Smile

I’m fifteen and I’m on a subway car in New York City, where I was born, and where I’ve always lived. The subway car is packed, I’m on the 1 train heading uptown and it’s rush hour. There wasn’t any way to avoid this. In a taxi, I’d just be sitting in traffic with the meter running, using up the little spending money I make babysitting. On a bus, I’d be jammed in just like I am now, but we’d be stopping at traffic lights and moving at a snail’s pace. At least here, we’re jammed in like sardines, but it will be over quickly. I’ve managed to sneak my arm in and hold the pole closest to where the doors open, so when we get to 86th Street I’ll be able to get off the train as easily as possible.

Holding onto the pole is a game we New Yorkers play, and it’s called, how do thirty people in three feet of space manage to do this and not touch each other’s hands? The lucky people have seats, and when things are normal, decent people give their seats to the elderly, or those with small kids, or anyone who would have a hard time standing up in this situation. Some people manage to grab a strap of their own and tower over the people who are sitting, often leaning into their legs and apologizing with a smile, because what can you do? This is the price you pay for living in the Big Apple. Whether you get a seat, a strap or a communal pole is really just timing and luck of the draw. But during rush hour, you’re so packed in, it almost doesn’t matter if you hold on - when the train lurches there’s nowhere for you to go, there’s no space for you to fall. 

Photo by Ronny Rondon on Unsplash

There’s a man behind me. I can’t see his face, because to do that I’d have to turn all the way around and there isn’t room for that. As the train lurches, he lurches up against me, but it’s impossible to tell for sure whether he’s doing it on purpose. Some guys ride the subways at rush hour for this reason. They ride the buses, too. They wear sweats and no underwear. They get off on it.

I’m in that uncomfortable space of feeling pretty sure this man is rubbing his hard-on into the back of my thigh, but I could be wrong. How can you tell when people carry briefcases and purses and umbrellas, and are shoved up against you on a moving train? I could jam my elbow back into his ribs - that’s how up on me he is - but if he isn’t doing anything wrong, I’ll feel terrible. I could say something loudly, but again, if I’m wrong I’ll be so embarrassed. Also, will anyone help me if I’m right? Because he’ll definitely deny it one way or the other. I try to move away from him, but there isn’t anywhere to go. And now, I’m not wondering anymore, that is definitely what I’m feeling and I know because this isn’t the first time it’s happened. I jam my elbow into his ribs as hard as I can. I hear him gasp and feel him turn away from me. A woman on the other side of the pole puts her hand over mine and I look at her. Are you okay? She mouths the question, like we’re sharing a shitty secret because we are. I nod, but I can feel my cheeks are red and my heart is racing. I hate confrontation, I’m not violent, but I’m not going to let some man do that to me. The train stops and the woman leans in and tells me he’s getting off at the stop. I think she says good job.

Years later, when I’m twenty-five, I’ll be walking down the hallway of an apartment building at 3am with my dog. I’ll be holding a bag full of the things I could grab in a rush, the things I grabbed quietly after the man I’d been dating fell asleep. I knew I was going to have to leave, the fights had been getting worse. He was irrational, controlling, and jealous of everyone. If I looked at a waiter while I ordered my food, he was sure it was because I wanted to have sex with him. On this night, he’d gotten so enraged he’d come at me and punched the wall right next to my face. The threat was clear, next time it would be my face. I wasn’t waiting for next time, I wanted to leave right then, but I knew I was stuck. He apologized, crying, and said he loved me and he was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again, just like he had the time before, and the time before that.

I had sex with him to appease him, I wanted him to think everything was okay. I faked it that night - not to make him feel good about himself like I had so many times before, and not because I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed, which I did not - but because I was worried about my safety. Then I waited until his breathing was slow and steady, and clocked about forty-five minutes staring at the ceiling, hoping he’d be sleeping deeply. I inched out of the bed, barely breathing. I slid down to the floor and put my clothes on quietly and carefully. I crawled over to my dog and slipped his collar off so his tags wouldn’t make noise, and I clenched those tags in my fist. I didn’t have a ton of stuff at his place, I’d been taking things with me a little at a time whenever I left. 

