All Grown Up

by Jami Attenberg

reservation. I am thirty-eight and he is forty-two. “I’m just starting over,” he tells me. “Sometimes I feel like I’m done,” I tell him.

Sundays are the days I am the most me I will ever be.

I have found myself resisting their sadness when I have so much of my own.

There is a former neighbor I text with and sometimes he comes over and we drink wine on my roof. He won’t date me because I’m white and he’s black and he refuses to date white girls but I think maybe we’re dating anyway.

Then she calls me and she’s crying and we talk for a while about her marriage and while I am sad that my friend is sad, it makes me happier than ever that I’ve never been married and never will be, because marriage sounds like a goddamn job, and why would I want another one of those?

“But maybe it’s more that I grew up in a household where I watched my mother be oppressed first by my junkie father and then secondly by every loser stoner who walked through the door even though she was supposedly this strong independent smart woman who should have survived on her own, but felt like she was supposed to ask for help. And maybe because I didn’t have any positive relationship models in my life I don’t feel inspired to make concessions to keep this one, because what’s the point, men will suck you dry anyway?”

The fucking we did hangs between us, but we will not return to it.

Better to deny desire than to collapse from it.

“Morty is a terrible man,” says my mother. “But Morty has paid.”

“Do you even like men?” I say. “I don’t know,” says my mother. “Sometimes?” “Same,” I say.

“Look, you had it easier than me,” she says. “You think Nana and Papa were busy supporting women’s rights? No, they wanted me to meet a nice man and get married and cook and clean for him and give them grandchildren, and that’s it. You were born into a world where feminism existed and was readily available to you. I had to acquire that knowledge. I didn’t know I could be on my own.”

no matter how much you own yourself and your body and your mind, there are men who will always try to seek power over your body, even if it is just with their eyes, although often it is with their words and sometimes with their hands.

We begin to tell each other our secrets, about the things men have done to us, the horrible things.

One more drink and we’re sharing our rape stories. Nearly every woman I know has one. If

It’s buttery and slow, nearly southern, and I love it, because it makes me feel feminine and doted on and I hunger for signs of affection in the universe, and I know it’s a genuine term of endearment. And I hate it a little bit too, because now I’m in my thirties and I haven’t been a girl in a long time, and even when I was, I don’t think I liked being called “girl” very much. But eventually I decide I love it more than I hate it, so I let it go.

But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don’t want to get married: they don’t believe you. They think you’re lying to yourself or you’re lying to them or you’re trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse just for telling the truth. But I don’t want to agree with him. So I end up arguing the other point.

But if you’re not white or if you’re a woman or if you’re poor or you live in some terrible place, then you could be fucked. This is why I love your mother, Andrea. Because she fights to level the playing field.”

“Not to mention, what about your own special secret desires that thrill you like no other thing. Not to mention pleasure. No one ever mentions pleasure. Why are we supposed to feel bad for wanting to feel good?”

“And worst of all, what if you don’t know what you like at all? What if nothing sticks? Then you spend half your life wondering what it is you’re supposed to be doing next. What happens after that?”

I call my therapist, whom I fired six months before, for a touch-up session. I sit down on her couch and hold up the book, and she says. “Andrea, I’m glad you’re finally dealing with this,” and even though she is totally right and I should have dealt with it a long time ago and it was a good choice to read this book, there is a smugness to her tone, reminding me of why I had ended the relationship in the first place, so now I’ve made two good decisions this year.