Martha Brockenbrough
“A woman who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.”
—Donald Trump
The first time I took my shirt off in front of a boy who was not a blood relative, he told me to put it back on.
We were in my bedroom. I sat on the bottom bunk, and he looked down at me. “You’re a girl. You have to wear a shirt.”
I was six years old and he was seven, a friend of my older brother. He wore faded cutoff jeans, and his skin was taut and tanned over his sun-polished muscles. He was one of a pack of boys who roamed the neighborhood riding bicycles, throwing dirt clods, and best of all, playing baseball on the lumpy dirt field near the shopping center. I wanted to join them.
“But I’m hot,” I said. “And your shirt is off.”
I showed him my flat chest. I, too, was muscled, from playing soccer and swimming, though my skin was paler than his, especially on the parts that were always covered by my clothing. “We’re the same, see?”
“You’re a girl,” he said. “Girls have to wear shirts because they have boobs.”
I pulled my green cotton ringer close, covering the parts he was talking about. It was so hot out—the kind of summer day that draws the sweat out of you and leaves your skin rimed with salt and dust and your mouth dry and wanting. Going shirtless as I ran through the rhododendrons at my parents’ house made things a little bit better, but more important, had made me feel the equal of my brothers and their friends.
I put my shirt back on.
* * *
It was the mid-1970s then, and my brothers played baseball on a team through the local Boys Club. There was no Girls Club then. That would come later—too late for me ever to play. But I wanted to.
My older brother was a star athlete. A leftie, he’d stand at the plate in a pose of fierce concentration, his tongue out. Someone took a picture of him and printed it large in black-and-white, making it look like an image from the past, important and true. I’d hold it by the edges, careful not to mark it with my fingerprints. I stuck out my tongue to see if that was the magic that made him such a powerful hitter, the secret that let him snatch a sinking baseball out of the blue with his glove, snapping the leather closed around it.
My younger brother did not stick out his tongue. He was not a great hitter, and the one time he caught a baseball, it was an accident. He’d been daydreaming behind second base, his glove open wide, and a pop fly dropped into it. Roused from his reverie by cheering, he looked all around for the ball, only to realize slowly that he already had it in his hand.
The moment was exciting and hilarious, and he won the game ball, making it one of the best events I’d ever watched from the bleachers, where the moms and sisters sat, knitting, chatting, reapplying lipstick, watching. Once, one of the moms was wrapping birthday presents during a game, and she taught me how to fold the ends of the paper so the lines would be crisp and even, the tape concealed. I did not want to watch, or chat, or learn how to wrap birthday presents. I wanted to play.
There was room for all sorts of boys on the team—boys who dominated, boys who daydreamed. There were cheers for all of them.
There were none for me, although my gift-wrapping skills remain top-notch.
* * *
On the first day of first grade, my mother waited with me at the bus stop. When the bus arrived, she nudged me up the steps. I found a seat near the front, and the bus rumbled down the road, smelling of exhaust and the breath of children. I was barely big enough to see out the steamy window, but I knew when we turned left at the intersection instead of right that something was not quite right.
Maybe, I thought, the driver knew a different route to my school. Or maybe there would be two stops.
Maybe.
And then we arrived at the other elementary school in town. I waited in my seat, still hopeful, but the driver told me to get off and go to class.
I slouched off the bus. At the base of the stairs were the hands of grown-ups shepherding kids to their classrooms, but I knew these hands were not for me. I couldn’t bear to look at their faces. I didn’t want to ask for help. That only would have made things worse. It might have made me cry, and that was out of the question.
I slipped away from the hands and quietly crossed the street, and I walked in the direction of my school. I had new sneakers and my lunch box, and I hustled beneath the green-black arms of Douglas firs and alongside glossy laurel hedges. I knew I’d be late, but perhaps I wouldn’t be very late.
I made my way along the shoulder of the road, for there was no sidewalk, and a car pulled up alongside me. I pretended not to notice. The driver rolled down the window and called my name. I turned to look. She was the mom of a preschool classmate.
