My Gun

From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring 1997, Vol. XIX, No. 2

I am thirty-eight, have straight teeth and good hygiene. When those from the thin-is-godly camp look me over like I should lose a pound or two, I tell them, “Sorry. I protect my roundness.” Although I haven’t yet tried to write a personals ad to attract somebody new, I think once I figured out the codes, I could come up with something punchy and tantalizing. Now that a year has passed since my husband’s death, I start to think about such things.

Lately, however, the question of whether or not I should buy my own gun seems to preoccupy me more than whether I should look for a new mate. I ask you, what kind of country is it where a woman finds herself considering a gun for a companion? When my husband was alive, the idea of owning and using a gun never occurred to me. I’m not even sure at this point why I feel myself inching toward the moment I’m actually forking over cash for a little snub-nosed silver something, dropping it into my purse, and walking out of this one particular gun shop I’ve had my eye on, just east of town.

This shop attracts me because it sprang up overnight like a bad mushroom. It looks as if it could be staffed by the same men—why am I certain they are men?—selling arms elsewhere in the world—to Bosnian Serbs, or helping the Macedonians get ready in case their towns are next, or beefing up Croatian arsenals. Just the thought of those Serbs, according to belated reports from national observers, raping several thousand women for three years as an actual so-called “weapon of war”—now this makes me want to rush right out and buy my gun.

It scares me when I think like this. But then, many things come to my mind, now that I’m alone. I have too much time to think, according to my friends. Most of the time I wouldn’t even say I am “thinking.” I muse a lot. I especially like to muse in my flower garden, which borders the property my husband and I kept as a summer home, but to which I have now retreated full time. When I’m musing I dislike being interrupted. My neighbor, who’s about fifty and who practically lives in her yard, is always trying to carry on conversations with me.

“We have twenty-one cats in our neighborhood,” she says. “I didn’t count yours since he never comes outside. These are outdoor cats I’m talking about.”

My neighbor is fuming on the cat question because someone has dropped a flyer into her mailbox. It suggests that those who have outdoor cats keep them indoors during the entire spring and early summer months, because birds are nesting and raising their young.

“Cats have to do their cat things,” she says. “Why should I confine mine when twenty other cats are on the prowl?”

At precisely 8:00 every morning my neighbor scatters a stingy handful of seed on a hip-high platform in her backyard. I have never pointed out to her that these feeders are patent death traps for birds. In neighborly tolerance I allow her to bait, entrap, and tantalize to her heart’s content.

Aside from cats and birds, my neighbor can be nosy in other ways. Like asking if the investigation is still going on as to why my husband, a well-­known progressive senator from a southern state, committed suicide. I correct her right away.

“Not suicide. Nobody knows. But not suicide.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and I believe she is, in her own way, sorry. “I only know what I read in the papers,” she says, deftly hinting.

“I can’t really talk about it,” I say, though I’d like to. But I don’t want to ruin the nest of my musing. How would it be if, every time I stepped into the yard to water my sweet peas, my neighbor and I had to talk about my husband’s death?

One thing I know: my husband was a man who loved every instant of life, and no way did he shoot himself in the back of the head at that impossible angle. For one thing, he had a muscle problem in his right shoulder. He had dislocated it a number of times during the three years we were married. I used to rub liniment on that shoulder every night.

Of course, it’s true, I didn’t know he kept a handgun that was registered to him with his own apparent signature. If he could keep a handgun secret from me, he could also conceivably intend suicide and not give hints. No matter what anyone says, I think suicide is totally out of character for him.

From her remarks in the press, his ex-wife seemed to accept the idea of his suicide a bit eagerly, I thought. At the funeral I wanted to ask her a few things, but I never got a chance. She made an awful racket at the graveside and had to be kept from leaping onto my husband’s coffin. It was probably a mistake even to think we could have spoken peaceably to each other, since even now she considers herself the “authentic widow,” essentially because she put in more time with my husband.

My husband was an obsessive preparer. This may have caused me not to notice things I should have. I don’t know if he had this habit of preparing for the worst during what he referred to as his “interminable marriage” to his first wife. Right from the time we were married he frequently used the phrase “if anything happens to me. . . . ” He was twenty years older and he knew it was likely I would survive him.

“Here’s my safe-deposit key,” my husband had said. “Notice the shape and color. Your other keys look silver, but this one’s tarnished, clouded like pewter.” He slipped it onto my key ring, right next to my rabbit’s foot. “If anything happens to me, look in the safe-deposit box.”

