I Knew How it Would Look, What People Would Say

On trapped butterflies that learned to escape.

Me and Michelle our junior year, spring 1990, Los Gatos, CA

Note to my readers: In telling part of my story below, I reference bullying and physical violation. It’s not graphic, but it goes deep and covers some sensitive ground. Also, there’s a happy ending.

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I want you all to know that I am the kind of woman who would wear a hot-fuchsia pink, faux-leather moto jacket. But because on second try it was really too big, I am taking it back. 

Also, I have a difficult relationship with clothes, one that I am trying to heal.

What I wear has alternately hidden me, showed me off or otherwise defined me. 

I picture myself in a not-yet-mine pair of pants or dress or jacket and think, that's it. That's the piece. The one that when I have it, will make me invincible. I will finally be so perfect, no one will ever want to make me feel like I don't deserve to exist. 

When I was a freshman, an older boy I really liked had sex with me, against my better judgement and more than less against my will. I was wearing clothes borrowed from my best friend, Michelle. And her shoes, a size too big, so they slapped against my feet as I walked with my friends to the party.

I knew how it would look, what people would say. So I said no and no and no and no. And then, because I was young, and the boys at the party had filled up the bong and gotten me stoned for the first time and I was also a little drunk—not for the first time, I gave up saying no and let it happen. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with—when you didn’t do all you could to save yourself. It’s a hard thing I didn’t come to terms with for decades. Allowing that even if I didn’t fight enough, it wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t to blame.

I remember the open window and Tom Petty on the radio downstairs, the voices on the front lawn, the summer breeze. How my head hung over the end of his boy's bed. How the gold foil butterflies on the velour wallpaper seemed to be beating their wings, frantic to fly out the window. 

When it was over, I asked him not to tell anyone. 

But then, he asked me to be his girlfriend. I remember wanting so badly to say yes. The ache in my stomach, between my legs, in my heart. Of wanting to be wanted by someone. A desperation. 

The little voice in my head spoke up. He doesn't mean it, it said. Don't be stupid. Don't say yes. Deny yourself before he can. 

I laughed, as if it was a joke, and then I said no. 

But I didn't know. 

I didn't know he wasn't joking. 

His young heart, like mine, had already curled its scar tissue around multiple fractures, multiple healed breaks. A quilt stitched with pain and violence living forever under the skin. 

He disguised it with cruelty. From the vantage point of 50 and with lots of therapy under my belt, I see how he was screaming for relief, crushed under the weight of not being wanted, by me, by his dad. By his stepdad, by his mom. 

I can see how what he did next was his way of coping. Hurting me was easier than acknowledging his own.

The Monday after that party, he came to school wearing a t-shirt he'd made, with a picture of my face, life-sized, on the front, with a big red circle around it and a slashing red line through it. Seeing it for the first time plays in slow motion in my memory. There was the moment before, when I was still in my body. Then there was the moment I saw my friends' faces, the ones who'd already seen the shirt, their eyes pitying and also understanding in a way only teenagers can, of injuries too deep to ever fit into words. And then there is the moment when I saw him. Standing there, smiling, arms holding his jacket wide open. For the briefest of seconds I thought he was going to ask me to be his girlfriend again, that I had a second chance. And then I saw the shirt, his wild grin, his beautiful face carved with fury. Later, someone would tell me what he'd written on the sleeves and the back. "She likes UB40, being on top and gold circle coins." 

For two years he would not speak to me, even though I begged. He pretended I wasn't standing there in the circle of kids out in a field, in a parking lot, in someone's parent's house, drinking on Saturday night. For two years, every day, I didn't exist, but then, once or twice a day, he would surprise me in the hall or come around a corner and get very close to me, whispering in my ear, "slut." Or sometimes he would shout it from afar. I never knew when, or which, was coming, or if he would pass by with no acknowledgement at all. Which was better? I couldn't have told you. For two years, it's the only word he spoke to me, until he graduated. Leaving me to roam the halls, free from the fear of him, free from the hope that this time he would say something else, this time he would see me. This time he would let me say I was sorry. But I wasn't free. He was there, inside my head, lurking around every corner. He had rained a constant ocean of salt into a gaping wound. And he watched, as, slug-like, I blistered and frothed and began to slowly die from the poison. 

