Look this way, tilt your head just a bit, a bit more, turn a little here, chin up, smile. The lights warmed her already dewy face, brought pink to her cheeks, made her crimped 90’s hair glow highlighter yellow under their harshness. The first shutter. A hushed voice from the back. Look at Haley. Laughter from a shadowed chorus of third-grade boys with sticky mouths and spiky hair all in a row behind the camera man like a police lineup. Led by their mob boss Logan, a lanky hockey hopeful from Nebraska with a prejudice against big-haired big girls who just want a memorable school picture. The second shutter caught her biting her lower lip to keep the tears behind her eyelids. I’ll punch him right in the nose. Her mother’s threat rang hollow. No adult woman is going to punch an eight-year-old jackass in the nose. She needed her to say anything else, needed her not to put her on a diet at seven years old, needed her to show an ounce of positivity toward her own body, needed her not to add to the chorus of laughter, hushed criticisms. She’s going to be called a land whale on the internet in twenty years by a man who has outgrown the sticky mouth, spiky hair, but not the general jackassery. You could’ve at least paid for the therapy.
Weeping Woman, Drowning Girl
The morning Pacey died I still went to the coffeeshop, like regulars do. I woke up and waded through the usual thick viscosity of Monday morning, traced the length of the hallway with the shuffle of my bare feet, soles picking up crumbs and dust and all manner of hair as I made my way through the kitchen and around the corner to the room where Pacey slept. How many mornings had I made the same mundane journey from my bed to his? In the slow motion manner in which hindsight paints all of our heaviest moments, I lifted the chevron-printed crate covering. Pacey laid there still, not lifting his head to greet me or shake his fur into the morning chill. Deaf dogs tend not to wake until nudged. Dead dogs don’t wake even then.
A phone call. He’s not moving. No, he’s not breathing. He’s cold, Mom. Wailing, heaves of an empty stomach, throat sandpaper, head murmur, ringing, hollow. My ears felt heavy under the weight of my glasses. I sank to the floor, became the floor, became hardwood, stiff, stained, underfoot, covered in pug hair that would never fully come up. The vet came and carried his sweater-wrapped body from crate to car, leaving me with the quiet vacancy of a half-filled water bowl swimming with overnight dust floaters, couch cushions stuffed with stray chews and toys, a cabinet of collected costumes and the bowtie he wore everyday, blankets that smelled like his little bugle chip paws, months of leftover heartworm preventative that could have never prevented what was already growing in his chest before I rescued him. There was no staying in that house any longer with all that empty evidence, a chalk outline proving that Pacey had been there and never would be again. So I went out for coffee.
The coffeehouse hummed with the midmorning lull and the warm, nutty smell of espresso, nearly full of students and eager young professionals that had been there for hours, soon to be displaced by busy moms and breaking shift workers in the noon rush. I ordered my usual and took a seat in one of two tufted armchairs positioned on a platform that became the stage for weekend shows when the chairs were cleared and the amp came out. Tucked away in the front corner of the long open space, cushioned and lined with dark paisley and greens, these chairs always felt to me like a lush hideaway, separate from the grid of industrial tables and chairs meant for studying, typing, budget meetings, dry first dates, cold conversations between graduated townies and multi-level marketing disciples—a safe, almost secret place to sit, sip, and grieve.
The unspoken rule of coffeeshops is that when there is a pair of comfy chairs like these, facing in toward each other, sharing a single and small side table, with one chair occupied and one left open, you sit anywhere else but in that open chair unless there is absolutely no other place to sit. This is a boundary particularly reinforced when the occupier of the one chair within the set is reading a book. I pulled the book I brought with me that morning out of my bag almost as soon as I sat down to wait for my vanilla latte, brushing pug hair off the cover. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. I knew I wouldn’t live into the rich fiction of New York’s Gilded Age to the level of my liking that particular morning, but I needed both a distraction and a buffer. Only every other word on the page even held its form between marrow-pricking flashbacks. Soft tears painted streaks on my cheeks, and I let myself weep there in my chair-hemmed cocoon, book in front of face, hoping anyone looking on would assume I was only reading a sad story, like one where the dog dies. Alone with my grief. Until someone sat down in the chair next to me.
