13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 2

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Chapter 2
“The easiest way to get a man to leave is to have sex with him.”



“They’re asking if we have space for four more people,” My Only Friend asks me as soon as I enter the office adjoining the women’s shelter that we run, “We don’t have space for four more people.”

I smile at my friend while she walks from desk-to-desk as if she will find space to put women inside our drawers that are crammed full of paperwork legitimizing the existence of those society deems fit only to sleep in boxes.

“We’re going to have to make space though,” she continues still zipping around the office while our shared assistant watches her and then looks at me from behind the folder she’s using to stifle her laughter.

My Only Friend is amazing but each morning begins with her burying herself under the impossible weight of her job while frantically pacing and muttering for about an hour, we all try to schedule our commutes in a way that we get in only at the end of the show but it’s not an exact science.

“We have two empty beds,” she says rummaging through my bag for the coffee I already put on her desk while she was raging on the other end of the room, “The rooms are all full and we can’t just take the rest home, can we?”

“No, we can’t, we can’t just take the rest home, they’re not leftover vegetables,” I tell her handing her the cup of coffee which would be a bad idea to give to a person so worked up but, in her case, I know it to be the only tool that calms her down.

She looks like she is going to douse me in coffee.


…….



I met My Only Friend fifteen years ago. She was standing outside the coffee shop at the end of my morning running route, leaning against a tree, and screaming at the shutters of the building. I used to run really early and I wasn’t used to seeing people on that stretch of road before eight when the shops and offices began to open. For the most part my mornings were peppered with polite nods to drunk college students finally heading back to their hostels in auto-rickshaws and vegetable vendors leaving their homes for the toil of the day. It struck me as rather odd to see a young woman standing outside a coffee shop, clearly distressed and rather well-dressed to be someone returning home after a night of binge drinking, so I stopped and went over to her. I took my headphones out of one ear as I walked towards her and caught the end of her sentence admonishing the shutters for being down when the sun was already up.

“Is everything okay?” I asked her.

The look she gave me was a mixture of the amazement one experiences when a guy grabs your ass on the street and then blames you for having an ass to grab when you chide him and the hopelessness of a mother explaining factorials to a ten-year old dunce, and it was entirely the reason I instantly fell in love with her. She still gives me that look routinely, it is why I remain in love with her. Her eyes were huge for her face and the general ethnic ambiguity of her features somehow enhanced the dramatic nature of her speech. Her hair went all the way down to her knees and had clearly been carefully brushed recently, and while it appeared as if she wore no make-up it was apparent that she possessed a lot of skill at using makeup to appear natural. On one arm she wore bangles of every colour under the sun that the human eye can perceive and perhaps several that it cannot, but I would not know because as hard as I have tried to wash the human off me in my years, I cannot succeed because you cannot wash off the limitations of your species. I can see only what colours I can see and the rest, I cannot even perceive, but there was a light in her eyes that was of no earthly colour.

“No everything is not fucking okay,” she said rapidly before turning her head towards me, as strong as her words sounded her manner was as light and breezy as the pleasant mornings, I spent running down those streets, “I don’t understand why they would sell coffee at eleven at night but not at six in the morning. Who needs coffee later at night than in the morning?”

I removed the other earpiece and let the two dangle towards each other with a slow magnetic energy until they were close enough and then they just crashed into each other with that satisfying clunk of two poles snapping in on each other and then I walked a few steps closer to her.

“How do you know they serve coffee at 11 PM?” I asked her.

They did.

“I was here,” she said.

She wasn’t. I knew that because I was there from ten until they closed, I was sitting right outside and there were only three other people there, and I knew all of them.

“What did you have?” I asked her.

“The same thing you had,” she told me.

It made me laugh, not because I was convinced that she actually might have been there but because she had clearly been there before, had seen me before and was lying for no reason at all.

“I can make you coffee at my place, if you want,” I offered even though she still had to tell me her name or from whence she came, “They don’t open for another two hours.”

“But what if you kill me and dismember me in your home?” She asked, already walking towards me, “Throw my body in the rain gutter.”

