A Certain Hunger

by Chelsea G. Summers

One learns so much about a person when one merely wants to fuck him.

I have always found it hard to listen when a man pulls my head back by my hair. I should have listened. I should have known. I did neither.

Indeed, I can think of only three lovers who have seen where I live; my home is mine, and I don’t like to share.

It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.

I saw myself inviting all my lovers, present and past, to a dinner party. I knew even as puberty was dawning, fluffy and pointed as a kitten, that my life would be rich with men. These men, I imagined, would be plentiful, interesting, attractive, and, above all, devout.

Each man would RSVP yes, delightedly, each unknowing that the invitation was not for him alone, and each thrilled to his core to see me. I could not then imagine I’d ever have a lover who would not want to see me again. I still can’t.

In my imagination, these men I loved would sit together, ranged along the two sides of the table, joined by their adoration for me, and united in their befuddlement.

I knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust for me because, even though I didn’t know the precise shape and weight of lust, I knew that lust was power—and I wanted power even then.

Thus my fantasy of power. This from the fecund imagination of a twelve-year-old girl. It’s amazing I didn’t turn out worse than I did.

There’s a lot to be said for intimidating intelligence and a dearth of conscience, and I possess both.

To this, I laughed. I know what I am. It may not appear in the DSM-5, but just because you can’t prescribe a pill for us doesn’t mean we don’t exist.

Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.

Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise. Prison may be the hell of other people, but at least it’s not a hell of people you love.

I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.

All these years later, a couple of bars of “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and I’m instantaneously holding a plastic cup of tepid PBR, looking to make out with the nearest, stupidest lacrosse player.

Let me put it this way: I was so careful and so thorough that ex-lovers would stand up for me, not because they liked me but because they feared me.

You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.

You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never know too much.

Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild. Thus, protected by knowledge and the Pill, I fucked my way through college. It was easy; it was fun; and it was educational, if not reliably pleasurable. Emotional attachment is for children, and sentimentality is for great meals you’ll never eat again. I went to college for an education, and I got one.

I could research and write a charming, sprightly, thousand-word article in record time. And I could investigate, seduce, and drop a man with elegance and ease. I could, in short, support, nourish, pleasure, and protect myself. I felt like a proud parent of a devious mind.

That’s not to say I didn’t do research on them; it’s merely to say that I didn’t have to. It was optional, not obligatory, and any dirt I discovered I saved for myself. Sometimes it’s just nice to know what you can know. Other times it’s nice to use what you know. In any case, though I didn’t necessarily need to add to my files, I often did. Almost out of nostalgia’s sake—almost, but not quite.

There’s a perverse pleasure in bringing someone to a truth about herself that she has long repressed.

we fucked so much, so long, and so often, we passed a yeast infection back and forth like a joint.

Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman’s love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love. Some people grow together like horrible species of lichen. My parents, I learned, were precisely this kind of symbiotic organism.

She is neither too crazy nor too sane. She is neither too independent nor too attached, neither too successful nor too ambitious. Not too hot and not too cold, not too soft and not too hard; not too big and not too small, she is the baby bear’s chair, porridge, and bed. My father snuggles in her mediocrity, and I feel fine about it.

I also tried to dig up dirt on my mother. Either her life was as boring as her Burpee seed catalog, or she was superb at burying the bodies. In any case, I found nothing on her. I was bitterly disappointed, though I’m not sure in whom.

Fucking with, fucking up, fucking over, fucking around, fucking right: New York Fucking City has earned its name. It makes perfect sense that I felt at home on its streets. The catcalls of its men were a comfort.

We toasted to love, we toasted to friendship, we toasted to cock, we toasted to my dead mother, and we toasted to our lives, shiny and slick and feral in the sleepless city.

I found Italy an interesting place to be a young American woman. I rather enjoyed being objectified. I like it when men look at me as if they want to devour me. I find it deeply entertaining. It becomes annoying only when they start talking, as if I’d have any interest in anything that comes out of their mouths.

(One thing about Italy: the natives don’t trust people who like to be alone. Italians abide by the saying, “Chi mangia solo crepa solo”—he who eats alone dies alone.