The intruder was wearing baggy black cargo pants and a t-shirt with some band name or video game slogan under his probably years-old not-quite-black-anymore coat, glasses-decked face hidden partially by a curtain of shaggy brown hair, tapping one heel of his sneakers on the platform stage. Was he wearing Vans or some off-brand? Probably my age or still in college. Too wannabe to be alternative, too geeky to be basic—boy enough to be a threat. I studied him out of the corner of my eye as he sat in that off-limits chair, fidgeted with his fingers, took his phone out, and began typing. Not an updated smartphone, flat, sleek, instead there was a keypad with buttons reminiscent of the early aughts. Loud. I shifted my eyes back to the words on the pages in front of me, trying to pick up any reading rhythm despite the intrusive tempo of his typing and tapping, making myself look as occupied as possible, cheeks damp and downward-shifted eyes still seeping with grief over my dead dog.
An out-stretched hand clasped around a cellphone entered my vision from the left. I took a beat or maybe an eternity before lowering the book to my lap, wiping the sticky residue from under my eyes, drying the corners of my mouth, and taking the phone from his hand. The screen was open onto the notes app, revealing finally what he had been typing and retyping while we sat in disquiet. You are really pretty. Can I have your number? I read and reread while he stared at me wordlessly, getting off on the sight of a sad girl he wanted to see more of. What about my weeping appealed to him? Weakness? My sadness wilted into unease as the high-stakes panic of unsought public interaction with a strange man settled into the lining of my gut with its fist around my trachea, catching my breath in tight pulsing squeezes of dread, as I considered how dangerous each of my options were. But the worst had already happened that morning, so the ritually rehearsed rejection came easier—I swallowed a lump of melancholy—but not without the cushion of an unnecessary apology. No, sorry.
I wish I could remember which song underscored this quick confrontation. I’d place my bets on Mumford and Sons, James Bay, the Decemberists, something very 2015, gruff and mellow. Coffeehouse music. But the in-my-dreams movie soundtrack song for this scene? “Absolutely (Story of a Girl)” by Nine Days. An underwhelming one-hit-wonder of a man singing about a girl “who cried a river and drowned the whole world,” who “looks so sad in photographs,” but he absolutely loves her when she smiles. Not once does the vocalist say why the girl is sad—he probably never even asked her—he just romanticizes her sadness, loneliness, makes excuses for his poor behavior toward her, as if the only thing this girl has to be sad about in the world is a mediocre man’s pathetic attempt at love. Hardly worth crying a whole world’s worth of tears over.
Did my coffeeshop suitor just want to make me smile? Maybe he wanted to rescue me from my sadness. Then the song should have been “She Will Be Loved” by Maroon 5. Adam Levine asking us to look for “the girl with the broken smile” because she will be loved. By him and his perverted hero complex. Though she’s only 18, possibly just out of an abusive relationship, and has had some nondescript personal trouble. It’s easy to presume his main character is a pedophilic rapist, given the context that he’s already “had [her]” several times before, and now she is being stalked by this man, who waits on her street corner everyday, who knows “where she hides alone in her car,” who just wants to make her feel beautiful even though she’s sad. Or perhaps because she’s sad. Because when a woman is crying, all she wants, all that will dry the flood of her tears and fix her broken smile is a man telling her she’s beautiful. Because that’s what she must have been crying over in the first place.
The romanticization of weeping women as damsels in distress to be rescued from the dragon of their own personal rock bottoms is pervasive, and the male gaze necessitates that the distressed damsel be ready when her hero gets there, well-dressed, sexy, red-lipped, long-lashed, doe-eyed. In a recent male-directed television adaptation of The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis, the main character, a woman whose life has been rent asunder by addiction and abandonment and systematic underestimation of her genius, hits rock bottom while wearing sexy lingerie and a cardigan that wilts off one shoulder, casually revealing her collarbone and perfectly-in-place camisole. She’s curled her hair, done a dramatic makeup look, shaved her legs. Had I forgone the cotton and pug hair t-shirt and second-day hair in favor of such a look on the day Pacey died, maybe I’d have been the benefactor of many more notes app advances. In her grievance, she drinks a PBR and eats some salty snacks instead of a dinner salad, which, of course, is the most alarming distress signal that a man can think of for a woman in pain. She lounges suggestively on her pristine velvet furniture. The perfect picture of a woman suffering for man’s consumption. A grieving madonna.
