And Took Note of Her Shape

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The same summer I got my period was the same summer a stranger touched my vulva. My parents took us on a trip to Paris. In our small hotel room, my brothers and I took turns with my new red Kodak camera, snapping pictures of each other lounging like artistes on the wrought-iron balcony. We ate croissants and cringed at the smell of Camembert. I was twelve, the age when girls have stick legs and puffy lips. The foreign language thawed something within me. As we walked on paved and cobbled streets, I stole private glances at my reflection in glassy buildings. I wore my favorite pair of short white shorts and made sure to gloss my lips. Men walking on the street shot side-glances at me—real men. I didn’t know how to react but the heat inside me grew. Never in my life had I been the pretty one. I did exactly seventy push-ups every morning. Seven was my favorite number. I practiced this new female power—swaying my hips, pouting my mouth, poking out my breasts.

On our way up the Eiffel Tower, we were shoved into a massive freight elevator, packed hip to hip. My mom and brothers ended up in one corner, my dad and I in another. I held his hand but people shoved between us. I kept holding on and my arm was awkwardly extended all the way out, even though we couldn’t see each other. When the elevator doors closed, it went dark and stuffy and gross armpit smell. People were whispering, carrying on conversation, all squashed together. The man in front of me pressed very close—and I thought, Strange. As the elevator jostled up slowly, a hand lightly brushed the inside of my thigh. It couldn’t be a hand. It had to be something else, a purse, a toddler, the flap of a rain jacket. But the touch sent delicious goose bumps up my spine because the possibility of a hand there one day was exciting, and I’d started to think about what kind of guy that would be.

Then a real hand clamped down on my left shoulder. I gasped with no sound and glanced up to a shadowy figure of a man so tall I could only see the outline of his face. He reached up into my white short shorts and slid his warm hand under my underwear. I stopped breathing. His fingers pushed up inside of me. My immediate reaction had been to snap my legs shut like scissors. In trying to crush him out, I fastened him in. I let that man fish around on that long ride up. I kept silent. My free hand, my fighting hand, stayed limp, my camera dangling from it.

At the top, my mother rounded us up for a picture.

“What’s wrong, honey? You’re all pale. Do you feel sick?”

“No, it was stuffy in there.”

“Stop being such a wimp,” my brother Peter teased, jabbing at me.

“Yeah,” echoed the youngest, Alex, “stop being such a wimp.” In the photo, my brothers are making silly faces, holding up peace signs. I am a statue. Beyond us, the lights of dusk spread across the city as far as we could see, small blinks to far and further countries I had never been to.

The aftermath was simple. I planned to make myself as ugly and fat as possible. I went back to middle school where kids were now kissing each other and instead, I grew a thick forest of rationality up around me. There was no need to tell anyone. Worse things had happened to people. I had not been raped.

When I became an official teenager, my fate of being born into a beautiful family became an irritation. No one ever called me ugly. My mother’s older brother, Lauren’s father, and his young family were our closest set of kin, the cool and gorgeous city people, the ones who sang “2 Legit 2 Quit” in the car and took us to restaurants where the owners knew them. They, in their homespun glamour, scooped me up with big love arms. Family was a singular devotion, and as family, we were in. Behind my braided hair and smile, though, I sensed a competitive undercurrent in their community: good looks were important. By observation, I came to see myself in the “not hot” category. In some ways, this positioning would set the framework for almost every decision I made onward. Someone needed to be the social example to prove to everyone that beauty was as empty as spun sugar. Love me anyway. I decided to not give my parents (or my extended family or the world) the pleasure and satisfaction of having a beautiful daughter. I didn’t write this down in a journal, speak it aloud, or even think it in those exact words.

I just acted it out.

I did not understand this act was a violent one.

I did not understand I was violating myself by cutting myself off from pleasure and beauty and delight.

There was so much violence brewing in me.

Some people grow up with chaos and survive by creating order.

Some people grow up witnessing a false sense of order and choose to blow the system apart to extract some remnant of truth.

I was the latter.

When my father suggested I eat fewer cheese sandwiches, I asked why. Dairy was my protein; I didn’t like meat. He explained cheese had a lot of fat in it, and so did hummus even though everyone thinks hummus is so healthy. Watch out for that sneaky hummus. He didn’t mention any of this to my brothers. Girls at school had begun to talk about how celery was a great snack because it had negative calories. I was aware of the girl-food destiny—not yet involved with it, though. I glanced down at my scrawny body and was able, just barely, to connect that he was telling me this because he, like so many people, had his own issues with overeating and was scared for me. He continued to explain the nutritional facts. I went to the cupboard and pulled down the bread. I sliced double the amount of cheese. I pretended to listen as my knife slathered mustard all over four, instead of two, slices of bread. In minutes, I had a double sandwich. When he was done explaining, I stared at him, took a huge bite of my massive cheese sandwich, and walked out of the kitchen.

Puberty squeezed on my ribcage.

Where was my heart?

Where were my trees?

