ONE: New Orleans. The 1950s. I didn’t know in my pre-teenage years about patriarchal systems and how Mother and many women like her colluded with them. Mother’s pride caged me in the dutiful daughter role while I struggled against her misogynist attitudes. I could not see that by climbing a man-only ladder to clean a sooty ceiling and making a huge mess would become a metaphor for setbacks in achieving potential as an adult female. 

TWO: A hungover daddy working on his day off was a dismal sight—wearing boxer shorts and a stained ribbed tank top, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. He stretched up over the ladder with the paint roller and rolled a fresh coat of white on the ceiling and spattered his tanned skin and the black hair on his head and arms as sweat rolled down his face. I stood where I belonged—beneath him holding onto the ladder.

THREE: Mother badgered Daddy to paint the goddamned ceiling. She nagged him for two weeks until he bought the paint, brushes, paint roller and pan.

FOUR: When Daddy came home two weeks earlier and saw my mess, he turned crimson. The veins in his neck popped out. When Mother saw the mess, she shrieked. They both gave me a good tongue-lashing. I don’t remember if I felt guilty, or cried, or shrugged and walked away. I was used to that kind of scolding, but never before for cleaning. 

FIVE: And now I would hear Mother’s words bang in my brain: What were you thinking you stupid girl? And Daddy’s voice: Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone? Now look what I have to do to make up for your blunder.

A YOUNG FEMALE’S INITIATIVE—START WITH A—A good idea AND A simple plan to execute it: 

AT THE AGE of eleven, home alone, I decided I would clean the goddamn ceiling—the part where the exhaust from a gas wall heater had turned the ceiling black—a black spot about eighteen inches in diameter. The whole ceiling was dirty with soot and yellowed with age and nicotine stains, but the black spot had to go.

AFTER RETRIEVING a man-only ladder from the shed and setting it up under the black soot circle near the wall directly above the heater, I filled a bucket with soapy water, grabbed a rag, climbed the ladder until I could reach the sooty part with my upstretched arm.

AND THEN the soapy water from the rag dripped down my arms, soaked my shirt, dripped all over the vinyl floors. Reaching over my head and exerting enough force to clean in a circular motion cramped my neck and shoulders. But the soot came off.

AND THEN stepping down from the ladder, I looked up at my work. Staring at me was a glaring white spot—a ghost of the original white ceiling. Back up the ladder with my bucket of soapy water, I cleaned another two feet beyond the white spot hoping to reach a space where the white spot blended in with the rest of the ceiling. But I made the ceiling look worse—a much bigger white spot. The whole ceiling would need cleaning. A job too big for girls.

BRING ON THE B—

BEMOANING MOTHER—I never understood her language about women—her criticisms, complaints, her gossip. And she was mean. Got her meanness from her father’s side according my grandma. Her Uncle Jim tried kissing me on the mouth when I was nine. I tattled, and Mother said, oh don’t mind him, he does that to all the girls. But despite her criticisms, complaints, gossip, and meanness, Mother was graced with style, beauty, and elegance, qualities I envied, but qualities she exploited to be seen as the good woman. Behind every good man is a good woman, Mother would say.

BEHIND is the word that rang in my ears.

Mother showed me how to put the man on a pedestal and stand BELOW him—at his feet—because that was just the way of things: look beautiful, smell nice, have your hair done once a week, handle the social life but let the man lead the way. 

BEMOANING THE MAN—I called him Daddy. He never hit me, spanked me, slapped me around. But because he was a drunk, he was absent—unavailable. He was a very handsome drunk, though, whom I fantasized about—a daddy who could teach his daughter the ways of the world, the ways of love, the ways of making money and spending wisely. Most days he was hungover. He brooded whenever I asked him for help on a school project. He came through for me sometimes but never showed joy doing it. 

BEMOANING MOTHER’S MESSAGE—In Mother’s worry days she would say, don’t be stupid like me—don’t marry a man who leads the way to the nearest bar.

