The Summer Without Men

Ellen leaned forward, her eyes intent as her lips registered every insult with tiny movements. When Alice cried, Ellen’s eyes grew smaller, a wrinkle appeared between her brows, and her mouth tensed into a thin straight line, but she did not weep. Maternal listening is of a special kind. The mother must listen, and she must empathize, but she cannot identify entirely with the child. This calls for an enforced remove, a distance acquired only by steeling oneself against the story being told. The knowledge they have hurt my child can easily summon a brute response, something on the order of I will tear those little tarts into a thousand pieces and gobble them up for dessert. Watching Ellen, I sensed that she was resisting the desire for grisly vengeance, and I realized that I liked her—both for her rage and for blocking it.
    Alice had been receiving ugly messages for quite some time. “Skank” and “Ho” had appeared regularly as text messages, as had the highly original commentaries “You think you’re so smart,” “Go back to Chicago if it’s so great there,” “Ugly slut,” “skinny weird bitch,” and “Fake.” All anonymous. As for my cabal of girl poets, Alice admitted that they had been on again and off again with her, one day confiding, the next, cold. They reeled her in and they cast her out. When, after weeks of misery, she confronted them with the bald statement “What did I do?” they snickered, rolled their eyes, and chanted “What did I do?” over and over again. It pained me especially to think of Peyton among the tormenters. Then photos of a naked Alice standing in front of her own mirror at home had been posted on Facebook—blurry images taken with the spy’s cell phone through a crack the blind. The poor kid snuffled hard when she coughed up this humiliation. She had taken the pictures down, of course, but not before the damage had been done. The memory of my changing body at thirteen and the achingly private, protective feeling I had had for my newly swollen breasts, three pubic hairs, and the mysterious red lines that appeared on my hips (which I discovered only two years later were stretch marks) made me squirm with discomfort. The bloody tissue narrative was garbled, but eventually Ellen and I understood that Alice had gotten her period just before my class and had been unequipped and too shy to ask any of her “friends” for a pad. She had stuffed her underpants with the Kleenex she was carrying in her purse (always on hand for her allergies), but when she walked into the room, one slightly bloody tissue had dislodged itself from her shorts and fallen to the floor, at which moment Ashley had grabbed it and then, pretending to understand all at once what she had touched, had thrown it on the table and begun to squeal the word gross. The most recent ruse, the one that must have induced the stomach pains, involved the message from the desired boy, Zack, who had arranged to meet her at the park near the swings at three. That must have been where Alice was off to when I saw her bouncing down the sidewalk after she left class at two forty-five. Upon her arrival, however, there was no Zack. She waited half an hour and then, realizing that something was wrong, sat down on the grass, put her hands over her face, and cried. When the tears came, so did the jeers and laughter from behind a tall fence that bordered the park. The invisible hooting girls berated Alice for her fantasy that a boy like Zack would even look at her. This was, it seemed, the most recent “joke,” the one Alice hadn’t been able to “take.”
    Despite its particulars, Alice’s story is depressingly familiar. Its basic structure is repeated, with multiple variations, everywhere all the time. Although occasionally overt, the cruelties are most often hidden, surreptitious jabs to shame and hurt the victim, a strategy most often adopted by girls, not boys, who go for the direct punch, blow, or kick in the groin. The duel at dawn, with its elaborate legalisms, its seconds and its paces; its mythical reincarnation in the Wild West when black hat and white hat face off with their six-shooters; the plain old let’s-take-it-outside fisticuffs between two male disputants, who are each cheered on by a rooting faction; even the playground brawl (young boy returns home beaten bloody to face Father, who says, “Son, did you win?”)—all are granted a dignity in the culture that no female form of rivalry can