How to Wrestle a Girl

by Venita Blackburn

  The website for the trainer seemed legit and even included an interview on a national morning talk show, no pricing info, which piqued the couple’s interest, daring them to prove their worth as newcomers to such a high-priced city with unattainable real estate. On their appointment day, the couple walked up the stairs to the trainer’s home not at all prepared for what they’d encounter. Drums and chants welcomed them. There were shrines to several gods, some recognizable to the couple and others more mysterious. Partner #1 had seen Santeria in practice at her aunt’s home, a Cuban expat with glaucoma and a temper. Here was a familiar altar easily mistaken for an abstract sculpture, wires and scrap metal, the head of a broken hammer, slips of paper, one with a penciled eye, at the center a female doll, Our Lady of Charity, all painfully and meticulously arranged. Partner #2 saw the look of recognition in partner #1 and felt more at ease. A happy Buddha losing small flecks of gold paint rested under a mirror. Beside the mirror hung a tiny Christ like a queer sconce, similar to one that still resided in partner #2’s childhood home, the son of God on his perpetual cross with tears of blood frozen on his head and ribs.

  The trainer led them all, partner #1, partner #2, Duchess, and Gnarls Barkley, out of the hall of deities and into the main room, where yet another shrine existed. They noticed a side table without a cloth, laden with figurines of gray schnauzers in many sizes—one too big for the top of the table so it sat underneath, others strategically placed above in various poses of delight, play, sadness, and contentment. Their clay tongues lolling or pointed, ears perked in perpetuity. Partner #1 and partner #2 looked at each other and nearly smiled at the question posed by this house: What kind of human collects both gods and porcelain schnauzers?

  Silently, the couple shared a thought about the morality and/or sanity of practicing so many religions at once in such close proximity inside of one room and one woman.

  The couple’s reverie was not long-lived and they remembered why they were there, and it wasn’t for religion or a religion that still had a name. Shortly after moving in together partner #1 touched partner #2’s breasts in a way that was declared offensive. The two have yet to recover.

  In the light of the main room, the trainer glowed like an aging rock star except her feet were bare and toenails a little dirty. The trainer sat everyone down on a green king-sized sheet that covered the hardwood, and asked what were the main issues. Partner #1 considered the question and how much there was to repair, how they had tried several cramp-inducing sex positions, how they had abandoned them all for wine and binge-watching television shows, how soon their lives were consumed with cleaning, washing clothes, and wiping every surface of their home and cars and seeking out exhausting menial domestic gestures of affection to avoid each other but still be with each other, and how touching partner #2 now looked more like calculus than love. Partner #2 said the dogs didn’t get along. During the move to the city, Duchess bit Gnarls Barkley twice on the back of the neck for undisclosed reasons. The attack was brief though blood fell.

  Both partners #1 and #2 had high expectations for the trainer’s response to both the answer given and the one unspoken, and after a serious nod the trainer said, “Well, if they’ve been violent they can’t be alone together anymore; the risk is too great.” It was an obvious solution that they hadn’t considered, and felt somewhat more hopeful, a kind of relief. An inevitable end for them all: separation.

  Then Gnarls Barkley lost his shit. He growled and whined and lunged and humped in the direction of the dog shrine. On the website the trainer wore a sweater with her business logo and jeans. She spoke with a boss-like kindness and authority even to the hostess of that morning show, as if she were being trained along with the labradoodle panting under spotlights. But here in her wide brown skirt with lace trim and the ferocity of Gnarls Barkley, the trainer sweated. She made attempts to control him with odd clicks and snaps then squirts of water and bitters to his face that all failed. Her embarrassment was sour, and could not compete with the feral desire of Gnarls Barkley for every one of the porcelain schnauzers. The partners realized that the relief they felt earlier and the solution given came from a charlatan, that she did not understand how to teach love. They would not take her advice or pay her fee when every promise of a correction lay broken. The couple would go on, drawing blood from barely any contact while waiting for a real answer. Partner #1 spoke gently, excusing them all from the room and the shame, then passing through the hall as every one of the gods closed their eyes.

