I was invited to be a guest speaker at an event recently and
early in the evening a woman approached...
I was invited to be a guest speaker at an event recently and
early in the evening a woman approached me and said she was looking forward to
my talk, and that she was going to give a copy of the book to her brother, a
carpenter. I’d put her in her late fifties, a white woman in
business-casual with hair like straw.
“He’ll probably roll his eyes though.”
The matter-of-factness with which she said it suggested she
was speaking also for herself. Nothing in her tone was apologetic or condemning
of this reaction.
“Why would he roll his eyes?” I asked, warm as could be, trying
to sound, above all, curious. I was a guest, after all, and wanted to be polite,
and also wanted to err on the side of giving her the benefit of the doubt.
“Does he not think women should be in the trades?” I said it as though this was
a completely reasonable position to take, an unsurprising and warranted view.
Which reminded me that I am a coward.
She told me then about a picket line her brother had been
on, and how a woman carpenter showed up wearing pink hot pants and how
disgusted her brother had been. She described this woman to me, how she had
been smoking and had brought her kid with her and she was wearing these hot
pants, and she didn’t have the figure for them, she was too old for hot pants,
she was the sort of woman who should not have
been wearing pink hot pants. And the amount of times she said the words hot pants began to feel somehow absurd,
almost frightening, in a Twin Peaks sort
of way. “The hot pants went up to here,” she said as she twisted her hips to
show me her rear, her hand like a plate at the base of her ass in her pilling
navy trousers. “Pink hot pants.” And she said again how the woman “didn’t have
the figure for it.” How she was “too old.” And she repeated that she was
smoking and had her kid with her and how her brother wanted nothing to do with
her, that she’d tried talking to him and he’d just walked away. There was such
disgust in her voice.
Usually I can figure out what to say to people. Here, standing
by a podium in a conference center in a fancy Boston suburb with plates of
bacon-wrapped scallops and crab cakes and sesame chicken fingers being passed
around and fading spring light filtering through the slats on the windows as
the sun set outside, I had no idea what to say. Undone by how many times she’d
used the words hot pants. Undone by
the disgust in her voice.
“You know, sometimes I’ll try to help him with projects,”
she went on. “And he’ll tell me, go away,
you don’t know what you’re talking about. But then later he’ll admit, maybe that wasn’t so bad a thought. Well,
anyway, I’m looking forward to your talk.” She turned and walked away and back
into the crowd.
It threw me off for the rest of the evening. As I did my
talk about the book to the gathered crowd as they sipped their wine and fumbled
with their cocktail napkins, all I could think of was this woman’s brother
rolling his eyes –
he was a ghost in the audience, standing at the back of the room, thick arms
folded across his chest, heavy tool belt sagging at his waist, shaking his head
at me. And there was the woman in the hot pants, too, and good for you, lady,
wearing what you want on the picket line. She looked great, with wrinkled
sagging flesh and fire in her eyes. What was it that shook me so? At first I
thought it was how it sounded like this man hated women. But more so, more so,
it was the way it sounded like this woman did.
