All Eyes on Her

by Poonam Sharma

  “We are told time and again as children that girls do not act aggressively,” professor McNulty explained from behind her desk. “However, if you look more closely, the evidence actually tells us the opposite. And when you accept that emotional aggression is as valid as physical aggression, and analyze it systematically, it begins to make a lot of sense.”

  The camera pans over to the host, who is chewing on the end of his glasses, pensively, while the professor continues.

  “Fact—As animals, it is only natural that all humans feel the instinct for aggression. Biologically, it is the primary tool at our disposal to contend with the chemicals released in our brain when we feel a physical threat. Fact—We are taught as children that while boys will be boys, girls should make nice, or else risk being considered wild. Fact—Studies have shown that girls begin to develop emotional intelligence far earlier than boys, and learn even before they leave grade school how powerful social status can be. Is it any surprise then that the effects of female emotional aggression not only cut deeper but linger longer than male physical aggression which is usually over once the boys have a chance to physically duke it out?”

  “According to McNulty—” the host’s voice-over narrates videotape of schoolgirls laughing together on playgrounds and in lunchrooms “—social and emotional aggression among adolescent girls is on the rise in this country, and its effects are alarming. Increasing pressure to conform to an unattainable physical ideal makes it easier for girls to tease, harass and essentially perpetrate a form of social death upon one another when competing for status in their social hierarchies.”

  “Emotional pain, or a stab at the reputation, if you will, takes the place of a physical stab at the heart,” McNulty explains while walking a tree-lined academic path alongside the host. “Unlike men, women have not historically won social status in their societies by causing physical harm to their enemies. Rather, in order to compete, women have had to devise clever tools of psychological warfare to make the other feel unwanted, out of place or small. Social ostracization quickly took the place of a punch in the face. And this happens as much among women in large extended families as it does in extended social groups.”

  An hour into the documentary, my phone rang.

  “See?” Sheila squealed.

  “Interesting.” I turned down the volume. “But what does this have to do with your monthly visitor?”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t say monthly visitor. You’re too old to say that.”

  “Okay, now I really am hanging up.”

  “No, wait. I’m sorry. It’s my mother-in-law. Don’t you get it?” she yelped. “She’s not ovulating anymore so she sees me as a threat to the resources of Joshua’s primary loyalty! That’s why she always needs to make me feel so left out! She’s trying to cut me down. Establish dominance. She’s…she’s throwing her feces at me!”

  “Sheila, breathe,” I urged, trying to stifle a grin. “We’ll get you a Handi Wipe.”

  “I won’t calm down! Everybody acts like this monster-in-law crap is okay, and so I am expected to accept it. Look at that hideous dress she bought me. Clearly, she wants to diminish my chances of breeding by making me look totally gross, even if it is subconscious. Because she knows that if I get pregnant then all the attention shifts toward me! Am I the only one that sees this?”

  “Honey, I’ll grant you that she’s an evil witch, but I don’t really think she wants to prevent you from having children. Wouldn’t that be kind of counterintuitive?”

  “Well then she’s going to have to choose between wanting grandchildren or wanting status in our family. Or ape clan. Or whatever. Because the stress of this passive-aggressive garbage is drying me up. I swear, I think my hair is starting to fall out.”

  “Sheila, I’m sure that she wants attention, but I don’t believe that your mother-in-law wishes you physical harm. You need to take a deep breath.”

  “I know, I know.” She started talking herself down. “I know she doesn’t have, like, some incestuous tendency toward Josh or anything. But I’m the new lactating female. And she’s not gonna get off my ass until she makes me look small in front of the entire family.”

  “You’re lactating?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “And I don’t know what to tell you.” I glanced at the clock. “You married into that tribe of baboons. So make like a monkey and groom up for as long as it takes to make her accept you into the group. It’s either that or find a way to finally teach your baboon that he belongs to only you now.”

  “Groom up?”

  “Yeah, weren’t you watching?”

  “I stepped away to make a sandwich. I was craving ham and pickles.”

  “Basically, they talked about how certain female monkeys allow others into their groups only if there’s some benefit for them. So you should do whatever it takes to ingratiate yourself to a higher-ranking female, so that she’ll be on your side, since there’s no one else who’s gonna defend you. Love your enemy and eventually she will have to love you.”

  “So you want me to come on to my mother-in-law?”

  “Yes, Sheila.” I got sarcastic. “That’s exactly what I am implying.”

  She giggled while I wished that I could take a squeegee to my brain.

  “I’m kidding,” she said, regaining her composure. “Anyway, thanks for listening. I gotta run. I saw a pint of rocky road in the freezer that I forgot we had. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  eight

  I HUNG UP THE PHONE AND TURNED UP THE VOLUME ON THE TV. How Sheila could take any of this stuff literally was beyond me.

  “Jealousy among schoolgirls, envy between older and younger women, even competition in the workplace.” McNulty continued, “As far back as the fairy tales we grew up with, like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, females have been trained to be suspicious of one another, and to resent power imbalances between ourselves and other women. Naturally, we cope by either placing other women on pedestals from which they are destined to fall—begrudging them their humanity—or by simmering with quiet aggression beneath a thin veneer of propriety. When aggression goes underground, and when physical attacks are replaced with emotional violence, can psychological terrorism among women be far behind?