She wanted to be joking, I know, all women want to be joking when they say things like that but underneath the jest is a sneaking concern that lurks in all our minds all the time. We worry about being attacked by anyone and at any time because even when we spend so many years at rallies designed to make us believe that we are strong and the attackers are the ones that are wrong, no poster has ever helped a woman after she’s been knocked to the ground by an assailant that isn’t necessarily stronger but intends to do harm.

“I won’t throw your body in the rain gutter,” I told her turning back towards the direction of my home, “I will have the decency to preserve it in formaldehyde and do unspeakable things to it.”

She laughed and it is, until today, the strangest laugh I have ever heard. It sounds fake the first twelve thousand times; it seems almost artificially constructed by an alien species based on a verbal description of what a human laugh is supposed to sound like. The only thing that lends her laugh any authenticity is that she does it with her entire body, her shoulders shake like the leaves of a tree when a monkey is attempting to swing from it. On the walk to my place, she told me more about herself. She had only recently moved to the city and was living in a moderately refurbished kitchen attached to an apartment that had its own independent access, she said she didn’t mind living in a kitchen so much but wished there were no rats living in there with her. She was a hair stylist then and worked in the salon where I begrudgingly had my eyebrows done each week while chastising myself for partaking in the barbaric ritual of ripping hair out of follicles to appear more beautiful but I did it then because beauty was part of the curse of my profession, and I do it now because I am addicted to seeing the symmetry of eyebrows that look drawn on. It’s amazing how a bunch of stray hair will make a woman feel so ugly but it’s much more astounding that despite the knowledge that we’re plucking out our hair to please another we may not even know yet we continue to do it.

We walked up the six flights of stairs to my place, and she made herself instantly at home. I had recently purchased my first couch then and I remember it being a big moment because up until that point I had spent most of adult life wandering from city to city and moving from one furnished apartment to another unable to decipher why anyone would want to own their own stuff. She complimented the couch as soon as she flopped down onto it, her hair fell like a curtain alongside her and covered almost half her body. She has since cut them so short they barely cover her ears but they still retain their original quality of always, unnaturally falling perfectly in place. I left her alone on my couch while I piled grounds into the coffee machine, when I returned she was rummaging through my bookshelf.

“So, you’re some kind of…writer?” She guessed waving a copy of Ulysses in my face, “Or wait.. literature professor?”

I ignored her question but also took the book from her and returned in back to its proper place on my shelf.

“Do you take sugar in your coffee?” I asked her walking back towards the kitchen as I heard the water boiling on the shove.

“Four spoons,” she said, “And a lot of milk.”

I shook my head as I walked into the kitchen because I cannot understand, to this day, why we drink stuff that comes out of the boob of a cow, least of all, why we put it in the most glorious human pleasure that is coffee. Regardless I made her coffee the way she liked and came back to find her still pulling out books and notebooks but this time from my desk. I don’t mind people in my stuff but I wasn’t used to someone who didn’t even wait for permission, and if I am to be perfectly honest, I am unsettled by any disturbance in my established systems and seeing her pull things out of their alphabetized homes and pushing them back into places where they didn’t belong made the hot side of head hurt a little. I put the coffee on the coasters at the table and called her over.

“You’ve got to be a teacher,” she said holding a German textbook in her hand, “Who else would study German?

“I’m not a teacher,” I told her handing over the white porcelain cup to her and skillfully extracting my textbook from her hands, “I’m a sex worker.”

She stared at me for a long moment, clearly debating whether she should believe me, question me further or take anything I said with a pinch of salt. I was always upfront about what I did with anyone I met, you can afford to be that when you have no ties no matter where you go, but because I was so upfront most people thought I was kidding or just trying to be shocking. Some others thought I worked in a corporate setup and my socialist leanings made me refer to myself as a whore but at that point in my life I was a whore. Plain and simple. It was a decision I had made very early on in life, and I was very happy with it. I liked my job and I was good at it, and I had carved my own little niche in the market with a clientele I handled myself. People always expect a gut-wrenching story but I don’t have one to offer, sometimes I made one up to satisfy the need of the customer. A lot of men need to believe you are so wretched that this is your only option to be able to pay you and I am happy to put on an act for the money. I’ve had many jobs and I know that at the heart of it, that’s what most of us do at them.

