When I was ten, the man who was functionally my stepdad left. Divorce (which this was in all but name) does weird things to your life when you're a kid. It’s like being in a funhouse mirror room that has suffered a minor earthquake: the reflections are fractured, your nose is where your eyebrow should be, searching for the exit you must face endless splintered images of what ought to be whole. The day he left, before my mom went silent for a year, she asked me if I wanted to shave my legs. I was the hairiest girl in my school; anyone who would have rivaled me had already rid themselves of the problem. I had begged my mom, but she told me I was too young, that once I started the hair would grow back thicker and faster, that it would never be as soft as it was now. Her arguments lost all credibility in the bathroom where I would perch like a hirsute gargoyle on the toilet while she shaved. I watched, enchanted, as even columns of shaving cream were excised by the razor, leaving behind smooth, hairless skin. Her legs were so unlike mine—long and unblemished, seemingly poreless so that there was neither hair nor any evidence that hair could grow there—womanly legs.
With our positions switched and the shower curtain fully pulled back I lathered myself in shaving cream, great globs of it spitting from the tub like embers, sputtering out into foamy puddles on the floor. She instructed me on pressure, told me to go slow and half-watched as I scraped uneven squiggles through my unwanted hair. That night I slept in her bed, which I was never allowed to do, and rubbed my new woman-legs against each other, against the sheets, against my hands. As I get older, I often think about myself in my mom’s position. This thirty-year-old woman truly alone with her daughter for the first time. Perhaps she thought if I was to go through the ritual of heartbreak, I deserved to start the ritual grooming as well. A little of the parent-child veil between us thinned as we were forced closer: she a little younger, curled around her grief in a fetal position, me a little older, armed with my very own Venus 5-Blade Extra Smooth Green Women’s Razor.
I never had close guy friends before college. I don’t think I had been consciously avoiding them, but I went through my entire adolescence with just my mom. Boys were incredibly foreign to me. The only other people who understood my brand of self-immolating rage were other girls, particularly other girls without dads. We wanted to be good, and prided ourselves on being best friends with our young moms, but we were also so fucking furious all the time that it was only safe to be around each other. Pack mentality. The play I am in now, The Wolves, takes me back to that closed circle of violent, joyous girlhood—the girls can sooth and claw each other away from the prying eyes of men and mothers. My character, #46, doesn’t know her dad and doesn’t shave, “like anywhere.” Reading the script is like opening a time capsule: remember when we didn’t know anything but had the conviction to back up every claim?
Ninth grade. I am once again perched on a toilet, this time standing so I can see over the bathroom stall to watch, enchanted, as my best friend leaches the blood from my favorite pair of light wash ripped jeans. I was a late bloomer, fully prepared and impatient for my period. I thought I knew all the rules—insert tampons at an angle, microwave the heating pad under the sink for four minutes, eat chocolate without guilt—because I was fifteen and fully informed, my period started without fanfare. It wasn't until we realized I bled so much more than anyone else that I had to learn more rules. Cold water for blood. Rinse the garment inside out so the red can go out the way it came without setting the stain further. Embrace pain.
In the play, the girls are brash about periods, “suck my tampon bitches,” and oblique about sex, “you left me alone with that guy.” These are the murky waters. No one has the playbook. The word sex never actually appears in the play. The most direct mention is during an argument when #14 screams one of my favorite lines: “then you left me to go fuck your stupid fucking boyfriend so very loudly.” Abortion, Plan B, and possible assault are all mentioned more than actual sex, and there is zero conversation, hinted or otherwise, about masturbation. It makes total sense to me that this is not in the world of the play—we are told of the pains and dangers of womanhood so much earlier than the pleasures.
Eleventh grade. I am in the kitchen with my mom in our third and final Philadelphia apartment. I ask in some sort of sideways halting way about masturbation (I don’t remember what I said because I blacked out from embarrassment). She responds, “you’re not masturbating?!” I have never felt further from her, from what I thought our shared experience has been. I feel betrayed on some level. How would I know if she didn’t tell me? Sophomore year of college. I tell a girl I have known for two months that I’ve never had an orgasm, that I don’t think I can. She sends me the link to what she calls “a starter vibrator.” I order it and stash it in a drawer for six months.
There is a scene in a new play called cityscrape by Sophie McIntosh where one of the two main characters reveals, ashamed and uncomfortable, that she’s “not good” at sex, with a partner or alone. She doesn’t like touching herself she might not even like herself. The other woman, who wields her messy sex life like a weapon, offers to help; she calls it a guided masturbation. It is one of the few genuine and vulnerable moments between the two. They aren’t sleeping together, they aren’t romantically interested in each other in the way we are taught to think of romantic relationships; and though the action would be necessarily sexual, the impulse falls in that impossible to explain tender intimacy of female friendship. Let me help you. Let me gift you something. Let me smooth over this wrinkle someone else has left.
It is so hard to pick apart the strands of relationship between girls and women. I am reminded of the sea anemones you’re sometimes allowed to touch at aquariums. They’ve got all these squishy tentacles swaying in the water. If you reach your two fingers in to touch them, they’ll curl around you in a sticky little hug. Or maybe they’re trying to devour you. That’s kind of how growing up as a girl was: you put out all your little feelers to gather or annihilate. In my close friendships there are moments when we mother each other, becoming daughters of our friends. Sometimes we are each others’ lovers, emotionally at least. They are the ones I protect and seek shelter from—a team, a tribe, a pack, a pride.