the double bind as coming of age

updates + excerpts from TV SUMMER: GIRLHOOD

Hey!

For the rest of the summer, I’ll be featuring pieces from TV SUMMER: GIRLHOOD in our newsletter, as well as ongoing essays, bloggy-updates, and book reviews. (Currently reading White Teeth, slowly. Still also currently reading Swann’s Way — pleased to report it’s picked up.)

As a reminder, submissions for fall and winter (themed, respectively: AMERICAN GOTHIC and CAREGIVING) are open until September 1.

The academic semester begins on Monday,

for me, and I can’t stop making minor tweaks to my syllabus. For my nonfiction students, I plan to start with a general assignment about loss. Why? Because that’s the bread and butter of the early essayist. It’s where most of start (some also stay, of course, good for them), and I thought it might be futile to resist in an introductory class. So, when I read this Sloane Crosley essay about her dead cat in The New Yorker, I thought, oh, I am definitely assigning this.

A favorite passage:

A gift in life can be a problem in storytelling, especially when the story is about a pet. This is why I keep adding jokes. For texture. I’m trying to take my own advice. When I teach, I encourage students to find the second story. Tear up the floorboards of the first story and see what treasure lies beneath. This part they already know. They were not born yesterday, an administrative impossibility. But another tactic is to imagine the first story searching for its mate, for a wall off which to bounce. Fear not the unlikely clash. I’ve read solid essays that weave together, say, diabetes and tree bark. This second story will bring forth the larger story. It’s why people tell cat owners, “You want the first cat to be happy? Get a second cat.”

But I did not get a second cat. I got one cat.

Now! Please enjoy an essay by

Brittany Ackerman

. This piece spoke to me — as a writer and as an editor — because it looks directly at something it’s excruciating to look directly at: burgeoning sexuality and the way that experience is both brutally mundane and astonishingly isolating. For girls, so to speak, it comes with a brand new (sort of brand new) set of expectations. These expectations revolve around how you are supposed to perform your new role as Sexual Object, something the world will reduce you to, but which you’re not supposed to care/know too little or too much about.

Enjoy!

xoxo,
Monica

By Brittany Ackerman

I go to the nurse for period cramps, but really, Allison D and Mark C hooked up last weekend at Sammy J’s house party. The exact rumor I heard was that she gave him head in a closet, and that it was bad. He didn’t like it. And so he doesn’t like her.

I’ve never given head. I’ve only kissed boys and one time Zach F felt me up, under the shirt, over the bra, so I’m not even sure if it counts, though I still tell people I’ve been to second base. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, but it seems scary, or maybe the right word is intense. But I’m fourteen, almost fifteen, and it feels like something that should happen soon.  

I don’t have any classes with Allison D, but I saw her in the hallway this morning and it looked like she’d been crying. No one’s ever asked me for it, for head, and no one’s ever pressured me to do it. One of my best friends, Brittany R, who everyone calls Rosenberg, she’s done it. It happened at camp. She and her cabin mates practiced on water balloons. And then at the next camp social, everyone seamlessly paired off, boy-girl, and went into the woods and did it.

Rosenberg said it wasn’t gross, but she didn’t say she enjoyed it either. 

And then the nurse hands me two Advil and I wonder if it’s okay to take these on an empty stomach. I don’t eat breakfast and I skipped lunch today because I was nervous. That’s the word—nervous—that I keep feeling in my body. I am nervous all the time.

I keep thinking about Allison D’s eyes, how she paints them up with so much eyeliner, all the boys call her “raccoon eyes.” We had swim together in seventh grade and I saw her without all her makeup on. She looked pretty and young. The eyeliner ages her, an idea I read about in Teen Vogue. 

It takes me twenty minutes to get my mascara right in the morning, my mom’s Lancôme that comes in a sample pouch when she buys her moisturizer three times a year. She lets me keep the bonus gift, the lipstick and eye shadow with the little applicator sponge and the under-eye concealer and the mascara. Brittany G taught me how to open my mouth while I apply it so that I don’t mess it up, but I still have to take my pointer finger and pull apart some of my lashes when the goop makes them stick together.

I also read in Teen Vogue that mascara can be a code word for talking about sex and relationships. Mascara can refer to someone’s romantic partner. “Think about it,” the article said, “…a mascara wand is kinda like a guy’s…you get the picture!”

