The Expiration of Girlhood

When I was twelve, my grandmother told me that pain was a woman’s destiny. She said this with pronounced certainty, like a doctor delivering a critical diagnosis. I was a nervous child, I bit the tips of my fingers - not the nails, just the tips, eating away at my fingerprints until they were raw, white circles of dead skin that were unnerving to look at. Stop that, my grandmother said. When I asked her what destiny meant, she answered that it was the inevitable happenings of life. When I asked her what inevitable meant, she answered that it means unavoidable. So, pain was unavoidable for women, what a senseless and dark condition to have, I begged her to tell me if she knew of any cures and she laughed and said the only thing that’s provided her an inch of relief was self-medication. I asked, self-medication of what, she said of whiskey.

I was disappointed. I had tasted whiskey once, on Easter. It was brown and translucent like apple juice, sitting in my dad’s glass on the dinner table. I reached for it and as I did I noticed my dad utterly captivated by my innocence, like it was a language he forgot how to speak. He watched me sip it, gag and run to the sink to spit it out. His convivial attitude towards the incident challenged my mother’s forbidding expression of disapproval on the opposite end of the table. A person in their 40s or above thinks their scope of reality is holistic and complete and there are no hard truths left for them to be confronted with. They think a life is as meaningful as it is long. My dad watched hungrily and curiously at the reminder of youthful stupidity; I tasted the whiskey with no reluctance, expecting something sweet. My mother had no such fondness or nostalgia in her observance of the event. If anything, in retrospect, she was grateful I didn’t like the taste as much as my dad did. At twelve, I was comforted by the notion that my age was a shelter, preserving my unscathed view of the world and its varying people, all different, but all good. I’m thankful foolishness is easily forgiven in children.

I didn’t like the whiskey because I didn’t like things that tasted man-made. I complained about this to my grandmother, and she said that’s too bad, because that pain she was talking about, the pain of womanhood, she said, most of it was man-made, too.

I knew what she meant far sooner than I should have. Learning a sad truth can happen in an instant. For me, for most women, it was an accumulation of moments over years of girlhood. It was too many instances of fleeting pleasure at the expense of my completeness. It was a chin two days after being freshly shaven, scraping the skin of my face, of my chest. It was fear of disappointment and hollow touches and trembling legs and a few other things, too, until I got the gist, then I knew my body was a privatized jungle gym of which I owned very little. I made an effort to stop biting my fingers, hoping to regenerate the prints that the government promised would make me unique. Individuality is one of those things women are ridiculed for both having and lacking. I lived for so long with my fingers in my ears until a large, dirty pair of workman’s hands pried them away and I was left with stomach cramps and fourteen new earth-shattering last-lines of poems that haven’t been written. At some point, I stopped braiding my hair. I stopped neatening my blouses before leaving the house. I brushed my teeth once a day instead of twice. I once heard an incel say a woman’s deepest wish was to be desirable. After exiting girlhood, I wanted nothing more than the dead opposite.

I met Jon on my twentieth birthday at a bar that didn’t card its guests. It was a winter without mercy, disinterestedly adding a thick layer of cold to every evening. The weather was terrible and I looked especially gauche in my purple sequin get-up against the carelessly gray sky. I didn’t think any man I’d meet late at night in a bar would strike me as a potential lover, but after a few drinks and hours of conversation, I realized Jon was a recruitable blank slate.

Jon didn’t have much to say about anything. I liked him for his big shoulders and his gentle manner of speech. His belly was rounded and hairy, and it felt warm against mine when we fucked. We went out a few more times after my birthday before giving the relationship a title: Jon called it a partnership, I called it a transparent Band-Aid. Jon didn’t feel strongly about anything. His parents raised him to be malleable. I hated them as quickly as he introduced them to me. Meeting them was knowing them. They were Catholics; the sort that cry during mass and then flip off the unhurried Mazda in the church parking lot. Their first son impregnated his godless girlfriend at twenty-one. Their second son brought a ‘friend’ (male) to Thanksgiving. I’m sure they did it three times a day every day for weeks until the miracle of Jon appeared in his mother’s dusty womb. Third time’s a charm? Hardly. They didn’t like me either. I’m a pseudo-Christian boomer’s worst nightmare. When I first met them, I told them I was a writer, and they looked at me the way people look at mothers who don’t love their babies. I made a joke about generally disliking men, and when I left for the bathroom, I heard Jon’s father say I’m trouble.

Jon’s bedroom in their house was hardly touched from childhood. I had to look closely to see that the wallpaper was light blue behind all the baby pictures and T-ball championship team photos. On top of the dresser was a plethora of trophies for sports and academic contests, mostly ones for participation. As we laid in his bed, I told him what I heard his father say about me and when he looked concerned I told him not to worry because I don’t care what ugly, old men have to say about me. He said that’s my dad you’re talking about and I said that my dad could kick his dad’s ass, and he said he wouldn’t doubt it because my dad was unhinged and drank too much. We both laughed and kissed but I couldn’t have sex with him because I imagined his parents compulsively decorating this room year after year, refusing to be proud of their other children’s success and it made me sick and unable to get aroused.