I held my dog by the scruff of his neck and crept toward the bedroom door. All I had to do was open it, grab my bag and my dog’s leash on the table, pull my boots on, and slip out of the apartment. If I was lucky, he wouldn’t know til morning, and I’d be safe by then. I made it into the foyer. Just as I got my dog’s collar back on and attached the leash, I heard him groggily calling my name from the bedroom. “I’m in the bathroom, be right there” I called back, trying to speak at the volume I would if I really were in the bathroom, and hoping in his stupor he’d mistake the distance. I got us out the front door and down the hall to the elevator bank, and pushed the button. His apartment was on the thirtieth floor, so taking the stairs didn’t seem safe. I thought about all the Dateline episodes I’d seen, and being overtaken in a stairwell didn’t seem like a good plan. Plus there was my dog. My heart was pounding so loudly, I thought I’d wake all the neighbors. I watched the elevator and pushed the button over and over again, like that would make it come faster, and then I heard the front door of his apartment open.

“Hey, Ally,” he yelled, no concern for the time, “What are you doing? Get back here!” and I started hitting the button as he came flying down the hall in his robe. “Leave me alone!” I yelled back, because I knew if he dragged me into that apartment it wasn’t going to be pretty. My dog was in a panic, scrambling around at my feet. An apartment door opened, and an older woman’s face appeared. She was a neighbor I’d seen in the elevator a few times, we’d had a nice conversation one day - she’d gone crazy over my dog. She looked at me, and at him. It stopped him for a second, and just then the elevator doors opened. “What?!” he yelled at her, and her eyes flashed. He took a step toward her. “I’m calling the police,” she said to me, and I nodded at her as she slammed the door and bolted it. “Oh that’s just fucking great,” he said to me as I stepped onto the elevator and pushed the button to the lobby. “You know what? I don’t even care that you’re leaving! You are a replaceable hole.” The doors shut, and I slid down the wall and wrapped my arms around my dog, shaking. 

That man sent me a friend request on facebook a decade later. I was pregnant with my son by then, living in Los Angeles and teaching yoga. I found a message from him in my “other” file and it was disgusting and inappropriate. He said he missed me. I blocked him. He tried to add me on instagram and I blocked him there, too. Then he followed my business accounts on facebook and instagram, so I blocked him there. The guy then sent me an email. I haven’t mentioned yet that he was (is) a doctor. Maybe that surprises you, but if it does, it’s probably because you’re a man. 

Growing up as a girl in this world, you learn things from men, and you learn things from women. My mother was a beautiful woman by anyone’s standards, and I watched her ignore men on the street. Sometimes they’d stare, sometimes they’d say something to her, but either way she kept her head up and ignored it. When it started happening to me, she became furious. When I was twelve, she called the husband of a good friend of hers and told him never to come by our apartment when she wasn’t at home - after I told her he’d shown up and stood at our front door telling me how beautiful I was, and asking if he could kiss me on the cheek. I hadn’t known how to handle it, he and his wife were at our house all the time. Their son and my brother played together almost every weekend. I’d known them since I was eight. I let him kiss my cheek because I thought it would be rude to say no, or that it would seem like I was saying he was asking for something he shouldn’t be asking for, and I wasn’t sure if he was or he wasn’t. He kissed me in a weird way. He left his lips on my cheek for too long, and when he backed up his face was red and my cheek was wet. It made me feel sick and strange.

Twelve.

By the time I was fifteen, I already knew that you grouped men into two categories: dangerous or not dangerous. And sometimes you put the wrong men into your not dangerous column and learned the hard way. At fifteen I didn’t know how hard the way could be, but I’d find out.

But then there were times it seemed my mother was furious with me. There was a day when I was fourteen, wearing a Betsy Johnson dress with a built-in bra. I loved it. It was black with little pink roses on it, and the bodice was form-fitting, but the skirt flared out a little. My mom and I were walking down 85th Street and this guy was heading in our direction. As he got closer he stared at me, and said something disgusting I can’t remember. My mother turned on me after he passed us. “You have to wear a bra,” she hissed, “otherwise men see your tits bouncing and it makes their dicks hard.”  Her face was twisted and her eyes were wild and I felt ashamed and embarrassed. “But it has a built-in bra,” I said, “you’re not supposed to wear another bra with it.” A tear slid down my face and I wiped it away as fast as I could because I knew it would annoy her, and I was right. “Oh for goodness sake,” she said, “don’t cry about it.” I had no idea where to put all the feelings I had - shock about the way she’d spoken to me, confusion about whether this instance had been my fault, whether she was angry with the guy, men generally, me, or all of the above, and how I was supposed to navigate being a girl turning into a woman in a city teeming with men who seemed to view women and girls as theirs for the taking. My mother was either unwilling or unable to help me figure it out. Or maybe it enraged her so much, she couldn’t control where the rage went. Some of it was mine to digest.

