The Girl Who Climbed Trees

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On a brown porch, eucalyptus trees reached long scented leaves down to us two-year-olds. The dense forest called out—Girls, girls, girls, be aware of what it means to be a girl. We lived in Australia, on a continent made of songlines and the outlaws who paved over them. My friend started to cry and the prance in my legs slowed down. I didn’t know why the tears but our adults moved around her like bees, humming, cooing, bending, and hugging. They tended to her unravel. Her blond curls everywhere. My brown curls limp.

This is my first memory.

This is where my body mythology began.

I had been born into a family of beautiful people. They considered me a beauty too—those blue eyes, I love you in that smocked dress, you are so pretty, pretty girl. We were internationals and yet we were traditional. My father went to work and provided. My mother stayed home with me (and then my brothers and me). She made dinner every night, stroked our foreheads with her smooth, cool hand, welcomed us with a bright smile, a new idea, how about we bang on pots to hear the sound? Her beauty was an important part of the familial equation. Corporate trips. Jewelry. So many silk scarves. Even when she got on her knees to scrub tiles, she never sweat or appeared disheveled. For my mother, self-decoration was an art, a pleasure of her own.

But my particular set of young eyes only saw the social agreement.

Pretty Matters.

I wasn’t one of those buttoned-up, tidy children. For my first five years, I knew only humid islands. When we lived in the Dominican Republic, near a busy dirt road where men sold avocados and hearts of palm, when we lived in a place where pale-skinned people like us had dark-skinned maids, a woman would come to our small stucco house to give my mother her weekly massage. The air clung to windows. It dripped down seams and pooled in cracks on the concrete patio. Curls matted to my forehead. Sticky was all I’d known. I stood in a doorway as my mother dropped her coral dress and draped her naked body over our wooden dining table. Like her own mother, she called her butt her “rear end.” I plunked myself on the cool red tile floor underneath. Here I could be part of it all. My beautiful mother’s red toenails on the edge.

I thought every mother must be a painting.

I thought every woman was meant to be a painting.

With my mother’s family, beauty would become the ground cover of femaleness. My same-age cousin Lauren and I met on the steps of a cathedral in Chicago. Wind blew and papers skittered along the concrete. We could barely speak. With a bottle in one hand, she toddled toward me in pink satin. Someone nudged me forward in my white cotton. It was the start of her in dresses-that-poof and me in dresses-that-tie-in-the-back, her blond and my brown, her inhibition and my shy. She would become the closest thing I would ever have to a sister.

My body both wanted beauty and wanted to forget about beauty.

Confused.

I grew into a girl with deer legs. We moved again. The willow tree outside our L-shaped house in Spain became my ally. Smells of laundry detergent wafted from our outdoor washing machine and my arms pulled me up branches. My legs latched. I hung upside down and inspected the dead crows below in our run-down pool. Hot breezes grazed against my brothers and me. From me, they learned to leap from limb to limb. Somewhere a family of iguanas trotted through the brittle grass. They didn’t scare me. At our international school, the jungle gym was my home, climb higher, bend further, backflip off the swings.

My parents, though, might say I was a cautious child.

I was as reckless as a piece of toast.

I was as daring as a turtle.

But I was sure of how my body moved.

“Stop picking,” my mom would say when my hands found knee scabs. I couldn’t stop, though. What did these freckles on my body mean? What was that? Would my toe feel better after the bee sting and why did the bee sting make it hurt anyway? Was there a reason for that? I wanted to know all about my body. My mother interpreted my curiosity as worry. I interpreted her “Don’t worry about it” as non-listening. It would take years to develop the language to correct each other.

I made plans for the strong woman I would become.

Fast runner.

Tree leaper.

My sneakers crunched on the gravel of our schoolyard. My friends and I sized each other up without knowing we were doing so. I wanted to rub my body against my blond friend—to get as close as possible to her face, mouth, hair, to play house and cave with her, as if our closeness would make me more like her. My arms clung around her neck at birthday parties. I would not release her. I wanted to make her mine, make me her, make her me.

Meanwhile, my mother lifted heavy things. She hauled terra-cotta pots. I saw her kill spiders, lug bags and bags of groceries, and muscle large bottles of drinking water from car to house. Once, when we drove up to a dead horse on a dirt road, she got out to inspect, swatted flies, and told us horrified kids it was fine. She rarely asked for help from a man. She never shrieked. Somehow she did it all while wearing a pear-shaped ivory necklace and pants that never smeared with dirt. When my parents hosted dinner parties, Fleetwood Mac played loud on my father’s stereo and she appeared from behind our bamboo furniture like a doll.

Lipstick.

Clothes ironed.

Big white smile on her pretty moon face.

On one of our summer vacations to Illinois, my parents gave me a Get-in-Shape Girl kit for my seventh birthday. The 1980s had provided it, everything I had ever wanted in a gift. Lauren and I darted around on soft grass all day. Smells of boat gasoline and lake water and sunscreen stuck to our girl skin—then Lauren got sick and went to the doctor and I was left to play with the set of small weights, jump rope, wristbands, and cassette tape. Under the oak trees, I pumped iron in the proper amount of reps. Be as strong as a gymnast. In America, on magazine covers at the grocery store, blond women posed with blank looks on their faces. In my cultural home context that was the definition of beauty. I wanted strength instead, but also whatever it was that would make me desirable. Later, when Lauren came back, we flopped belly-down on the grass in our green and pink swimsuits, our legs stretched long behind us, our faces pressed together. In her husky woman voice, Lauren told me she wanted to be just like someone called Marilyn Monroe and that she had been practicing how to French kiss with her pillow. I pretended to know what she was talking about.

Back overseas, I greeted my backyard full of lizards and porcupines, led my animal figurines outside for fresh air, and got back on my bike. We were surrounded by low hills. The sun warmed my legs as I tested my speed. Freedom spread over me again and my eyes closed to take it all in. Then my face hit gravel. I stood up, tasted blood in my mouth, and ran with my hands out toward the house, screaming. At the hospital, I lay on a gurney in the hallway and stared at aqua-colored tiled walls. My parents whispered nearby. Eventually, the doctor stood over me and announced they wouldn’t have to stitch it.

The skin flap that attached my top lip to gum would grow back.

“Let’s go home,” I said. My brothers had cracked their heads open on pool edges and rocks. They knew about stitches. Not me. After sundown, tucked into my yellow bed, I touched my mouth and absorbed a new electric knowledge.

The body could heal on its very own.

This was how the body worked.

My mood, unlike my brothers’ moods, shifted based on how my body felt. That would become truer and truer as I grew up. These were the surest years of my life—two to three to four to five to six to seven to eight years old. My name was Molly May and I was an older sister and I had brown hair and blue eyes and I wanted to live in trees. Only from a great long distance was I aware of what it meant to be in a human body that was specifically girl.