Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Girl Power” by Tanya Shirazi Galvez. Tanya is a Los Angeles born, Las Vegas based writer. She is a Black Mountain Institute Ph.D. fellow in fiction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Tanya serves as Senior Editor of Aster(ix) Journal and Fiction Co-Editor of Witness Magazine. She writes about the messiness of girlhood. She’s at work on her first novel and a collection of short stories.
Emergence
We're Brown girls with Spice Girls stickers on instrument cases, textbooks, all loaners. We say she’s on her rag, when one falls out of form. We wrap sweaters around our waists when it’s that time. On our tippy-toes, we ask each other for checks. Girl, am I good? We pose for mall Glamour Shots with plunged halters, our baby faces unsmiling. We watch Pokémon while we log on and lie about our Age. Sex. Location. We Ask Jeeves questions we will not ask each other. We steal Cosmo magazines we hide in binders, label them “required reading”. We shrink with our mothers when they’re on Atkins, Grapefruit Diet, Master Cleanse. We say we have done more or less with our bodies, depending on who asks. We scrape off Baby, Ginger, Posh, Scary and Sporty with quarters when we return what we borrow. We associate the word sexy with power much too early. We hold it anyway and burn. We burst. Our fits of laughter turn into fits.
Girl, you good?
Girl.
Sorcery
“Women's regular bleeding engenders phantoms.”
― Paracelsus
The first time I bled, I was a sorceress. Inside of the girl’s bathroom were my mother’s black fishnet stockings: a bloody mess. While my Algebra teacher wrote PEMDAS on the whiteboard, the softest part of my belly turned into my grandmother's pin cushion.
An invisible hand pricked pointy pins against my insides.
Vexed and hexed.
This is the first time my body betrayed me.
At 13, a body that wants to bring knees to chest and plead please stop to the widening hips, the growing breasts, the marks that deem girlhood gone.
Holding myself, I stomped out of class in my mother’s heels, not yet mastering how to shift the weight of my body past ghouls, dead cheerleaders, witches.
Monsters.
******
Halloween is the perfect time for an eighth grader to play at being more than just a girl.
On weekday mornings, the bathroom light lured me out of my bedroom I shared with my aunt. I’d watched, bleary-eyed, as my mother lined her brown eyes with charcoal black, her lips with a bombshell red. With her eyebrows furrowed, she’d run her fingers through her curly hair. I'd winced as she tore through the tangles at the nape of her neck. Before she pulled her uniform top over her shoulders, she fasted her frame into a girdle that held her in for her work day. From her, I learned how to hold my breath. Bated.
To a girl, a mother is a warning or a wish for what’s to come.
That Halloween morning, my mother transformed into Elvira. Her blonde curls slid into a black wig. She traded her cashier uniform for a black plunge neckline dress with slits on the side.
When her transformation was complete, I was a fresh canvas she could mark.
“Look up,” she said as she held my chin in her hand, applying the same red stain on my lips.
My mother’s touch was foreign. In my 13-year-old mind, my mother was a woman held captive by girlhood. Her mistakes, picked up like articles of clothing dropped in different rooms throughout a home.
“Mmmhmm. Brujas chulas.” She blew a kiss at our reflections. Mythical creatures, who look more like sisters than mother and daughter, stared back.
This was the first time I saw the resemblance. The way our lips had the same cupid’s bow, our thick sharp dark eyebrows, the button noses, the same dewy skin. Our eyes dark, heavy with mascara and eyeliner.
My reflection almost smiled.
But no. I would not turn into my mother.
“Dina. You’re a Mistress. I’m a Sorceress,” I said. The sound of the words felt good in my mouth; disarming adults with them felt better.
13 is cruel. So cruel.
At 13, I stopped calling her my mother and used her given name. At 13, I could meet her eyes. My curves filled her dresses. I could slide into her heels. 13 is all wrath, rattle, wants and whys. 13 is terrified. At 13, I began receiving the same catcalls, the same ay chhh chhs from men older than my mother. While I shrunk into my hoodies, she leaned forward and invited them. At 13, my mother was a mirror I wanted to simultaneously blow a kiss to and break.
“Same thing.” She responded to the calculated cut. Her face was flushed, her full lips pursed into a straight line, her eyebrows coming together severely.
She shifted her body away from mine and left me alone, where I stared at my own reflection.
Where a girl with too much body, too rattled and foreign, stared back.
Monstrous.
*****
I had been warned. But not by my mother. She revealed to me other parts of womanhood: the fawning, the sensual, the romance, the dramatic.
The warning about menstruation came in the fifth grade. Before my uncle signed my parent consent form, he read it twice. He paused, not wanting to know more than he had to. He settled for asking me if my teacher was a woman.
“Yes.” I said. But what I did not say: Mrs. S. was a God-fearing woman hellbent on instilling that fear into us. She caught two classmates in the supply closet and let the boy run out and held my friend by the elbow and squeezed. Called her a Slut. Loose.
She pointed to us girls.
“Listen. Nobody will buy the cow if they can get the milk for free.” She detailed the difference between a whore, a slut and a bimbo. Girls who go on ahead and ruin themselves.
We were 10.
“Better for them to teach you about those things...” My uncle signed the form quickly.
