Sex Object (10 page)

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

BY THE TIME I GOT CAUGHT WRITING NOTES SIGNED WITH MY
mother's name to give to teachers after I had cut class, I had perfected both of my parents' handwriting. But my mother's—the messier of the two—was easiest. I practiced their names and certain phrases—
please excuse Jessica
,
feeling ill yesterday
—in spiral notebooks for pages on end. My mother, forever snooping for evidence that I was having sex, found one of the notebooks and confronted me.

It was bad enough that I had written notes using my parents' names, but my mother also found pages where I had practiced the signatures of my boyfriend's parents. So I wasn't just grounded for a month but needed to call Jay's parents too to apologize. I don't remember what I said to them, just that I was mortified, and that I continued to write notes anyway to get us out of class until Jay graduated at the end of my sophomore year of high school.

My signature today looks a lot like my mother's did back then—big, loopy, and illegible. So when I find myself sitting at
a table after having given a speech at a college, signing my name over and over in books I have written, I can't help but cringe a bit at the mess I have left on the page.

Before I walk onstage to be on a panel or give a speech—a fortunate and strange part of my job—I say two words to myself internally: “slow,” “smile.”

I write the same words in the margins of my notes, so that while I'm speaking I don't forget to slow down my natural New York/Italian-American cadence and so the smiling calms me. It has the added benefit of making me come across as funny! and relatable! rather than angry, because for a feminist, anger is forbidden. It gives your opposition too much ammunition, even if you have every right to be angry and even if the stereotype should be long gone by now.

And so I smile and speak slowly (for me) and get to do something that a lot of people would love to do—to say what I think and have people listen to me. It is easy for me to say that to give a speech to young people and have them ask me to sign their books or take a picture with them is humbling. It has the benefit of being true. It's humbling, wonderful, flattering.

But the thing you're not really supposed to say because it sounds tone-deaf or ungrateful is the thing that sticks to the back of your brain and stays there: that being known by strangers is uncomfortable. And that I don't like it.

Or that you can come to like it too much. That the line of people waiting to talk to you can come to feel commonplace and mundane in a way that people sharing their stories with you
should never be. But when you do something often enough, it becomes muscle memory. You sign books, pose for pictures, and answer the same questions at different colleges with strikingly similar auditoriums.

When girls tell me that a book I wrote made them a feminist and they want to hug me, I let them, but I also hate myself a little bit because the feeling I am feeling most is that if they really knew me they would never say that. But I say,
Thanks, thank you, that means a lot to hear, thank you
. It starts to feel like nothing, which is fucking horrible, because when someone calls you a cunt it sticks. It's everything else that feels like the fluke.

I am not supposed to say that. Of the horrible things that men say to women online, I am supposed say,
You get used to it
. Or
They must have sad lives, I feel bad for them
. And it's true—I imagine these men who spend so much time hating women and sending me pictures of fetuses or making videos screaming about my sucking their dicks must have sad lives. Of course they do. There is no version of a fulfilled life that allows someone to write
fuck you cunt
on Twitter or tell you over email that your four-year-old daughter will grow up to be a bitch like her mom.

But despite my best intentions and pseudo-Buddhist upbringing, I don't feel bad for them. I don't feel compassion. I just hate them. That's all I have.

I know I'm meant to be the bigger person; I know you're not supposed to hate people because hate is bad for your soul. But so is getting called a cunt every day for ten years. So is knowing that every time you produce something to put out into the
world someone will try to kill it. That whatever you work on, whoever you are, the nameless horde of random people who go home at night and kiss their wives and children would like for you to disappear.

And that sometimes you want to, too.

Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman “the most poetical topic in the world” and I've often found myself wondering how many woman writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfill this most popular of narratives. We're most valuable when we're smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them.

I'm supposed to say that
it goes to show we're making a difference
if we're making people that mad, and that's true, but what is also true is that it is terrifying. I don't want to give speeches anymore; I don't want to stand in front of a crowd because I am more afraid than I used to be. But still, I speak deliberately on that stage and I smile.