I loved Jon, so much, in a way that was severe and sometimes cold. I wished he gave more thought to the conversations we had. I wanted to fight with him. I wanted to get him angry with me from time to time, to validate the frightened child that saw wickedness in most things. I tried my damndest, but he rarely got upset. If I intentionally left a pile of dirty dishes in the sink of his apartment after he cooked me dinner, he’d clean them all, silently. If I flirted with the friends he invited over on Friday evenings, touching their hair and belly-laughing at their jokes, he’d tell me later he was happy I got along with them so well. I didn’t just show Jon the ugly, I thrust it in his face. I let him come to my family-only college graduation party and witness my dad stumble over his “she’s a bitch, but at least she can write,” speech that no one asked for. Jon helped my dad off the table he climbed on and drove him home. Jon didn’t ask where my mother was, he knew I didn’t have her phone number or address. Jon held me when I cried and brushed the knots out of my hair when I couldn’t. Looking at him made me feel guilty, like whatever debauched, sickly creature living inside me wanted companionship in its misery and sought him out for that. I told a therapist this, once, and she said I need to figure out why I think I’m so dirty and everyone around me is so clean. Then I had a fifteenth last line for an unwritten poem.

My grandmother died before she got to meet Jon, but he sat next to me in the front pew at her service. Before her death, I called her every Monday, and I think she liked the version of him she knew from my descriptions. I told her Jon was gentle and patient, and she said that sounded like how my dad used to be, back when he was viceless.

The funeral was the first time in years I saw both my parents in the same room. My mother uttered her condolences to me, paid respect to the casket and did not linger. My grandmother always had kindness left to parcel out to her while she endured her marriage to my dad. My mother was cruel in the removal of herself from the havoc of my father’s disease; she couldn’t tolerate the absence of such cruelty in her daughter who foolishly believed she was important enough to her father to inspire sobriety.

My grandmother was lovely enough to never truly voice her agreement with my mother, but her disapproval of my forgiving nature was evident in her constant jabs at ‘the male species.’ My dad’s behavior at the funeral made a case for her and my mother. He tripped on his way to the altar and kneeled for a lengthy period of time; I wondered if the God he thought he was talking to could understand slurred prayers. I felt humiliated by the idea of a higher power, and the attribution of my grandmother’s life and death to it. When I was younger, I believed in a God and I imagined Her with large, hairy breasts and long, sparkling acrylic nails. Next, I learned about WWII in third grade and I figured God must be a man. Finally, I met Jon’s parents, and I realized I had no creator and neither did they, nor anyone for that matter. The only grand maker of things is circumstance. Though I rejected the notion of fate, I continued to beg a deaf sky for scraps of relief from the unpatched cracks of womanhood.

I kept the rosary my grandmother gave me hanging from my rearview mirror. It was pink, her favorite color. One sharp left turn and it fell and broke and some of the beads were lost forever among the dust and deserted M&Ms littered under the car seats. It happened on the way to dinner with Jon’s parents, and I was certain it was their fault. In retaliation, I made a comment during dinner about my grandmother’s diabetes and the heinous expensiveness of insulin in this country. They ignored it, the snobs, but Jon’s mother finished three Bloody Marys by dessert, so I imagined the talk of their car ride home was a real class act.

During our ride home, a familiar coldness breathed itself into my abdomen; as my grandmother would say, a woman’s monthly destiny. When we stopped at a pharmacy, I asked if Jon would go in the store for me because I needed to call my dad. Of course, he agreed. My dad answered after the first ring. I wanted to talk to him about how he always used to say I was too analytical of others, like the time I swore my 6th grade math teacher was a pedophile because he gave the girls, only the girls, lollipops after every exam. Or the time I suspected my cousin Mary was being abused because she wore a long-sleeved swim-shirt to the beach. I wanted to remind my dad about the time he said my over-observance would drive him to insanity, and that his marriage fell apart because of a conspiracist daughter and not an incorrigible addiction. I wanted to tell him I was a little girl until the world pointed at me and said little girls don’t exist here, and I was hurled into adulthood as fast as a teenage boy gets a hard-on. Hyper-vigilance was written in my stars, like my grandmother warned me of. I had no choice but to forgo my doe-eyes and retreat to a corner and whisper what I see, like a child learning to identify different letters and colors. I had so many things to say to him but said none of them. Instead, I let him convince me that he was glad I called and that he was finally getting sober. Jon entered the car at this point, tossing the box of products onto my lap as I told my dad how happy I was to hear his news and I couldn’t wait to see him.