I thought nobody liked me, but I was wrong.
What can I remember about the summer I was eleven? I looked like a man made from a marshmallow and toothpicks—long, poking limbs and a big, soft middle, knees and elbows getting everywhere a week before the rest. Microwaving lunch. Reading Stephen King, swimming with a shirt on, holding certain inanimate objects as sacred and giving them names. Trying and failing to build a fort. Getting locked in the basement for hours or twenty minutes or a night or by mistake during a party at the house. The beer cooler as big as a body, ice cream and screaming. I’d climbed down to lie under the hanging bag, nudge it slightly with a pointed finger every so often. Creaky chain. Whoosh. The black leather sand monster swinging feet above my braces. Threateningly unthreatening. Somebody upstairs flipped the lock. For safety. My mom wading into the ocean to mid thigh waiting for me. Her tan shoulders. After, a white terrycloth cover-up that zipped at the front. We bought it in the women’s section at K-Mart. I’d grown enough. At night I watched television in her bed and she told me about her life.
Annie Baker’s Janet Planet tenderly chronicles the heart-stopping and ordinary pain of realizing, as you stand on the precipice of a swan dive into the world and away from her, that your mother is a whole person separate from you with desires and disappointments. The pain of recognizing in your mother a person who inevitably wanted their life to be somehow different than it is just as you too become a person who wants their life to be different than it is. The blooming of adolescence necessitates a severing of the freaky matched pair intimacy between some small girls and the women they’ve done everything with for as long as they can remember doing anything. I was one of those little mothergirl gremlins. Secret keeper co-pilot acolyte. Janet Planet is a movie about boring days in August and piano lessons and ice creams stains and wanting attention and needing to be alone. The unrelenting stillness of Baker’s camera approximates the languid mood of months spent waiting for what you can’t yet name. Mother and daughter tripled in the bathroom mirror. The younger seen only from the eyes up. But just for now. What I had with my mother when I was a child is not what we had when I was a teenager, is not what we have now and that is healthy, necessary, and a loss. I wrenched away. We were a duo before I busied myself with myself. It’s all so sticky. Peeling off the old. I think we are most fragile at those moments of transition. The liminality of eleven and an eleven year old’s inky arrogance. It thins the skin til even dull, daily strictures sting, til you’ve made yourself sick from fear and throw up at the sight of a school bus. What can I remember about the summer that I was eleven? An ever raucous mind palace gone newly stormy, Bend it Like Beckham, and the almost living hum of a box fan in the bedroom running all night.
Maybe I’m too sensitive; I’m currently watching, under Megan’s tutelage, my first season of Love Island and am finding the friendships between these young women—all of whom are ostensibly competing with one another for the attention of wretched boys—unbelievably moving. Of course it was funny when sweet Kaylor (her name really is Kaylor lmao) from some place outside Pittsburgh began healing her own broken hear live before our eyes as sobs melded with laughter and made something ugly and hopeful and sweet. She was reapplying her makeup after receiving news that the guy she’d been coupled with for weeks had been spending time rubbing another girl’s feet while cooing sweet nothings in a language Kaylor couldn’t understand. She’d been sent a video. The whole thing is barbaric. But there was Kaylor all wet and getting wetter from the painted on color and all the girls are in the dressing room now petting at each other’s wounds and Kaylor realized with a phlegmy chirp, that oh. Oh!! Thank god she’d found out what Aaron was really like. Thank god she wasn’t kept in the dark longer. No, no, it’s good, really. It’s less that she stops crying than that she is crying in a new and frightening way. Something animal taking over now. She screams. The fucker’s from the UK!!!!! IMAGINE THAT!!!!!! Anyway I find that quite sweet, you know, the way the girls wrap one another up in all the rest. I’d die in battle for Serena. I think Liv should try lesbianism. JaNa is too good to have ever spoken to any other those Neanderthals; misandry is the only way forward which makes any sense in light of their treatment of such a sweet, funny and beautiful woman who has a speaking voice that charming and weird. Nicole, even, has grown on me immensely. I clapped when she saw her guy making cruel jokes about another girl and crinkled with disgust head to toe. She stayed with him anyway. This isn’t Utopia. But even seeing nastiness and pointing at it shows promise. Leah I obviously adore because she is aware of her own atrocious impulses and decision making yet incapable of extracting herself from the cosmic pull toward making them following them tasting them anyway and there are many sisterhoods I have entered intentionally but hers is one to which I was born. They’re great, strange. Again, I might be fucking losing it. But none of this is easy. They’re all younger than I am. I watch and I worry, thinking, oh. We all were little girls.
Nobody ever told me the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are supposed to be America’s Sweethearts. I thought it was about being hot. Flexible. Probably blonde, likely awful. This isn’t Netflix promo. I’m sure you’re aware they’ve got this show. But the trouble is that within minutes of idly throwing it on TV last weekend I wanted—needed—to become a giant. A monster. A being measured in miles. I needed to become the Hulk for girls and I needed to save these cheerleaders. To scoop them and swoop them and steal them away. They’d do high kicks in my palm if they wanted and never hear an unkind word. This impulse is not purely from a place of The Patriarchy Is A Violence Without End and Fiona Apple Mumbling There’s No Hope For Women, though obviously the subjugation of women in society is the root cause way down there under the soil, under the criminally low wages, the eating disorders, the hips and back and necks ravaged by death defying dives people are only ever half watching. Feminism is the grounding principle behind the distress I felt in watching these women tear themselves apart to be perfect, smiling, sexual playthings, but it’s not only that. I think that in theory it’s literally fine or even great to wear a itsy bitsy cowboy costume and dance in unison at the halftime of a football game. My problem was the gentle love between the women. My problem was I worried about them too much. While I found nearly all of what was happening systemically distasteful, the women themselves (NOT Jerry Jones’ wretched Gen X girlboss daughter, a woman so openly, cartoonishly evil that if she were acting that way in a scripted drama you’d be like all right that’s a bit much) were hopeful and talented and friendly and kind and very strange and often sweet. In the very first episode they have tryouts. Everyone must try out, even those who have been on the team for years. At the end they make preliminary cuts. Those remaining will go on to a training camp where yet further eliminations will occur. Everyone tries out and then cuts are made and some of those cuts were cheerleaders who had been on the team in previous seasons. They were the others’ beloved friends. It was the first episode and everyone was crying. It was the beginning of their season and the women were a wailing mass. The coach prodded them to cheer up, to remember what a moment this was for the newbies who did make the cut. The crying went on. It made me shiver. I’m always trying to remind myself it doesn’t need to be so hard. I worry nobody is telling those women that it doesn’t need to be this hard. Unfortunately, it really is amazing when they all jump in the air with arms locked and come down together in a split. Splayed on the grown gleaming. Harming the body to feel the thrill of its power. It really is a remarkable spectacle. I guess I just didn’t expect so much crying. Not the first time I’ve made that mistake.