My friends and I start saying how badly we want Peter M or Danny D to stick his mascara wand in our you know what so teachers won’t understand. And when Kenzie says she wants to suck on Greg P’s big, hearty mascara wand, it sounds bad, but there’s nothing they can really do to stop us. The secret language makes us feel invincible. 

The nurse also hands me a paper cone full of lukewarm water as I sit on the soft plastic shell of a blue chair, the same kind of chair that’s inside all the classrooms at school, the same one that will have followed me my entire scholastic life. The chair has three slits in the back and a tubular steel frame with metal legs. The blue is a navy blue, but not the same navy as our uniform polo shirts. The blue is the blue of an institution, of a place where you don’t want to be but are forced to go. It is the blue of time kept inside. It is the blue of looking at a clock and waiting for the day to end, of counting hours and minutes and seconds. It is the blue of peeling back nail polish and drawing on the back of your hand and sneaking Cheetos from your backpack to your mouth during English because you haven’t eaten anything all day. It is the blue of rumors and information spread quickly, the blue of mouths talking in whispers, in code, in yelling over each other in the cafeteria, in hugs hello and goodbye and kisses on cheeks and feeling the gel of a boy’s hair because it sticks up so straight, so high, that you need to feel it for yourself.

And I can’t ask the nurse if she has any liquid Tylenol, the cherry flavored kind that’s for children, because I can’t take pills, never got the hang of it, while my mom can take them without any water, and Rosenberg can too. And so I put the two pills in my mouth and under my tongue and drink the lukewarm water and feel the cornstarch coating dissolving as the nurse smiles at me, with her ice blue eyes that seem impossible, and her long black hair that goes down to her butt. She says, “Why don’t you lie down for a little while,” not as a question, but as a statement, as a remedy, so I wait for her to turn around and shut off the light before I spit the pills into the empty paper cone and toss it in the trash.

I think of Rosenberg sitting in our Honors English class, my blue Jansport still on the floor next to my chair, the zipper unzipped, the bag open like two lips parting, and Rosenberg wondering if I’m coming back because how bad can period cramps really be, and Ms. Vignetta writing notes for To Kill a Mockingbird on the board, the black dry erase marker gliding across the whiteboard, the tiny squeaking sounds that scratch an itch inside my brain that make me tired.

Rosenberg has the most makeup out of all of my friends. She has a special box that she got at Sephora. When she opens the box, a series of rows unfold revealing different shelves: one for lips, one for eyes, one for face. Her skin is pale. She jokes that she’s see-through. So she cakes on foundation and bronzer to look like she belongs underneath the Florida sun. I let her do my makeup once when I slept over. She used the arctic blue eye shadow she always wears on me and I was surprised when I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. I looked like another version of me, a girl who could go out and make boys fall in love with her.

I climb onto the exam table and the nurse leans the headrest back. I stare up at the white, pockmarked ceiling. A layer of soft blue padding rests beneath me. There are only two more periods left in the day, US History and 3D Art. I’d love to sleep through History, but Art, I’d like to go to. Maybe the nurse will wake me up when it’s time, or maybe the bell will wake me up and that’ll be my cue to go. 

Allison D’s eyes were red and her bottoms lashes were stuck together in clumps, her mascara failing her, all that time and effort spent in the morning, a waste because everyone was talking about it, everyone was talking about her. 

In the makeup ads of Teen Vogue, the women look up and hold a mascara wand above their eyelashes, as if the wand had just painted each lash in one swift motion. The lashes remind me of the minutes on a clock, the fat black lines separated in perfect increments. And in real life, I can never get my makeup to look like the pictures of these women and their eyes. Yet there is the implication that someday I will be like these women, fully made up.

I close my eyes and hear the whoosh of the air conditioning kicking on. 

I imagine it was me in the closet with Mark C at Sammy J’s house party. I imagine Mark C pulling down his pants and then his flannel-patterned boxers and the moment he moves toward me and I get on my knees. I imagine it was me that everyone would talk about. And I wonder if his hand, holding my hair, resting on the back of my neck, would be a comfort.

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York.  She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in The Sun, MUTHA, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel, The Brittanys, is out now with Vintage.