More Than One Way to Be a Girl

by Dyan Sheldon

  The night before The Assault, I’d watched a documentary about Emma Goldman, the twentieth-century American political activist, philosopher and orator who led the struggle for workers’ and women’s rights. File under the heading: Positive role model. I fell asleep thinking of her. I dreamed that she was giving a speech on a street corner. There was an enormous crowd gathered to listen – mesmerized by her eloquence and passion, and surrounded by policemen. Suddenly, it began to rain and people started to run for shelter, until I was the only one left – I had my emergency rain hat with me – and Emma continued as if I was a multitude. It was better than the dream where I win a Nobel Prize. When I woke up, Emma Goldman was still in my mind.

  On my list of things to do that day were a couple of odd jobs in town – I did everything from mowing lawns and putting up screens to rewiring lamps and putting up shelves. I started fixing things around our house when I was eight or nine. My dad and mom are both great at their jobs but they’re fairly useless when it comes to basic household upkeep. They can change a fuse and clean out the filter on the washing machine, but that’s their limit – and as far as the car goes, their expertise stops at putting in petrol. Somebody had to be able to do necessary maintenance and repair, and the cats weren’t interested. I taught myself basic plumbing and carpentry, the man next door had a vintage motorcycle and he taught me basic mechanics. Our middle school offered an elective in woodwork and I took it – I was the only girl. I started fixing things in other people’s houses and putting the money I earned away for college when I was twelve – which may sound a little extreme but, as I said, I make plans and one of them is to take several college degrees.

  On my way home that Saturday, since she was still on my mind, I decided to go to the library to see if it had a book on Emma. It didn’t, which wasn’t exactly the surprise of the year. Howards Walk isn’t what anyone would call a bastion of radical thinking. I was on my way out when I glanced down one of the non-fiction aisles and there were Giselle Abruzzio and Jude Fielder. I don’t know whether I stopped because the sight of either of them in the library was so unusual that I wanted to be certain my eyes weren’t deceiving me, or because Jude Fielder wasn’t actually looking at the shelves of books as Zizi was, but at ZiZi’s breasts. And then he grabbed one – a breast not a book. To be fair to ZiZi, she looked as shocked as I felt. My first thought was: What would Emma Goldman do? Zizi didn’t do anything. She just stood there as if she’d been turned to plastic. Jude Fielder laughed. Then he said, “I just wanted to see if it was real.” Which made me think that he’s probably even more stupid than I’d always thought. ZiZi had a half-smile on her face, like she wasn’t sure what had just happened, but she must have been sure because she left so quickly she might have been on wheels. Jude Fielder waited a few minutes – presumably because he was at least smart enough to give her time to get away in case she recovered the power of speech and not because he’d suddenly discovered a love of books.

  I followed him out, still thinking, What would Emma Goldman do? As soon as I stepped outside, I knew exactly what Emma Goldman would do if she were alive now. She was an activist, after all – and she wasn’t afraid of making a scene. I’m not exactly known for my spontaneity, but I hurried to catch up with Jude, and when I was right behind him I called his name. Jude Fielder stopped and turned. I made a grab for the crotch of his jeans. He jumped back so fast and screamed so loudly that I didn’t actually touch him, but the effect was the same. He was horrified, but, unlike ZiZi, he still had the power of speech; he yelled that I was crazy. I said I was sorry, that I just wanted to know if it was real. I was pretty pleased with coming up with that line; usually I don’t think of the really good, zinger response until it’s too late. He didn’t find that a fraction as funny as he’d found molesting ZiZi. Well, he wouldn’t, would he? Then he marched off, yelling at ZiZi about her dyke friend – which would be me, despite the fact that at that time I was neither of those things. And what do you think Giselle Abruzzio, having been assaulted in broad daylight in a public place by a boy whose only documented talent is the ability to run a piece of dental floss through his nostrils (Year Six, cafeteria, absolutely disgusting) did next? Here’s a hint: it for definite wasn’t what Emma Goldman would have done. ZiZi apologized! Of all the things that had happened in the last ten minutes that I couldn’t believe, that was the one I couldn’t believe the most. She said, “I’m sorry,” and sounded as if she meant it. I’m sorry? Was she insane? What the hell was she sorry for? Having breasts? Not letting him grab the other one, too? Not taking off her top? Talk about blaming the victim. Here I was listening to the victim blame herself.

