Would he text? Would he call? I daydreamed about his call, I daydreamed about what he would say, I composed his speech in my head. I told myself to stop it, to get back to work, to finish my draft. I told myself to imagine that the boy in my novel was Ian, so I could sublimate my daydreams into art, but everything I wrote was shit. It was literature. It was a lie.
Then I fell asleep for an hour. When I woke up I thought, in wonder and amazement and hope, Oh my God, it’s noon on a Tuesday, and I’m napping? Is it finally happening? Am I becoming a Depressed Girl?
If I were a Depressed Girl, Ian would definitely fall in love with me. Later, in my slim autobiographical novel, I’d describe how I’d felt faint when he’d proposed.
After the wedding, I’d become frightened of certain streets. I’d cry often and forget to eat. Naturally, he’d be unspeakably good to me, so I’d have to do something truly unforgivable, like fuck his best friend, leave without warning, or give away his cat. In a foreign country, I’d tell lies to well-meaning strangers. I’d have meaningless, degrading sex. I’d spend a decade drinking too much, sleeping too much, sleeping with the wrong people in a studio apartment containing nothing but a mattress and a milk crate, only to emerge from this wasteland with a fully formed literary voice that described this torpid self-destruction in limpid, quasi-spiritual prose which would immediately earn unanimous critical acclaim, and all the disciplined little twats who had actually been writing for all the years that I had been depressed would just about expire from jealousy and frustration.
But who was I kidding? I was a disciplined little twat. Even as I lay on the couch pretending I was too sad to move I was making to-do lists in my head. I would never weep poetry from my fingernails. There was no sense in wallowing. I got up and got back to the desk.
When I got there, I found an email from Isabel. No content, just a single attachment. “College Essay.docx.”
WHAT WOMANHOOD MEANS TO ME
By Isabel West
There is a boy in my grade. Actually I should say, there was a boy in my grade. Last year he announced that he was actually a woman. He started wearing dresses to school and sitting with girls at lunch. Everyone was very respectful except for some guys on the soccer team who did some disrespectful things, but they were punished and school guidance counselors came to all our classrooms and led a discussion.
I have always been very excepting of Jewel. Her new name is Jewel. But secretly I have a hard time seeing her as a real woman. A bunch of my friends talked about it and we agreed. The thing is that Jewel never got her period. Getting your period the first time is weird. My mom said, “Now you’re one of us!” and hugged me, and I felt sort of freaked out inside, like I had turned into a monster.
But now I like getting my period. Not all the time, but sometimes. It makes me feel really powerful and proud, like look, my body made this. Sometimes women who get eating disorders don’t get their periods anymore. It’s because their body is too weak. I am proud that this never happened to me.
I’m not saying that Jewel isn’t a woman. She is. I’m not transphobic. But for me, I realize, my identity as a woman is the feeling that I have about my period, kind of embarrassed, kind of think it’s cool. That is what being a woman means to me. You’re just like a man, except you also get to do all this extra cool stuff, in your body, without even really meaning to.
I wrote back to Isabel right away: This is amazing! So great. Maybe the best thing you’ve ever written. Just make sure you’re always using the right pronouns, and watch the difference between “except” and “accept.” Otherwise, great! I’m proud of you.
Yes, she had written it fast. Yes, she would get pilloried for that opening. But at least she was finally getting weird.
That night, Ian came over. Don’t get too excited: with Lacie. From my room I heard them talking in the kitchen. For a while I pretended to read The Book of Disquiet, as lonely as I’d been since moving to New York. It would’ve been better, I thought, if they’d just gone back to his house. I could’ve been truly alone.
But when I walked past her room after brushing my teeth, Lacie called, “Rose? Come here.”
The door was open a crack, and I pushed inside. Lacie and Ian were in bed. Lacie had on some old gray tank that made her boobs look big. Ian was in a white T-shirt. Being so close to them made me flush.
“Come over,” she commanded again. “We were just reading.”
Ian held up a pink paperback covered in ghoulish cartoons. “Do you know Angela Carter?” I shook my head no. He didn’t seem embarrassed. I wondered whether this was some kind of dare.
“Listen for a while,” Lacie said. “She’s so good.”
I inched forward. There was the usual chaos: clothes in mounds and heaps, books and dirty glasses everywhere, unspooled yarn. Her paisley duvet had been pushed off the bed—too hot, the heating in the building was manic. The top sheet was up around their waists. Beneath the sheet, their legs. There was nowhere to sit but the bed, so I perched and listened to Carter’s demented fairy tale.
In “The Bloody Chamber,” a young bride is whisked away to a remote castle by her new husband, a wealthy older man whose two previous wives died under mysterious circumstances. The castle is huge and dark, with many rooms, one of which is forbidden. Immediately upon arrival, he deflowers her in a tower filled with white lilies and endless mirrors. Then he leaves. Alone, she roams the halls, drawn inexorably to the locked door.
The story was sexy and disturbing, about complicity and depravity, and as I listened I couldn’t keep my eyes from Lacie’s breasts. Without a bra her boobs were soft and full. I nudged her, and she moved over, so that we could lie next to each other, two little girls sleeping side by side, as we had been at countless sleepovers. On and on Ian read, in a slow, steady voice.
I wanted to drift my fingers up her chest. I imagined: her eyes would close, and she would settle on her back like a good girl, the obedient and passive girl she had always been, and I would peel up her tank top and bury my face in her breasts. Ian would watch. Ian would grow hard…These were just thoughts, cloudy dream-forest thoughts; they braided with the bloody chamber, the fairy tale with the cock like a sword. Yes, and Lacie would gently turn me over. She would give me to Ian. It was her way, to share everything….
A heat traveled from my stomach to my toes, a wave of longing so strong I felt ill. Beside me Lacie smelled dusky, of earth and bed, in her thin tank, with her mysterious face, long and plain one moment, incandescent the next. Beside her Ian hulked like a mountain, a dark gravitational force. I wanted them both so badly—the desire was so strong I didn’t have to wonder at its strangeness—that my head went thick and my vision blurry, their voices distant through this haze.