My husband believed in safety nets, and he told me from the start he had insurance to cover payments on both our houses, the one on the East Coast and the one where I now live, the location about which I can’t be specific. Naturally the suicide question put a kink in his preparations, and I am on the verge of losing both houses. Soon I may have no garden in which to muse, no well-meaning neighbor to avoid.

“You should get yourself a gun and let me teach you how to use it,” my neighbor is saying, as I douse my sweet peas with Miracle-Gro. “Bruce and I worry about you,” she says, “over there by yourself in that big house.” She doesn’t say alone. And woman is the other word we take for granted.

“I know how to shoot. I’m also a crack shot,” my neighbor says. “I could snap off the nose of a reindeer at two hundred yards.” It’s when she says things like this that I realize I wouldn’t trade this neighbor for anyone on the planet. She is better than a security system or a pack of pit bull terriers. Plus, she makes me laugh, which is curative.

I’m aware that she practices her marksmanship because on Sundays I see her blue Ford station wagon parked just off the highway in front of the shooting range. She goes to church, then comes home, grabs her gun, and drives over to the range to shatter clay pigeons for an hour or two. Sometimes Bruce goes with her. Maybe she and my husband shattered clay pigeons elbow to elbow, but I don’t ask.

When I’m unresponsive she says, “If you need me, I’m just a phone call away.” She is a good and thoughtful neighbor, it’s easy to see, and I believe she would bring her loaded gun over here in the early morning hours and shoot to kill if she found me in any possible danger. And Bruce, he would be right behind her with his gun. I would have a small but capable army of two at my disposal. These are people whose consciences would not wince, or be hampered in the least, by slamming a bullet through somebody’s heart or brain if they found such a person climbing through one of my windows or breaking down a door. “Hesitate and ye are lost” is their motto, and “Let the police ask questions of their relations later.” When I muse about getting a gun, I often think I should instead put a sign at the entrance to my property which says: Beware: Neighbors Armed & Dangerous. Then I wouldn’t have to continue this dialogue with myself about the advisability of owning a gun.

It’s funny how just beginning to consider getting a gun feeds all sorts of personal encounters into the question. Last week a girlfriend in an upscale area of San Francisco calls me, shaken to the core. She has zapped open her garage door and gone inside, only to find a man behind her. Two seconds later he puts a knife to her throat. She is dressed in a pretty summer smock with a dropped neckline and carrying a purse, just for looks, with no more than twenty dollars cash in it. My mother would say my friend has brought this on herself by dressing this way. Whatever. My friend is under attack and coming up short. Her credit cards—she can see them now—are zippered into her regular purse in the downstairs closet. Listening to her is like watching a reenactment on a TV cop show.

“The guy is pissed because I’m an empty cash register,” my friend says. “Then he spots my wedding ring. He orders me to take it off. It’s my great­grandmother’s ring and just to think of this worse-than-scum taking it is like throwing generations down a sewer. But I can’t get it off my finger.

“‘Let up on my neck,’ I breathe to the creep through my teeth. ‘Maybe I can suck it loose.’

“‘Get it off, bitch, or you’re blood on cement,’ the guy says.

“I can’t see the man’s face because he’s behind me, but I am ashamed to be glad the arm around my neck is a white arm. Honey, why, as a white woman in America, have I been caused, against my will, to think, Hey, shouldn’t this guy mugging me be black? Where did this designer-thought come from, and why do I suspect I’m not alone in having it?” my friend asks.

I’m used to her rants and can generally cut through the haze to touch down on the other side. I admit I’m more concerned about her throat getting sliced than her political and sociological quandaries. But then, just having a throat to be cut, like having a gun to fire—these are new concerns for me. And white arm, black arm—if the throat is cut, it bleeds.

“So I’m sucking away on my ring,” she says, “and the white arm has let up enough that I could get my whole hand into my mouth if my mouth was big enough. Finally the ring clinks against my teeth and rolls to the back of my tongue, so I nearly swallow it. I have to bend into the knife to keep the ring out of my throat. I manage to spit it onto the garage floor, and he shoves me to the cement where I get a mechanic’s view of my car. This is life in America.

“I am still afraid he’s going to bend over and slit me open like a melon,” she says. “But the white arm reaches behind one of the car tires and grabs my ring. Next, I see these big feet in high-powered Nikes loping off into the daylight. I reach up and touch my throat. There is blood on my fingers when I bring them away. I pull myself up and tremble back inside the house to a mirror. There’s a hairline slice where I had to bend into the knife. I call the police and then I phone Bobby, who’s so furious I won’t even repeat what he said, and who assumes I’ve been raped. And hey, there is that black guy again. The one who wasn’t there. ‘Was the guy black?’ That’s the first thing Bobby wants to know. Not: ‘How are you, babe? Are you all right?'”

