“Maybe then people wouldn’t think you’re such a stuck-up cunt.”
Ariel flinched. She wasn’t surprised that a man had appended some abuse to his supposed compliment; this was not uncommon. But she was surprised at how angry he’d become, how fast.
It was broad daylight, on a crowded sidewalk, with plenty of witnesses; she wasn’t going to be sexually assaulted here. But still she felt seized by the grip of terror, scared of being yelled at, or punched in the face, or slashed with a utility knife, or shoved into oncoming traffic. Maybe this man was a psychopath. He certainly hurled insults like one.
Ariel took a long step away from the curb, away from that particular threat. Then she turned to face her assailant. He was such an ineffectual-looking man, unattractive in all the ways that a person could be physically unattractive. But still threatening, because anyone could be threatening. All it took was meanness.
This had been happening to her almost every day since she was thirteen or fourteen years old, for two decades now, it was such a commonplace experience as to be almost unremarkable, unless she allowed herself to dwell on it: Why should this be a part of my daily life? Why should I be harassed, menaced, threatened, terrified that someone is going to attack me—verbally, physically, sexually—as a matter of routine?
Occasionally Ariel considered responding to these provocations. She weighed the tiny range of pros versus the vast array of cons, and always came to the same conclusion: Don’t say anything, don’t antagonize, you can’t win, just try to minimize how much you lose. Don’t make it your life.
Suddenly she had no more patience, no more turn-the-other-cheek. No more fear.
“Why would you say something like that to me?”
The man was heading toward the office building, but now he froze, and turned back to face Ariel.
“Why would you say that to anyone?”
“Hey, I was just trying to be friendly.”
“Friendly?” She took a step in his direction. Then another. “Calling me a cunt, that’s friendly? What’s wrong with you?”
Now she was just a step away from him. Other people on the sidewalk were noticing this interaction, slowing down, stopping. A security guard emerged from the lobby.
“Me? Nothing’s wrong with me. What’s wrong with you?”
“You. You’re what’s wrong with me.” Ariel realized she was yelling. She decided to yell louder. “You and all the other assholes like you, telling me to smile, yelling that I have a nice rack, a nice ass, that you want to put your big cock in it, and then cursing me when I don’t thank you for insulting me, for terrorizing me. You.”
She was pointing at him now, and yelling very loudly. He was frozen.
“You’re what’s wrong with me. You’re what’s wrong with the world.”
The security guard put his large body between these two, and that’s when the harasser found his voice again, found his courage, and started yelling while the guard restrained him.
“She just started attacking me! Psycho bitch.”
The security guard knew there was no way this was true. But he also knew this wasn’t his battle to fight; not his responsibility to set anyone straight, especially a volatile man. Volatile men tend to create their own wide orbits of tolerance. No one wants to confront them.
“Come on,” the guard says, “that’s enough.” As if gently reprimanding a small child for a minor lapse in manners.
Ariel walked to a taxi that was discharging a passenger. Then she turned back to her assailant, who was still being steered away by the security guard.
“Hey?” she called out. “You should smile more. Maybe people wouldn’t think you’re such a fucking asshole.”
*
She took the taxi way downtown, to the nucleus of the civic center’s bureaucracy. She filled out the simple forms, paid the modest fee. The whole process was easier than expected, this thing that seems like maybe it should be more difficult, or more expensive, or more time-consuming; more something. She shed her old first name in favor of something she’d liked back in high-school Shakespeare; she replaced her husband’s family name with her grandmother’s maiden name, which no one knew, no one would go looking for. These were puzzle pieces that no one would put together, a new identity that no one could trace.
This was the second time Ariel had changed her name. The first time it had been in the way that’s widely accepted—even sometimes required—by taking her husband’s name. But she was Laurel Turner for just a few years, living on New York’s Upper East Side, summers back and forth to the South Fork of Long Island, a lifestyle defined by recreational shopping and occupational exercising, fine dining and benefit attending and first-class vacationing.
That woman no longer existed. Newly minted Ariel Pryce walked out of the stately neoclassical building on Worth Street, hailed another cab to Penn Station, and boarded the train back to her new town, to the small apartment she’d rented above a wine shop on Main Street, a one-bedroom with big gaps between the wide-planked old floorboards through which she could see down into the shop, hear the music that the owner cranked up after closing, smell the pot that wafted up. For some reason her thermostat was down there, tucked behind the shelf of local rosés; she had to go downstairs to adjust the temperature, wearing her slippers, a flannel robe, nodding sheepishly at the proprietor.
She was just beginning to show. It wasn’t noticeable to anyone except herself, a tightness in her jeans, an unfamiliar shape in the full-length bathroom mirror.
Armed with this new name, and the advice of the small-town lawyer Jerry whose shingle was hanging up the street, Ariel Pryce began to build a whole new identity one piece at a time—driver’s license, bank account, credit card, each document removing one brick from the old persona to construct the new. By the time she found the ramshackle farmhouse that she irrationally wanted to buy, she’d already taken on the full veneer of a new person, an identity she continued to bolster with a passport, with business documents filed with the town, the county, the state, the IRS, with voter registration and organization memberships, everything. Ariel Pryce was a complete person, documentable and provable.
A few years after changing her name, she tried to find Laurel Turner. She scoured the internet, made calls, searched every way she could think of to find a woman who’d one day ceased to exist. She failed.
But Ariel was an amateur. Professionals, she knew, could find her. Would find her, if they ever needed to.
*