  Not for Resale

  DADDY’S GIRL BARBIE

  Treat her like she’s the best because her daddy says she is his little girl. She plays sports with the boys, rides in the front seat, swears at the playoffs, and starts a gas-powered lawn mower. Daddy’s Girl Barbie doesn’t need your approval when she has his. Be tough, never feel scared to speak up for yourself. Learn to feel more comfortable in groups of guys than with girls and develop repressed sexual attraction to older men.

  Comes with three sports balls, removable baseball cap, game-day T-shirt, and shorts. Two-door Jeep and disregard for the value of women sold separately.

  PTSD BARBIE

  Imagine loving your country so much you would go anywhere to escape it. Feel the power of semiautomatic weapons and the screams of hot death still not as terrifying as your own childhood trauma. Be everything you can to everybody else because that is the minimum expectation for a woman: soldier, widow, mother, and mistress. Failure is not an option, especially when substance abuse keeps one unaware of time and space.

  Comes with Army fatigues, tattered bathrobe, a four-day supply of marijuana, and a stack of unopened bills. Memory of war zone fatality not included.

  SEX OFFENDER KEN

  Though difficult to spot, he is often included with many Barbie extended-family and neighborhood editions. Comes with removable dad bod and inflated sense of self.

  FAT GIRL BARBIE

  Know that there are amazing possibilities all around and inside. Never feel ugly and alone, because feelings are edible. Fat Girl Barbie remembers being outgoing and athletic as a child before personal tragedy upset her trajectory. Enjoy a potential for growth and artistic achievement along with a sparkling tendency toward unhealthy amounts of sex with unhealthy people. Never have enough of anything, including alcohol, Fruity Pebbles, anal, onion rings, and BDSM porn.

  Comes with Thin Girl Barbie wrapped in outer frame of Fat Girl Barbie + varying degrees of self-esteem issues.

  JESUS KEN

  Exciting adventure awaits in the historical revisionist minefield of Judeo-Christian theology. Have your image and symbols co-opted by white nationalist agendas. Let’s not forget capitalism! Billion-dollar businesses lobby your representatives, catering to the large Christian voting bloc. Offer hope to the most vulnerable communities of color that recognize the beauty of compassion, but not tools that arrest consciousness. Only the best brown leather sandals for the son of God. Most boxes will be empty because the wonder of Jesus is often best left to the imagination.

  Skin will darken or lighten under hot or cold water to satisfy owner’s racial preference.

  BABY DYKE BARBIE

  Explore the grief of losing your most understanding and tolerant parent so thoroughly that it ages you half a lifetime in a year. Possess the maturity level of a thirty-year-old before you can legally drive a car. Marvel at your first sexual experience with another girl that is so good you cannot hold your lesbianism in till your late twenties as is expected to avoid bullying, ostracization, and sometimes homelessness. Be free in your choice of haircuts that resemble R&B singers’ from the late 1990s. Challenge the femme/butch dynamic with an androgynous makeup routine honed to perfection over ten years. Have fewer followers on social media but far more loyal friends than any straight people.

  Lace-up military-style boots, lip gloss, and gold chain definitely included. Strap-on sold separately.

  TEEN PREGNANCY BARBIE

  Transform into an adult in the blink of an
eye, then back again. Teen Pregnancy Barbie is actually not one doll but three! Depending on the operator’s mood, Teen Pregnancy Barbie can wait a few months and manage a relatively easy birth to become Teen Mom Barbie or instantly become [Your Choice] Barbie. Teen Mom Barbie knows the struggle but relies heavily on familial and government support to survive, eventually transforming into [Your Choice] Barbie.

  [Your Choice] Barbie has the largest accessory package of any Barbie because yes, she can be any Barbie.

  Comes with Gender-Neutral Baby. Failed Birth-Control Ken sold separately.

