‘Slowly, he unpinned me from the wall, and my dress fell back’

Intuition is always more reliable than luck

Iknew I was in trouble even before trouble started. I was standing in the kitchen.

I remember thinking, “Good thing you’re right next to the knife drawer.”

In the end, it wasn’t knives that saved me. It was words. And luck. Mostly luck, but if I had paid attention to intuition, I wouldn’t have had to rely on either.

We had moved from Vancouver to Florida.

We’d made a conscious choice to live in a gated community.

Not just gated, but doublegated.

You can’t be too careful, we said.

To get to our house, you’d pass through two checkpoints. One was manned, the other involved a code.

This particular Saturday, I was entirely alone.

I knew no one on the sunny cul-de-sac.

The kids were at Disney World for the weekend and my husband was away.

We’d been in our new house for about a month.

It was another relentlessly hot day in southern Florida.

I was wearing a modest sundress.

The previous week I’d had a plumber in to fix something. The fix hadn’t worked so I’d called him back.

He arrived and set to repairing his repair in the master bathroom. Meanwhile, a carpenter worked in the kitchen putting shelves in a pantry. The plumber came into the kitchen and explained what he’d done to rectify his previous work. The carpenter was just finishing up. The plumber mentioned that the sink needed some sort of attention and said let me get that for you – no charge. It was one of those, “Don’t worry your pretty little head” types of comments.

I hadn’t noticed any problem with the sink, but I was busy dealing with the carpenter. The plumber made an elaborate production of changing a simple washer in the faucet.

It was at this point that my mind flashed on the knife drawer. Fear came as a fully formed thought. In many years of similar situations, I’d never had this sensation.

I dealt with the carpenter and showed him out. I came back into the kitchen and the plumber explained what he’d done. He asked if anything else needed fixing and knelt to check the pipes under the sink. He was stalling.

The plumber gathered up his things, crossed the kitchen to his toolbox. The next thing I knew, he had me pressed up against the wall and my dress was up around my waist. He leaned his whole weight on top of me and ran his hands over my body.

He explained that he’d taken a fancy to me when he’d come to do the initial repair. Apparently, I was just his type. It dawned on me that this second visit must have been planned; that he’d done a lousy job so as to be “invited” back.

I remember his breath on my neck.

I remember thinking, Oh no, this isn’t happening. I remember thinking: Think. And think fast. Even now, I can hear myself saying the words and I marvel how anyone could have believed them; wooden, stilted words. Manufactured.

“I, too, find you very attractive.”

Some instinct told me to just agree with him.

“You are a very handsome man.” I didn’t look up. I remember the Florida sunlight, cheerful on the white kitchen tiles.

My feet, bare; his feet, boots; the toolbox, open: wrenches, vise grips, a hacksaw.

“If I wasn’t a newly wed, I’d be very taken with you.”

I think I told him his timing was bad, what with me being, essentially, still on my honeymoon, and all.

I said all this, motionless, in a flat, calm voice.

After a few minutes all the air seemed to go out of him.

Slowly, he unpinned me from the wall and my dress fell back to my knees. He seemed annoyed. Not mortified. Not humiliated. Not angry. Just miffed. I showed him to the door. He didn’t look back. I shut the deadbolt and slid down the door to the cold marble floor.

What I remember most about that event is the absolute clarity of my thought about the knife drawer. How, unbidden, some part of me had identified the danger early. I also think back to just how little value I had put in that powerful intuition.

When my kids were young, I had them read Gavin de Becker’s book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence. It was published in 1998 but its message is timeless. De Becker is a worldrenowned security expert. He’s also a good storyteller with valuable information to share. In debriefings, victims of various crimes — in particular, crimes of a sexual nature — acknowledge that they suspected something was wrong well before trouble announced itself. In each case, they had undervalued intuition. In his book, de Becker teaches the reader how our default settings – politeness, deference, doubt – are exploited by those who mean us harm.

Each time a sexual assault hits the news, the outcry is that some mechanism in society has failed. Culpability is often assigned to third parties.

We can punish sexual predators, but sadly, we can’t legislate them away.

No campus email alert or headline can replace awareness, judgment and caution. There’s no greater security device or system than the gift of fear; informed intuition is a powerful ally. Double- gate your life; trouble can still find you. Your best line of defence is intuition.

And intuition is a better partner than luck.