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Her Price above Rubies My friend B has a tighter schedule than most but has always enjoyed it. She is up at 5 A.M., runs to a jogging track on the grounds of a neighborhood school, runs there from 5:30 to 6:00 A.M., then runs home and breakfasts with her school-age children, drives to her full-time job at a school in Queens, is home in time to swim a half hour's worth of laps in a Y pool, then to supper and the evening chores of a parent and householder and the paperwork of a junior-high-school science teacher. A minor physical impairment that would make this day impossible for her is mitigated and controlled by the adherence to the regimen of physical exercise. The necessity becomes a pleasure too; she enjoys the exercise and the first bloom of morning it reveals to her. Her body rewards her with health and stamina, and her friends have learned not to telephone after nine when she's more likely than not to be asleep. One day while B was jogging in the dawn she felt strong arms fling themselves from behind about her neck and drag her down. At first, without thinking, she fought back. She and her assailant fell to the ground and B kept moving. A saying from her childhood sounded in her head, from the time when boys made sneering remarks about rape-"You can't thread a moving needle"-and she kept moving with all the strength of her excellent muscular body. She screamed and fought so long and hard-rolling, kicking, biting-that it must have become clear to her assailant that he would have to kill her to prevail. Suddenly he was up and sprinting . She leapt to her feet without seeing anything about his appearance except, in one horror-struck instant, that he was a jogger too. He ran to the lot, she to the road. As in a nightmare she knew that she had been released only to be trapped again. She would have to be swifter on foot than he in his car, which in his rage he 161 162 LIFE NOTES would surely use to run her down. But she reached the road before him, encountered a woman jogging there in time to warn her from the track and saw a car race by, unidentifiable in the semidarkness of dawn. If B had not been in fine physical shape, if she were not a runner and a swimmer, she could not have been that "moving needle." She would have been overcome. We have, alas, great evidence now; we know what can happen physically and psychically to a woman who is overcome in this way. But B got away, narrowly. How does an escape this narrow affect a life? In B's case, this was not immediately discernible. First, her schedule had to be fulfilled. By the time she reached home, bathed, dressed, breakfasted with children, her husband was descending the stairs to begin his morning. She had barely time to tell him what had happened before she took off for work, where an early conference, the first of several in a tightly packed teaching day, was waiting. Finally a colleague noticed her bruises, her trembling. Pressed, she told the story again, briefly, en route to another appointment. She must call the police, she was told, even though no identification was possible. She must talk about it, to someone who would understand the psychic harm. So she telephoned her husband at his office and asked him to report the event to the police because she had no time. Nor had she time for a therapist. That evening she received a dozen guests at her house for a prewedding dinner for her oldest son, his bride- and inlaws -to-be. At odd moments she ran upstairs to her bedroom, shut the door and sobbed, then washed her face and came down again. She spoke to no one there about what had happened, for in three days her son was to be married and not only was there no time; there was also no tone of voice in which she felt it could be said. She decided that she would not-could not-change her schedule. Or give up her beautiful mornings. Or ruin her health. Or cripple her psyche with fear. So she began to run again, same place, same time. Except of course that nothing...

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