Okay, so Stephen says he’ll kick in the price of a cup of coffee if I’ll tell the stories of the Night of the Screaming and the Burglar Who Is Still Running. You know, Stephen, the price of one fancy Starbucks concoction will keep the old lady in premium espresso coffee beans for almost a month…
Ah, yes. The Night of the Screaming.
There was a reason I was a trophy wife. When I was young and nubile, I was…well…damned spectacular. Men would stop their cars in the street to watch me walk by. The occasional lively young gent, emboldened by a rush of testosterone, would even try to get me into his car. It was like that.
On this particular evening, I was still young and lush. My then-husband was a partner in one of the two top law firms in the American Southwest. This august institution had regularly recurring firm meetings, at which all the partners and associates were required to show up. Poor fellows (and in those days, that’s what they were: fellows) forced themselves to gag down a filet mignon with béarnaise sauce and several glasses of wine, preceded by a bit of whiskey, down at the Arizona Club. Afterward, they talked business into the night. He usually got home between 11:00 p.m. and midnight.
I’d fed our three cats, fixed and consumed my dinner, done a set of tummy-tightening and boob-lifting exercises in the living room, and started the dishwasher. Then I set the hated Smith-Corona portable typewriter on the floor in front of the television (this was before the days of the PC) and got to work writing a graduate-school seminar paper that was due the following morning.
So there I am, typing away.
The old Kitchenaid works wonderfully but it’s no Bosch: silence is not its thing. It’s plinking and plonking busily in the background, and I’m mostly ignoring it.
I hear a rustling sound in the service porch between the TV room and the kitchen. Two catboxes are in there, serving as a latrine for the feline livestock. This noise, I register as the cats scratching in litter. It stops, confirming my impression.
I type. I throw out another sheet of paper when the hated Smith-Corona lets it slip loose from the platen on the last line of the page, causing that last lightning-typed line to skew down through the bottom margin and off the page. Pick up another sheet, roll it into the platen, hear more scritching in the service porch.
Insistent scritching.
What ARE those cats doing in there? think I.
I get up off the floor to go see what the hell the cats are doing in the service porch and find…no cats.
No cats anywhere around. Puzzled, I take a closer look and find…
The latch on the door handle wiggling up and down.
Door handle latches do not wiggle themselves. Even I am bright enough to figure that one out.
I run to the front of the house, look out through the French doors into the screened entry atrium, determine no one is out there, throw open the front door, and holler, at the top of my lungs,
F-I-R-E!!
F-I-R-E!!!!
HELP! MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!!!
FIRE!!!!
FIRE!!!!!!!!
CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT!!!!!
Well, naturally, all the neighbors come trotting out of their houses, cocktails in hand, to watch my house burn down.
I’d always been told that you should never yell HELP! RAPE! BURGLAR! Because no one wants to get mixed up with a rapist or a burglar. What I didn’t know was
how freakin’ LOUD a woman really can yell.
I had no idea I could make a noise like that.
It worked. Some of the neighbors saw the perp. He’d parked his bike next to the side entry to our service porch, and when the circus began, he jumped aboard and shot off down the alley.
The guy had almost managed to jiggle the dead-bolt open—it was about 1/4 of the way thrown. Another few minutes and he would have been in the house, helping himself to the lawyer’s dish.
So there it is: the moral of the story is “never yell ‘help.’ Always yell FIRE!” No matter what, no matter where. Oh. And never do your exercises in the living room, where anyone loitering in your side yard can see in through the windows that open only to the oleanders.
Tune in on October 31 for The Burglar Who Is Still Running
Very similar thing happened to me. Drowsing on my bed after an early dental visit. Kept hearing noises from the bathroom but assumed it was the cats. I finally get up to investigate and there is a man who has just climbed through my bathroom window and is holding one of my blouses. Before the fear took hold I walked over to him, took the blouse and ordered him back out the same window.
He looked at me blankly (possibly did not speak English.) THEN the fear kicked in. I rushed away for the unloaded gun under my bed so I could wave it around. I was terrified he would catch me before I could get it. When I got back to the bathroom he was gone, but I didn’t know if it was out the window or into the house.
I searched the house with my trembling gun hand, but he was well and truly gone. Took me months to get over it.
Oooh–post a pic of your trophy-wife self! Would love to see it.
@ frugalscholar: LOL! I don’t think I have any of those. You know, I did run away. 😉
When I was in college one of the professors told us to do exactly what you did. He told us to never yell police or help, because then people would be afraid to get out of their houses and you want people to come out and see what is going on. He also told us to never get in the car when someone points a gun and orders you to do so. Apparently your chances of survival is higher if you start running instead of getting in the car.
Now, what is your PayPal? A deal is a deal. You have my email, so let me know. I’ll even throw in an extra dime. 🙂