And my mother wanted affection from men—no, that wouldn’t be right to say. She wanted men to want to give her affection; she wanted to feel attractive. How did I know this? Certainly she never said it. No one would have said it. But I saw it, clear as day. I saw it in the contentment she seemed to feel as the object of a compliment. I saw it in the way she looked with disapproval at other women being the objects of affection, being thought attractive. I saw it in the way she spoke of how some women were desperate for attention. She wanted it too but would never admit to the wanting. “Look at the way she’s falling all over him. It shows no class,” my mother would say when a woman and a man were standing close, speaking intimately, in a way that seemed to show affection. She wanted affection—and it was a finite commodity—but she wanted to get it the right way, the classy way. It was so complicated—tough for a kid to understand.
When my mother married her second husband, I noticed her contentment at how often he called her “a pretty girl.” “Such a pretty girl.” His words were like a recording being played just barely louder than the growling hostility that rumbled beneath. When he looked at other women, my mother wondered why they didn’t know better—that if they acted that way, of course someone would look. When he looked at me just a beat or two too long, with the smile that seemed slightly like the bared teeth of a wild animal, she started to look at me as she had those women at the party. Why didn’t I know how to act? Why didn’t I cover up? Surely, I should know better. She started to wonder, how I got to be so different from her—such an exhibitionist, such a loud, defiant, willful child.
Didn’t she see that I was an observer? And, as such, I was a blank slate, a curious container for the stares of others. Didn’t she see that I was her daughter, her child, not more than eleven or twelve years old? She did not focus on me as a child, because I was not only that. I was also becoming a woman, a player in a competition for which no rules are spoken. We learn through reprimands and prizes. “You’re trying to seduce my husband, aren’t you?” she said to me once in private, quietly. And the absurdity of the statement rendered me guiltily mute.
But maybe I was—either trying or seducing—just by being female in the room with a man. Maybe she was right about me and everything I was, everything I could be. I tried on the possibility of becoming the tightly buttoned victim of stares I did not invite. But that seemed like a lie, and I’d also been taught not to lie. “Pretty is as pretty does.” That’s what my grandmother said, and there’s a virtue in keeping pretty. It’s so complicated. It’s so hard to figure out when you’re young.
And it’s still a puzzle throughout life too—one we never quite solve. There’s always a piece or two missing under the rug, a piece or two swallowed by the family pet. There’s always a willful sabotage—somehow, someone seated at the table is to blame. The men at the party never sat with the women. That much, I observed for certain. Maybe briefly, during the meal, they sat with their turkey and green beans, rolls perched on the edges of Styrofoam plates. But then they were up again, smoking on the porch, chatting with one another, on the sofa in front of the television. There’s a puzzle on the table we never quite solve.
At seventy-three, my mother started dating again. Her third husband dead, she was seeing someone who lavished her with compliments. She was still beautiful, still proper, still classy and well-dressed. This new male attention brought her contentment, but it also seemed to make her nervous—as nervous as I remembered her being when she was middle-aged and I began to look like a woman, still a child. She had become nervous again and seemed on the lookout always—on the lookout for someone’s wrongdoing, a misstep that would explain whatever misfortune she endured. When I was first about to meet her new beau, a man of eighty-nine years, clearly smitten with her, she examined my blouse, and her expression judged it untoward. She said, “You’re going to try to seduce him, aren’t you?” And this time, I was not mute with shock. I was surprised and wounded, thrown back into an earlier part of myself that was astonished by what I was beginning to discern as the rules of men and women. Even as an adult, long practiced at paying attention, watching out for my safety and choosing carefully who I would be, I was jarred by her question. My adult voice came forth with humor, even though this was not joke. “Oh, mother, that’s just what I’m going to do! How ridiculous.” And I laughed.
And then she laughed. She repeated the sentiment, “Yes, that would be ridiculous.”
4. Wanted: Fat Girl
Maybe I bumped her elbow. It could have been something as simple as that: the catalyst. And when she turned around to see me, her response was habitual—not calculated. She saw my face and then looked down my body and back up again with disdain, then disgust, and then she finished with a small laugh of gleeful pity. The entire assessment and pronouncement lasted a full second—not more than two.
Could I have imagined the disdain, or had there been some past interaction between us to prompt her disrespect? No, I am anonymous—and I have spent a lifetime cataloging glances such as these. I know the difference between a pullback that implies I’m taking too much space and a step-aside that extends respect for someone who needs to walk past. I’ve been thinner too, and I know that, for thin women, there are different glances (but that’s another story). Those who don’t experience them often dismiss the social sanctions that take place in mere moments. Perhaps they are imaginary, a symptom of paranoia. To those who know them, they are as real as the furniture.
To be fair, she had been drinking. It was late at night, and I was on her turf. That is, anyplace where the body is put into motion. I can sometimes get her respect in the classroom, or behind a desk, a place where my body is secondary to my mind. The hour and alcohol would make her drop the decorum she might use at, say, the post office. She would note my body shape and size, attire, and demeanor at the post office too, but the schoolgirl glee at my perceived defeat is reserved for late-night encounters, times of slight intoxication. For a place where she believes I am unarmed, unwelcome.
We had just left the dance floor, and I think I bumped her arm. We’d been out dancing, and the music was ending for the night. We were coming back to ourselves—the selves that were no longer ecstatically moving, bodies pulsing rhythm. We were coming back to the selves that have to find meaning in our own lives, make decisions about who we are, how we project ourselves onto the bright canvas of culture. The bracketed existence of dance floor anonymity was finished. And though I didn’t know the woman who gave me the look, I knew how much she needed me.
What causes one to disdain another and think it is warranted? The fact that it will be excused, or even lauded, for starters. What causes a person to dismiss the humanity of another? A need to elevate oneself in a social order where most of us help ensure that some can be disdained in order that we may flourish. And that’s why the slender girl on the dance floor needed me to be fat. While she thought she didn’t want me around, she wouldn’t have known how to live without me. And her relief that she could have been me, but wasn’t, spurred the gleeful chuckle of dismissal to her affront. I gave her life authenticity.
By the bar, late at night—this was not the time for conversation, but I caught her eye and looked for a moment with real compassion. This did not even take a second, maybe half a beat. I was so out of place in this interaction, not doing my job. And, indeed, I know how to do my job: to avert my eyes and show the shame that I feel. I felt it as a child and still do at times when someone like her catches me unaware: the shame of forgetting that I am not credible, followed by the hot rage of injustice. But not that time, and less often, the older I get. I just looked at her with compassion—so different from pity. I was not afraid that I could’ve been her. I accept that I could have been her. I might ridicule another in order to elevate myself. Of course, I could. And I knew that my ability to practice kindness toward her would help