Elisa Albert - After Birth

Girls who don’t look at each other when they pass on the street. Girls who ignore the fact of each other whenever possible. No: who pretend to ignore the fact of each other.

My friend Shane and I decided to level with each other. Her wealthy ex-hippie underachiever “artist” parents were forever stoned; her older sister was fucking the wrestling-champ senior (fucking him constantly, fucking him everywhere). My mother was dead and no help regardless. So we had to be totally honest. Tell each other what the rest of the world saw. We occupied the same rung of the social ladder: Utterly Irrelevant. There was nothing to lose.

She went first: No offense but your nose is suuuuuuper Jewish. Your stomach is fat, I mean, like, weirdly way fatter than the rest of you. You have really good legs. And eyes. And okay, we seriously have to do something about your mustache. No offense. You could be almost pretty .

No offense was Shane’s thing. Offense: God forbid.

Then my turn: Your face looks like an alien’s. Your weird eye fold is creepy, and your eyes are so far apart, like practically on the sides of your head. It makes you kind of look like a fat fish. Let’s just leave your body out of it for now. You wear really ugly clothes. No offense. Your hair is amazing, don’t ever cut it. Maybe a deep conditioning once a week, though, because it’s kind of dry. Let’s wax your eyebrows .

There was a moment of quiet where we each came to terms with the realities. Then we got busy. She helped me bleach my mustache with some stuff we stole out of her sister’s vanity. It stank and stung.

We bought a home waxing kit at the drugstore, little plastic tub of brown wax you melted in a saucepan of boiling water. I accidentally gave her a tiny second-degree burn on her nose and took more off the left side, but she looked way, way better anyway.

We went on pretending to be friends through high school. She got good grades, went to a good college, became doting auntie to the legions of children sired by her sister and the wrestler. Looks like she’s planning a wedding now, pretty into it. ( Cannot wait to be Mrs. Jason Fishman!!!! ) Professional engagement photos, assload of makeup. What the fucking hell has happened to her eyebrows? They’re entirely gone, drawn on. Her poor eyebrows.

It was Arlene — my father’s one-time high school girlfriend and blink-of-an-eye soul mate — who took pity on me and carted me to an electrolysis salon, the dermatologist, and her fancy-pants gynecologist, appalled I hadn’t yet seen one.

Norman , I heard through the wall, they’re supposed to go when they start menstruating!

Do you think she’s, ah… do you think she is?

Norman, the trash in the bathroom reeks.

I didn’t know , he told her.

I had been menstruating since just before my mother finally sailed off and away.

I’d gone around the corner to the drugstore alone, hands shaking, to get pads. There was a hospice nurse living with us. I’d wrap each pad, once used, in half a roll of toilet paper, stuff it way down into the trash can the nurse used for all the hospice detritus.

You didn’t know!? Norm, she wears a double D.

I guess I… didn’t know.

Arlene led me into a hushed, gray-toned waiting room on the bottom floor of a townhouse in the East Sixties and pinched my arm, leaned over, whispered Jackie O goes here. This was meant to be soothing, I guess.

Without much fanfare the good doctor introduced me to a speculum, mauled my tender lopsided titties, and hesitated for not even a second to put me on the Pill, citing “irregularity.” A truly dumb-ass thing to do to a wonky motherless fourteen-year-old with big lopsided tits and a mustache, still years away from the faintest hint of possibility of sexual intercourse.

The good news, he told me, was that since I’d be on the Pill anyway I was eligible for the miraculous new acne medication! It worked wonders, he said, referring me to a dermatologist. Oh, but it was also “strongly recommended” that the acne medication be taken alongside an antidepressant, since it was known to cause/exacerbate “mild-to-severe” depression/psychosis. So not the best idea, because ever since the excellent ninth-grade English teacher had assigned us Muriel Rukeyser’s “Effort at Speech Between Two People,” the line “When I was fourteen I had dreams of suicide” had been replaying like a mental rosary I worked my way around. I rehearsed the ways I could do it. Pills, wrists, subway leap, roof leap, gun, noose, bridge leap, oven. Only our oven was electric and there were no guns anywhere I knew of.

Thusly medicated I gained forty pounds, never again stood on a subway platform without the detailed flash of my body under a train, and have very little concrete memory of those years.

But my skin did clear right up.

There was Sweet Sixteen after Sweet Sixteen. Dresses from a store in the Village called Neo-Romantic. There were the uptight girls who acted all smart and detached, the mean, stupid ones who made everyone’s lives hell. Girls with big ol’ tits, their fates decided. Girls whose parents signed off on surgery to have said tits removed, replaced with appropriately demure ones.

I did have this one friend Rachel — an okay one, I thought: smart and ambitious and quirky and cute, with a big honking laugh — but by junior year she turned out to be yet another boring ano-fucking-rexic. Her doe eyes went bug over the course of the spring. Plain iceberg lettuce her big thing. Quirky interesting smarts starve-starve-starved away.

You’re not having lunch? I would ask, chowing. Eating, and heartily, in public: my big protest. One-woman sit-in, private-school performance art: masticating food that I would then actually digest.

I already ate . You weren’t supposed to say anything to the anorexics. It was considered rude.

Oh, really? What’d you eat?

She glared at me. Stupid cliché! Teachers didn’t seem to care, her parents didn’t seem to care, none of the other girls seemed to care, and in good time the admissions committee at Harvard didn’t worry about it too much, either.

There were the teeny-tiny girls (always popular), big-boned early-to-develop girls (never popular), A-list girls and B-list girls and C-list girls and D-list girls. The B-list girls who got a new haircut and the accessory of the moment or landed a guy of note and suddenly found themselves catapulted to the top. The C-list girls who just banded together to create their own little utopia.

Those are the girls you want to be, it couldn’t be clearer in hindsight. Early anarchists. Badasses. They didn’t bother, exempted themselves, turned their backs and took up softball, computer science, gardening, poetry, sewing. Those are the ones with a shot at becoming fairly content happy/tough/certain/fulfilled/gray-haired grown women.

An important takeaway from those horrible, if hazy, years: whoever tries hardest is out. Too loud, too much makeup, fast talk? Detectable need? Fragility? Any indication of effort? Automatic out.

Disqualified.

Thank the good Lord almighty there was no Internet back then. Thank fucking Christ there was not yet Internet.

Why couldn’t I just enjoy it? Why couldn’t I be calm and at peace and fulfilled and engorged and certain and calm? Why did lack of sleep make me feel like I was going to die? And why then couldn’t I simply hand the baby over to someone else and take a nap? And why, when he cried, when I had nursed and burped and hugged and kissed and changed and nursed and burped and changed again, when he kept crying, when the crying went on and he wouldn’t sleep and the days unwound sunrise to sunset, when I hadn’t eaten or changed clothes or bathed, when I had no one to talk to, no one to sit with, did I feel like putting him safely down in his crib and walking out into the park and sitting on a bench without my coat on until I died? Why so numb, so incapable, so enraged, so broken?