“So… should I wash this again or is it safe to drink out of?” She said finally.

And that was it.

She made her little joke about me being a dirty whore, I laughed and she never required an explanation from me again. That’s the thing that made me fall in love with her for the second time in the same morning, her response was unlike any I had ever gotten before. Everything about her has always been unexpected and sure. She’s like a storm that will definitely land but will loom threateningly for a few minutes before it does.


…….


She looms frantically around the office while I sit down at my computer and begin to make room in our budget for accommodating four new people. As I go through the names, ages and backgrounds of the women seeking assistance, she comes and stands beside my desk quietly. She puts her cup at the table and taps her fingers against the desk.

“Yes?” I ask her.

“Do you think if we cleared out the storage room and sold all the junk in it, we could afford bedding for four people?” She asks.

“Probably not but I am sure we could turn some of it into bedding,” I tell her, handing her the coffee and wiping the jarring ring off the wood, “Where would we put the bedding?”

“In there of course, why else would we clear it out?” she asks rolling her eyes while her fingers linger on the ring that the liquid has left on the table next to the three-hundred other rings that I am yet to make my peace with.

“There is no door,” I tell her, “I can’t make women sleep in an unlocked room.”

“You know that’s insane, right?” She asks and I nod my head as I type numbers into the calculator hoping she would go and harangue someone else with her brain-nuggets, “I’m doing it.”

I nod my head without looking at her but I am deeply uncomfortable with this idea, I know at this point we have no choice. I know that between a hostile home, the streets or a room without a door in a safe place most people would choose the room. I know my discomfort with the idea does not discount that it is a viable option and while I would have opted to sleep in the bathroom as opposed to a room, I know I cannot make the decisions of others based on my ideals and this isn’t even an ideal, this is fear. I am mortified of being alone behind an unlocked door and so I assume it must be just as dangerous to let anyone experience that. I find that is the best way to disguise between something that makes you anxious and a legitimate worry: Is something really scary or are you being scared on the behalf on your own personalized fear? Neither is less valid than the other but only one should be used when making decisions for another. I worry about making decisions that impact other people unintendedly in strange ways, and I’ve worried about that since I was thirteen.


……..


When I was thirteen my mother decided that I shouldn’t be allowed to lock my bedroom door, which is a position I know many parents share, and perhaps even with good reason. I began locking my door when I was a little younger because I had started to masturbate. It happened by accident the first time as I imagine is often the case. I was in bed at night, without my phone because after the debacle with The Faceless Man my mother didn’t return that phone to me for almost six months, and I was thinking about My Imaginary Abusive Boyfriend and an imaginary fight we were having that led to him throwing me onto the porch and kicking me with his boot. My pajamas were pulled down to my knees which I often inexplicably did in bed because it felt good even though I couldn’t explain it, while I thought about my Imaginary Abusive Boyfriend’s threats and the imaginary bruises formed on my skin, I touched myself. I had tried to insert fingers inside myself before but I had found the experience so unpleasant it was almost jarring, it wasn’t that it hurt but that the skin Inside me felt like the oddest, most unpleasantly spongy and somehow hard texture I had ever felt.

However, I did enjoy the tingling sensation the soft skin and coarse hair underneath my fingers, and I often touched myself in bed while I cooked up little stories in my head. As I cooked that particular one on the porch my desire to circle around what I now know is my clitoris grew stronger and within only a few seconds I felt my very first weird surge of electricity that shouldn’t be possible, and has somehow genuinely been attempted to be disproven as existent by a bunch of men. No orgasm since has ever felt like that one, and over the next few months I spent a lot of hours trying. A locked door was somehow in my head crucial to the process of masturbating, even though it was extremely rare for my mother to climb up the stairs to my bedroom, so rare that it took her a little over a year to discover that I had been locking my bedroom door.

