I am a woman
Which means
I am insufficient
I need—
Something to uphold me
Or perhaps uphold.
I am a woman.
— “Ivy,” by Georgia Douglass Johnson
I am a woman
Ivy rubbed her stomach, then gathered it up in her hands. It wasn’t a stomach so much as a spreading middle, a generous armful of skin and flesh. There were no words for her body. Thick hoof ankles bolstered trunk-like shins that bundled soft brown calves on their backs. Knees, bulging heavy in the front, skied caves of secret young skin behind them. Hips, hands, arms—they were all there, but more and different. Hands thicker than hands. Arms fuller than arms. Hips wider than hips, and busier with weight to carry.
Mostly it was not her body, but everything else that tired her—the world outside, all the things beyond her skin. But then, when she came home and looked at herself with the world’s dust still on her eyes, she was often tired still. All that differentness. All that nameless flesh, that wordless body. And on top of everything, her head seemed so small…
Which means
This little white man is looking at me. He is inspecting me on this bus like a woman inspects a pimple on her chest. This white man in his suit is eating his sandwich under the NO FOOD/DRINK/SPITTING/RADIO PLAYING sign on the M4 bus and his eyes are steady on me. He stares, snarls, turns back to his paper, but he can’t help but look up again, again, again, peering at me as though he wishes he could reach out, squeeze me, pop me, get me gone. Of course I have seen this man before. There are so many of him. When I was younger—eleven, seven, even five—I swallowed their wishes for me. I remember yearning to press my body until it popped and seeped away, delighting in the dream of my body punctured and gone.
Now I stare back. It’s hard, exhausting, but I do. I watch this man, his sandwich in his hand, unallowed and flagrant, his paper on his lap unread, his eyes, unabashed, on me. I imagine a world in which I bow, devour his sandwich, his hand, his body, his briefcase, the bus, and the street, wipe my mouth and bow grandly again. My imagination amuses me. I swallow my laugh into a smile and turn away.
Harlem is big, gorgeous and moving. Strutting its street lights and corner stores, men playing with balls and children carrying groceries for old ladies, church bells ringing the time. Cops, sitting, watch the dealers standing, slinging double-dutch girls into short tight dresses as heads and eyes and genitals follow. “Excuse me—” My neighborhood is full. Outside the projects people in t-shirts play cards on cement tables and children chalk the ground in front of swingless swing sets, write their names on monkey bars. “Excuse me—” Someone got shot on this corner and there is a mural, a portrait, a cross, candles, flowers, big brown bear with big read heart. My neighborhood is mourning. “Excuse me—” I wonder who he was. “Excuse me—” Two tall men in pink shorts and braids dance across the street….
“Excuse me!”
This older woman whose peers would call her “heavy-set” heaves my thighs with her hips. She is trying to push me into my seat, half a seat too small for me.
I pull in for her, move my feet so she can rest her cane. She surveys me, frowns, then continues to rustle and breathe. The woman makes fists out of her hips and arms and pushes me hard, handles me like furniture, banging, shoving. She shifts our weight around in the seats, thrusts into my side, into my thigh. She leans forward, she huffs. I decide to do this dance with her. She is old, black, a woman; she deserves her space. I know that with her violent bending lips and bones she is telling me that I need to try and fit—she has learned this. I press myself into the narrow seat for her and send my mind away.
The street numbers are counting seconds half-time and I am almost home. I grasp the metal handrail and hoist myself out of the seat. Glide, aim my weight, pop in a half-guided fall quickly onto the pavement. Hike up jeans, smooth out shirt, I prepare to climb Sugar Hill.
The men on the block are familiar, and their calls mark home like a series of tattered welcome mats.
“Big Girl!” a middle-aged black man in sweatpants calls from beneath the bodega awning.
“Que linda, la gorda!” a short Dominican man with sunglasses and a plate of chicharrones in his hand calls from a crate in front of a car.
“Excuse me, miss.” A young dread clearly smoked into his sixth sense walks up behind me. He follows me quietly until I turn around.