Bobby is my friend’s husband and it turns out he owns a gun. He’s been trying to convince my friend she should get one too. By the time of this conversation, she has been to her first gun-handling session. She has her mind around a trigger and is saying, “I never thought I’d be so totally into anything like this, but I am. Our instructor put it to us like this: ‘Would you rather be carried by six or judged by twelve?'”

“And do you feel safer?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“You bet holes in your panty hose,” she said. “I’m not to be messed with.” She went on to say that just having the gun in her possession made her more aware of danger. “I will never go into my garage again without my hand in my bag on my loaded gun.” She had bought a special purse, she said, with a Velcro side pocket made just for her gun. She won’t even have to take it out of the compartment to fire it. Just pull the Velcro tab, and BLAM!

It all sounded eerily reasonable, given what she’d been through. The hairline slice on her throat lingered in my mind when I walked into my own garage after that, and I thought of my gun out there somewhere, waiting for me to buy it and carry it everywhere like a mother kangaroo. I felt a glint of unattached affection for it spike off me into the cosmos.

I have begun to think a revolver would be my weapon of choice. I just like the word “revolver,” though the word “automatic” also has its charm. If I were buying a new microwave I would go into the store and look at them. Run my hands over them. Open and shut them. See what buttons there are to push and how big the cook space is. Muffins versus turkey—that sort of thing. But going into a gun shop, the idea strikes me the same way going into a porn shop might. I feel all scummy and wrong just thinking about it. Like something I don’t agree with is going to happen.

But then, I’m a widow and this is also something to which I didn’t agree. I think of him all the time, my husband, out there under the dirt where I know he doesn’t want to be.

Not long after his funeral I’m back to doing just what he told me. I take the deposit box key down to the bank and have the girl let me into a room that is positively chilly with money. We each insert keys. I tum mine, then she slides out a long metal box. I carry it to a little alcove and sit down. For a moment I think of my husband, that he intended for me to do this. It’s a bustling place, this bank, but my alcove is a still pool of silence. The sort of silence I imagine around my husband when he was shot. Or, if I’m wrong, the silence he broke when he shot himself.

I lift the lid. Inside are my husband’s will and the papers on our houses. But in a long, brown envelope I discover several thick bundles of travelers’ checks. One-thousand-dollar checks, unsigned. Packets and packets of checks. Why did my husband put so much money in here, money which was never invested and also has not been collecting one cent of interest? Where has this money come from? Did we pay taxes on it? Should I report it to someone? I mean, this is more money than I have ever seen before in my life. I am not even going to mention the total amount.

My mother’s descriptions of hot flashes come back to me because I am sweating right through my favorite apple-print top. The travelers’ checks seem tainted, cut off from the whole idea of spending. It’s true I could use them, even to bail myself out of my current financial problem caused by my husband’s assumed suicide. I could pay off the mortgage on one of the houses, probably the one next door to my armed-and-dangerous neighbors. “If anything ever happens to me,” I recall my husband saying. But what did he intend with this stash of ready-to-travel money? Am I supposed to go someplace, and if so, where?

I hate the paralysis of this decision period I’m in. I phone a woman I met at a fund-raiser for my husband’s last campaign. She’s a performance artist living in L.A. When she started telling ex-wife stories at the party, we hit it off right away. We even joked about doing a book together called The Men We Love and the Bitches They Left. Our plan would be to write this under aliases, so as not to get sued by our respective ex-wife antagonists.

“What about guns?” I ask her. “Do you own one?”

“No,” she says. “But I’ve handled one. I went over to this guy’s, Stan Mosman-Mossy, we call him. He has guns all over his apartment, the way some people collect masks or ships in bottles. I tell him, ‘I want to do a performance piece in which I load a real gun with real bullets, then point it at my audience while I do my monologue—some ramble about having gone off my meds because I was losing my edge.’ This appeals to him. ‘How can I help you?’ he asks. I tell him I need to learn to handle a gun so it’s second nature. He takes a handgun out of a locked cabinet and slides it onto the coffee table in front of me with a shivery metal-on-wood thunk. When I pick it up, it’s heavier than I expected, but more than that—the power, the diabolical nature of the thing. No doubt about it, I’ve got my hand around pure evil, something made to kill people. My whole body is horrified. After a few moments I just ease it back onto the table and say, ‘Mossy—thanks a lot, but I’m going to have to borrow a gun from props. A real gun is just a little too real.'”