The first time I realized I was out of my depth was at a conference in Cambridge for women in the media on the MIT campus where the organizer opened the session by talking about the amazing women they had participating. She mentioned my name, in a room full of women, and a girl sitting in the row in front of me said,
Exciting!
My friend and I looked at each other, shocked. We knew that people read our website but it was hard to imagine those people reading our words as people sitting in front of us.

The best and worst advice I ever got about being powerful and having a successful career was
fake it till you make it
. So many of us, women especially, don't feel confident or worthy or smart enough to be in the rooms that we worked hard to get to. So instead of letting that insecurity take over and showing the world just how vulnerable we feel, we're supposed to act like we belong. Feign the entitlement that seems to come so easily to our male peers.

I live this advice every day and hate myself for it most of the time.
Fake it till you make it
, but at what point are you just a fucking faker?

The feminism of the day says we need to lean in and stake out our claim and not be shy about our accomplishments, but it wasn't so long ago that taking up any kind of space was considered feminist blasphemy—a thorn in the movement's side. When I was pregnant with my daughter, just starting to show, I was asked to take my name off the website that I founded and built. Not entirely of course, but the hope was that in sisterly solidarity I would disappear myself from a section of the site where writers could promote themselves as speakers. And I wasn't asked as much as I was shamed in the language of “collective leadership” and “feminist dialogue” to step aside by a person who could financially afford to do as much.

Succeeding as a feminist meant that you had failed somehow, profoundly, as someone who cares about other women. A
real
feminist shouldn't be able to make a living, have her work recognized, take up space. But the problem is that you already
feel so small you don't think you could shrink down any more without completely ceasing to exist. But maybe that's the point.

The moments you feel large are fleeting—you blow yourself up but the air leaks out at a continuous rate as you speak and by the end of your sentence you're catching your breath again.
Slow. Smile.

The first time I heard my writing read out loud was the same year that I got caught writing fake notes from my parents. My sophomore-year English class had been taken over by a substitute for the remainder of the semester after our original teacher left midyear. Mr. McCourt had retired from Stuyvesant some years ago but was funny and had an Irish accent, so everyone loved him.

I wrote about meeting my boyfriend's parents for the first time and getting caught, later, with the pages filled with their signatures. The writing assignment was anonymous and so he didn't say my name but as soon as he started to read and I knew the paper was mine, I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be. I was thrilled. To hear my words in someone else's mouth, to see him speak them in front of other people, made me feel as if I existed.

It was the first time since I started at that school that I felt so out of place in that someone had picked something of mine, that someone had picked me. And so the following year I started to take creative writing classes and Shakespeare classes with the thought that they were similar to the acting I was already doing after school and couldn't believe my luck when my homework
was actually just writing things down. Writing down anything I wanted.

I wrote about my parents, I wrote about boys, I wrote about parties, and one day when I got back a ten-page creative writing assignment from a teacher who was not Mr. McCourt, in the margins of a scene where I described my father yelling at me the teacher wrote:
Is he mad about your promiscuity?

I am tired of faking confidence or being told that my lack thereof is a fault when it seems to me the most natural reaction I could possibly have to the lifelong feedback women are given. I don't want to be confident or inspirational and I don't really want to buck up anymore because the faking takes more energy sometimes than the work itself.

But still. The faking is what got me here. Every time I put on a sheath dress and heels and blow-dry my hair to go to a party or an “event” where they inevitably serve salmon, which I fucking hate, I feel out of place, because who the hell do I think I am, but also proud, because I am here. I like to send pictures to my parents.

A young activist who saw me at a fund-raiser once tweeted out, angrily, that I looked like I belonged there—among these rich people and well-coiffed pro-choice donors. As if fitting in was a betrayal, even though it's what I worked so hard for.

On my thirty-sixth birthday my daughter presented me with a “book” she had written because she wants to be a writer, like me, she said. The book, written on construction paper in crayon, bound together by string, was about watching me give a speech.
I was accepting an award from a humanist organization and Layla sat in the front row, avoiding her salmon but excited about the chocolate cake with the raspberry ganache, looking at me. She watched me talk for a while and didn't say much but wrote this book and drew the award, a placeholder for my confidence with my name etched in glass, proving I'm actually here.