One of Pablo Picasso’s many mistresses quoted him as saying, “Women are machines of suffering.” His famous painting The Weeping Woman proves his obsession with feminine anguish and his taste for stripping women of their humanity, their autonomy, on his canvas. A woman in cubes weeps into a handkerchief in a hand held up to her face. The color drains from her as she cries. She’s dressed, hair done, flowered hat on, earrings in. Her eyelashes are long and accentuated. Her gaze veers off into space, making her the unwitting object of our attention, making the viewer just as culpable for boundary-breaking as the man who sits in the off-limits second chair in a coffeeshop pairing. Does she even know we are looking in on her private, tender moment? She’s given no power to tell us her story. We don’t know why she’s crying. We only know Picasso thinks it’s beautiful. He thinks it’s so beautiful, in fact, that a different weeping woman shows up in another of his paintings that same year with her breasts bare, full, and hanging out, though all the rest of her human features are cubed, misplaced, distorted in her distress. Her whole village has been decimated, but don’t worry, her sex appeal is still intact.
Roy Liechtenstein is famous for his modern comic book depictions of miserable women in bright pop art colors. He almost gets away with hiding the male gaze in his work, lifting his pieces up as a feminist rebel yell. Many of today’s creatives even sample his work in their own progressive art, but his former girlfriend artist Letty Eisenhauer exposed the man behind the paintings, detailing the abuse she endured by him and all of the ways he made her cry, saying, “The crying girls are what he wanted women to be.” In his most famous work, Liechtenstein depicts a blue-haired woman caught in a whirlpool of waves, on the verge of going under. Perfectly neat pools of tears seep out from her long black lashes. Her eyes are closed. She doesn’t know we are watching. She hasn’t invited us into her grief. She thinks, “I don’t care! I’d rather sink than call Brad for help!” So mustn’t she be a powerful, independent woman? No, the only power, the only choice, Liechtenstein gives her is to call her boyfriend for help or die, then he names the painting Drowning Girl and makes the choice for her.
When I made my choice and handed the phone back in rejection of the cargo-clad cocoon intruder, he hung his head, mumbled oh, okay, and sauntered back to his seat in annoyance made apparent in the volume of his knock-off Vans shuffling along the floor of the coffeeshop that his cowardly quest for affection hadn’t worked out this time. I drank only half of my vanilla latte when it was brought to my table, eager not to spend much more time adjacent an empty, open chair, vulnerable. Then I tucked Edith Wharton under my arm and walked out the door with what was left of my precious, private grief to work, knees to the ground, at erasing the chalk outline I’d left at home, one hair-covered couch cushion at a time. The morning Pacey died, I was the weeping woman, drowning girl, sitting alone in that coffeeshop, and it’s the only day any man has ever approached me in public to ask for my number.
To Rose,
To Rose,
Who gives a person they have never seen before a birthday card? I’ve tried to imagine the scenario a hundred times over, tried to put myself in your shoes. So I’m sitting there at the table, and the barista is talking with a customer he seems to know as more than just an order on a ticket. The customer, a mysterious fair-haired person, the kind who looks like the poems he writes, is giving his order, and then it happens. He says it’s his birthday, which means he gets a free drink. I, being you, smile at the thought that someone has something to celebrate today. I think it’s wonderful, and I leave it at that. I look back down at the book I’m reading or studying or writing, and I don’t give another thought to the customer at the counter who was born 20 years ago today.
But that’s not what you did.
You, being you, must have thought that it was your job to celebrate this day in the life of a stranger. So you set out on a mission. You got out a notecard that you probably should have filled out with vocabulary or historical facts, and you wrote down a verse. I’m sure you remember - it was Psalm 139:14. You reminded this kind-eyed stranger that, yeah, he’s fearfully and wonderfully made, then you wrote a succinct “happy birthday” message on the back of the card and gave it to him. It’s easy to imagine he was surprised. He was always one to receive love as something unexpected. So you handed him the card. There you are, standing there, sitting there, whatever you are doing there, and you are handing him the card. And he is smiling, and he is surprised. So you handed him the card.