“Can I get your name?” he says. His eyelids are thick as prunes.
I am breathing heavily, out of breath from the climb. I pause, steady myself till I am calm and can smile for him. “Why?” I say, hoping my face is not too sweaty, thanking him silently for calling me “Miss.”
“You know, you a pretty girl… Maybe I could take you out sometime, nahmean?”
“My name is Ivy.” I smile and feel the thick feather boa of woman glory around my shoulders. He extends his hand.
“Ivy. That’s a pretty name.” His voice drags. “I’m sayin’, Ivy… I like big women. You strong, nahmean? Like you not gon’ take no shit. I like that.” He gestures strength with a Sumo wrestler pose and slides into place with others like him in my memory. I wish I could paint myself on my shoulders to warn these men that I am fragile, that there are valleys here, and if they are looking for only hills they need not waste their time. Maybe I should get my hair straightened—maybe it would help.
The dread is still talking, making a chorus with the other Harlem men as I walk away. Their eyes feel like borrowed diamonds on my neck and I want to give these men what I have if they want it. But when they smile, I always wonder if they are swallowing laughs.
I am insufficient
On the music video channel, white- and yellow-skinned women jump and fly across the television screen like kernels of popcorn from a skillet, and I watch, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Singing and dancing, the women make declarations about men and love and self, the traps of life. They hold forth on the shedding and catching of various weights as they bounce around the glass box and spring into the air: losing you was like losing two hundred pounds of nuthin. Love me up like good food, fill me with your love. I check the clock: only five fifteen. I settle into the sofa’s arms and sigh, waiting for my food to come. Waiting for food is a special kind of waiting. A wanting and a not wanting at once.
On all the other channels there are small white people. This one with a small black friend, these two embracing one another, this one gaunt and luxurious and alone. I feel my middle with my left hand and hold the remote with my right. I wish these buttons would take me to some world in which I could find myself in a three-segment struggle complete with mild conflict and total conclusion, love at each stage, a role to play. I am pressing buttons, scanning the screen for myself like a spirit in the air looking for a body on the ground… Nothing. I rest my hand on a warm fold of me and press in.
The black talk-show mother is holding a grown white woman, stroking her mousy brown hair, kissing it, stroking again. The woman’s tears and snot are leaving stains on the talk-show mother’s suit jacket and the mother invites more. “He’s not worth it, baby. You know it. This is about you.” The audience claps. The camera pans the spectators and freezes on the most empathic faces: a black man nodding in solemn support, a white girl streaming tears down pink cheeks, an older Latina holding her chest, her eyes moist and proud. The woman sobs: “Thank you. I love you.” The talk show mother looks up at the sky and back down at her charge: “I love you, too, baby.” The audience claps and claps and claps.
No part of me is clapping, but my eyes moisten. So this is the big black woman in the glass box. The closest thing I will ever find to me. She is not bopping and singing and moving like the others. Not discovering life’s secrets, falling in or out of love. She instead must be love, the vast, wet ground from which generosity grows. I can never be a small, broken white woman; I can never make it my life to love one. I cannot lay down in my own lap and cry; my lap is buried—my middle—so far away.
As I watch, I remember being young, twelve or so, and dreaming of a spotlighted existence as girls do. I thought I could dance around this screen one day, in the same way that I thought all allegories were about me—Alice, Dorothy, Rapunzel, Snow White—their lessons my lessons, their stories all secretly mine. Now I know better—the bus men, the street men, the women behind the screen all see to that. But still there is a small part of me. I feel it now. Stubbornly, hardheadedly, that part of me still waits for the stares and shoving hands to dissolve into light. For mean eyes to soften and crinkle into smiles, for pointing fingers to lift and part and join together in applause.
I watch the talk show mother’s eyes shine onto the white girl’s cheeks, a spotlight. Nothing but giving in that gaze. I am reminded that getting is not supposed to be for me. And then there is the doorbell, the food.