  That’s when I decided I had to talk to her. She didn’t seem to realize that this is the twenty-first century, and women are no longer considered the property or inferiors of men. Not in our society, at least. But, as soon as I opened my mouth, I kind of lost it. I may have shouted. I do tend to shout when I feel strongly about something, and I felt very strongly about what had just happened in the non-fiction section, world history aisle, of the public library. ZiZi didn’t want to know. Talk about defensive! Why was I getting on her case? She was completely innocent. If you ask me, she was more comatose than innocent. Why didn’t she do something when he grabbed her? Yell, scream, hit him over the head with the book she was holding. Instead, all she did was apologize. She apologized to him! Had we all fallen down a wormhole? That’s when she shifted everything around so that I was the one in the wrong – which I now know is a typical Giselle Abruzzio manoeuvre. She said she was apologizing for my behaviour, not hers. She said that I was overreacting. Apparently, it’s flattering to be sexually harassed. According to ZiZi, Jude Fielder hadn’t done anything wrong; he was just being a boy. At least she got that part right. I tried to make her see all the other things that were examples of boys being boys and men being men – war, murder, genocide, rape, pornography, colonialism, slavery, torture, domestic violence, paedophilia, recreational hunting, etcetera – but she wasn’t listening. She was thinking deeply. I know that because when I finished she said she thought the reason Jude Fielder assaulted her was because of the sweater she was wearing. I felt as if I’d been walking down an ordinary street in an ordinary way and suddenly ploughed into a mastodon eating an ice-cream cone. Where the hell did that come from?

  I said I guessed that meant she was five hundred per cent right to apologize since the whole thing was her fault – her and her orange sweater. What had she been thinking when she got dressed that morning? Why didn’t she wear black? Why didn’t she put on something baggy over it like a bathrobe? Maybe she should start wearing a suit of armour. That would make her breasts virtually non-existent. ZiZi smiles the way everyone else breathes. “I wasn’t blaming myself,” she said. “I was just saying.” How can you reason with someone like that? We might as well have been speaking different languages. It was like trying to convince a climate change denier of global warming. I was still thinking of ZiZi as the Koch brothers when she said that next time I did something like that I should give her some warning so she could take a picture. I immediately saw Jude Fielder’s face in front of me, looking as if I’d just hit him with a dead fish. And ZiZi said it was more like I’d hit him with the entrails. We both started laughing.

  I think that was when I realized there was hope for ZiZi. She’d been smart and spirited before; she could be smart and spirited again. She was drowning in the frothy, pink sea of girliness, and I was in the solid boat of persondom. It was my duty to pull her aboard.

  I asked her if she wanted to get a coffee or something.

  File under the heading: Fate.

  ZiZi

  Loretta and I have never been the kind of best friends who act like they’re identical twins who were raised by different parents

  So after the boob grab, Loretta and I went for coffee. Well, I went for coffee. Loretta went for green tea, a brownie and a cookie the size of a wagon wheel. (The only math Loretta isn’t interested in is counting ca
lories!) And that was it really. To look at us, you wouldn’t think we have much in common. (Which we don’t!) My dad’s a store manager and my mom’s a receptionist at a vet’s. I have two brothers (both of them pretty annoying). I’m feminine. I’m sociable. I try to get along with everyone and don’t like to rock any boats. And then there’s Loretta. Her dad’s some kind of shrink and her mother teaches yoga. She’s a pampered only child. Loretta’s look is all no make-up and sexless, androgynous clothes. She’s super academic and can be kind of stand-offish. She’s a girl who would sink the Owl and the Pussycat if she thought they were wrong about something. But even though we’re pretty different, we were friends after that. We started walking to school together, and then we started hanging out after school and on the weekends. If we weren’t just mooching around or talking about life or whatever, we’d watch movies at her house (she’s a major movie freak, so she had about a thousand films I’d never heard of). Because I live in a house dominated by boys, most of our movies illustrate Loretta’s views on male violence, but my brothers do have some cool games, so if she wasn’t fixing the toaster or helping Nate get his bike going (he’d been working on it since he was fifteen, but until Loretta came along, the only time it moved was when it fell over), we’d play something that didn’t involve killing. Here’s the thing. The more I got to know her, the more I liked Loretta. Even though we disagreed about a lot of stuff (clothes, make-up, what it means to be a girl and stuff like that), she’s easy to be with. Plus, she does have a good sense of humour (when she isn’t in lecturing mode). We’d be arguing one minute and laughing the next.