Did your fingers brush?
And how did this next part go? My story is not so straight. You handed him the card, and he was surprised. Then… Did you tell him your name? Did he use it when he asked? Because somewhere between you handing him the card and him coming to my apartment that morning, he asked you on a date. He gave you his number - the one I had memorized only seven months before, the one I had sent secrets to, the one that told me I’m beautiful, the one I wanted to see on the screen every time my phone made a sound. You handed him the card, and he handed you his number.
What did you do with it?
I know you never called. Did you lose his number? Did you forget to tell him about some boyfriend of three years? Were you just not interested in celebrating him on any other day of the year except this one you somehow felt responsible for just because it’s called “birthday”? I know you don’t know this, because you don’t know him, but he is an idealist. He is more of an optimist than he would ever like to admit, and he thinks about death so often that he will probably figure out a way to beat it. So you should have called. You should have called just to say that you wouldn’t be calling. Because he deserved that. He waited. He must have. He must have also hoped because he is full of the stuff. And hope probably became so synonymous with your name that he has never looked at a rose the same way again.
So I’d like to tell you that you broke his heart, and that’s exactly why he turned around and broke mine.
It has to be. Broken people can’t go on holding other people together. See, he had this dream - albeit a short-lived dream - that he would have met this beautiful stranger at a coffeeshop who’d give him a birthday card and they would write a love story together to shame the masses. And you finished the story before it ever started. And that must be why he took a dream I had been weaving all year and unravelled it with just a few brief words. I know you broke his heart because otherwise he would have never looked me in the eyes and said, “I have just finally realized you aren’t my only option.” Those are breaking words. Those are words he said while he was thinking about your face and your hair and your eyes, even though he was looking at mine.
And so I know you must have broken his heart because I couldn’t have been so foolish as to have overlooked the capacity he had within him to break me for as long as it went overlooked. I could never have been in love with someone so cruel. I would never choose someone who wouldn’t choose me. And so you handed him the card, and you broke his heart. And that’s why I blame you.
No.
No - I only blame you because this lie is even less ridiculous than the truth.
And I may be the only one who knows what that is.
The truth is that you handed that card to someone I had hoped, for as long as I knew what hope was, to marry. His name had become woven in with a promise I felt so entitled to that I couldn’t even see a reality where he didn’t choose me. And you made that reality undeniable when you handed him that card. And it’s true that his words broke me in parts that may have never gotten set back in quite the right way. You opened his eyes the day he learned you exist, and so he no longer felt caged by mine. And this isn’t the first time you’ve been framed in words either. He wrote about waking up roses, having the darkness that is me lifted from his life, seeing things clearly for the first time, feeling sun on his skin where my existence had previously shut it out. You didn’t break his heart - you woke it up. And so I can’t blame you.
I can’t blame you or me or the dream or choice.
I can only sit here and imagine what my life would be like if you hadn’t handed him that card.
So you handed him that card, and you broke my heart. But it didn’t take very long for my days to shine brighter than ever. It wasn’t long before I could walk in straight lines without fearing what hid behind every corner. He got a job at that coffeeshop, and, yeah, he stayed in my life longer than I wanted him to. Funny how someone you had hoped to wake up to forever suddenly becomes the last person you want handing you your morning coffee. But he met the love of his life at that coffeeshop, and I think that’s wonderful. And I’ll meet the love of my life at a different coffeeshop, and they will choose me as if I’m the only option they could have ever dreamed of having. More than that, you handed him that card, and you handed us freedom and a life of bigger dreams than the lint-ridden ones we had been carrying around in our pockets.
So, yeah, I blame you.
I blame you for teaching me that I’m worth more than settling and lesser things.
If I never get to sit down across the table from you or pass you in line at a coffeeshop, I hope you know that it was good. It was good that you handed him that card and never called and broke my heart. If I could, I would send you a birthday card every year just to thank you.
And I want you to know that hope has become so synonymous with your name that I will never look at a rose the same way again.
All my best,
A Regular.