I am three. My favorite game is to put tennis balls under my shirt, press my plastic doll Winifred up against them, and pretend to nurse.
"I'm very busy," I tell my grandfather when he asks what I'm doing. "But you can nurse Katina."
And because I am his only granddaughter and because he does almost anything I say, he goes, fetches the doll I have named Katina, and sits down next to me. I lend him a tennis ball. We both very seriously nurse and burp our babies.
I am five and I will not wear anything but dresses because I like the swish swish sound that they make. I become a girl from another era, with patent leather shoes, tights, and flouncy dresses. My hair is cut short in little orphan Annie curls. I have a poochy tummy. I am profoundly unselfconscious about any of these facts.
"Don't you ever wear pants?" people ask.
"No," I say.
One day I decide to try to be a tomboy like heroic girls in books always are.
I go up to huge fifth grade boys playing tetherball and ask, "Can I play?" They look down a moment, taking in this crazy pink-clad ruffle-skirted kindergartner.
"Get the hell out of here," one finally says. I flounce off. I am secretly delighted.
I am seven and I do not let the fact that I only wear dresses stop me from hanging upside down on any and every bar-like object. I like the way the world looks that way, when I can see it. Sometimes, I can't see it since my dress has fallen down in front of my eyes. I stay upside down so much that my parents become concerned about my exhibitionist ways.
"You're getting a little old to be doing these big underwear shows," my dad tells me.
I am still too unselfconscious to care.
I am eight. I still only wear swishy things. I have a special sunflower dress for the first day of second grade. My hair is still very short.
"Um, my friends and I were just talking and we were just kind of wondering, are you a boy or a girl?" A fifth grader demands.
"Girl," I say.
I now see that this was meant to be an insult, not a sincere question.
That is the day that I begin a 2 year campaign to stop getting monthly haircuts.
I am still eight and I am in my first play: Charles Wallace in a children's production of A Wrinkle in Time. I have 131 lines, 133 if you count the lines that say "All."
Playing a boy bothers me not in the least. The director, thrilled to find a girl who doesn't mind playing boys, takes extreme advantage of this over the next year and a half that I sign up for his plays.
I am Pa in Little House on the Prairie, Michael in Mary Poppins, Ferdinand in The Tempest, Gazeen in Aladdin, Avery in Charlotte's Web, the main character man who I can't even remember the name of in Around the World in Eighty Days, and Captain Ahab in Mobey Dick. It is Ahab that breaks me. I am nine and I am deeply unhappy to have to draw on a mustache and clomp around the stage with a cane and talk about wenches and whales. I pull a neat trick and leave out half my lines in the actual performance, saying only those ones that aren't too embarrassing.
The next play, I ask the director not to make me a boy this time. The play is Pippi Longstocking.
"But you'd be such a good Tommy," he laments.
Begrudgingly, he casts me as Annika. The girl he does cast as Tommy begins to sob. The director looks at me pleadingly and I shake my head. I have won. I have been affirmed as a real and bona fide girl and Tommy will just have to deal with that.
Being a girl, I learn, is not something that you just are. It must be pleaded for and earned.
I am in junior high and I feel bad for being a girl. There aren't enough boys for everyone and I am clogging up space. I am not junior-high-hot and resign myself to having an ugly husband, if I manage to snare one at all. It is the girls that use self-tanner who will get the attractive ones. Late at night at a sleepover I tell Jessica my worst fear: what if, in 1986, there were like a billion more girls than boys born? What if the balance is all off?
I am seventeen, in high school, and I have tricked a boy into acknowledging my girlhood and wishing to date me. I have just gone on the worst date of my life. The first part of it had been fine—we went to a laser show and, in that most delicious cliché of early high school couples, made out during pretty much the whole thing. I kept thinking the whole time WOW! I am kissing someone! This was a novelty that had in no way worn off after our first week of dating. After not kissing anyone for years and years, suddenly I was constantly kissing and being kissed and my mind reacted with reeling shock every time.
The show got out around 8:30 and my curfew wasn't until 10:30 and I felt certain that because he had chosen the laser show it was now my job to come up with a suitable new activity. "So, we could go to Starbucks," I said. "Or...walk around Ravenna Park...or something." I had no idea what one was to do with a boy at 8:30 at night when you had two hours and you both had already eaten dinner.
He gave me a look of knowingness. "I think we should go park somewhere," he said.
"OK," I said. So that's what you do with a boy at 8:30 in the evening when you have two hours, I thought. You park. OK. OK, I am totally comfortable with that. He had said it like it was an obvious suggestion when it honestly had not crossed my mind. I had been hoping he would choose Starbucks—I had developed a large craving for a mint mocha.
We found a fairly uninhabited parking lot down by where I had once taken swimming lessons as a small girl, a fact that I tried not to think about as we climbed into the back seat. High school cliché! High school cliché! my mind blared loudly, amused at me. I was secretly impressed with myself— since when did I, Sarah, do anything other than read or, on daring nights, have a (girl) friend over to watch a movie on Saturday night? Since when was I ever on the other side of steamy windows?
What I think happened precisely is that he was, while kissing me, slowly working his hand up my leg. He stopped then and said "May I continue?" Because I liked him a whole lot and because I naively thought he was referring to the kissing, I nodded.
I then had no idea what to do. In very twisted logic I was pretty certain that my female anatomy would be repulsive to him. So, as he studied my face intently, I sat motionless and pretty much tried to ignore what was happening. I did not know what reaction I was supposed to have, so I simply did not have one at all, except for lying straight and stiff and blushing fiercely. I could tell that he was trying very hard. I was trying very hard to have him keep liking me and, what's more difficult, to preserve both his self-esteem and my own dignity.
Dear God, I wanted him to know I was a girl, but he didn't have to prove it that much.
I am in college and I wear dresses and skirts. I like the swish-swish sound. I have never wore jeans. I still feel strangely complimented when someone says, "she" in reference to me.
"Of all the people to have a man complex, Sarah, you're the least likely." I hear it anytime I reveal my phobia.
Yet still I live in a constant state of fear and compensation, wearing pink and baking bread, wondering how much of me is driven by this deep fear of secret testosterone lurking in my blood. Wondering why, exactly, I am afraid; why, exactly, being manly would be so bad.