You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy, moral business, and feel like you are a better person.

Outside the electrified perimeter of the prison, life goes on. I don’t want to be forgotten. Kill one man and you’re an oddity. Kill a few and you’re a legend.

I suspect what makes these women irresistible is this: the women who impassion men are those who can maintain that tension between being not in love and succumbing to it. In my experience, this delicate space is where men are most keen. On either side of this emotional divide, they may fall away, succumbing to boredom on one side and fear on the other. Women who sustain that emotional tension perform the emotional equivalent of edging an orgasm. My fondness for gratification has always been my downfall.

“It’s really nice to see you.” He snuggled his face into my bosom and sighed again. “It feels like the last decade was a dream.” He nosed closer to my heart. He needed to die.

It’s better to live with guilt and remorse than it is to die—just look at how many of us cheat on our partners, our taxes, our diets, our dissertations. And that’s not even with our backs pressed cold against a dead glacier wall. It’s surprisingly easy to overcome moral qualms, if you give in to the appetite.

Here’s another way to look at it: in the 1930s, there were 5,000,000 more American farmers than there are now, not quite a hundred years later, and these millions of farmers grew a wider range of foodstuffs on these predominantly family-owned-and-operated farms. Most important, these farms don’t exist today. That cool six-figure loss hides the explosive growth of corporations like Monsanto and DuPont, shrouds the decrease in differing crops that American farmers grow, and obfuscates how what we eat is making us sick because what we’re eating is in no small part dictated by the big businesses that grow the raw materials for our meals. We’ve gained cheap food (and the cheapest food goes to public schools and for-profit prisons), but we’ve lost everything else.

trip. You can’t slide tapas-sized plates of three-star Tuscan food before me and not expect me to use my fingers. Really, whose fault was it that my index finger made its way inside that sales manager’s mouth, topped as it was with a brown-butter-and-chickpea sauce the exact shade of a maiden’s aureole.

If this was how he treated women on the regular, he didn’t deserve to draw breath, much less be allowed to enter my body.

Only intellectuals are more gullible than idiots.

Bring us our sirloin, our lamb chops, our veal cutlets, and our chicken breasts snugly swaddled in plastic, thoroughly exsanguinated, wholly dismembered, and completely sanitized for our protection. We won’t hear the bleating of the sheep, the lowing of the cows, the hydraulic thwack of the bolt gun. We won’t smell the copper rivers of blood sluiced from below kill floors, the acrid tang of the chemical foam that suffocates “free-range” chickens, the florid stench of mountains of fish guts. We eat our meat, and we act as if all animals were always already dead.

American girls grow up knowing the intrinsic importance of having female friends; our girlfriends are our bosom buddies, a term that links the girlishly erotic with the emotionally intimate.

Our female friends, the close ones, are the mini-breaks we take from the totalitarian work it requires to keep up the performance of being female.

What drives killers to kill is a very personal question. We like to think that men kill because they’re men—it’s as indiscriminate as their wont to procreate. The quarterbacks in the high school of life, men are given a wide berth for murder, as they are for most things. Women, on the other hand, kill for only two reasons, or so the people who study women killers say. We women kill for personal financial gain or to escape an abusive relationship. Of course, this binary stereotype is insulting and inaccurate.

The truth, whether we want to see it or not, is that women will kill for almost any reason.

The goddess of femininity is cruel to mature women, crushing our brittle bones in her silken, youthful grip. As a girl, when you grow up, you become delectable. As a woman, when you grow old, you turn immaterial—unless you bear children, unless you make art, unless you leave a legacy.

The choices that we have, the choices that we make—these choices condemn us, constrain us, and create us. This is life at its most essential, a series of decisions that leads to your inexorable end and your desperate, muffled hope that you may be celebrated when it comes. I can live with my choices, as I will live with my legacy. I write this knowing that I will grow old and die in this prison, and I write this so that no one will forget me. I have carved my place in your memory, cut to the quick of American consciousness. How many women—hungry as we are for immutability—can say the same?