbard on the nightstand before she turned out the light. Just knowing that it was within reach gave her the strength and comfort to sleep with confidence that nothing bad could happen to her.

She wore the knife to work the following day. Its reassuring weight on her forearm, handle pressed against the inside of her wrist gave her energy to make up for the spoiled sleep when Rodney’s friends came to her door with rape on their minds. She had told Mr Ryan that she could take care of herself, and now she carried the proof up her sleeve.

Helen pushed her cart down the second floor corridor, stopping at each classroom to empty the wastebasket into the trash hamper. As she passed the staircase, Mrs Louden, the school nurse stopped her.

“Feeling better, Helen?” Her hand went out, then stopped short. Helen did not like to be touched by anybody for any reason.

“I’m fine.” Helen dumped a wastebasket and returned it to the classroom.

“Mr Ryan had mentioned you were looking poorly the other day.” The nurse leaned toward Helen as she returned to her cart. Mrs Louden had been working at the school for as long as Helen and carried the matronly look of a grandmother. She still wore the old style white nurse’s uniform with sturdy white shoes, white stockings, but no cap. Her glasses hung around her neck from a gilded chain.

“I must have eaten something that disagreed with me.” Helen shrugged. She felt weight shift in her left sleeve. The knife handle had come loose from under her watchband and began to slide out of its scabbard.

“You certainly look well today.” Mrs Louden smiled. A real smile, not the pasted-on version Mr Ryan had the other day. “You look the way I feel after a trip to the day spa.”

Helen brought her hands up to the push handle of her cart. The knife’s hickory grip sagged against the inside of her sleeve, pulling at the cloth. She shifted her elbow in hope that gravity would slide it back into the cardboard sheath. “I did something good for myself.” Weapons on school grounds were against the rules, and the knife had to stay a secret. She had to get away to secure its handle before the weapon fell clattering to the floor. Helen glanced over the nurse’s shoulder down the hall. “I have to finish emptying the trash cans.”

“Oh, of course.” Mrs Louden stepped aside to let Helen trundle the cart past her.

Later that evening, on the bus ride home, Helen sat in her usual seat behind the driver, but this time, she held her head up instead of watching the floor and her feet.

The ringing phone interrupted Helen’s sleep that night. Instead of a voice, all she heard was the click of the connection breaking when she picked up. Rodney’s friends? The phone rang twice more before the alarm clock buzzed. The first thing Helen did after she turned on the light was strap the knife and scabbard to her left arm.

Spoiled sleep left her feeling groggy at breakfast, honey buns and doughnuts this time. The morning news yielded three stories of rape: a woman attacked outside a bar in the early morning hours, another woman attacked in a neighboring city, and a suspect behind bars in a case from two weeks earlier. They’re out there. Mother’s words of warning came. They’re coming for you. Watch out. Helen touched the knife strapped to her left arm as she sipped coffee. Nobody was going to rape her.

The sky lay overcast this morning, making the pre-dawn hours more threatening. She stood in the middle of the pool of light shed by the streetlight on the corner at the bus stop. This morning, two young men, probably still teenagers, milled around. Strangers, not part of the middle-aged regulars who caught the bus the same time Helen did. She kept a wary eye on them, because they might be Rodney’s friends.

Helen’s eyes moved to the bus as it rolled to a stop at the corner and the doors hissed open. Her peripheral vision sensed motion and her shoulder rolled back as one of the two young men tugged at her purse.

Helen whirled around. “Rape!” she shrieked. The man looked at her face, then she felt hands on her shoulder. The second young man had reached for her purse strap.

She screamed again. Her feet pounded the pavement as she fled the two men.

Helen didn’t look back to see if her attackers were following or not. She simply ran for her life, as Mother had taught her when she was a child. Run. Run from the bad men. Find the police. She caromed off of other pedestrians as she fled, hugging her purse.

After four blocks, she felt pressure in her left arm, as if an iron clamp had gone around her bicep, and she fought to pull in enough air through her mouth to press on. She stumbled over a manhole cover and took four stagger steps to regain her balance. A stitch in her side made it hurt to breathe, tearing at her ribs with each inhalation, and her throat burned as she tried to draw air.

The pressure in her left arm and shoulder grew into radiating pain, a heavy weight dragging her down as she fled the rapists, Rodney’s friends, for sure, and friends of Mr Ryan’s as well. The pressure and pain welled up and slowed her down, as if the hard sidewalk had transformed itself into soft sand. Her legs grew too heavy to continue running, and she hooked her right arm around a lamppost to rest.

Air wheezed in and out of her lungs as she held herself upright with the lamppost for support. A gray haze fogged her vision as she looked back to see if the two men were still there.

She saw nobody, then hung her head as she proceeded to catch her breath.

A hand fell heavy and warm on her shoulder. The rapists!

“Are you all right, ma’am?” A deep voice cut through the haze in her head. A man’s voice.

As she had practiced so many times, Helen’s right hand reached inside the cuff of her left sleeve. The knife emerged in her fist, and she rotated toward the voice. Without a word, she drove the knife into the midsection of the man behind her. She felt the initial resistance, then the knife slid into his belly, cutting and dividing flesh. She snapped her elbow to draw the blade out and pumped her arm to drive it back in, again, and again, and again, and again. Her voice returned but failed to form words, only shrieks as she used the knife to defeat her attacker. Father may have raped Mother, but nobody would rape Helen, because she chose to arm herself against evil men.

The man reached for her right hand, then moved to his hip, as if to retrieve something.

“Rape!” she screamed for the second time that morning and let the knife pierce his forearm, before he could reach for anything.

The knife’s handle had become slimy and sticky, the way her hands got after cutting and handling raw meat, and she tightened her grip.

The man fell to the pavement. Helen maintained her grip on the knife and followed him down, kneeling on his body as she brought the knife down again to slash and stab. Wet, slurping noises emerged as she plunged the blade into his body.

Her head made a sudden movement to the left as something slammed into it from behind. A thud sounded as her neck whipped to the side. A sparkling red-purple glow blocked her vision and strong hands took her arms. She felt weightless as she rose up from the sidewalk, and a sharp pain like one of Mother’s slaps came to her right wrist. She realized that she no longer held the knife.

“Jesus Christ,” said a male voice near her ear, one of those holding her arm twisted behind her back. “The old lady went berserk.”

Helen tried to see who said that, but the strong arms and hands kept her from turning her head far enough. The scalp on the right side of her head throbbed and felt as though it were coming loose from her skull. She floated above the pavement as if she were a helium balloon. Helen’s vision faded, gray and pink clouds passing by and obscuring her view. She stared down at the man she had defeated, the man who would have had his way with her. He wore dark clothing, fitting for those who loved the darkness and thrived on it. His midsection glistened under the streetlight as blood drained away and formed a puddle to surround his body like a moat. A siren wailed in the distance, growing louder.

Helen reveled in her handiwork. She had defeated the rapist, beaten him at his own game of violence. A smile spread on her face, satisfaction from a job well done, and her thoughts addressed Mother. Here lays one defeated rapist. He’ll never touch me again. Her eyes followed the rivulets of his blood upstream to the damage she had done, then stopped at the patches on his shoulders and a glint of metal on the man’s shirt. Her vision grew hazy again as she recognized the badge pinned there with the word Police embossed into its gold plating.

Interested in more stories with driven and eccentric protagonists?