The Ladies’ Handy Book

I feel like I’d like to be a man sometimes, just for the sheer unconscious power of it. Some type of cockiness must come from having a dick, sticking out like a pointer, pointing at everyone you walk by, declaring, Yes, that’s the type of woman I like, That’s how I like my women to look just before I fuck them, going around with the thing pointing rudely but unawares, jamming itself headlong into any available crevice, making girls blush and pull at their skirt hems and wonder if their makeup is right or their butt too big, when really all you can think of is distracting them long enough with their own self-preoccupation to allow you to slither into their warmest and wettest of secrets.

I wish I could be brash and crude and strut as though I owned the whole damned planet, rather than limping with my apologetic female gait, feet bound in high heels, legs restricted to straight skirts, stockings, the nervousness of having missed a spot while shaving, feeling straitened as though by leathers, invisible, unmentionable bondage posing me in my most slimming profile, chin neatly smoothed of its hated twin, line-backer’s weight shoved onto one sore foot in order to cheat the eternal camera of its extra ten pounds.

I hate with a ferocity that would drive a normal person to commit violence on its object. But I have cultivated for years a serene, if stony mask, a perpetual look of restrained brutality that prompts perfect strangers to ask if I’m all right. I have held my own hand back from my throat, inefficiently at times, but altogether quite successfully. I am, after all, still living. I am even functioning after a fashion.

I work. I eat. I water plants and say “hmm” to my husband. I feign ambition and make plans for the ‘future.’ I hedge my bets, knowing my chances of surviving the strength of my hatred are 50/50 at best. If I live, I would like a life to participate in. If not, I don’t want to miss anything too great.

My insides smell of good, aged bourbon, sweet and salty to the tongue. But my body feels like it has given up, is surprised to look out of un-cataracted eyes and to still have control over its less delicate functions. It begins to lay down and die, only to recall I have just turned twenty-four. It sighs and stands wearily up again, staring at the fifty years ahead as though at an interminable workday afternoon.

2004