by Amy Reed
Just before the school year gave way to summer, we sat side by side in the little room the trainer used to tape up injured athletes. The union of our fingers and palms felt like an event horizon, a point of no return with galactic consequence. Outside observers might see something as benign as two teenagers clasping hands, but inside my soul felt pulled someplace unmapped, even in my imagination. Could someone really care about me, despite the many ways I was flawed and broken? Or was he after something else?
That fall, our team had competed in the state cross-country meet. Afterward, exhilarated and silly, a few of us decided to play a game of strip poker on a creaky antique bed in the grand Victorian bed-and-breakfast the team was staying in. The place belonged to someone who taught at the school, and it had been won in a game of cribbage. The winning hand hung on the wall in a frame. It was the sort of thing I’d never seen before and couldn’t imagine: wealth that enabled people to bet something as big as a house, and the audacity of the winner taking what he’d been offered, what he’d won, but what was simply too big to be transferred so casually.
I did not win the game.
I lost, with agonizing slowness. And as my clothes came off, piece by piece, I found myself regretting my underwear. Rather than putting on something lacy and daring and desirable—which I’d recently acquired—I’d chosen my most comfortable bra for after the race. A jog bra. I can no longer remember its color, but I liked wearing those because they were streamlined and functional, and they had no cups to remind me of what I lacked. (My breasts were small enough that my parents discussed their size behind my back, and my mom later presented me with their conclusion: I had small boobs because my body fat percentage was low.)
Somehow, just as I had hoped, despite my failure to wear alluring underwear, this boy and I found ourselves in the parlor, a room with French doors and a couch silhouetted in moonlight like some great lounging beast. Despite the presence of the couch, we were on the floor. Or, rather, I was. He was on top of me. I’d put my shirt back on, and he took it off, and then my bra was off, and he was kissing my lips, my neck, my bare flesh, those small breasts that had been found undersized by my own parents.
His hands wandered lower. I pushed them away.
I was not ready for this.
I was a Catholic girl who’d promised to save herself for marriage, if there was anything left to be saved after what had happened with the man in the little red car. It wasn’t that I’d thought of that man again, not really. Every once in a while I thought of the glint of sunlight off of his glasses. I thought about the word he’d used. Dolly. But most of my energy was spent hiding the broken bits of me.
I had never wanted to be anything but good, and I was not. Every time my parents scolded me, every harsh word I heard, every time I failed to achieve perfection in a world that demanded it: be a girl, but not like the other girls; be like a boy, but not a boy; be the fastest, the smartest, the best . . . By the time I was that age and on my back beneath a boy, I felt like it was only a matter of time that the rotten truth of me would be laid bare for the world to see, and I would be rejected once and for all.
It was a dark room we were in. But my eyes had long been used to darkness, and I saw everything. That darkness that we fumbled in felt dangerously day bright. I was still the six-year-old who did not want to be seen as she suffered, the one who had to be covered in a shirt, the one who tried to walk an impossible line between masculinity and femininity, the one who had no place in the world where she felt wanted just as she was, except by the cruelest of strangers.
“No,” I whispered when he slipped his hand into my pants.
He rolled off me. And he sat there, his edges bathed in moonlight. And then he said good night and walked through the French doors and into the darkness beyond.
I put my shirt back on. I slipped into my room and under the covers, trembling, wondering why on this night, of all nights, he’d wanted to do so much more than we ever had in the past. Had he wanted me? Or had he just wanted sex?
The next morning he stood in the open doorway of the bus taking us home. He glanced down at me and said nothing. He turned his back to me and got on the bus. I sat by myself up toward the front, bewildered and numb.
The next week marked the opening of the season for Tolo, the dance where the girls chose their dates instead of the other way around. Surely he wouldn’t have done those things to me if he didn’t like me, I told myself. And so I called him on the phone and I asked him if he’d be my date to the dance before it was officially announced.
It was a faux pas, but I needed to know where I stood.
He did not answer directly. I cannot recall the rest of the conversation, or even whether there were more words.
I did not need them, though, to have my answer.
He went to the dance with another girl, an extraordinarily beautiful one with dark eyes and hair, elegant cheekbones curving over dimpled cheeks, and teeth that gleamed like cultured pearls.
He and I never spoke to each other again. I was nothing to him, after all. Just a mouth to kiss on the floor of a grand mansion that was worth less to someone than the thrill of gambling it away.
“And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything . . . Grab them by the pussy.
You can do anything.”
—Donald Trump
A few years later, I was working at a hotel on Crete, a small island off the coast of Greece that I’d first read about in my books of mythology. Crete was home of the labyrinth, a maze built by Daedalus to contain the monstrous offspring of the queen and the bull she loved. As legend told it, a hero named Theseus, with help from a girl named Ariadne, found his way out of the maze. Theseus later abandoned Ariadne as she slept, and Daedalus’s son Icarus flew too close to the sun on wings made of wax and fell to his death in the sea. Crete was a beautiful tragedy, a cautionary tale about love and wishes.