We drove to Sesame Place after the event and watched as Layla avoided the people dressed up as the show's characters—
They're too big
, she said.
Are they real life?

A few months ago, I gave a talk at a college, even though I had been sick for a few weeks. I felt weak. I smiled, and posed, and sat down to sign books afterward. But in the middle of the line at some point, when a young woman put her book in front of me, I signed my mother's name.

THEY CALLED IT AN EMERGENCY C-SECTION BUT STILL FOUND
the time to shave my vagina. The nurse—I think she was a nurse—used a blue Bic razor, the kind my mother would buy in ten-packs and keep under the bathroom sink. I made fun of her for using such cheap razors, embarrassed by her leg stubble and bikini-line razor burn. I made a joke to the woman wielding the razor across my pubic bone about not being well groomed—
Who waxes while pregnant anyway?
She said nothing, left a few red bumps, and was gone.

Three days earlier I had gone to my doctor for a checkup but felt something was off and told them so. Layla's heartbeat was fine but the nurse kept taking my blood pressure. Once, twice, three times. Then my doctor came in, shut the lights off, and told me to relax and lie on my side before she took it for the fourth time. Then she had me walk across the street to the hospital.

I had never liked being pregnant. I felt more sweaty than glowy and didn't appreciate the sudden willingness people
seemed to have about touching me: my stomach, even before it swelled; my shoulder, as if in commiseration. Overnight, strangers felt entitled to know if I'd be breast-feeding or to ask why my stomach wasn't bigger at six months along.
Are you eating?

The first time I was hospitalized I didn't saunter over but was taken by ambulance after crashing into a tree with my back while skiing. I was fifteen years old, on a school trip, and was a moderately good skier. Still, on the first run of the day I hit a patch of ice and lost control. I saw that I was going to hit the tree and so I threw myself onto the ground, sliding down on my side the last few feet before impact. Later the doctor would tell me that this probably saved my life, or at least my ability to walk. I was lucky, they said, to have only ruptured my spleen and bruised my kidneys.

I was alone when it happened, and lay there in the snow for a while before a school friend passed by and went to go get help. Then two men strapped me into a sled and asked me questions about the date and my name. I must have gotten something wrong, though, because they called on their walkie-talkie for an ambulance.

I didn't have a bruise or scratch anywhere on my body, just a bad pain in my left shoulder. The strange thing, I told the doctor at the lodge, was that I hadn't hit my shoulder at all during the fall. That's when he told the man standing next to him,
We need to get her onto the ambulance now
. Apparently shoulder pain is a sign of internal damage.

My parents were a six-hour drive away at home so when
we got to the emergency room I asked someone to please call them for me. They let me get on the phone with my father as they worked on me, the coiled cord stretched tight to reach me in the gurney on the other side of the room. I told him I was fine but as we were talking a nurse put a catheter inside of me and I screamed. It was the first time that I cursed in front of my father.

I was able to avoid surgery to remove my spleen because the organ was encapsulated, they said, by a thin layer of skin holding it all together—keeping the blood from pouring into my abdomen. A few days later, whenever I shifted my weight, I could feel the blood sloshing about inside of me.

Fifteen years later, when my ob-gyn sent me to St. Luke's–Roosevelt Hospital, then in Hell's Kitchen, I was not alone. In addition to Andrew, my mother was with me. By pure luck she had gone with me to the doctor's appointment that day because Andrew had gone out the night before and was too hungover to drive. And so both of them were there with me as the doctor told us I would not be leaving the hospital until I delivered. My due date was three months away.

They said it was preeclampsia—high blood pressure, something that sounds innocuous but in pregnancy is deadly. A nurse put in an IV line in case I started to have seizures and they needed to get medicine into me immediately. We were skeptical, thought it was a fluke or my anxiety playing games with my blood pressure. I was healthy; I felt mostly fine. But with every new visit from a new doctor or nurse came more bad news.