My body morphed from a playful comrade into something to hate. Even when I felt glad about what genetics had given me, I knew I was expected, as a girl, to not love my body. Every girl has body issues. Every girl wishes she looked different. These were the American world’s beliefs. This was how girls connected with each other. Find the wrong thing and fix it. As much as I had vowed to be ugly and fat, I didn’t actually want to be those things. My thighs touched when I stood with my feet together. This detail became my thing. How could I get my thighs not to touch?

Meanwhile, at church, my mother and I stood in wooden pews and sang “One Bread, One Body,” the song that made us both cry a little. But I was now onto the priests, listening hard and elbowing my mother when one of them talked about people who were right (us) and people who were wrong (everyone else). She agreed with me on the injustice but held her ground. The land of the lapsed Catholics was not far away and we would both travel there. Each time we stood for communion and ate the body of Christ, I couldn’t believe people around me actually took the thin tasteless wafer to be the real body, and, as I knelt in prayer, my thoughts would tumble over themselves until I ended up stranded and alone on a pile of debris wondering why we were praying over a man’s body. Didn’t every person come out, actually, from a woman’s body? Where were the women, what about Eve, the snake, what the hell?

My body had become an aberration to me.

For the later part of middle school, I attended bar or bat mitzvah parties every weekend. This process forced a certain level of grooming. My mother bought me a pink taffeta dress. I remember how she uttered the word taffeta as she stroked the material. For her, it was fun to shop for the dress that would carry me through these events. But when my well-meaning mother pressed a dress or outfit against my frame, my throat closed off. The humiliation and pain was so acute I stared at the wall to keep it at bay. I became a grump who couldn’t shake the underbelly. We were little people trying to act like big people. Girls took note on who was better and why. I became a second-class citizen. No boy would choose me—the freckled, brown-haired, shy girl—to dance. Could I skip this part and just be a woman?

So I let my mother choose my dress.

It was too much energy to engage in the choosing.

Once, in the middle of the dance floor, my pretty blond friend told me her boyfriend had broken up with her. He happened to also be my crush, a boy beyond my league. I clutched her into a hug as she wept into my shoulder. She smelled of tears and sweat, a smell so sensual I wanted it all over me. I was the chosen one to help her navigate this devastation. This intimacy, this connection, was a drug. We hobbled over to the chairs in the corner so we could have some privacy to discuss. I could feel the eyes of my other friends on me, all of my friends, because I was friends with everyone—the cool kids, the nerds, the middles. I couldn’t bear seeing someone rejected, so always invited the outcasts to my birthday parties, and therefore had a string of followers around school. But my loyalty, truly, lay here, with the girl whose beauty so astounded me I trailed around after it in a haze.

I couldn’t be the pretty one.

I could be the wise one.

For me, they became mutually exclusive.

I toned my essence so far down my core began to disintegrate.

We moved to a swamp for my high school years.

The land was made of orange groves and fireworks. It was strange, this Florida place. I was a complete stranger to myself. It was easy to hide behind homework and good grades and late-night volleyball practice, and being told over and over I was one of the best athletes. A deep sadness had taken root within me. I had not wanted to move. I didn’t know who I was. To cope, I blocked my parents out of my life. My brothers, though, were allowed in my room. They would pump iron or just talk to me as I did my homework and the leafy trees outside flopped around in the wind. The company was welcome. They knew me best. They trusted my opinion. Peter would strut up to the mirror and ask me whether his muscles were getting bigger. Alex would lie in bed with me, his head on my shoulder.

“We tell you everything and you tell us nothing,” they often said.

I told everyone nothing. I hoped a teacher would notice when I lounged around like Ophelia in between classes, but no one ever did. Life had channeled me toward deep navy waters, where part of me floated and part of me drowned. We were all out there, but few of us knew to look around for others. Most of me valued my own melancholy—it made me “wise.” My teenage body dove and rolled for volleyballs. I slapped my teammates five. We leapt into each other’s arms. But I had begun to shut down to movement. The space between my hips was a void. When I crouched on the court, the words You are fat, You are ugly, You are fat, You are ugly rumbled through me and, at some point, the message made it to my body and my body said, Okay, I guess I’m fat and ugly and I’d better sit down.

Nature resurrected me once.

On a weeklong school canoe trip, we slid through mangrove tunnels and spiders fell into my shirt and I learned how to breathe through my fear of them. A hard paddle across a bay in a storm made me want more, and the sight of the moon and the sun in the same sky made me throw my arms open. My classmates were astonished at my exuberance. I had never been in the wild. My body, for a short instant, became a body of possibilities and capacity and knowing. I wanted to learn about snakes and read constellations. Wasn’t I made of stars? Weren’t we all? I didn’t want to dress my body up. I wanted to undress it, to get to the oldest part of who I was.

Good girls, however, do not undress.

Years later I would read about animal body and feel at home.

Hello, old friend.

You, at last.

But then it was just a glimpse.

Back in my regular world, on my sixteenth birthday, my family gathered around the cake. In front of everyone, my mom nudged me and mocked that I had probably never been kissed, right, right, right? She must have seen the wall shut down over my face. She must have wanted to take back her words.

But it was too late.

