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My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself
to please my father who’d make me tiptoe from wall to wall then back again to improve my lacking calves or worm the ground like a vacuum palming the carpet for bits of trash he’d count in my little hands. When I spilled a cupful of crushed chili flakes on my Chapagetti noodles, he forced the whole hot bowl down my throat as I sobbed. And he ordered my hair pulled back, always, in a ponytail. It wasn’t until I neared forty that I discovered them—the women I’d twisted myself into for the men I loved—all slumped in my gut like a heap of secondhand costumes. Once, I followed a man into a hurricane minutes before it stripped half of Manhattan from power. I trailed behind him when the transformer line exploded and the night sky flashed a ghastly green like God smothering the city with a neon sheet. Then the traffic lights, streetlights, and every last lamp through every window flickered then snapped, and in that alarming darkness, the city shrank into a closet so cramped I couldn’t breathe. Still, I stood in that downpour on a sixth-story roof to hold up his boom mic as he recorded the storm. For another, I became a Ron Paul for President groupie. I scanned Reddit in my homemade campaign shirt while smoking weed to white boy emo tracks about tommy guns and existentialism the same year I voted for Obama. For yet another, I learned to ride a bike. Even managed one from the Village to the GW Bridge, but when the path clogged halfway up with bikers on three sides of me close enough to kiss, I forgot how to brake. I threw out my hands to grab the highway divider and collapsed, then I hauled up the rental to finish the trek, bloody knuckles and knees be damned. And for hundreds of mornings, I woke each morning before the morning— not even two hours after last call in the city— to blend spinach and strawberries with flaxseed meal and hemp seeds for a man to take to work. And when one provoked a drunk stranger then couldn’t meet a deadline with his battered head, I let him turn me into a comic book android. I wrote pages upon pages of a monologue he fed to the robot, fashioned by a toymaker who loved her the way he thought he loved me. He injected her with scene after scene from my childhood, and in the final issue, haunted by my life, she screams, Stop inventing me! before she claws open her chest and yanks out a fat blue gem carved like a heart. And during a spell when I was shackled to no man, I got naked in a room full of naked people, all of us drunk and stoned, seated in a circle like schoolchildren waiting for some game to begin or for the morning hello song, the kind that loops until you’ve hollered everybody’s name. At daylight, I drove the prettiest of the girls home. The one some men bragged they could bed with a fat stack of C-notes, the one who eventually married the mayor’s son. She had a habit of laughing at everything everyone said and danced with her hands above her head like someone panicking with a pistol pointed at her face. For years leading up to that day, I thought she was the sort of woman I was supposed to be—nonthreatening with a body that inspired valuation. She insisted she ride with me instead of with the boys hovering over her like a flight of hungry kestrels. And minutes into the drive, it became clear she wanted something from me, something like absolution. Approval maybe. And she said, I feel sad. And she said, I don’t know who that was, I don’t know why I did that—that being what we’d all done all throughout the night, and I admit I was rankled by her conscience, clanging louder than mine, which was bored of my neglect by then and resigned to watching my life lurch forward without it. When my father wasn’t sculpting or smacking me, he said I was made in the image of God. So God I became, forging myself each time I found a man to die for. I was the creator, the crucified, the wildfire slamming against their chests. I read what they read, and I drank what they mixed. I bent the way they bent me to do what they invented. And how I charmed their brothers. How I disarmed their mothers—the lemony dolmas, the pink pork meatballs I rolled with them, the dough I pinch-pulled then dunked in anchovy broth. And when I married the last man I loved, as the woman I thought I was, I woke one night like a jinn horrified to find herself fixed in her final incarnation. I stopped recognizing myself to such a degree that some days I’d wake having forgotten— really, I’d forget—we had an actual child. I morphed into a serpent, a tempest. I struck myself against our domestic walls like a mad bat trapped in a coop. And my husband—who from the beginning looked at me like he understood I was not his, like he was willing to take what he could get for as long as I’d let him have it—refused to enter my war. How bereft I was left with no enemies. How I brawled on that battleground alone with myself, punching at nothing until I conjured my multitudes. I wish I could say I freed myself somehow. That I’d pried those shadow selves from me with a hex, a needle, a healing quartz. Or that like the cloak of Bartimaeus, they dropped in the dust when I stripped myself to sprint toward the savior’s voice. No. By then, I’d lost that appetite for discarding myself. I carried them, one by one, like bride after bride across the threshold and removed their boots. I drew baths loaded with salts, cooked meals in butter. I let each one sleep when she needed to sleep. And in time, I thanked them. I came to recognize their service. And in time, they let me love them the way a father or a mother ought to have loved them. Them. Yes, I suppose I do mean me.