I need—
For Ivy, the man in the doorway had become an awkward acquaintance by now. He knew her number, her address, how to press the broken elevator button hard enough to be carried to her floor. He did not know her name and she did not know his, but there was an intimacy in that too. He knew what she ate and how she liked to eat it. She flashed her smile and hoped he would smile back, hand her the bag, and leave quickly.
“Hello,” she said. The tenement hallway smelled like arroz con guandules. Someone was cooking down the hall.
“Hi—how are you?” He sat the plastic bag on the doormat and shuffled through his pockets for the receipt. Ivy held out a twenty and waited.
“Fifteen-seventy.” He looked up with wide eyes, first at the money, then at her. He lingered on her face for a minute, then took the cash. “Thank you,” he said. “You having a good day?”
She shifted her weight and stooped for the bag: warm air, crisp heat.
“Thank you,” she said again, the best answer she had.
He nodded, counted the change, and handed it to her, still looking at the bag.
“See you later.”
On the television, a reporter stood a few blocks away on the corner of 137th and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, in front of colored lights and a police barricade. She was reporting live from Harlem, she said, where yet another drug-related shooting had taken place. The neighborhood was in panic, she explained, holding her hat to her head as a gust of wind blew her calico hair into her face. She shivered—or was it a stutter? “Harlem r-residents are stricken with fear.”
Ivy opened the containers: chicken, broccoli, gravy, egg rolls, rice.
The camera tightened on neighborhood faces.
“Our young people need to learn to stop this mess. We can’t keep dying like this.”
Ivy spooned rice into her mouth and chewed over the peas and onions: bursts of sweet grease released in gulps.
“I hope the mayor watches this and sees that we need to find ways to keep our kids in school instead of out here on the block.”
She steeped the broccoli in its sauce and rested it on her tongue for a second, chewed and went in for another piece.
“I just can’t believe he’s gone.”
The food warmed her stomach as she watched. There was sadness, there was heartbreak, there was anger, and more. She closed her eyes and listened to Harlem around her: laughter, hip-hop, sirens and bachata. An old soul song. Children calling mothers at windows, men yelling down the street. Ivy did not hear fear, did not see it, except on the face of the reporter herself. But still, here she was, the one with the microphone, her huge eyes at the center of the camera’s frame:
“The people of Harlem are in a state of panic.”
Ivy finished what was in front of her, heaped the plate with more.
Something to hold me
I would sell my feet for a bed right now. For real. I would resign myself to lay limp for the rest of my life if it would promise me comfort in this one instant. I am dreaming of floating in cool blocks of Jell-O, a pool of thick pudding, even a pile of leaves.
I am at the beauty parlor, in a too-tight chair, being cut into and it hurts. This is not an old, easy pain. I feel those old pains, too, and I can list them at will: bra cutting paper-cut slits into my shoulders, jean waist burning at my middle, ripping my skin raw. Those pains are always happening, are happening now too, but my body stopped feeling them a while ago. This pain is different. This chair…
Last night I ate myself to sleep to the music of TV and street sounds. People were crying and laughing all around me, and I was quiet inside. Men called my body a hard-sealed woman and I did not speak too loud. I did not scream—I could lay down.
But now I am sitting stuffed into a narrow metal chair, piled, layered, folded like pastry dough into this small space whose stiff arms are denting my sides. The woman behind me is slathering cream on my scalp and it is so cool at first, all snow and mint. But then it starts to burn. And my hips are burning and my behind is numb and I am trying so hard to send my mind away to still and calm last night, to the food warming me from the inside, to my sofa, soft and wide like a lap. But the chair is tearing tracks along my legs and I feel my body gasping.
“It’s burning,” I say. My voice is as numb as my hips, and I realize I have not spoken in an hour, maybe more. I squeeze myself out of the chair—one side of my body thick and heavy, the other worse. I balance my weight on the counter and stand, looking for the sink. My hips throb with the air, make a rhythm.
“No, baby, wait. You need to keep it in. Let it set for a while.”