  I was between best friends right then and by the Summer Loretta had filled the vacancy. My last best friend was Catie Coulson. Catie and I were like the human equivalent of a pair of earrings. Same colouring and body type. Same taste and style. We spent hours together shopping and looking through magazines and watching fashion vlogs. I learned a lot from Catie about clothes, dieting, make-up, boys, sex – and things like that. I also learned a lot about betrayal. She was always getting me in trouble by telling people what I’d said about them in private. She couldn’t keep a secret if your life depended on it. And then, our first year in high school and not even a week after I said I had my eye on a certain boy working in the Starbucks at the mall, she went out with him. Quel Judas! I never spoke to her again.

  So even though Loretta was nothing like me, we kind of fit together. Like the clasp on a bra. (Not Loretta’s bras, though. They don’t have clasps.)

  Quel example of truth being stranger than fiction!

  That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of things about Loretta that drive me crazy. There are dozens.

  She’s stubborn.

  She’s opinionated.

  She thinks she’s always right.

  She doesn’t like spectator sports.

  She’s not really great when it comes to compromise.

  Just because you’re her best friend doesn’t mean she’ll do you a tiny little favour.

  * * *

  “Absolutely no way,” said Loretta. “Get somebody else. You know a lot of cheerleader types. Get one of them to go with you.”

  “It’s Thanksgiving. The cheerleader types are either going to be at the game, cheerleading, or they’re visiting their grandmothers.” I gave her one of my really winning smiles. It was our sophomore year, so I knew her pretty well by then, but I was desperate. Plus, I can be pretty persuasive. “And anyway, I want you to come. It’ll be fun.”

  “It’s a football game.” Loretta sneers a lot for a teenage girl. “Saying it’ll be fun is a contradiction in terms.”

  “But we’ll be together. That’s what makes it fun. And afterwards we’re going for pizza.”

  “I thought you said pizza’s fattening.”

  Not if you just eat the topping.

  “But you love pizza,” I reminded her. “Plus, after that, we’re going bowling.”

  Loretta’s really good at looking underwhelmed.

  “You’re making solitary confinement seem incredibly attractive.”

  I started to plead. “I know you’re judgmental, but you can’t really judge Kyle when you haven’t even met him, Lo. For all you know, he’s the boy you’ve been waiting your whole life to meet.”

  “I very much doubt that.” She treated me to another sneer. “He’s Duane’s cousin, ZiZi. Which means it’s more likely he’s the boy I’ve been waiting my whole life to avoid.”

  Duane Tolvar is another thing Loretta doesn’t like. I’d been dating Duane on and off since September. Duane was a junior and the star quarterback on the school’s varsity football team. Most people thought he was pretty cool. Loretta thought that if Duane was a pond you’d have to dig six feet to make him shallow. (That’s a quote!)

  “You’re being really unfair, Loretta. You hardly know Duane. Maybe he’s not going to find a cure for cancer, but he’s a nice guy. And you don’t know his cousin at all. Both of them might surprise you.”

  “Only by being worse than I think.”

  That’s what I mean about stubborn.

  “Please, Loretta. It’s important.” Three isn’t really a good number for a date. “If you don’t come, Kyle’s going to feel like a third wheel.”