BEMOANING THREE MESSAGES FROM DADDY—watching him clean up my mess: 1) Asserting initiative was wrong. 2) Thinking I could clean a ceiling at my age was stupid. 3) Being female made it wrong to climb any ladder that reached too high in life. Only men could climb that ladder. It was my job to look beautiful, smell nice, have my hair done once a week, handle the social life but let the man lead the way.

CONTINUE WITH C—

CONFUSED and COPING with the idea that so many women collude with Patriarchy, giving THE MAN permission to own them, their bodies, their possessions, and the goddamn ceiling.

The boy, 17, leaves in a hurry before the party ends. He drives his truck to a parking lot off the I-480 interstate near Valley View. That’s where my brother sends the ambulance. That’s where he tells his son, there’s nothing you can do to make me not love you. It was close to midnight. The medics waited. Would they have to use restraints, like they used on our mother? That’s where the father says, It’s your choice but we want you to get help.

On the advice of a therapist, his parents hide all the knives. The boy, 18, signs up for a daycare program. In O.T. he makes a black and white pitcher and a rough-hewn wooden crucifix. He grows his hair and beard wild. He reads Abraham Lincoln’s biography, shares a quote with his sister: Remember that your resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.

The boy, 19, drives his truck to the graduation party, slips into the backyard, chats up the aunts and uncles. He’d quit school but was working toward a masonry apprenticeship. Dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, he looks the part. But it’s 80 degrees and humid, and the shirt has long sleeves. He talks about going back to school. He talks about Abraham Lincoln. He calls a Marine recruiter. The call ends when he tells them he’s on Seroquel.

Cutters don’t typically take it further, the books said. So the mother, father, sister, brother, lived between the highs and lows as if the highs and lows and even the in-between time were seasons. Late on a Monday night not long after the graduation party, the boy heads out to Taco Bell, then drives his truck to the Valley View bridge, finds a place to park. He won’t be noticed, not at that hour, not by drivers in a hurry to get home and sleep. Like them, like the season itself—it is the summer solstice—he inhabits that space between one day and the next, between when what is turns to what will be.

He stows the wrappers and his keys and his cell, right after he texts I love you to his mother, father, sister, brother. He’s neat by nature, or at least organized, and so the wrappers from Taco Bell seem out of character, as out of character as the texts he sent before he left the truck, before he climbed the fence near mile marker 21, eastbound, and jumped. The parking lot where his mother will race, just before midnight, when she gets the text.

I remember thinking I’d seen that place before. I remember morning sun slicing through the curtains when the phone rang. I remember pounding a storm door until the glass broke. I remember my mother saying “We didn’t know what to say so we said nothing.” I remember the therapist saying we fill in silences with our worst imaginings.

And now. Now we didn’t have to imagine anymore.

Months later that Lincoln quote shows up on the tag of a Good Earth teabag. I remember the therapist asking what is to be learned from this, how can you help him now?

I can’t. I never could help anyone in any of those old too-familiar places.

His mother asked me, the winter before, when the meds weren’t working and the hospital wouldn’t take him, what are we supposed to do, wait until they find him dead under a bridge?

The light off the lingering snow on the river path that day was bright and blinding. I took my time answering. I thought about the cousin someone found dead under a bridge in California and about the uncle who’d turned on the oven then fallen asleep in his chair with a lit cigarette and burned the house down. I thought about my mother’s brother who, we were told, drowned at 16 in a quarry lake. I thought about my grandma, who quite possibly drank herself to death. I thought about my mother and the clotheslines in the basement. I kept my gaze on the trail, kept putting one foot in front of the other.

It could happen, I said. But even I didn’t think it would. 

Now I want to know things that don’t matter. What did the note say? What was he wearing? Because the things that do—the why’s—have no answers. I won’t ask these things. But I listen hard, and as stealthily as when I was a child eavesdropping behind the door that hid the staircase leading to the upstairs bedrooms of our house, listening for anything that would let me know what the adults knew but would not say.

