Deep Cuts

Just Like a Woman

The split finally happened in spring: a clean break, they called it, which meant the end of our trio. Exactly a week later, it was Zoe and I who kissed.

I’d been giving them space, unsure how to help and frankly obsessed with the idea of what it all meant for me, when she invited me to study in a park. I was so relieved to hear from her, I exhaled loudly into the phone. We spread blankets on the grass and lay on our stomachs propped up on elbows. It was a warm day, bees buzzing around the open textbooks we were ignoring.

Zoe wanted info. “Does he seem okay? Is he smoking during the day? I don’t want him to become like a real smoker. What’s he doing this summer? Don’t let him go home to his dad’s.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s always at band practice.” I didn’t mention that I hadn’t even heard from him since the breakup. That every day I had awoken to a blast of possibility—this might be the day!—and fallen asleep disappointed. “You’re coming to his show next week, right?”

She shook her head. “If we keep hanging out, it will be like we never broke up. That’s all we ever did together anyway. It was codependent and weird and it kept me from becoming myself, you know this, I’ve told you this.”

“But it’s his first show!”

She shook her head again, one sharp, decisive swoop. “What about you guys? Has anything happened yet?”

“No.”

She looked relieved, but she said, “Chickenshit, the both of you.”

I wanted to ask her what she knew—what he’d said about me when I wasn’t there—but I did the right thing for once and said, “What about you, Zo? How are you feeling?”

The question seemed to surprise her, and then her chin wobbled and she started crying a little. “Excited,” she said. “But also scared. I know my parents will take it okay, but I haven’t worked up the nerve to tell them yet. My dad’s got Catholic baggage. Also I just—I don’t know how to be gay! I know how to be Joey and Zoe who both like Bowie, and I know how to be a good student. That’s it. That’s all I know.”

I shifted my elbow so it was touching hers. “Maybe focus on being a good student, then, for a while. Just until you’re not so scared. We can be good students together.”

She nodded, wiping her makeup-streaked eyes. The sight of her made me think, for the first time in years, of Dylan’s “”: for all her smarts and self-possession, here she was, breaking like a little girl.

“I know it’s selfish,” she said quietly. “But I have this fear I won’t see you anymore when you start dating Joe.”

“When?” I blurted, laughing nervously. “ If that happens, of course we’d still see each other.”

“Right,” she said. “That’s what girls always say. What about your roommate? Didn’t you used to be close before she started dating that frat boy?”

I felt a pang of guilt at the mention of Megan, who had become a distant acquaintance with whom I still shared a home. “You guys came between me and Megan more than what’s-his-name.”

She looked unconvinced. “I know Joey—he’ll be all in. He was like that with me. Remember this is a boy with a giant hole in his life.”

She said it like a warning, but it didn’t scare me; I wanted to be all in too. Instead of telling her this I hugged her, which was awkward since we were lying on our stomachs. We ended up sort of rolling around and laughing at ourselves, and then she kissed me. I decided to go with it; I knew it was safe, unserious. She tasted like stale cloves and Jamba Juice. Almost immediately, her hand was up my T-shirt, and she pulled back to ask, “Can I?”

I nodded, and her hand slipped under my bra, traveling over my breasts like a spider—clutching, jiggling one breast, then moving to the other. I rolled onto my back to make it easier for her.

A young family nearby packed up their picnic and left. Zoe had stopped bothering with the kissing now and was just staring at my shirt, at the movements she was creating with her hand.

“You’re welcome,” I finally said.

She looked up at me. “Sorry. These are my first boobs. Can I take your shirt off?”

“No! Zoe! We’re in a park!”

“But you’re never going to let me do this again, I can tell!”

I laughed and rolled over onto my stomach, forcing the retreat of her hand. My breasts, relieved, settled back into my bra. “That’s true,” I said, and picked up my textbook. “But I’m still your girl.”

Black streaks still on her face, I saw a tiny smile. She opened her book, then looked back at me. “Hey, can I ask you something?” Her voice dropped to a hush: “What do girls like?”

I smiled. “Are you not a girl, Zo?”

“I’m a sample size of one. With the body of a little boy, let’s face it.”

I looked out at the park and tried to think. What did I like? I liked talking about music in bars. I liked any contact between my body and Joe’s. A hippie couple was walking through the park, the guy’s arm slung around the girl’s shoulders, her fingers entwined in his dangling hand. She wore a lazy expression and sandals that consisted only of a thin leather sole and a loop around her big toe. She looked like she knew what she liked.

“I don’t really know, if I’m being honest,” I said. “You playing with my boobs like a kid discovering Jell-O didn’t do much for me, I can tell you that.”

“Damn. It did for me.”

The hippie guy had a guitar on his back, swaying with his long blond dreads. “What does Joe like?”

Zoe was watching the couple too. She shrugged. “I don’t know either. Same stuff they all like, I guess—touch it, suck it, worship it. What’s that English-major word for the part being the whole?”

“?‘Synecdoche’?”

“Men are walking synecdoches. Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

I smiled and held her hand. “Me too.”

—

When I got home that evening I couldn’t find my Blonde on Blonde CD, so I looked the song up on Napster and was surprised to find a version by Nina Simone. A woman singing “”? I downloaded both versions and then brought my laptop to my bed. I played Dylan first, then Nina.

I knew little of feminism at the time, beyond what Zoe interjected into unrelated conversations. I had been introduced to the concept as a teenager by late-night talk-show hosts who couldn’t say the word without rolling their eyes, and man did I love those dudes. It’s not ideal for a young girl to discover Letterman before the patriarchy, but that was the order of things for me. Dylan had loomed large over my adolescence too, and introduced me to certain systems of oppression—court-ordered racism in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” communist fearmongering in “I Shall Be Free No. 10”—but never, of course, gender. I wasn’t particularly curious about the women of Blonde on Blonde, about their stories; I viewed them only through Dylan’s filter, sad-eyed and bony-faced in ribbons and silly hats.

Nina Simone changed that. It took me hours that night to peel back the layers of her song—years, even; I still have new thoughts about it. The wounded bitchiness of Dylan’s version was quickly, finally, laid plain for me to see. Then the power of a woman reclaiming it. (Later: the power of it being a Black woman, and this particular Black woman—brilliant, bipolar, so incredibly singular.) But mostly what hit me that night was the deep womanly kindness of it. She spends most of the song observing another woman’s flaws and pretenses without any of Dylan’s judgment, and then, switching to first person in the final chorus, she finds it all in herself—the taking, the breaking. And the acceptance of her own frailty becomes the thing that makes her just like a woman, the thing Dylan couldn’t do.

I loved this idea, but I didn’t know where to put it. I didn’t know how to use it. It felt bigger than a Ring Finger column, but I wrote it in my binder anyway: “Simone’s acceptance of her own frailty is what makes her just like a woman.” As I fell asleep that night I could see both of their faces—Nina’s and Zoe’s—hovering in the darkness of my almost-sleep. I wished we knew how to help each other.