Once she did make that discovery, though, she ventured upstairs routinely to make sure the door was not locked. At first, I tried to get away with locking it only when I was touching myself or undressed but a few times I fell asleep without unlocking the door and the hell that was unleashed upon me was enough to give me the fear of locking it at all. Instead, I started masturbating in the bathroom, I already ate there so touching myself seemed a lot less questionable than that, and no one ever beats you up for locking the bathroom door. One day, it must have been shortly after my thirteenth birthday because my hair was still extremely short from my annual cropping, I came out of the bathroom to see someone sitting on my bed and reading through the notebook I had left on my table. Even then I hated it when people moved my things out of place and my first, and most immediate concern, was to take it from him and put it on back in its place on the table. To be fair, though, if that man had been a stranger perhaps, I would have been more concerned with yelling to draw attention to the stranger in my room but honestly, I can’t say that for sure. I have never been a screamer, which is not to say I am soft-spoken, but I cannot shriek or yell. It felt distasteful even before I was entirely sure what distasteful means but I suppose that’s more to do with women never being taught to be loud. Boys are loud and boisterous, and girls are soft and thoughtful, and neither of us are immune to letting some unlikely lessons through.

“What are you doing here?” I asked the man in my room.

I didn’t mean what he was doing there, in the house, but what he was doing there, in my bedroom. I really didn’t like the man and my primary reason is that whenever I saw him or had to talk to him, I could smell and taste boiled chicken. He didn’t look like a chicken or act like one but something about him had the quality of that smell and texture. Though the years would not be kind to him, he was at that time, handsome enough, but his skin was fairer than it needed to be and it had a waxy quality that made it shine like it had just been dipped in baby oil.

“The door was open,” he said to me still turning the pages of my notebook.

“The door was unlocked,” I corrected Mr. Boiled Chicken, “It was not open.”

He was an old friend of my parents and he was sleeping with my mother’s closest friend. She was married and so was he so they often met at my mother’s house in the guest bedroom upstairs. It was their Paris. Personally, I would rather fuck all over the countryside than in any room that had green walls but I don’t think they cared for romance the same way I do. I found the whole thing rather disgusting at the time but over the years I’ve developed a better understanding of why people cheat and I’ve come to realize that cheating is more often symptomatic of a terrible relationship and not the cause of it. The manner in which the business of marriage is conducted in this country almost guarantees that the likelihood of ending up with someone you love is slim, most of my childhood the married adults in my life explained to me that you eventually fall in love with the people you marry, and I still wish I had known enough about Stockholm Syndrome then to explain it to them. I didn’t so I just thought they were all fucking nuts to have sex with people chosen by their parents after they had already committed to spending their entire life with that person. Put me in a situation like that and I would cheat nine times out of ten. The tenth time I would commit suicide or homicide. At that time, though, I couldn’t rationalise or analyse cheating, I just knew it made me feel sick and uncomfortable to be around either one of them and it made me want to throw up a little to be included in their subterfuge.

“Can you please go now?” I asked him while trying to pull my notebook from his grip, “I have to study.”

I didn’t have to study, I did certainly like to study but at that moment all I wanted from him was to stop reading what I had written because all of it had to do with being beaten, abused, tied up and used. I had leanings that it took many years to comprehend but I could articulate what I wanted very early on. I believe that the reason I didn’t mind my mother beating me so much was because I almost enjoyed it and certainly afterwards, I always felt like there was an electric current flowing through my veins.

“Is this what you study?” He said pointing to my left-leaning penmanship while he looked me straight in the eyes.

“What do you want?” I asked him as I started to lose my cool because I felt trapped inside the unbolted door of my own bedroom.

I was sure he wanted something because even though I hadn’t been with men like that yet, I knew from the way that he looked at me and the fact that he had been in my bedroom at all that his interest in me was as innocent as my experience of my own childhood. He closed my notebook and the stupid unicorn on the cover flashed its glittery eyes at me. I used that notebook because someone gifted it to me after undoubtedly going into a primarily-pink coloured shop and asking for a suitable gift for a young girl, and obviously a young girl cannot write inside a notebook that isn’t covered in glitter. How would she know she was a girl if everything she owned wasn’t covered in bright and happy colours to reinstate the joy in her innocent fucking soul? Later that day I took a marker and coloured the entire cover black. If being a girl is pink, I can guarantee that womanhood is black. That’s what I felt like when he put his grip on my arm and my mind instantly began to fade to a blank, black screen where the fact that this moment would be permanent memory was being projected even as it happened.

