The premises of feminism--that women are entitled to do any kind of work men do, for the same pay, and to be accorded an equal measure of social respect--must seem obvious to you. But in 1973 these items were just barely on the agenda. The first time I suggested to my father that a woman could be president, he got a pained expression on his face just thinking about a woman having to go through that mess. He asked me, as delicately as he could, to consider what a disaster it would be if we had a war, and the president was on her menses. Both of us were acutely embarrassed, and that was the end of that. (It didn't occur to me until years later that most presidents are elected well past the age when menses would be an issue.) When I told my parents about an older college friend I admired who intended to keep her name after she got married, my mother offered sadly, "Any woman who'd do that doesn't love her husband."
My parents, in telling me of these and a thousand other limitations on my gender, weren't trying to hold me in contempt. They were merely advising me of the ways of the world--which, in 1973, held me in contempt. Since then they've changed their minds about many things, including my keeping my last name, which is now also yours. (And if you ever run for president, I'm positive Dad will vote for you.) But the persistence of misogyny in the world outside our family is not forgivable, and it makes me crazy. Why is it, for instance, that on the popular teen radio station, all the women are singing about guys who treat them like dirt (or, on a more optimistic note, declaring the jerk must go), while the men are chanting, sometimes literally, "Die, bitch, die!" It scares me that boys listen to this stuff; it scares me more that girls do. I can't tell you what to listen to, I know. To this day I get a buzz when I hear the first notes of "Lay Down Sally," probably from all the warnings I received against its morals and grammar. But if you're going to listen to these guys, listen. Eric Clapton was singing to me, "You are so the best, I can't stand for you to leave the room." I'd just once like to hear that from some rapper. One of the best gifts you ever gave me was when you turned off Eminem and started listening more to Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morisette on your CD player. I think--I hope--you did it not for me but for you. Because you didn't need "Die, bitch," as bedtime music.
I know that some girls of your acquaintance worship Eminem. Some are already doing drugs and having sex with guys because they need male approval that badly. I understand that perfectly, because of how I was in my teens. I wish I could tell them it's not too late yet: If they can just yank it back for a minute and find some little island of pride, there's hope. But it takes believing in some larger space for women in the world than they can presently see. For me, that belief came from the right books, because I happened to revere the printed word. Even more, it was finding and joining a huge, heady current that allowed me to believe I could change things a little--that I could fight back against what made me angry, in some way that was real and grown-up. Piercing and branding one's flesh or getting pregnant or getting AIDS is not fighting back, even though it may feel like it from the inside. From the outsider's point of view, these things make a display of self-loathing, which is the opposite of fighting back--it's a score for the opposition. I know, because I used to hate myself, and now I don't.
You never did, it seems. You like who you are, you work hard at whatever you do, you're kind to your friends, you show compassion for the world. You're a person I'd choose as a friend even if we weren't related. I actually like the ways you're turning out different from me; your confidence and smart-aleck wit inspire me. I was impressed, the day we were listening to the presidential campaign and the one guy started pandering to the audience, when you rolled your eyes and said, "What a suckup!"
If I'd said that about a presidential candidate when I was your age, I would have gotten it for disrespecting authority. So I had to ask myself, Am I allowed to laugh at what she just said? Answer: Yes. I agreed with you totally; he was groveling for the vote. I can't insist to you that all authority is worthy of your respect, because much of it is not. In five years you'll have to see through all the sucking-up and vote for your own president. Why shouldn't you start practicing now?
Every authority has its limits. I find myself defusing the menace of maleness by viewing it as a source of fascination. I study it constantly, not trying to learn how to be that, just trying to understand it. To say they run the world just doesn't cover it, because we do, too, in our less material way. Not in terms of real power, of course; it's impossible to imagine a reverse Saudi Arabia, in which we walked around doing whatever we pleased while forcing our entire male population to vacate themselves from public life and wear black cloth sacks with sideways slits for their eyes. We could never get them to do it; they're devoted to being in charge of things, and we seem unable to whip up any zeal for treating people like that. It's hard even to imagine a tradition of fine art in which naked men would recline on picnic blankets while fully clothed women looked on. Recently an artist in Colorado tried to communicate (especially to men, presumably) how it feels to have our sex so constantly and casually appropriated: She created a display of colorful penises pinned to a clothesline. The surfeit of masculine heebie-jeebies wrought by this little demonstration made national news, and lasted only days before a man broke in and destroyed the installation. I hope the artist has sense of humor enough to see that she made her point perfectly. Men rule, but in general seem to lack our fortitude.