Listening to my actress friend’s experience is like being an astronaut of my gun question. I begin to see all sides of it. The way she’d felt about the gun is close to how I’d felt about the checks in the lockbox. Something unsavory. Too many unknowns. Then my friend begins to describe her neighborhood and I realize she has more reason than I do to start down this should-I-get-a-gun path.

“So I walk back from Mossy’s to my apartment,” my friend continues. “Remember, I live in the Echo Park area of L.A. Still, it’s weird to see black spray-painted messages that say RIP SPOOKY on telephone poles and the sides of buildings.” She assumes I know what this means. When I ask, she translates: “Rest in Peace, Spooky.”

“Spooky,” she says, “was a kid not six blocks from me who was shot to death in a gang showdown.” It gives me a jolt of confidence to know that my friend, in such an environment, has chosen against owning a gun. But then she’s an actress and could probably fake her way out of anything. She would just bite the white arm, and if the guy caught up to her, she’d offer first aid so convincingly he’d forget whatever he meant to do to her.

Recently I’ve tried to shift the focus of my musings from guns to a certain man who attracted my attention at a party after a production of My Fair Lady. He is physically impressive, looks able to lift and move things—more and more this is how I judge the desirability of a man. I noticed immediately that he would be fit enough to help reorganize the boxes I’ve stored in my garage—my husband ‘s things, which I’ve kept for a museum. This man talked about how he loved to hike in the back country and, before I left, gave me his phone number on a scrap of paper he tore from a newspaper. He said he had a van that he often used as a camper. This added information seemed a little forward and suggestive, but I ignored it.

Even though my husband is gone, I still have friends in helpful places. One of them has access to records at the county courthouse. She offered to check out this gentleman. A day later she calls in a great state of alarm. She has not only checked the courthouse files, but has asked around at her hair dresser’s and the tanning salon.

“This guy’s a real zero,” she says. “Less than zero, if you want to know. Besides that, he has a permit to carry a gun. Trouble,” she says. “If I were you, I’d just crumple that phone number and toss it into the nearest public toilet.”

But I don’t do anything of the sort. I put the number into my coat pocket and head for the supermarket. It’s a ten-minute drive through the usual heavy afternoon traffic. I go inside and locate the magazine racks. At least ten different gun magazines are available. I decide on one with a photograph of a woman, arms extended, both hands grasping her handgun with the tension of a slingshot, before the target of a shadow-man. There are already lethal holes in this “man.”

It occurs to me that, if this target were in the shape of a woman, with bullet holes arranged like erogenous zones, I wouldn’t be buying this magazine. I notice I am willing, at least in my imagination, to shoot holes into the shape of a man. I wonder, could this be one of those designer-thoughts my San Francisco friend was talking about?

The female cashier acts like I’m not doing anything special buying this magazine, but I’ve camouflaged it with necessities—milk and raisin bread. Maybe she’s a gun owner herself. It’s not something I’d know how to ask. As I walk to my car, I think I see the attractive man getting into his van. I situate my groceries in the back seat, then reach into my coat pocket and touch the slip of newsprint on which our link is scribbled.

Back home, I carry in the groceries. I take my gun magazine into the bedroom and place it on the nightstand, saving it for bedtime. It’s late afternoon, so I go outside and unspool the hose to do my watering. A fat, white cat dodges into the shrubbery when he sees me. I assume he’s had experiences.

I begin to muse about the attractive man as I water my sweet peas and glads, the hanging baskets and rosemary. Then I muse on the word “inevitable,” whether my husband felt his death was, in any sense, inevitable when he loaded up the lockbox with travelers’ checks for me to find. My neighbor fills her bird­bath and we wave reassuringly to each other from the parameters of our yards.

Later I make a trip to town because I need to drop something at my lawyer’s, the one still trying to unravel my husband’s financial affairs. I drive past the gun shop, which is covered with fishnet and painted camouflage green and gray. The phone number of the attractive man with a gun permit is in my pocket. I wonder what make of gun he packs. Having his number is like having a gun, without having it. Just to know he’s there, if I need him. Loaded and ready. I am certain he would teach me all I need to know about guns. I might even invent some trigger-happy love-name for him, like Spooky or Mossy, and we’d go off to shoot clay pigeons together on Sundays. Or maybe he lives in the country, where we could shatter the windshields of junked cars. The scrap of paper curls around my finger and causes a ripple to run up my spine, just to know he’s there. Naturally, I don’t plan to use his number. I hope that’s clear.