I see now that I could have collapsed into one, or any, or all, of those watching friends and they would have held me. Would have surrounded me and protected me. A barrier of girls just beginning to understand the meaning of being female in a patriarchy without the language to explain it. But I didn't know how. I didn’t know how to tell them I’d said no, and then stopped saying no, watching the butterflies and waiting for it to be over. I didn’t tell anyone and so everyone thought he was right. Maybe they would have thought that anyway.

I moved away for college and started, on the outside, to remold myself. I wore loose Levi's, a man's v-neck tee and a vintage old-man's wool cardigan. I lived in a version of that outfit, unnoticeable, buffered from myself, for two foggy, gray years by the ocean. 

Then I moved to shiny LA. I met Jasmine, Jazzie for short, cousin to the friend who talked me into applying to school in Southern California. Jazzie lived up the hill from us in an apartment with her boyfriend, was the cliche LA girl. Blonde corkscrew hair that looked like Nicole Kidman's, petite, blue eyes, full lips, button nose. And that girl had clothes. We walked up the street to check out her new place, she wanted our opinion on paint colors, was so excited that the landlord said they could paint the place, and of course, we went through her closet. I walked in wearing my baggie jeans and man's t-shirt and walked out holding a divine little champagne-colored cocktail dress. 

My mother would have said it needed a slip. I didn't care and relished not wearing one. I was in LA. There were no rules, just people who looked good and people who didn't. 

I wore that borrowed champagne dress to school the next week for my birthday. I walked all over campus, sat in my classes, chatted with teachers and other students, went to work at my desk job in the school's cogeneration plant. All in this fabulous, tiny cocktail dress. I felt invincible. Gorgeous. And it was wonderful.

During the LA years, I ditched all my jeans, wore three-inch heels except on Fridays and dyed my hair strawberry blonde. I bought tailored pants, sheer blouses and tiny mini skirts; my closet a refuge I could dive into and pretend to be anyone but me.

As the very wise Diane Strinati Baur said in a recent article, "Consumerism, like alcohol and drugs, can provide temporary comfort to deep pain."

I have been using shopping, the distraction and clothes it provides, as a way to check out, as a way to feel pretty, as a way to feel in control of myself and my body for so long now, I'm not sure where it ends and where I really begin.

I'm not sure how to disconnect myself, my true self, from who I am as someone who likes clothes and feels a sense of power when I take the time to leave the house looking put together, and who I am when I could care less. From the me who doesn't wash her hair, even though it feels thick with minerals and chlorine, because I'm just going to go cold swimming again this afternoon. The me who prefers, 100 times out of 100, to stand around at 7:38 at night, in the deserted dog park behind my house, in my ratty slippers and pajama bottoms, waiting for the full moon to rise. 

What I know is the girl, the young woman, the married woman, the divorced woman, the remarried woman who is now middle aged, is ready. Ready to shed the second skin I've been wearing most of my life to shield me from pain. She is ready to see who I am when I court joy, court nourishment, court love. I'm so curious to find out what I wear when I'm only trying to please myself, as Mary Oliver so beautifully put it, and let the soft animal of my body love what it loves. When that soft body, more than anything, craves being held not by Nordstrom or Anthropologie but by soft grass, cool water, moonlight. 

The question now is: which clothes tell the story of a woman who loves herself with reckless abandon, however she looks, wherever she goes? 

I think the answer lies in recognizing it's not the clothes at all that tell this story, but her tarnished and dented, yet still shining heart.

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If you do not know Mary Oliver's poem, or if you do, here it is. One of the most gorgeous and heart-wrenching poems of enoughness: 

Photo by Matthew on Unsplash

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

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