  Smoothies

  The first time a guy said I look like a man was at the Jamba Juice stand in the mall. He was still a boy, probably my age and sticky from adolescence. You look like a man. He said it as if he had the right to say anything to me. As if it was important for his survival, an echo of his ancestors who were my ancestors, long and Black and muscled, though we were two strangers holding smoothies. His phone was three generations older than mine. I had superior sneakers, a designer sweatshirt, better moisturizer, and even my drink held more protein and complexity, but he wielded his right to possess them all in one note of disgust. I took a sip as a man in a suit too tall to have a head in my sight line jingled the change in his pocket.

  You look like a man. It took a few seconds before I knew it wasn’t a compliment, that it was a lesson, an exchange, that he was learning too, how to be a man by not being a girl. In Sunday school we were learning about the first man and first woman and how Adam must’ve been closer to God because God made him first, and pretty much all the problems of all time thereafter came about because of Eve and a snack. I chewed a hunk of ice that hadn’t broken down properly, and a woman hit the headless suited man in the heel with her stroller.

  The boy could’ve said the words like he’d say hello or nice to meet you or where did you get that watch or what a wonderful day it is to be upright and breathing here together. But he said them in a different way, the way we tell strangers your shoes are untied or you have toilet paper on your ass. He saw himself in me and felt ashamed. He saw himself in me and felt proud, but pride wasn’t supposed to live inside of women, so he had to walk it back and cut its throat till the blood ringed around my neck.

  You look like a man. Years later it would become, You eat like a man. You walk like a man. You sound like a man. My chromosomes had not yet been tested. My birth certificate says female, live birth, seven pounds and three ounces.

  I didn’t think I wanted to be loved by boys until that boy told me it was not possible. I don’t remember what I looked like then, a few years ago, but I remember him, his dirty Chucks, ashy corners of his mouth, and dry scalp. Back then I stared deeply at people the way children do, still curious. He existed. I didn’t expect him to look back, though. Children are rarely seen, but I wasn’t a child anymore and had not fully realized that. Now strangers could assert their judgments on my whole body, my whole story, without permission.

  You look like a man. I was three sips into the smoothie before it hit. To be a woman seemed a terrible thing to have happen, and it happened at 3:54 on a Friday when I was fourteen to the sound of a blender jolted to life. Women have to be small, give birth, wear makeup. I could see all the women, the court reporters, the accountants, psychics and secretaries, biologists and senators, important but nameless, with inconvenient hairstyles and morning routines. Men got to invent women over and over one generation after another by the grace of God.

  The woman’s stroller spit out a toy from what must’ve been a child tucked inside. The mother cooed, then retrieved the toy and fed it back to the stroller. The mall was not a place to fall apart. It happened anyway. When I get hurt, usually the universe opens up a little, like a bullet through a watermelon. Things separate and scatter. It feels like this is how we really are all the time and everything else is just pretend. We pretend to have legs and skin and penises and milk ducts. We pretend some skin looks one way while other skin is different. We pretend to have green eyes and brown eyes and yellow teeth and gray teeth, and the sky is blue to us in the day and black at night. We pretend lots of things that are only sort of true when we are the sky and time and memory and the center of the earth and destiny and gods and gravity and salted oceans and children of the gods who ate their mothers and birthed the constellations and nebulas and death are a myth because everything goes into itself to begin again. There was fear and doubt on the boy’s face when I finally turned away. The condemnation dissolved. I, a girl, would grow to be a better man than he and still be a woman.

  The sugar pooled like acid on my tongue when the feeling passed. All the other customers departed, and it was just us under the fluorescent lights together again. There seemed nothing left to prove and a whole new point was born between us that we had not yet named.