Mrs. S. didn’t teach us that lesson.
That day, we left our classroom and huddled into two rooms. The girls went one way and the boys the other. Then there were those whose parents didn’t sign the slip—mostly girls who were sent to the auditorium to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The other third of us were in fits of giggles, anticipating the lessons that would help us understand our bodies. The disparate smells, the growing hairs where there was smooth skin before, the suggestions of puberty spilling over our eager eyes. Hungry.
Straight-faced facilitators still in braces inserted a VHS tape into the VCR. A Barney-like song introduced the instructional video that featured white kids who looked nothing like us but like each other, all wearing the same type of Fruit-of-the-Loom unisex T-shirts in different colors. Diagrams of the fleshy parts of our insides named words our mothers blushed at and called our privates.
What my 10-year-old brain gathered in a week’s curriculum: my body will bleed.
I recall the words uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes. I recall my mother a few weeks before. There, on that hospital bed aching, with a belly still swollen. My infant sister bundled in my arms, heavy. Not like one of my dolls, light and flimsy.
This is the first time I will associate relief with bleeding.
What we learned manifested in child’s play: playing pregnant, playing labor, playing mothers.
During recess, we would ask each other if we found puberty marks.
We compared notes. And then we taught each other lessons.
We’d sit on the ground, the red rubber mulch leaving stains on the back of our legs, the prickly parts stabbing our calves, the backs of our knees, our thighs.
“They say it smells like iron. They’ll know. So we have to keep our legs closed,” the smartest girl in our class said confidently. Smart, as she had older sisters and therefore knew it all.
“She’s gonna get it first. She already has.” The petite girl in Ms. S. class lifted her eyebrows and pointed with her puckered lips gesturing toward me. We were the same height, always the girls in the front of our class photographs. But age made her thin out, baby fat slimming and making her all angles, while I filled in, a body already too generous.
She placed her two fists under her shirt, imitating my already budding breasts. No matter how many tank tops I layered, how baggy my sweaters were, I could not hide my body. I felt other eyes, zeroing on all the things I attempted to hold inside.
All I saw was red. Before the petite girl and I knew it, I had a fist full of her hair in my hand.
“Stupid slut.” She sneered at me once she broke out of my hold. She was all tears and sobs. A mosquita muerta.
“She’s a bimbo. Bimbos have big boobs.” The boy I liked since I was seven, interjected.
When it picked up with the boys, it was over.
My wide-eyed friend said I should tell Mrs. S., but I bit my tongue instead.
When I’m 11 and an older boy slaps my ass in middle school, when I’m 12 and another brushes against my chest and smirks, when a man tells me I have a fuckable body at 13 and asks if I want to practice, when others eventually try and take liberties and do, I’ll bite my tongue as well.
After-school, my grandfather rolled up in our minivan with my toddler brother in the back seat. While he spoke baby talk, he crashed his two black and red Hot Wheels together, over and over as we drove home. I gave him a scowl and blamed it on his loudness, when all I wanted was to jump in the backseat and be all blubber and play.
My grandfather, in an attempt to uplift his sullen granddaughter, turned down KLOVE 107.5 and asked me if I wanted to listen to las Spicy Girls.
When I shook my head no, he asked, “And what did you learn in school today, mi niña?”
“Nothing good,” was the best I could conjure.
*****
That Halloween morning, before the pins and needles, before the ghouls and monsters, my grandmother held my face in her hands. Her steel grey eyes marveled at the sight of me.
She blessed her little sorceress.
“Niña, con ese vestido, eres un hechizo, un encanto.”
My grandmother’s words echoed in my head while my chest fluttered pregnant with fear.
The fear that feels feral. My core, now exposed.
In the girl’s bathroom, I picked up my mother’s stocking from off the tile floor and ran the cold water on the stain until. But it was futile, the dark mess bleeding through onto my numbed fingers. The blood running up to my cheeks, my face burning hot. In the mirror, I caught the look I saw on my mother’s face that morning etched onto mine. Wounded.
Un hechizo, un encanto. Un hechizo, un encanto.
A curse. No instructional manual, no talk, no notes, no pretend play necessary.
I held my breath bated, standing at the precipice of womanhood.
Your bones, they already know what’s coming.
Initiation
To be, you need to break. No, we’ll want to say. Instead, the response is yes. So we’ll give each other punctures: wounds before the world does. A gaggle of girls in giggles skip to the back of the abandoned school building. Weeds. Torn mags. Broken windows. Tampons. Tattered index cards. Condoms. An inside out backpack. A canvas of lies on the dirty old broken bench. Little fingerprints, dicks outlined. There we’ll lie, the silhouette of a girl, rattled. Shut your eyes. That tightness, dark. And fits are louder in the dark. This is our operating table. A pluck here, a pinch there, a cut here. Yes. When we’re done, we’ll pour Pop Rocks into our mouths. Part our lips open and burst in each other’s ears. More pops and giggles. When the crackle stops, we’ll pass an open faced lemon in our mouths and suck. We taste all of the bitter. We’ll wince and say it’s sweet.
You’re all good.
Open your eyes.
"To a girl, a mother is a warning or a wish for what’s to come." What a line. Wonderful writing.
Stunning and haunting in equal measure. An incredible essay.