  “Woe be to the woman who underestimates her adversary on the playground or in the workplace. Because if there is one thing that holds true across females of the different species and socioeconomic classes which I’ve studied over the last thirty years, it’s that the most vicious attacks are those which come as a surprise.”

  “So what does this mean for our society as a whole?” the host asks the camera. “Maybe Ms. McNulty should have the last word.”

  “Humanity is at a critical point in the evolution of our social mores. Never before in human history have we been able to openly acknowledge these issues and recognize their universality. As a culture, we only have two options. Either we can acknowledge woman’s capacity for aggression and begin to talk about it openly, or we can start telling our girls what we tell our boys, and let them take it out on each other physically. Maybe then, rather than growing up to be socially anxious, deceptively dismissive or sarcastically aggressive, a larger majority of our daughters can grow up to be the type of women who can get it off their chests and get on with their lives. Even if it means that most of us will have a few childhood scars to show for it.”

  The upside of having taken care of my mother after dad passed away was that ever since then, while most people were trying to convince their parents that they were no longer children, she presumed I could also take care of myself. The downside was that she assumed I still wanted to take care of her.

  “Did I wake you?” she asked me through the telephone, in the moment before I would have drifted back to sleep.

  “Of course not.” I tilted the alarm clock display away from my face, not even wanting to know how few hours were left until I had to get ready for work. “What’s going on?”

  “I don�
�t want to upset you, but the situation is that…I have decided not to move back to Los Angeles just yet. Darling, I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about it and I am not ready for it. I thought I was, but there are still too many memories of my life with your father there. So I need to ask you to please sell the house for me, and try to get a little more than I paid for it, if you can. Can you do that for me, honey?”

  “Sure, mom.” I rubbed my forehead, wondering how long it would take me to view, list and sell this house for her, with no real estate experience, and for a profit. “Sure I can.”

  “I feel so much better knowing that you have Raj there with you,” she added, imagining that the middle of the night before a workday was as good a time as any for some girl-talk. “How is he doing these days? You haven’t mentioned him lately.”

  “Oh, fine, Mom.” My voice almost cracked. “He’s fine.”

  “Yes, well, good. Very good. Tell him I thought of him a few days ago when I saw a young man who looked like him from afar, walking here in London. The man was crossing the street in front of my taxi. With some pretty young woman with the most beautiful red hair. He looked so much like Raj that I almost called out to him. Of course I didn’t because then I would have ruined the poor man’s evening, whoever he was. Anyway, you’ll tell him to tell his parents that I said hello, all right?”

  My father’s best friend died of cancer the year that I turned twelve. Ashok Uncle had been my parents’ first neighbor when they moved to the U.S., and my parents’ only connection to their culture for the first five years of their life here. Eventually, he became my father’s partner in his hedge fund. His wife of seventeen years remarried less than two years after his death. Despite my father’s having taken it so personally, at the time my mother spoke out in defense of Malika Auntie. In her words, no one had the right to judge her for not wanting to be alone.

  We were not raised to be comfortable with being alone, she had explained to me while we were folding clothes. We went from our father’s homes to our husband’s homes, and we assumed that by the time we were widows, our children would be grown, so we would grow old in their homes in the traditional Indian style. Like our parents did. Old age was full of family and friends and life, so there was no need for a companion. But life in America is different. No matter how much community we have here, it cannot be the kind of community which will compensate for Malika being alone for the last forty years of her life.

  No love or relationship can ever be perfect; if it could then we would have nothing to fight for. Growing up in the state with the highest divorce rate in the nation, and probably the world, that fact could not have been more clear. Although, there’s always the exception because somehow the idea that she could not make room in her heart for another man made me love my mother even more. As much as I wanted her to be happy, I was deeply content with the freedom to believe that their love would outlast even his life.

  The problem was it also made me shudder at the total vulnerability of marrying for a love like that of my own.

  Why anyone presumed my luck would be better than most at talking Lydia down off an emotional ledge was curious. Why Lydia’s agent had my cell phone number on speed dial was questionable. Why he summoned Jonathan and myself to a dilapidated boxing ring way out in East Los Angeles in the middle of the following afternoon was anybody’s guess.

  But then there were the billable hours.

  “Someone better get that goddamn preppy outta my face!”

  A cup of dark liquid came flying out of Lydia’s makeup trailer, milliseconds after I pulled open the door. Following closely behind the mess was a mousey-looking production assistant, who ran smack into Jonathan as if running for his life.

  “I don’t care if you have to drive three hours to find a goddamned Starbucks this time,” Lydia yelled after him. “I want it soy, and I want it HOT!”

  “May I?” I asked, before daring to enter.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” she said, plopping back into her makeup chair and swinging around to console herself with her reflection in the mirror. “F-ing ivy-league interns. That kid’s from Yale and he can’t even get a goddamn latte right.”