But my temples are chattering hot, my thighs dead weight beneath me: I can’t wait. I lunge in a heavy slow motion toward the shampoo chair. Try to maintain my posture, to not look like a woman in pain. It is an impossible step to manage. I fumble with the knobs, pull the chair away from the plastic sink, try to leave enough room for my back…. I am spilling over the edges, as always….
The woman mutters over me as she rinses the No Lye Relaxer out of my scalp… the water is so good… “You didn’t wait long enough”… my head is crying “thank you” and my eyes are wet… “Not straight enough, you know, you got too much hair”… I move from cool and grateful in the water to raw and hot stuffed under the drier… “Long though—that’s good. Long hair slims the face.”
In the row of women under the drier, I am like a mother duck lined with her chicks… small them, small them, small them, Big Me. When the timer ticks and the heat stops I am relieved. I push out of the chair slowly, with one foot, but the chair makes a deep wobble... please… I am sending my soul to wake up my legs and tell them to hold me up before this chair collapses… lord, I do not need this chair to collapse… legs, come on and help… where are you… this chair will not hold me….
“Ok, baby, I’m ready for you, come on now. Let’s get at that hair. I can’t get it straight as I’d like ’cause you wouldn’t let it set, but I can blow it out good and work it with the iron, come on.”
I am praying for the strength and grace to get up. I imagine a world in which I do not have to scan every room for something to hold me gently without breaking under my weight… my heart….
Or perhaps uphold.
My scalp is numb and my hair flops against my ears outside. I am trying to feel it as a triumph—of beauty, of womanness, but I can’t. My scalp is burnt hard and my hips are aching. I imagine other wants: I want to feel myself in a suit eating a sandwich under a no eating sign, shooting glares like lasers wherever I please. I want to feel myself standing on one of these corners, big-jeaned and beepered, tossing thoughts out my mouth like darts at passers-by. I want to feel myself holding a nice hat in fear. I want to feel myself falling apart in someone’s lap, I want to believe they will pull me together, prepare me to live in this world…
I walk uptown past vacant lots and abandoned buildings, men behind tables selling black books and oil, women offering to braid my hair. They see that it is flapping, just straightened, but they offer anyway. I turn at 146th and walk toward the water, kicking broken glass through the streets as I go. At the overgrown park on Edgecombe, I choose the splintered green bench that is missing a slat of wood. The missing slat means I lean can back, spread.
I watch the little league boys play baseball on the other side of the torn metal fence. A tour bus parks behind me and a sea of tourists floods from the door. The boys and I notice them. They boys continue their game. I continue to feel my space and watch. Some of the tourists see me and look away quickly. Their sons point and laugh…. Their fingers are dirty. Their daughters stare…. They are skinny and ugly and to me they look sad.
I try to focus on the game while the tourists press against the fence and take pictures and talk.
“They’re so cute, poor things.”
The batter hits the ball high, past fat clouds and slim branches. The boy in the outfield catches. Everybody cheers.
“Oh, I can’t imagine growing up in such a dangerous neighborhood.”
The players drop their gloves and run to each other, exchanging daps and hugs in the patchy grass. I see tourist children laugh at me… in my head I laugh back.
“It really makes you appreciate what you have, knowing that these kids are so unfortunate.”
Now everybody runs to the mound, cheering. Some pick up broken tree branches and chase each other around in the dirt. Others grab bottle caps and throw them, laughing.… I smile.… the outfielder sees me and smiles back.… I laugh with the boys.… I can feel my legs. I rub them, feel their thickness.… They feel nice.
I am a woman.
Ivy comes home and pushes her hair back, away from her face. Her eyes are clear half-moons trimmed in fur. She is standing in front of her mirror, filling it to its edges. She lifts her arms, sways in the space around her. She has been standing for a while, feeling the roughness and softness of her body… massaging her middle… scratching her shoulders… reaching inside of her caverns and folds. Her feet are tired, but not too tired. When she wants to move, she will roll and sprawl wildly. And when she is ready, she will lay down.