All-American Bitch

a close reading

I am light as a feather and stiff as a board

When I was in middle school sleepovers were the number one way of socializing. If you weren’t invited to the sleepover, you weren’t friends. For a while it was me, J and C. We were the threesome. “Light as a feather, stiff as a board” was one of those things we saw girls doing at sleepovers in the movies we watched at our sleepovers. I don’t think we understood the mysticism involved because we were too preoccupied with the reality of our lives. Instead of playing “light as a feather, stiff as a board” or using Ouija boards or hosting seances, we talked about boys. J was the most popular girl in our grade and the prettiest. She already wore push-up bras, not that she needed them. So, really, we talked about J’s boys. If C or I had boys they were J’s rejects.

I pay attention to things that most people ignore

After I don’t know how many sleepovers it became clear to me that I was the funny one. J and C were pretty, I was funny. If I ever did something unfunny, like dating a boy before J got the chance, they would stop talking to me for a week, usually until the next weekend when they realized not talking to me meant having a sleepover without my being there to come up with interesting topics of conversation other than boys. Sometimes I did something unfunny on purpose because that felt like power.

And I’m alright with the movies that make jokes about senseless cruelty / That’s for sure

If you’re gonna be the funny, kind of weird-looking girl, you have to have a dark sense of humor. What we thought of as dark as twelve and thirteen-year-olds escapes me now, but I remember not being interested in the shows and movies J and C liked. I loved Monty Python and the old movies my mom raised me on starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. No one else knew who those people were. I loved that. Everyone in my grade called me a “hipster.”

And I am built like a mother and a total machine / I feel for your every little issue, I know just what you mean

I was tall and lanky, but when puberty caught up with me I was fleshy, always a little soft. J and C were hard angles and sharp corners. Our middle school incited controversy when news broke that the nurse was giving out birth control pills to the girls. What do preteen girls need birth control for? the outraged people wondered while also teaching us about sex at the same time. The boys would snap our bra straps and rate our hotness to our faces. I was a 7. J and C were 10s. But over AIM or text, when their friends weren’t around, the boys were sensitive creatures. They couldn’t cry to their mothers anymore, so they cried to us instead. We girls learned that our job was to comfort them when they lost their baseball game, or when they failed the science quiz, or when their dad didn’t come home.

And I make light of the darkness / I’ve got sun in my motherfuckin’ pocket / Best believe, yeah, you know me

Good girls didn’t have darkness. The darkest thing that happened to them was getting their period, which J got before the rest of us. The popular girls were the perky ones. “Happy-go-lucky” was a phrase that was tossed around a lot. Zooey Deschanel was the ideal. J was happy-go-lucky. She grew out her hair and cut side bangs so she kind of looked like Zooey Deschanel. But I remember that J’s parents slept in different rooms and that I rarely saw them both in J’s house at the same time. J had a big house in a nice neighborhood. People called her rich behind her back, like it was an insult. Her dad worked in insurance. He wasn’t around much, but when he was, he took us shopping on weekends or ordered us pizzas for our sleepovers. Everyone wanted to be J with her big boobs and her pretty hair and her rich dad, but I think that was her darkness, actually. It must have been scary, being so beautiful and so lucky and so young. It must have been hard.

I forgive and I forget

When J and C stopped talking to me because I lost weight and was almost as skinny as them, and they didn’t start talking to me again in time for the next sleepover, I silently forgave them and ignored the dirty looks I got from everyone else they had turned against me. I silently forgave them instead of asking them what their problem was and who they thought they were just dropping friends like that, which is what I wanted to do. The adults looked at me too, but with concern.

I know my age and I act like it

“Old soul” people called me. “Wise beyond your years.” And so, when I acted like the thirteen-year-old I was, I felt ashamed. A person who is wise beyond their years shouldn’t cry or throw a tantrum or be too scared to ask for help finding something in the grocery store. But there was also that sinister knowing, that intuitive feeling that if I acted like an adult—kissed boys, wore short skirts—I’d be punished for that too. I felt like J was being punished for it. I saw the way the male teachers looked at her: like she was a freight train headed for the station and her breaks weren’t working.

Got what you can’t resist / I’m a perfect all-American…

My homeroom teacher for 6th and 7th grade wanted me. He was the history teacher and also the director of the musicals, where he would always cast me and my best friends in the starring roles, regardless of our theatrical prowess (which was meager). He referred to me as his “Girl Friday” and told me I had “spunk.” He was nicer to me than he was to J and C, whom he punished for being pretty. He would always ask them questions about their boyfriends in front of the whole class. He would pause a lesson to comment on the way J was chewing her gum or the way C laughed at something. Once, during musical rehearsal, he sent me to his classroom to find a script he’d forgotten, and when I was rifling through the bag he told me the script was in, I found a book called “How to Talk to Your Kids About Divorce.”

I am light as a feather, I’m as fresh as the air / Coca-Cola bottles that I only use to curl my hair

I finally figured out how to do my hair in my mid-twenties, and once I did, I decided to cut most of it off so I wouldn’t have to.