“Do you need a ride?”
I shook my head. It was easier to pretend none of this had happened, easier to pretend I was invisibly unwinding the disaster of the morning by myself. And yet she would not leave me. She drove beside me slowly as I walked, perhaps understanding my need to keep myself together was as important to me as her need to protect me was to her.
The more steps I took, the clearer it became that these two schools were not close together, not close at all. I finally accepted a ride just as a squad car drove by. The police officer followed us to school, ensuring my arrival was the opposite of invisible. When I made it to my classroom at last, my kindhearted teacher told me to sit anywhere.
I chose the table with the books.
“Anywhere but there,” she said.
Everyone laughed. My face burning, I chose a regular desk by the blackboard and did everything I could to keep the tears from falling.
After that day I did not ride the bus. They all looked alike. Any one of them could take me anywhere. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I figured that if I could beat the bus home, no one would be the wiser. It was exhilarating to feel my feet against the pavement and to hear the bus far, far behind me.
This is how I became a runner.
In fourth grade, I raced my first 10K, wearing leather Adidas that blistered my heels. My little brother and I finished together. He’d waited for me as we ran up a hill, and I picked him up out of the mud when he slipped near the finish line. Hand in hand, we crossed it.
“You’re the next Bruce Jenner,” a grown-up told me. Only a few years earlier, Bruce had won Olympic gold medals and appeared on Wheaties boxes. Long before she came out as transgender, she was the athlete the boys wanted to be, the man girls wanted to be with. It was a compliment, and I reveled in it.
* * *
The summer after first grade, I took tennis lessons at a court not far from school. To get there, I rode a similar route on my blue one-speed bicycle, which I’d covered in stickers from the Buster Brown shoe store. The route was pretty. It meandered from my evergreen-tree-lined street down a short hill and onto a narrow path alongside the highway. It wasn’t far, a mile or so, and I’d ride my bicycle holding the handlebars with one hand and my tennis racket with the other.
One day, as I turned off my street and headed toward the hill, I noticed a car. A small red thing whose make and model I can no longer recall. But I remember its headlights looked like eyes. The car circled back and stopped not far from me. The driver rolled down his window. Sunlight glinted off his metal-rimmed spectacles.
“Do you know where the Turnips live?” he asked.
I knew of no one named Turnip. I did know of the root vegetable, though. I wanted to be helpful, but I didn’t know how.
“Why don’t you come over to the car,” he said. “I’ll show you the address.”
I went to the car. The man’s pants were unzipped. His penis, the first I’d seen that did not belong to one of my brothers, was erect.
“This is a dolly,” he said. “Girls like to play with it. Will you play with my dolly?”
A good girl kept her shirt on. A good girl did what she was told. I was a good girl, or at least I wanted to be. So I obeyed. It simply didn’t occur to me to say no. When I could bear it no longer, I excused myself. “I have to go to my tennis lesson.”
I picked up my racket and my bicycle and I pedaled off, wishing I didn’t have to touch the handlebars. My hands had become disgusting to me. But I had a tennis lesson to go to, and I had to get myself there.
I arrived at the court, and dropped my bicycle and racket in the grass by the drinking fountain. I had to hold the faucet for water to flow, so I could only wash one hand at a time. I had no soap, and I couldn’t rub my palms together, but this was better than nothing. As I was cleaning myself as well as I could, one of the girls in my class approached. I blurted out what had happened. I can’t remember her reply, or if she even had one.
Later that day, when I told my brothers and sisters what had happened, they didn’t believe me, and I didn’t argue the point. I didn’t want it to be true, so why would I? Because my siblings didn’t believe me, I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t want them to know what I had done.
But the girl in my tennis class told her mother, and about two weeks later word got back to my mom. When she came to pick me up at a sewing lesson that day, her face was gray. I suspected I was in trouble, the worst I’d been in. I said as little as I could about what had happened, and then she dropped it. Afterward, I tried to forget about what happened. I had tried to be a good girl and, in the process, I’d been bad. The worst. This was not a game I could win.