“Stop it,” I told him taking a few steps back in a blind panic I had never experienced before, “I will tell your wife about you being here.”

If I am to be believed to have still in any regard been a child, that was the exact moment that it died a complete death. The moment I realised I could use information to manipulate the world just as it did to me was the moment any vacuous naivety in me disappeared entirely.

“What, will you do?” His grip on my arm grew tighter as I wondered why there appeared to be no one but us in the house.

For a moment I considered screaming but it was a calculated risk which was not guaranteed to yield favourable results. I was scared too, I think, it’s been so long it’s hard to say anymore. I decided to stand my ground because I figured the worst thing he could do to me was tell my mother about the filthy things I was writing by myself.

“I will tell your wife why you come here,” the ideas in my head were a lot stronger than my voice.

Fear is a loathsome part of being human, it cripples you and when you have to live in it as a matter of habit because there’s a hole in your body that people can put things into by force it begins to control you in ways you don’t even notice.

“I swear I will tell her,” I told him louder, “I’ll tell my mother you were in my bedroom and you won’t be able to come here anymore.”

That was the first time a man ever slapped me. It confused me instantly because while I was terrified of whatever was going to happen, I liked it. I liked how it felt when he hit me with his big, disgusting hand.

“Pleases stop or I will scream,” I told him because he was holding me by the throat and pushing me onto my bed.

“Listen to me,” he said in the calmest voice I have ever heard a person muster; you’d have thought he had the spirit of a saint inside him, “If you scream or fight me, I will tell your father what your mother does in this house, he’ll throw her out and you think they will care about you? No one cares where you are right now. No one is going to walk through that door wondering what you are doing in here alone. You, my dear, might as well be an orphan.”

Cruelty with intent will break a person much more effectively than any weapon. If there was fight in me, I will never know because it didn’t show itself then. He put his finger on my lips unbuckled his pants.

“I would beat you,” he said pulling his half-hard cock out of his pants, “But you’d probably just like it.”

“Please,” I told him trying to beg even though I hated him enough to die at his hands, “I’m so young. I’m just a little girl!”

He pushed me down onto the floor so I landed right against his knees. He pulled me up to mine and that was the first time I smelled a penis. It was rank and oddly satisfying as a smell.

“You’re a fucking woman,” he said pressing it against my lips, “Or you’re going to be, anyway.”

It has since bothered me that there is this belief that a girl becomes a woman when she loses her virginity. Virginity, in itself, has always bothered me because it implies that a state of innocent sexual inactivity followed that incident while is never the case. It wasn’t even the case when a 35-year-old man decided to put his dick inside a little girl he deemed was ready to be a woman. It was a hurried affair and it could not have lasted longer than fifteen minutes. He never undressed me more than was necessary, he didn’t even take his shoes off. That it hurt was the only thing that enabled me to get through it without throwing up at the scent of his breath wafting into my nose from the side of my neck. I’ve always wondered whether he walked into my bedroom with the intention of doing that or that’s what happened because I didn’t scream or actively resist. I would later tell this story to exactly one person, the first man I loved, and he would tell me that I was a whore for not screaming, and I would agree because if I didn’t, he would stop loving me. I know now that resistance and noise are a much stronger deterrent to rape than we give it credit for, and it’s solely because the lessons we teach women in graceful endurance and silence are much more pervasive than we realise. I wasn’t born with the patriarchal agenda in my genes but I may as well have been if I wasn’t even going to scream when a man robbed my sexuality from me as if I were an unlocked closet just ripe for the picking. It surprised me how little time it took for him to do so much to me, I didn’t know how much more time he would be spending doing that to me over the next year, but I was glad it was over. The easiest way to get a man to leave is to have sex with him.

“You really should lock your door,” he said to me as he prepared to leave.

I should have but I wasn’t allowed to.


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