In real life, though, the labyrinth isn’t so much a maze as it is a mazelike series of small rooms below the surface of red-gold soil. On the walls throughout the hive of rooms, someone had long ago carved two-headed axes. Labryses. Butterfly-shaped, and symbols of female divinity. These axes gave the space its name.
Outside the labyrinth, archeologists had arranged huge jugs that contained remnants of ancient olive oil. These jugs were called amphorae because they are carried with two hands. That’s literally what the Greek word means: “carried with both.” The English word “ambivalent” comes from the same root, and it means “bonded to both things.”
I was twenty years old that summer, with dark hair that fell below my shoulders. My body was slim, and for the first time since I was four years old, I wore a two-piece bathing suit. The top part fit, which struck me as miraculous enough that I was willing to pay twenty dollars for it.
I spent the summer working there, making drinks for German tourists, clearing tables, washing dishes, and doing whatever else I’d been asked, even as it was not the translation work I thought I’d be doing. I was there, and aimed to make myself useful. I shared a two-room cottage with two women from Denmark. They shaved their crotches but not their armpits, and found it strange that I did the opposite. They also made fun of my pale skin—“You look like milk!”—so I did my best to brown myself up.
During the long lunchtime breaks Greeks take at midday, we’d often go to the beach together. My roommates laughed at me for tanning with my top on. The one time I took it off, an adolescent boy approached me on the pebbled beach, ostensibly to sell me something. His eyes never left my chest. I felt mortified. Dirty. Judged for being too small, too slutty, too something.
The boy was shirtless.
One day during my lunch break, I lay on some flat black rocks by the shore, my eyes closed against the midday sun. I perceived a shadow and felt something metal drag from my navel to my throat. I opened my eyes. Silhouetted against the brazen blue sky was my boss, who was probably in his fifties but seemed to me an old man with his slicked-back, iron-colo
red hair and his manner of exhaling cigarette smoke with his tongue jutting up and out, like a stone gryphon’s.
He was a beloved hero on the island, the kind of man who’d invite priests for dinner and dancing on the balcony as the setting sun stained the Mediterranean red. That metal thing I’d felt sliding from my bikini bottom to my throat was the crucifix that hung from his neck. My eyes went wide. I said nothing. I took myself inside.
Not long after that, he invited me to stay at his apartment in Athens. He told me not to tell the others, but said I could use it as a base for exploring the mainland. I thought he was being generous, so I took him up on it. I arrived in Athens exhausted from a ferry ride that deposited me at the docks around midnight. He greeted me at the door wearing a bathrobe made of silver silk, embroidered with a Rolls-Royce logo over his heart. The robe was short enough to show the hem of his white underpants.
“Are you strong enough?” he asked.
“Strong enough for what?” I pushed him away, realizing at once how naive I’d been.
The apartment had one bedroom. I took refuge there and barricaded myself in, sliding a honey-colored bedside table in front of the doorway. Through the square glass of frosted window in the door, I could see his silhouette hesitate and then disappear. I slept fitfully in the queen-sized bed, waking up every so often, every time having to remind myself where I was.
The next morning, over a light breakfast, he asked me if it would have made a difference if he’d been his son’s age. His son was twenty-three.
He was still wearing the short bathrobe. I couldn’t bear to look him in the eye, but I didn’t want to look at his bare legs, so I studied the tablecloth, the teacup, the empty bowl of yogurt.
“No,” I said. “It would not have made a difference.”
I left after breakfast and checked myself into the YWCA on America Street, praying my credit card would go through. Once I had secured a tiny, private room with a twin bed, I went to the Acropolis, where the Parthenon rose into the blue like the shattered carcass of a once-splendid animal. An Englishman’s voice behind me announced, “Prepare yourself for one of the defining moments of your life.”
I turned. He wasn’t talking to me. He’d taken his wife by the forearm so that he could let her know she was about to be forever changed by this relic of the past. He wore a tan shirt, tan shorts, and a tan hat, and I hated him immediately.
Later, when I went into my boss’s office to confront him for what he’d done, he denied everything. I’d misunderstood, he told me.
“What if I told your wife?” I said.
“Let’s tell her right now,” he replied.
I paused.
Maybe I did misunderstand. Maybe I was being stupid. In any case, I did not want to tell his wife, who had sad brown eyes, russet curls, and the soft body of a woman who’d borne two children, the sort of physique that had inspired sculptors in grander ages than ours. I left his office, doubting myself. Not just my body now, but also my mind.
And yet . . . there was that question he’d asked, in his moment of humiliation: Would it have made a difference if I were my son’s age?
I should have told him yes.
* * *
I’ve had to prove myself with every job I’ve ever held, and I thought I’d figured out the formula. It was the same one I’d used all through school. Watch the boys. Watch the men. Be as good or better if you can be.
“What, you run marathons?” a male city desk editor said when I mentioned I was training for one. Apparently my body didn’t look capable.
“No offense,” another male boss told me when I was applying for a job I was amply qualified to do, “but how much experience do you have?”
I had a lot, in truth. I was the editor of my college newspaper and managed a staff of more than a hundred and a budget well over a million dollars. I’d won journalism awards. But no matter what I’d done, it was never enough. Never the right kind. Or I wasn’t the right kind of person.