  “I don’t care if he feels like a training wheel. I’m not going.”

  “I’d do it for you.”

  “No you wouldn’t. You refused to come to the observatory with me in the Summer.”

  There was a beach party on. There was no way I was missing a beach party to spend the night looking at stars that you can see any night of the year.

  “I didn’t know it was such a big deal, did I? And anyway, I did plenty of other things with you in the Summer. We went to that Japanese movie.” (Three hours of subtitles. Even Loretta didn’t know what was going on most of the time.) “And that play.” (Good but so depressing you kind of lost the will to live for a while.) “And that afternoon of jazz in the park.” (Which is not my music but there were some very cute jazz guys dotted around on the grass, so at least there was something to look at.)

  “Okay, I know the jazz was a challenge, but you said you liked the movie and the play.”

  “I did, but that’s not the point, Loretta. The point is that you could do this one little thing for me.”

  “I go shopping with you.”

  “Most people don’t think that’s a chore.”

  “I came to your barbecue.”

  Ate two ears of corn, two veggie sausages and a baked potato, and gave a short but pretty gripping lecture on the life of a battery chicken (Marilee Sokalov had to run inside to throw up).

  “I’m begging you. It’s an emergency.”

  “Duane’s cousin being around for the weekend isn’t exactly the same as being stranded in a blizzard.” Said without sneering, but there was some scorn.

  “Please, Loretta. As a big favour to your best friend? If it’s just me and them, they’ll blather on about football all night and I could end up asleep with my face in the pizza.”

  “I don’t know, Zi. It’s not that I don’t want to help you out…”

  Loretta’s stubborn, but she’s a loyal friend. I could tell she was weakening. Plus, I could tell that something more than not liking football or Duane Tolvar was holding her back. And then it hit me! Loretta’s not shy about giving her opinion or standing up for her principles, but she is shy around boys – unless they’re asking her to help them with their calculus or get their car started. She doesn’t know how to talk to them. (This is the one advantage to having brothers. At least you know what to expect.) She doesn’t do chit-chat. The day all the other girls were learning how to flirt, Loretta was somewhere else, unblocking a sink or trying to discover a new planet.

  “You know what I think?” She looked like the answer to that question was “No”, but I told her anyway. “I think you’re afraid to come with me because you’ve never gone out with a boy.”

  “You said this isn’t a date. I’d just be m
aking up the numbers.”

  “It isn’t a date. But you know what I mean. You don’t know how to talk to boys. You act like you’re the rabbit and they’re the headlights. You totally freeze up.”

  “I know how to talk to them. I talk to them all the time. Usually in English.”

  “At school you talk to them. About school stuff. Or some theory about particles nobody is sure exist. Or how to fix something. But you don’t have casual, not-about-anything-special conversations with them.”

  “What about your brothers? I talk to them.”

  “About motorcycles and games. And anyway, my brothers don’t count. Nate’s too old and Obi’s only twelve. Your problem is that you don’t know how to hang out with boys our age.”

  I could tell from the way she was sucking on her bottom lip that I was right.

  “Come on, Lo. You have nothing to lose. Think of Duane’s cousin as practice. It’s like learning to swim in the kids’ pool before you go to the ocean.”

  She opened her mouth and shut it again.

  Home team one, visitors nil.

  When it comes to disasters, the not-a-date with Duane and his cousin wasn’t as bad as a plane crash. Everybody survived in one piece. But it was close.

  The guys-in-helmets-and-shoulder-pads-tackling-each-other part wasn’t too bad. Loretta and I were a little late getting there (I couldn’t find the green leggings I’d planned to wear and had to totally change my outfit at the last minute), so we were spared having to think of things to say to Duane’s cousin before the game. And Kyle is sweet. He’d saved us seats and acted like he was really glad to meet Loretta. I sat between them, and Loretta spent most of the game doing stuff on her phone. (Kyle was so into the game that the only thing that would have distracted him would have been if a bunch of giraffes invaded the field.) So Part One was no talking by anyone and everyone pretty happy doing their thing.