After the first doctor said I wouldn't be leaving until I de
livered we started to plan for how I would spend the next three months in the hospital. Andrew made lists of DVDs he could bring for my laptop, started to enlist friends to visit and bring food from outside of the hospital, and made a schedule of visitors on a spreadsheet. They kept testing my urine for protein, making me hold a pan over the toilet before I pissed so they could check it every time I went.

A neonatologist came into our room to tell us all of the things that can go wrong when you have a premature baby. We didn't understand.
I thought I was going to be here for three months.
She told us she would be happy if I could last another week before delivering.

I lasted three days.

Andrew's parents flew in from California on a red-eye and when I saw them I remember I cried and apologized; I'm not sure for what. The next day, they moved me to a different floor—a sign that I wasn't as urgent as other women who needed to be in the labor and delivery ward. But later that night they changed their mind and moved me back. Andrew's parents brought me a chicken dumpling soup from a nearby restaurant and I asked the nurses for an Ambien. A few hours later I woke up with horrible pain in my side and back. It wasn't just preeclampsia; I had HELLP syndrome: hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, low platelet count. Or in layman's terms: I was fucked. I needed to deliver or risk dying.

Once your pregnancy has gone wrong—really wrong—no one quite prepares you for the sheer number of people whose
hands will be inside you within a matter of hours. First, my doctor—no longer my original ob-gyn but a younger woman who was on call, whom I trusted immediately, maybe out of necessity or because of the fact that her fingers were touching my cervix. Then a man I had thought was an orderly but who turned out to be a doctor came into my room, lifted my gown, and shoved his fingers so hard into me I screamed. At least the anesthesiologist didn't finger me, but he was cute.

When he came into the room, despite the fact that I was swollen with fifteen pounds of water and had an on-its-way-to-failing liver, my sister and I found the time to exchange glances at each other with raised eyebrows. He had dark skin and gray eyes and he towered above us. I smiled and moved my hair—which hadn't been washed in days—to the side, behind my ear. I asked him if it would hurt.

Soon after a nurse gave me a drug to induce labor and I got to feel twinges in my stomach that they told me were contractions but just felt like jumps. I was glad to feel something. I hadn't felt the baby move much during pregnancy, just blips and here and there. Only one time, a few days before I got sick, did I really feel pregnant—the top of Layla's head poked up through my skin and Andrew and I watched, amazed, as it moved across to the other side of my stomach.

Within an hour of giving me the drug they said vaginal birth couldn't happen, my liver was in danger. And so someone shaved my vagina.

Andrew tells me now that my arms weren't strapped down,
but that's how I remember it. My arms lying out in a T shape weighed down by wires and tubes, being wheeled into a room naked from the waist down while handfuls of people prepared surgical instruments and talked to each other as if I was not in the room, my freshly shorn sad vagina on display.

My mother says that when she had a C-section she felt nothing; the family joke was that when the doctor asked how she was feeling—as they were cutting into her—she said she had a bit of a headache. But I felt everything. Not pain, exactly, but tugging and pulling and the shifting around of things that I imagine were my organs. I wondered if they were taking them out, placing them on the table beside me. I thought about what they might look like.

Andrew breathed in my ear what I'm sure he thought were soothing deep-breath sounds I was supposed to imitate. I just wanted him to stop but didn't say anything because I thought if I died, I didn't want to die giving him a hard time for being a good husband doing the best he could. I asked how much longer it would take.

I know that the doctors brought Layla to me for a moment after pulling her out of my open abdomen, before they rushed her to the neonatal intensive care unit. But the drugs I was on erased that from my mind. I fake a memory of it, so I have something, but the last thing I remember is starting to fall asleep while their hands were still in me and Andrew asking if that was okay.
She's probably pretty tired,
one of the doctors joked, and we both thought he was sort of an asshole for it.

Layla was high up in my belly so the doctor told me afterward that they had to cut me both ways, horizontally and vertically, and that because of this I should never have a vaginal birth in the future because contractions could make my uterus rupture.

And so I threw myself onto the ground, eyes closed.