  Blood, Guts, and Bile

  Nicole gathered her can’t-leave supplies for work on set—cordless power drill, color wheel, brushes, assortment of battery-free sex toys, acrylic paint (red, white, yellow, and black), blowtorch, and two packs of chewing gum for the stress. Walking into work was like strolling through a traveling meth den that happened to settle in the middle of a high school production of Julius Caesar; it was really coming together, and Nicole could hardly stomach it. There is a great and terrible force that moves among everyone on earth, this viscous invisible fluid of magnetism that is especially heightened in confined areas with poor ventilation and no natural light like subways, holiday dinner parties, brothels, and film studios. Fourteen years trailed behind her in the special-effects makeup business, a seamless pageant of costumes, rubber cement, paint, and body parts held and mashed into variations of glory and dismay. Her space was really just a corner partitioned off in the studio, large enough to house small aircraft but tiny by industry standards.

  Nick!

  I can’t give a single fuck right now, Ree. This body armor is going to take half the day.

  Not one solitary single fuck? For me?

  Ree was the only man Nicole had successfully fantasized about having sex with, a deep-voiced, super tall, mostly asexual with the build of an inflatable dancing air man, but he could suddenly become that sexy school principal, the captain, the authoritarian smooth as a jazz trumpet player with the unfortunate vocabulary of a twelve-year-old girl and mannerisms of a 1990s R&B singer, meaning he was super gay. Nicole held her head inches from the flame of her blowtorch as it neared the tip of a pink cylinder; the heat forced movement in the plastic, a concave and bubbling hiss. She looked up and said, What is it? with her eyebrows, the light of patience and love returning.

  Dar is on her way, Ree said, supposedly she tried to call you. She is super pissed, and everybody is seriously envisioning you as one hundred percent fired. I am not even kidding right now. Nicole let her eyebrows lower, shoulders rise, lips pout in a firm no-man-let-alone-a-little-white-puny-woman-runs-my-life-because-I’m-a-powerful-Black-woman-in-full-control-of-my-destiny-motherfuckers sort of way, though her immediate financial predicament, which was her perpetual financial predicament of barely enough to cover rent/food/gas/pretense of having more than enough, meaning never enough to cover rent/food/gas, meaning a cycle of growing debt and never-ending supplication to the patriarchy and its minions, which was number eight on her list of worst fears right above homelessness and prostitution out of desperation, meaning prostitution, put her in sudden fear of whatever judgment Dar might lay before her.

  Nicole’s phone is not on the list of can’t-leave items, especially since Reginald “Ree” Lee is the only person she ever really talks to, and they work eleven hours a day together. Nicole earned her spot as this feature’s special-effects go-to gal when she delivered the base for a set requiring a frozen Medusa. She found a bust of George Washington, sanded down the eyes, melted dildos to the crown, and voilà, a star was born. Dildo Medusa was Dar’s favorite prop, but it had been rapidly turning into Nicole’s one-hit wonder.

  She arrived. If Nicole were a tree, Dar would be the t
iny pug that comes to pee on it every day. There was something oddly natural in that arrangement, not because of sex or race or orientation, though it could be argued that Dar was an heiress to a fortune of a certain kind that Nicole still couldn’t quite quantify. Dar was short for Darcy, Darcy MacDowell, originally from Shreveport but worked the accent out of her vocal cords with Grey Goose and cigarettes. As with many women of her generation, her aging hormones left her figure asymmetrical like a dented can of stewed tomatoes, and unwillingness to wear a proper bra caused her breasts to float sneakily under her ever-present faded black T-shirts. There was something about their connection, something Nicole never talked about except with Ree. They were nearly fifteen years apart, Dar pushing fifty so hard you could see the digits on her palms. Nicole was just over thirty and delighted as hell not to be twenty-anything anymore. The two were the same height (not tall at all), had a thing for beautiful sexually fluid women (good Lord, yes), and though they were working on a sci-fi historical disaster film about zombies in ancient Rome, they were true artists, who cursed the assumption that computer-generated images were superior to good old-fashioned latex, and appreciated each other’s profound ability to imagine something else, a better you than you could ever dream of, a you so powerful that it actually swallows the original, holds it under its tongue to savor the birth of something bright, new, robust, fierce: the mangled corpse of a soldier who fought, died, and rose to fight again in the undead armies bound to the task of retrieving Helen of Troy (even though that was historically a different country).