The Women Could Fly

A small cluster of women dressed all in black and wearing big glasses were talking about Mississippi, where a woman was scheduled to be burned for witchcraft. “The laws are so lax there,” one said. “Not just there, this country,” another woman earnestly said. “I cry sometimes thinking about how we’re the only developed country to let this still happen.” I blinked and took a step away from them. They talked about how exhausting everything was, how unsafe they felt, while most of them wore large engagement rings. Statistics spilled out of their mouths about where it was only a misdemeanor if a man killed a woman who he thought had ensorcelled him. The law making its way through the Florida legislature that encouraged the state to give out gift cards to people who reported potential witches in their midst. “But we’re safe here,” one woman kept saying. I drank a large gulp of wine and understood I had made a huge mistake coming to this party.

Once, there were men who loved to see punishment. They were elected officials, businessmen, community pillars, and every kind of man in between. They loved anything that would balkanize everyone they considered beneath them. If everyone was busy fighting for their rights, fighting each other, and the men stayed together, they would always get to be in charge of everything.

When I say men, this isn’t to say there weren’t women like that, too. Gender expression has never guaranteed solidarity, especially among people who are trying to survive.

I kept trying to figure my way into a joke. What is the difference between having a husband and clinical depression? Both want you to give up your friends, lie in bed, and don’t let you eat enough. The punch line of having a penis felt too obvious, but I wondered if I said it the right way, found the right framing, could it work? Or was the joke too dark?

They confirmed what I knew but needed affirmed again: anything can make sense to a person as long as it helps them feel powerful.

Everything was meant to reinforce having a typically cis female body was a mortification that must be endured until you were old enough that your body was an aged mush helped into baths and rolled over in beds. And then it was only about the embarrassment of being alive. None of those magazines pointed toward what I knew of mortification: my brain and how ugly it was, how it was linked directly to my mouth that let ugly stuff slip from it, and how those ugly things were then permanently in my brain for me to consider whenever I was restless at 2: 30 a.m.

“The only safe place for a woman is 100 percent alone.”

I alternated between feeling like a terrible person and daughter for holding these grudges and thinking, No, I deserve to be angry about these things. There is nothing wrong with knowing you’ve been treated poorly for no good reason and wanting to be treated better.

Now, it was hard to tell because adult unhappiness is so much more compact, so much deeper than child unhappiness. There have been times when I’ve been laughing, my head bent over a martini, my favorite song playing in the bar, people dancing and flirting around me, and a small voice inside of me would whisper, “I would like to bite into this glass, chew myself dead.”