My not yet being kissed, I assumed, was because something was wrong with me. When my mother had reached toward me to say she just wanted me to feel beautiful, I heard, You aren’t beautiful. Driving became my savior. As a responsible young woman, I ran a carpool business for the kids who lived faraway from school like us. My car also allowed me to leave and go anywhere on my own. My summer plan would have been to dress like a man—shave my head, tape my breasts—and drive across the country. I told my mother and friends so. I was adamant about the need to disguise myself. A young woman, after all, couldn’t do it alone, not because she lacked strength but because the world was made of asshole men. If only I could feel the freedom a man does. If only I could pummel my way down the highway out of here to an open space.

Instead, I drove to Walgreens.

One night, I lied to my mother and told her I needed tampons. Was I really going to do this? I walked up and down carpeted aisles for half an hour and finally selected a box of devil’s food cake cookies. The teller didn’t seem shocked as I slid him my earned carpool cash. Maybe he was pretending not to notice how fat I was, how out of control, how ugly.

I made sure to ask for a plastic bag.

I strolled out of there with my most casual stroll.

Back in the safety of a car parked facing a ditch, I tore the box open and started with one until the cookies were gone. In the evening light, my eyes blank over concrete and palm trees, I knew I had just initiated a habit that could be with me for the rest of my life—sneak eating. Lauren and I had done it with crackers once. But that was together. You do this now, alone, and it’s going to be impossible to break it later. I folded the box into the size of a wallet and wrapped it in the plastic bag. Out of my car, I leaned in and pretended to be rummaging around for old trash to throw out. Found a few gum wrappers. Walked over to the trash can and let it all go together.

No evidence.

My struggle with food as balm began.

It was easier to disassociate from my body and be defiant at the same time. It would take me years to rediscover an authentic appetite.

By then, high school was almost over.

I would be going to the University of Notre Dame. Why there? The students did community service and seemed connected to a complex world beyond college. I liked to do the right thing. Somehow I had worn a silver cross around my neck for four years out of duty. It may also have had to do with pleasing Pat-Pat. She, the most eager student, was the only person in her family who had never graduated from college. For two years she attended a Chicago college until her father lost his job as an owner of a car dealership. She had to forgo finishing to work at the telephone company and eventually married and had four kids. Instead of pursuing the life of an intellectual, she found ways to mother and take classes on Japanese, the Bible, Jesuits. Her oldest friend, my godmother, chose not to marry and went on to a dynamic and global career with the State Department. My mother always wondered whether her mother wanted to be a mother at all.

Before I left for college, Pat-Pat asked to speak with me.

She grabbed on to my arm and pulled me close to her face.

The tears.

“I’m proud of you, Molly. I never got to finish college. I never got to finish college,” she stuttered, and it seemed she wanted to go on, to tell me the story, the why, but then she couldn’t.

It was too much for her.

I didn’t know how to react.

I gave her a hug and when it seemed appropriate to leave, I walked fast out of there, away from the deep pain of what hadn’t happened for her, from the pain of being a trapped woman.

Going to a Catholic university didn’t last long for me.

Late at night, I wrote email missives to my high school English teacher about the backward mid-century dynamics between men and women there. My lovely women friends made me laugh. We kicked and punched out to Tae Bo in our small rooms. We could go deep. But no one cared for books the way I did; no one walked down the hallway reading, no one but the seniors in my Mark Twain literature class. I was the only one in my two-hundred-person dorm who didn’t go to church and most women seemed to get drunk multiple times a week. Under red maple trees on the quad, I read about women and body and shame. It wasn’t hard to link that triangle to Catholicism. I bumped into female shadows everywhere. They were everywhere.

My roommate planned to be a virgin until marriage.

“That sounds hard, and sort of strict,” I said.

“Yeah, but . . .” she responded. One night, she came home drunk with her dress turned inside out and told me the boy had wanted to give it to her “the other way” to maintain her pureness. I put her to bed with a pit in my stomach. Stroked her forehead until she fell asleep. Watched the fluorescent streetlights outside until morning came. Maybe I was prude. Maybe some of this happened at every college.

The men scared me.

I wouldn’t let anyone touch me. Not that anyone tried. I made myself untouchable. Beneath my frozen water flowed the rage I wouldn’t be able to acknowledge for years. Alone, in my bed, in the dark, I sourced my own sexuality and soon understood how vast and unknown it was to me, and how badly I wanted to know it. My dreams took over, dreams about blood and shit, overflowing bathrooms, menstrual blood clogged in drains, my own blood running down my legs, shit smeared on every toilet I wanted to use, so much of it, this feeling I couldn’t escape the mess.

Only it wasn’t a mess. It was the humility of what it means to be a body. These dreams would never leave me. They would show up at points in my life when I wrestled with myself, my shape, when my body was preparing to take a deeper plunge.

Menstrual blood and shit.

Those would become my signs.

After the long vacant sad passage from girl to woman, I craved the corporeal.

Let me know what it means to embody.

After my freshman year, I decided to transfer out of there. In the packing and sorting, I failed to remember my mother’s father had allowed her to go to a college only as far as a tank of gas. But she bolted after her sophomore year, left an all-girls school for a coed one. She too wanted to expand herself.