“People like you are a dime a dozen,” one editor told me.
And it was true. Print journalism had become a pink-collar job, chock-full of white women who wanted to do some good for the world, to be brave, to ferret out the truth from dark places and bathe the wounds of the world in healing sunlight. Once women decide to do something, the work loses its value.
Here’s what I wish I’d asked him: And what about you—a middle-aged white man. How much per dozen?
I didn’t even think to ask it, or question for a moment a man’s right to succeed. All my life, I’d been watching white boys and white men compete. I tried to make myself into one of them, and while I never wanted to be one, I was ambivalent about femininity. I could see nothing to love about it, even as I wanted to be loved as a girl. And at every step of the way, I learned just how little I was valued. Not for my body. Not for my heart. Not for my mind. All of it was for boys and men to manipulate, and for me to go along with it. I thought I was being a feminist, when in reality I was hating women. And in centering my life around the men who had the power—white men—I was utterly disregarding other women, and particularly women of color, who carry at least twice my burdens.
Sometimes I think I tried so hard to erase this truth of me that I willed myself to have a small chest, the least a woman can have and still be a woman. It didn’t make a bit of difference. In every job I ever had, I made less than the man sitting next to me—including the one I married, the one man I decided to believe when he told me he loved me.
It wasn’t until we had two daughters that I began to see the world differently. I had no choice in the matter. These girls, one with dark hair and eyes and one blue-eyed and fair, are like suns to me: so beautiful it hurts to look at them. There is nothing wanting about their bodies, their minds, their souls. They do not have to be like boys in any way to generate a force that pulls my heart the way the moon pulls at the earth, invisibly, but inexorably. They are enough, miraculous, splendid, just as they are, for just who they are. I refuse to see them—or any girls—through the warped lens of a world that loves men best.
All girls are as distinct as individual stars in the sky. All girls are also part of the universe’s infinite pattern. How wonderful, to be just like all the other girls in this way. How wonderful to be part of this vast and dazzling existence.
The dust of the baseball field is made from the dust of stars. And so are you and I, and this is the truth: each of us emerged from the soft hollows of a single woman who was like no other, and yet like all the others. We are all linked backward through time to the first star that pierced the velvet of night.
Billions of us, and every last one of us full of light so brilliant it stings, if only we are brave enough to look.
IS SOMETHING BOTHERING YOU?
Jenny Torres Sanchez
I was in seventh grade and late for the bus again. I was wearing light pink jeans as I ran across my front yard on a rainy morning, just barely making it on to the bus, and collapsed in my seat. Another fine morning.
When I got to school, my friend yelled, “Jenny! You have a bunch of crap all over your jeans!” She pointed and laughed as others turned to look at me. Sometimes I wondered why that girl and I were friends.
I rushed to the bathroom and saw how splattered and stained my jeans were with mud. I was angry and I started to cry. I didn’t like to cry, and definitely not at school. But it was too much, and I guess I cried in a way that my friend knew wasn’t really about my jeans.
Later that day, the school guidance counselor called me into his office. It was a small, claustrophobic room. Maybe that was part of the reason I didn’t tell him my father was being chased by Ku Klux Klan members. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell him that in that very moment, while we sat in his tiny office and he looked at me curiously and asked me questions, a group of men could be beating my father to death.
I sat on a small leather couch.
“Someone said they were worried about you,” he said.
My friend who was sometimes mean and sometimes nice came to mind. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Is something bothering you these days, Jenny? Anything you want to talk about?”
“No.”
He tried several times, rephrased questions, tried different angles. But I shot him down each time. And when he told me to please come back if I ever wanted to talk, I knew I never would. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
In the weeks before I found myself on that leather couch, I sat on the floor of my living room with my older sister and baby brother because my parents had gathered us together. My sister and I exchanged looks. We knew something was up. We’d never been gathered like this before. We didn’t have family meetings or family game nights. Something was wrong.
My father looked at us and proceeded to tell us he wouldn’t be home regularly. As an interstate trucker who ran routes up and down the East Coast, he was hardly home as it was, but his schedule did bring him home at least a couple days a week. But now, he said, he would be home even less.
“Why?” we asked.
“There’s a problem,” he said. He didn’t want to tell us, but he also needed to explain his absence. He didn’t want to scare us, he said, but he wanted to tell us the truth. So, my dad explained to us about the men who were following him. “They tell me they’re in the KKK. I think it’s better if I don’t come home. I don’t want them to know where we live. I lose them before I come here, but it’d just be safer not to come home as much. They keep finding me on the road again.” I could see him trying to stay strong and calm for us. But underneath it, I saw fear.
I looked at my sister. I always looked to her. And she looked worried.
My dad told us about the trucker who’d been asking for directions over the CB radio in Spanish because he didn’t speak English and was trying to find the warehouse where he had to make a delivery. My father had given him directions in Spanish even though some other truckers told him to Shut up! Speak English! Go back to your own country! Grown men were upset over my father’s kindness and willingness to help. Grown men decided to terrorize him because of it.