Joan Is Okay

by Weike Wang

He seemed caught off guard to hear me say that. He explained he was using “woman” in the abstract, he didn’t mean me specifically. Oh, I said, and he continued to talk about this abstract woman as if I had no skin in the game. A woman biologically is able to reproduce, he said, and should she choose to, her legacy would be secure, without concerns for what else she can offer the world since she has already given it a human being. But a man can’t get pregnant on his own. A man must forge his own legacies and create something out of nothing. I tried to act surprised by his statements, to lift my eyebrows a little and show that I hadn’t realized this before, that Reese, being a male, didn’t have ovaries that released one egg each month to be fertilized, and if this egg isn’t fertilized by one sperm out of an onslaught, the sixteen-millimeter-thick uterine lining that had readied itself to support the fertilized egg, the zygote, would shred, each month, bit by bit, and come out the uterus like a vine of ripe tomatoes put through the blender. I said while I didn’t know this abstract woman personally, I imagined that once she met her abstract man, she would probably tell him to fuck right off. Fuck right off? he asked. Yeah, like that. Perplexed but not necessarily offended, he said it seemed too early in the day for swear words and he didn’t quite know what I meant.