Here is a true thing: no matter how fast you run, you cannot leave your own body behind. The things that happen to your body stay with your body. Cells die and are replaced, but each one of them carries the memory of what happened to the ones that came before. You can sometimes outrun other people. But you cannot outrun yourself.
“You’re not like the other girls.”
—Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables
This is what I believed: You can’t win the game as a girl. But you can become as much like a boy as possible. You can play soccer with the boys at recess. You can become a fierce long-distance runner and swimmer, beating all but the fastest boys. You can be funny. Strong. Competitive. Hilarious. You can wear jeans and sweatshirts. You can cut your hair short.
Then you can grow your hair out again because it turns out it’s not all that fun being mistaken for a boy, and besides, you don’t want to become so much like a boy that you are no longer wanted as a girl.
You do not yet have the word for this thing you are feeling.
But you can angle for some magic-sounding words that promise to bridge the divide: You’re not like the other girls.
These words were a compliment. Gilbert Blythe said them in Anne of Green Gables, and this was the best thing a girl could be. There are so many ways of being not like other girls. Don’t be catty or give the appearance of vanity. Be fast. Be strong. Be good at sports and science. Never cry. Never show anyone you can be hurt.
Because of your body, you must be a girl. But you don’t have to be like one.
* * *
“She runs like a guy,” my older brother said.
He was praising one of the stars of our cross-country team, a girl who was a senior when I was a freshman. And even though I often beat her across the finish line, there was apparently something about her that was better than me in my brother’s eyes.
I studied her form to understand it. She held her elbows high and out, with her arms at something of an acute angle. They looked like elbows that could do damage to a competitor’s ribs. I tried it, but it felt exhausting to run that way, exhausting and untrue to my own natural form, which was efficient and low to the ground. It was tiring and false in the way that taking AP math and science classes was tiring and false. I was one of the only girls in these classes, and I took them not because I loved them—I loved writing and art and music—but because I wanted to prove that I could keep up with the boys.
Girls can do anything boys can do.
You can do anything a boy can do. I was told this again and again. With every goal I set, keeping up with or beating the boys became my benchmark. I earned a dozen varsity letters in high school. I was the captain of four teams. Along with two boys, I was the editor in chief of the school newspaper, and of our trio, I wrote the hardest-hitting editorials. This was feminism to me. Be like the boys. It was the best way to be a girl.
I competed with the boys, but I wanted to be noticed by them. I wanted to be wanted by them, even as I purposely rejected the feminine. I was skinny. Intense. Opinionated. Nearsighted enough to need glasses. And although I cultivated a small group of female friends I loved, I took no particular pride in them.
“Most of my friends are guys,” I’d sometimes say. Although this wasn’t true, really. They were my older brother’s friends, and I had attached myself to this crowd because I could spend time in the company of boys and study them closely, the way a biologist might study captive apes.
The male of the species likes watching horror movies. He demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of physics by shotgunning beer. His games often involve hitting his fellow males in the shoulder for failing to say a nonsense word quickly enough.
One night I fell asleep on the carpet while I was with my brother and one of his friends. I woke up and heard them talking about a girl’s body. I had a crush on this friend of my brother, and to hear him talk with admiration about this other girl’s curves turned my heart into a pincushion. And then he said, “But don’t tell Martha. She’ll tell everyone.”
This was the moment I knew I’d failed. I wasn’t a boy. Nor was I an object of desire. I was a leaking mouth and nothing more. I kept my eyes closed and tried to breathe like a person lost to sleep.
“Women can play poker because anyone who can fake an orgasm can raise on a pair of deuces.”
—Brett Butler on Grace Under Fire
Proximity and quiet desperation have their benefits, though. I dated several of my brother’s friends. One of these boys was an athlete, with a tanned and muscular body and jet-black hair that framed the edges of his face. In short, he was hot, and it surprised me to no end that he liked me. He once slipped his jacket over my shoulders at the homecoming football game when I looked cold, and months later, as we sat on the bleachers between events at a spring track meet, he told me I was cute.
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-colored 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.