And yet in some way or other their whole lives long, heterosexual guys are knocking themselves senseless to get our attention, and you can't help being charmed by the parade of nonsense. One of the most absurd, sexiest, most entrancing things I've ever seen took place right outside my study window. I was trying to think of a metaphor or something, staring out there into the mesquite woods, when suddenly my eyes snapped to focus on some movement: two rattlesnakes rising up together, face to face, as if they were being noodled up out of two snake charmers' baskets. Moving slowly with muscular, sinuous strength, they levitated nearly the entire front halves of their bodies, twisted themselves together, tussled a little, and finally slammed to the ground. It resembled arm wrestling. I ran to get everyone else in the house, and we all watched this thing go on for nearly an hour, the two snakes rearing up again and again, silently entwining, and then throwing themselves to the ground. We called our friend Cecil, the Arizona reptile expert, who informed us that arm wrestling wasn't such a bad analogy: These were two male snakes doing a dance of combat to win the favor of a female that was surely watching from somewhere nearby. We scanned the brush carefully from behind my window--these snakes were not even thirty feet away--and there she was, sure enough, stretched out languidly under a bush.
Then all at once, after innumerable tussles, according to some scoring system invisible to human eyes but unmistakable to the contestants, one guy won. The other slunk quickly away, and Sheba came sliding out into the open, with no eyelashes to bat but with love clearly on her mind, for off she slithered with her he-snake into the sunset. The greatest show on earth.
When you, my dear, were about two and a half, I carefully and honestly answered all the questions you'd started asking about reproductive organs. For several months thereafter, every time we met someone new, the unsuspecting adult would tousle your adorable blond head, and you'd look up earnestly and ask, "Do you have a penis or a vagina?"
If you are ever tempted to think my presence is an embarrassment to you, please recall that I stood by you during the "penis or vagina" months, July to September 1989. I wasn't sure I'd live through them or have any social life left afterward. I gave you a crash course in what we call "polite company" and harbored some doubts about whether honesty had really been the best policy.
What I see now, though, is that honesty was. Manners arrive in time; most girls are gifted enough at social savvy to learn the degree of polite evasion that will protect their safety and other people's dignity. But before anything else, you've got to be able to get the facts. Penis or vagina? I couldn't possibly tell you it wasn't to be discussed, or
didn't matter. It matters, boy howdy, does it ever. Barbie or Ken, Adam or Eve, pilot or stewardess, knuckle sandwich or mea culpa, scissors, paper, rock, War and Peace. It's a very reasonable starting point. So begins the longest, scariest, sexiest, funniest, smartest, most extraordinary conversation we know. Cross your fingers, ready, set. Go.
Letter to My Mother
I imagine you putting on your glasses to read this letter. Oh, Lord, what now? You tilt your head back and hold the page away from you, your left hand flat on your chest, protecting your heart. "Dear Mom" at the top of a long, typed letter from me has so often meant trouble. Happy, uncomplicated things--these I could always toss you easily over the phone: I love you, where in the world is my birth certificate, what's in your zucchini casserole, happy birthday, this is our new phone number, we're having a baby in March, my plane comes in at seven, see you then, I love you.
The hard things went into letters. I started sending them from college, the kind of self-absorbed epistles that usually began as diary entries and should have stayed there. During those years I wore black boots from an army surplus store and a five-dollar haircut from a barbershop and went to some trouble to fill you in on the great freedom women could experience if only they would throw off the bondage of housewifely servitude. I made sideways remarks about how I couldn't imagine being anybody's wife. In my heart I believed that these letters--in which I tried to tell you how I'd become someone entirely different from the child you'd known--would somehow make us friends. But instead they only bought me a few quick gulps of air while I paced out the distance between us.
I lived past college, and so did my hair, and slowly I learned the womanly art of turning down the volume. But I still missed you, and from my torment those awful letters bloomed now and then. I kept trying; I'm trying still. But this time I want to say before anything else: Don't worry. Let your breath out. I won't hurt you anymore. We measure the distance in miles now, and I don't have to show you I'm far from where I started. Increasingly, that distance seems irrelevant. I want to tell you what I remember.
I'm three years old. You've left me for the first time with your mother while you and Daddy took a trip. Grandmama fed me cherries and showed me the secret of her hair: Five metal hairpins come out, and the everyday white coil drops in a silvery waterfall to the back of her knees. Her house smells like polished wooden stairs and soap and Granddad's onions and ice cream, and I would love to stay there always but I miss you bitterly without end. On the day of your return I'm standing in the driveway waiting when the station wagon pulls up. You jump out your side, my mother in happy red lipstick and red earrings, pushing back your dark hair from the shoulder of your white sleeveless blouse, turning so your red skirt swirls like a rose with the perfect promise of you emerging from the center. So beautiful. You raise one hand in a tranquil wave and move so slowly up the driveway that your body seems to be underwater. I understand with a shock that you are extremely happy. I have been miserable and alone waiting in the driveway, and you were at the beach with Daddy and happy. Happy without me.