Mom

Years later, my mom came out to visit me in Los Angeles. My son was four, my daughter was almost two. I’d been a single mom for half a year by then. When my mom would visit, I’d give her my bedroom and sleep in the kids’ room. I’d just given them a bath and was about to put them to bed, so I was going to bring them out to say goodnight to her - but I could hear that she was watching the news and it didn’t sound good. I came out to the living room. Sure enough, she was watching something about a war somewhere, and the images were awful. There were soldiers with machine guns, and dead bodies on the ground. “Hey Mom,” I said, “could you please turn that off for a minute? I want to bring the kids out to say goodnight to you.”

My mom looked at me like I was nuts. “You want me to turn off the news so you can bring the kids out? Just bring them out.” I looked back at the screen, and then back to her. “I don’t want them to see that,” I said, “that’s horrible.” She was incredulous. “But it’s the news,” she said, as if shielding them from something real made no sense. In her mind, if it had been a violent movie, she would have turned it off, but because it was real and something they’d have to get used to at some point, it was ridiculous for me to want to protect them from it, even at two and four. Finally, I said she could come and say goodnight to them in their room if she wanted to, and I went in to read them a book. She didn’t come in, and she was pissed at me for the rest of the night. I wonder if she felt the same way about me as a kid. No point shielding me from reality, or helping me recover from it. Trial by fire, sink or swim, guys push their dicks into you sometimes. Learn to deal with it. 

That is not the message I’ve passed down to my daughter. I believe with every cell in my body that she should feel as safe in this world as my son. She should have the same respect shown to her, the same feeling that it’s not only okay, but right for her to take up space as a full, incredible, capable, smart, kind, funny human being with as much to offer as anyone else. She’s fucking amazing. She should be able to ride a public bus or train, she should be able to walk down the street without being harassed, she should not question her worth, wonder if she owes a man something just because he acts like she does, or be treated as though she isn’t just as able to make deeply personal decisions about her own body. FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

I think about my daughter when I see people online who blithely assert that losing Roe is no big deal, because those decisions are now “sent back to the states.” Shrug, what’s the problem? Please understand, since losing Roe this is what it looks like across the country for women who might need an abortion. And I’m going to say women and girls, because many of these states have no exception for rape or incest - and I’d like you to please factor that in when you look at the interactive map. The laws in the most restrictive states are written in such a way that even if the mother’s life is at risk, and even if the fetus is not viable, or even if there’s a fatal fetal anomaly, the women showing up at the hospital for lifesaving healthcare? Yeah, they’re being told to wait in the hospital parking lot until their lives are so much at risk, no one could interpret it any other way. Doctors are afraid of losing their medical licenses if they treat a woman who is close to death, but not quite close enough for pricks like Ken Paxton, who seems to care very much about a fetus - even one that is not viable - but not at all about the woman carrying it. This is what it looks like when you “leave it up to the states” in practice. Read here if you have any doubt.

My mother couldn’t help me make sense of the ugliest things in life - the times I felt hollowed out because some man took what he wanted just because he could, the way no one did anything or said anything which normalized it, the way men are paid more for the same job a woman does just as well, the way boys own a room - and girls are told to be good, to sit down, to be quiet, to help the boy next to them focus - the way girls and women are constantly reduced to their weight, waist size, breast size, hair color - before anyone talks about their accomplishments…and meanwhile they’re running everything. “Behind every great man is a great woman”? Uh, yeah, I think we can be done with that, don’t you? This is not even halfway good enough for our daughters, nieces, sisters, cousins, mothers, aunties, friends, women who choose not to have children, women who desperately want children but struggle with infertility, women whose hearts break again every single day for the children they’ve lost, women who love other women, women who work, women who work because they stay at home, women in any and all of the ways that they come. This is not it. 

And do not tell us to smile. Vote.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about the problem with repressed rage, emotions that have nowhere to go, things that are normalized that are not normal at all, and whatever else I talk about as we end yet another outrageous week, I’ll be here 8/2/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast. As ever, I’m so grateful you’re here.