Now I am one of the adults. I don’t have to imagine. I know he stayed as long as he could. I don’t need to know what I haven’t seen with my own eyes. I don’t even have to know what it means, or what is to be learned. Just how we go on.

“Encore” first appeared in The Northern Virginia Review.

Warm fluid slides across my belly. The lights are dim. Hulking machines hum all around me. I am nearly asleep when the ultrasound technician tells me it’s a boy. This happens on repeat, three times over five years. 

This fourth time they don’t. When I hear “girl” for the first time, I smile, and then forget to breathe. There’s a tightness in my chest that was never there before. It constricts around a fear I’ve never had to face—that my sometimes-dangerous relationship with my body might somehow be contagious. 

I can trace a line from one woman to the next who helped raise me. We are connected by love, genetics, and matching jawlines. We are connected too by the battles we have faced with our bodies. 

I watched my grandmother hang her swimsuit up for good in her later years. This was a woman who once told me that she dove head first into the pool at a country club gala, high heels and all, because she just couldn’t resist the crystal-clear waters. At nearly 80, she could no longer bear the sight of her exposed legs and arms. 

I watched my mother bounce from one diet to another my entire life. Her personal diet history traces every trend from the ’80s to today—Fen-Phen, Weight Watchers, Atkins, Macros, Ozempic. She calls me weekly with updates on her weight loss. This time she’s committed to a doctor-approved plan where every “meal” is a protein shake. 

I watched myself at 12 years old, skilled enough to recite the calorie count for every snack in the pantry, too innocent to know the later dangers that could pose. 

I watched myself at 33 years old, shying away from family photos lakeside, letting my fears of what I might look like in a bathing suit get in the way of perfect summer memories. 

“I’m not sure how you’re even standing up right now. I’ve never seen numbers this low.” My doctor checks my chart, his eyes round with disbelief. 

My anemia is so severe, I may not be cleared to study abroad in France in a few weeks. I am a junior in college, and the years of binging and purging before this moment have finally caught up with me. My cheeks burn with shame. 

It’s the same shame that kept my grandmother from the pool. The same one that tipped my mother back to the scale over and over. All three of us, connected yet again, by some belief that our bodies weren’t good enough, that they should be hidden or transformed. 

Suddenly, our connection feels stifling, like a turtleneck closing in too tightly on my neck. I want to break out of it, to stop treating my body so poorly, to transform into the kind of person who would never again take such drastic measures. 

So, I do. I take my iron pills and visit my therapist and slowly, slowly, slowly dig to the bottom of what caused these troubling behaviors. There I find me—like a beloved oatmeal crème pie, soft and sweet and delicately protected by a thin wrapping that grows thicker in every moment of my recovery. 

Even now, my father can’t understand my diagnosis from years ago. He doesn’t realize that I learned my favorite binging tips from him—to eat alone, to eat for calm, to eat all of the cookies at once so they are out of the house. But he never purges. He never hides his round belly. There are so many more “acceptable” body types for men. 

My sons’ beautiful eyes look up at me—two green, two hazel, two blue. They stare with adoration. They do not see the scars from long ago, faded across my knuckles. They do not see the work I do, even now, to be kind to myself, to nourish myself without punishment. 

Perhaps I give them too much credit. It’s not like body image issues are for women only. I assume, though, that my sons are protected by their gender, the strong shield that maleness can be. I hope that’s enough to spare them from the constant desire to be smaller. 

I keep my eyes pressed shut when I step on the scale. I’ve learned not to mention that the numbers haunt me. Nurses look at you like you’re crazy, as if those digits don’t get stuck inside every patient’s brain for days. 

Instead, I take precautions my entire pregnancy to protect my sanity. I shrink away from information, like pounds, that weighs too heavily on me. 

Is this what sanity looks like? 

My baby girl flutters in my belly while I think—do I look fat? I wonder—can she hear my thoughts?

“Contagious” first appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Issue #36.