I am sitting on your lap, and you are crying. Thank you, honey, thank you, you keep saying, rocking back and forth as you hold me in the kitchen chair. I've brought you flowers: the sweet peas you must have spent all spring trying to grow, training them up the trellis in the yard. You had nothing to work with but abundant gray rains and the patience of a young wife at home with pots and pans and small children, trying to create just one beautiful thing, something to take you outside our tiny white clapboard house on East Main. I never noticed until all at once they burst through the trellis in a pink red purple dazzle. A finger-painting of colors humming against the blue air: I could think of nothing but to bring it to you. I climbed up the wooden trellis and picked the flowers. Every one. They are gone already, wilting in my hand as you hold me close in the potato-smelling kitchen, and your tears are damp in my hair but you never say a single thing but Thank you.
Your mother is dead. She was alive, so thin that Granddad bought her a tiny dark-blue dress and called her his fashion model and then they all went to the hospital and came home without her. Where is the dark-blue dress now? I find myself wondering, until it comes to me that they probably buried her in it. It's under the ground with her. There are so many things I don't want to think about that I can't bear going to bed at night.
It's too hot to sleep. My long hair wraps around me, grasping like tentacles. My brother and sister and I have made up our beds on cots on the porch, where it's supposed to be cooler. They are breathing in careless sleep on either side of me, and I am under the dark cemetery ground with Grandmama. I am in the stars, desolate, searching out the end of the universe and time. I am trying to imagine how long forever is, because that is how long I will be dead for someday. I won't be able to stand so much time being nothing, thinking of nothing. I've spent many nights like this, fearing sleep. Hating being awake.
I get up, barefoot and almost nothing in my nightgown, and creep to your room. The door is open, and I see that you're awake, too, sitting up on the edge of your bed. I can make out only the white outline of your nightgown and your eyes. You're like a ghost.
Mama, I don't want to die.
You don't have to worry about that for a long, long time.
I know. But I'm thinking about it now.
I step toward you from the doorway, and you fold me into your arms. You are real, my mother in scent and substance, and I still fit perfectly in your lap.
You don't know what Heaven is like. It might be full of beautiful flowers.
When I close my eyes I discover it's there, an endless field of flowers. Columbines, blue asters, daisies, sweet peas, zinnias: one single flower bed stretching out for miles in every direction. I am small enough to watch the butterflies come. I know them from the pasture behind our house, the butterflies you taught me to love and name: monarchs, Dianas, tiger swallowtails. I follow their lazy zigzag as they visit every flower, as many flowers as there are stars in the universe. We stay there in the dark for a long time, you and I, both of us with our eyes closed, watching the butterflies drift so slowly, filling as much time as forever.
I will keep that field of flowers. It doesn't matter that I won't always believe in Heaven. I will suffer losses of faith, of love and confidence, I will have some bitter years, and always when I hurt and can't sleep I will close my eyes and wait for your butterflies to arrive.
Just one thing, I'm demanding of you. It's the middle of summer, humid beyond all reason, and I am thirteen: a tempest of skinned knees and menarche. You are trying to teach me how to do laundry, showing me how to put the bluing in with the sheets. The swampy Monday-afternoon smell of sheets drowning under the filmy, shifting water fills me with pure despair. I want no part of that smell. No future in white sheets and bluing. Name one good thing about being a woman, I say to you.
There are lots of good things....Your voice trails off with the thin blue stream that trickles into the washer's indifferent maw.
In a rare flush of adrenaline or confidence, I hold on, daring you: OK, then. If that's true, just name me one.
You hesitated. I remember that. I saw a hairline crack in your claim of a homemaker's perfect contentment. Finally you said, The love of a man. That's one thing. Being taken care of and loved by a man.
And because you'd hesitated I knew I didn't have to believe it.
At fifteen I am raging at you in my diary, without courage or any real intention, yet, of actually revealing myself to you. Why do you want to ruin my life? Why can't you believe I know how to make my own decisions? Why do you treat me like a child? No makeup or nail polish allowed in this house--you must think I am a baby or a nun. You tell me if I forget to close the curtains when I get undressed the neighbor boy will rape me. You think all boys are evil. You think if I go out with my girlfriends I'll get kidnaped. You think if I'm in the same room with a boy and a can of beer, I'll instantly become a pregnant alcoholic.
Halfway through the page
I crumble suddenly and write in a meeker hand, I have to learn to keep my big mouth shut and not fight with Mom. I love her so much.
I am a young woman sliced in two, half of me claiming to know everything and the other half just as sure I will never know anything at all. I am too awkward and quiet behind my curtain of waist-length hair, a girl unnoticed, a straight-A schoolmouse who can't pass for dumb and cute in a small-town, marry-young market that values--as far as I can see--no other type.
I understand this to be all your fault. You made me, and I was born a girl. You trained me to be a woman, and regarding that condition I fail to see one good thing.
Small Wonder Page 16