I got class and integrity just like a goddamn Kennedy, I swear / With love to spare

Our bodies were growing beyond our control but we were expected to control them. If we wore shorts to school they were supposed to be as long as the tips of our fingers when we stood up straight and held our arms at our sides. If you could see a bra strap there would be trouble, because bra straps were distracting to the boys. Even then I knew that boys were thinking about boobs whether boobs were in front of their faces or not, so why should that have anything to do with me. I don’t remember there being any analogous dress codes for the boys, though there was plenty about them that I found to be distracting. Their smell, for example. I didn’t have boobs anyway, but J did. They sent her to the lost and found to find an ugly old t-shirt to put on over her clothes several times, and everyone knew she was wearing an ugly old t-shirt because her boobs were too big and that was a bad thing. But if she dared say something like, Why are you so concerned about my budding tits, anyway? if any of us did, we’d be punished. We were expected to be kind to the people punishing us for existing. But didn’t we deserve some kindness too?

Forgive and I forget / I know my age and I act like it / Got what you can’t resist / I’m a perfect all-American bitch

J is engaged now. C works in fashion.

With perfect all-American lips / And perfect all-American hips

As an adult, I’ve grown into my softness. I’m curvy now that it’s cool to be curvy. Men want me, and not just because I’m funny. I’m still not used to it.

I know my place, I know my place and this is it

I feel most like myself alone in my room. I feel most like myself behind my desk, with a candle burning. My posture is terrible but I’m happy.

I don’t get angry when I’m pissed, I’m the eternal optimist

Once, in Sophomore French class, a kind of nerdy guy who everyone made fun of turned to me and, with anger in his eyes, implored: Emma! Go home, get in the bathtub, slit your wrists and bleed out. That class was a certifiable shit-show; our teacher was powerless against our antics and each class period usually devolved into everyone loudly chatting as they pretended to fill out a worksheet. So, no one else heard him. I don’t remember if I had said something unkind to him or laughed at something unkind someone else said to him, or what prompted such an outburst. I doubt I said anything quite so unkind as telling someone to kill themself, though. But, do you see how that’s my first instinct, to wonder what I might have said or done to incite his anger? Anger is not something they teach girls how to feel, but rather, something they teach girls to look out for in men, to be wary of. And when we are the recipients of the anger of men we learn to seek the answer to it within ourselves. It took me a long time to understand that I do not contain the answer.

I scream inside to deal with it, like, “Ah” / Like, “Ah”

If the boy I lost my virginity to was standing in front of me right now, I would scream so loudly. I would tell him his penis is small.

All the time, I’m grateful all the time

I feel so much pressure to be grateful for what I have but I don’t feel like I can be grateful and angry at the same time, and I am so angry. Aren’t you angry? Don’t you wish you could be 17 again and be angry instead of sweet? Don’t you want to tell your high school science teacher to fuck off? Don’t you want to flip the bird to the stupid jock who snickered to his stupid friends every time you raised your hand in class? Don’t you just want to be mean to someone for, like, five minutes?

I’m sexy and I’m kind

I was dating this guy in January. Really it was just sex. The sex was always good until the end when he would eventually give up on trying to get me off. I’ve learned to be nice when this happens. I don’t fake it anymore, but I say something about de-centering penetration as the ideal form of pleasure. Obviously I say something sexier than that, but you get it. I have to say something is my point. And once I do, they take it as an invitation to jam their finger or tongue into me for 20 minutes, and then they give up on that too. Then I have to say something that indicates I have some sort of defect, like who knows why it takes me so long to orgasm. Must be a me thing! That was fun though! I said it every time to this guy in January. What would happen, do you think, if the next time some boring dude rolled over after coming and asked me how it was, I told him “That sucked, actually”?

I’m pretty when I cry

I’ve never cried more than when I was in a relationship with this one guy, H, when I was 21 and he was 24. H was a low life, but at the time I thought he was everything. When I’m single, when I’m alone, I rarely feel like crying. Or, I guess I should say I rarely feel like crying out of sadness. I cry at the sudden surprise of beauty, or if I’m stressed about doing the laundry. I don’t really, really cry. But when I was with H I found something to cry about almost every day. I was miserable. When he dumped me I cried in bed for a month. I barely passed my classes that semester.

Oh, all the time, I’m grateful all the time / I’m sexy and I’m kind, I’m pretty when I cry

When we got to high school J, C and I weren’t friends anymore, and then C ditched J for a blonde, artsy girl. J tried but she was never artsy. Can’t have it all. So, she transferred to a school where they had to wear a uniform. That was her most vulnerable moment, the moment she showed her fleshy little heart: when she couldn’t take not being the big fish anymore, so she left for a smaller pond. Her parents finally divorced around that same time. I’m venturing the guess that the darkness may have caught up with her then. It caught up with me too. I don’t know what happened to her after she transferred, but I think I ended up being the freight train with no brakes, not her. Isn’t it funny how that works? We follow each other on Instagram now and occasionally run into each other in town. She still seems so self-assured to me, like she’s confident in every choice she makes, mostly content with her life.

J, what’s that like? Do you want to come sleepover and talk about it? We don’t have to wear bras. We can pretend boys don’t exist. I forgive you. I’m sorry.

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