To pass along

In 2019, Hilton Als wrote that in the context of Joan Didion’s fiction “the standard narratives of women’s lives are mangled, altered, and rewritten all the time”. 

In Didion’s review of The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, Didion writes, on the topic of life out west when it revolved around a Utah murder, or maybe just in general, “Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories.”  Didion often story tells the passage of girlhood, of womanhood, of life, sometimes her own, sometimes that of an inspired character. I trust that her notion of girlhood reigns true. I trust that out west and south, east, and north, out anywhere, women pass stories along like lucky charms. Trading and inspecting. Comparing and making sense of.

Katy Waldman of The New Yorker critiques lingering for too long on “the trope of girl-dreamer” and brings up a point that might come as hard to swallow to those prone to mellow drama and fixation on life, their lives, their own deeply unique, inherited, and enriching experiences. Everyone believes their girlhood, childhood, is different. Maybe it is not. Maybe we are all the same at a base level and maybe this is ok. When writing about  “Girlhood” the title of the third book of nonfiction by Melissa Febos, Waldman writes that if “Women can grow attached to a vision of their younger selves as uncommonly pure, creative, and powerful, perhaps it’s because such insistence helps us to process the wrongness of what happened next.”

There is a photo of my friends and me that I have grown to quite like from this winter. The light is dark, barely there. Maybe there is no real, natural light, but the frame is centered around the infrared glow of the candles atop a white, grocery store-looking, birthday cake. “18,” the photo shouts at you. Pink sprinkles laughing, thick mounts of buttercream telling secrets. My friend who blows the candles out is crying, our crimson polished fingers grabbing at her shoulders, tucking back her dark hair. This surely isn't what adulthood looks like we scream through a series of worried glances. She positions herself neatly around the cake and inhales deeply. Then exhales---wooooosssshh                                     

                                                   hhuuusssshhhhhh. I palm Samantha's hand in my own. Our eyes speak quickly in the language of shouts and cries. Muted exhales fill the small black coup until it feels like it might pop while we listen as a man tears the gas pump out of Evan’s hands and hurries to the car's front window. Kanye West raps about a woman “dancing so sleazy.” The man at the window requests purses. He holds a gun and wears a ski mask, though I might have made up that detail, and he assumes we carry purses. “I don't have a purse,” I tremble out, putting forth my phone and wallet. He takes the wallet and leaves Samantha’s hand still grasped in my own, our fingers intertwined and steadying at each other's force. Don’t cry, I mouth at her. For the first time, I am sure that my dad’s weekly warnings to not fight back and stay calm in the face of a “carjacker” are applicable here. Don’t cry, I whisper, deciding this is all that matters at this moment.

 Nobody cry,

 or yelp, 

or make any sudden movements, 

or loud noise.

 Rania’s hand joins the embrace to the left of the glove box and the man speeds off in a car none of us remember the look of. Samantha’s eyes well with thick tears--aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

                                         “aaaaaaaaaall I wanted was for you to give me something that I never had!” Rihanna belts from the TV wearing a red catsuit while my friends take turns mimicking her choreography. Barely careful enough not to trip over “Coco” the white Shih Tzu or to spin out of control and hit a piece of glass framed art adorning the wall. Sequin dresses sway together and sleek black boots tap the hardwood floor. “Look! I'm basically her! Just not pregnant!” Lucy giggles while bending backward in an attempt to match a move that resembles Olympic gymnasts more than it does dance. A chorus of “You do’s” follow to reaffirm this belief. Like young children, we run around, trip over objects, and bare our teeth--grinning at the seductive dance moves and belting lyrics with presumed purpose.

Later we discuss our friendship and wonder what it might be like to make new friends, to get as close to people we aren't yet aware of. Waldren was precise in writing “But, of course, every kid is an archer, a spy, a merperson, in her own padlocked brain,” and that “This is girlhood—childhood—by its very nature.” But might that be a good thing? Might my tilted photographs, tales of pumping gas, and tucked away Rihanna verses be fundamental moments of my growing up, frozen pictures, memories, and echoes of my girlhood? 

I’ll take Didion's cue and pass them along anyway.