  “Lydia,” I said, and stepped inside, waiting until Jonathan shut the door behind us. “The deficiencies of an ivy-league education notwithstanding…why are we here?”

  “Because my client needs to be made to understand the definition of a contract,” Lydia’s chubby-cheeked, beady-eyed, suit-but-no-tie-wearing manager answered for her. He smoothed back his remaining piece of hair and kicked away a Chinese divider screen where he must have taken cover.

  He held out a pair of pink rhinestoned boxing gloves, which Lydia promptly smacked right out of his hands.

  “And my agent needs to stop talking to me like I’m an idiot,” she snarled, “before I fire his ass.”

  “Is there something objectionable in your contract for this photo shoot?” Jonathan asked.

  “Not technically,” the agent replied, bending down with some difficulty to retrieve the gloves from the floor. “But certain events could not have been foreseen. And we cannot reneg on the contract, no matter how ironic the event may seem at this point. We could be sued.”

  “It’s not the event, Marvin. It’s the title.” Lydia turned to face me.

  “You know that my name is Martin,” he corrected her, and then advised us, “My name is Martin.”

  “Well, since my last album put your kids through college, I think I’ll call you whatever I want, Marvin,” she scoffed. “Now Monica, do you think it’s unreasonable for me not to wanna do a photo shoot with the title ‘She’s Willing to Fight For It,’ considering the circumstances, as you lawyers like to say?”

  “What circumstances?” Jonathan and I echoed.

  Martin slammed a copy of Pucker into my hands. “Sources Say Camydia Has Less Than A Fighting Chance” the front-page headline screamed. It was emblazoned in bright red letters across a photograph of Cameron taken in the parking lot of a West Hollywood hotspot the previous night. Seated in the passenger side of his trademark blue sapphire Escalade was an “unidentified blonde” who was shielding her face from the paparazzi.

  “This is an endorsement deal for Outlast! It’s the most popular sports equipment company on the planet!” Martin pointed out the bejeweled logos twinkling across Lydia’s sports bra and satin boxing cloak. “You said you wanted an endorsement deal, and I got you the mother of all endorsement deals. Normally they won’t even consider giving them to non-athletes! We’ve got two hundred extras waiting inside that building to cheer you on, we’ve got three former heavyweight champions sitting in to play fake judges in the background of the shot, and the entire boxing ring has been lined with pink silk to match your tiara! If you pull out now, it’s a lawsuit!”

  “I. Ain’t. Doing it,” she told us forcefully, folding her arms in front of her.

  “Lydia!” he hollered.

  “You work for me, Marvin. And you are getting on my last nerve. Why don’t you go find that pink-diamond tooth cap they promised me? I’m probably not gonna do this shoot, but I’m sure as hell not doing it without my cap.”

  “Every hour we wait costs the company an extra hundred K,” Martin implored, before sulking out of the trailer. “And it hurts her career, too. This is a marital issue. It’s not about Outlast. It’s about Cameron. Please, try to make her see the bigger picture. I know it’s not what you signed on for, but I didn’t expect to be a fifty-year-old man scouring a boxing ring looking for a pink jewel-encrusted snap-on tooth cap.”

  Lydia ran her fingers over the glittery waistband of her boxing shorts. Jonathan picked her boxing gloves up off the counter and stepped between her and the mirror.

  “Maybe not as many people read Pucker as you think,” he tried.

  She stared blankly at him for a second before swiveling her attention to me.

  “Go ahead,” I said, sitting on the love seat across from her so that she knew she had my attention.

&n
bsp; “I can’t give ’em what they want.” She started tearing up.

  “Give who what they want?” I asked.

  “The media. The goddamn f-ing media.” She shook her head. “I am so tired of all this.”

  Jonathan chimed in, “You feel like you’ll look like an idiot if people think you’re threatening that woman through a magazine ad, right?”

  She nodded.

  “And you know what really pisses me off?” Lydia dabbed at her leaking eye makeup. “The media wouldn’t have anything to torture me with if these women would keep their hands off a married man. It’s not like they don’t know he’s married. I mean he’s not some random guy they never heard of. I’m mad at him, too, but…I don’t understand why women always have to go out of their way to hurt other women?”

  I said it before even realizing where it was coming from, “Because, deep down inside, some of us still believe that we can only get ahead if another woman falls behind.”

  “If I may,” Jonathan interrupted, lifting the custom-made tiara out of its case. “I have a suggestion. I think there’s a way to make sure you don’t look weak without you violating your contract.”

  The interior of the boxing gym was dressed as if the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy cast had thrown up all over it. The crowd sat ready to wave tiny logoed penants on cue, while bare-chested and well-oiled waiters with rippling physiques traversed the stands with trays of champagne. A silver-plated icebox full of Perrier bottles stood in place of a water bottle in Lydia’s corner. And above the ring in massive lettering there was a banner hanging with the phrase: Strong Women Refuse To Take Life Lying Down.

  Lydia squared her legs, tilted her tiara, and then faced off against the camera.

  And when they rang the bell, Lydia let go a smirk before swinging so hard that the crowd immediately went wild. She almost knocked that cameraman out of the ring.