Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(9)

“No,” my mom corrected. “She needs to learn.” I don’t know what would constitute adequate compensation for being forcibly dragged into a small child’s object lesson about accountability and theft while you were just trying to finish your blood mopping so you could make it to Amber’s house party later, but $4.25 an hour wasn’t it. He played along anyway.

“Oh. Um. Thanks for being honest? Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t,” I whispered. And I never did.*





Step Two: Accidentally Make Fun of Your Mom’s Friend’s Barren Womb


Third grade. My mom’s friend spread her arms for a hug: “Come here, sweetie!” Hopped up on my latest vocab test, I gasped in mock horror, “Are you STERILE!?”

I thought “sterile” meant “germ-free.” Turns out, it also means that your uterus doesn’t work anymore because you’re old and/or the victim of some authoritarian eugenics program. She quipped something dry and perfect like, “that I can’t remember.” Everyone laughed at me and I hid in a small cupboard for one year.





Step Three: Do a Mediocre Oral Presentation on Thelonious Monk


When you grow up with a four-hundred-year-old jazz dad instead of the three-hundred-year-old rock ’n’ roll dads all your friends have, sometimes your cultural references are weird and anachronistic. For my seventh-grade Language Arts class, we had to do a fifteen-minute oral presentation on the black artist of our choice, and while 99 percent of kids were like “Whitney Houston!” or “Denzel Washington!” I was all, “Pioneering jazz iconoclast Thelonious Monk, a-doy.” Which is actually a pretty cool pick, in retrospect—and even at the time was not inherently embarrassing—but, nevertheless, an oral presentation violated my “never speak audibly to anyone but my mom’s leg” policy, so I spent the week leading up to the event in a shivering flop sweat.

As I sat in the back of the class, waiting for my name to be called and trying not to lose consciousness, a wave of sudden, intellectualized calm washed over me—a tipping point so unanticipated that it still feels a hair supernatural. I looked to my left at the kid who’d been carrying around a “pet” light bulb since kindergarten. I looked to my right at the girl I’d once watched eat an entire tube of ChapStick for “lunch dessert.” What the fuck was I scared of again? These people? It made no sense. Talking in front of people is the same as any other kind of talking, I realized—and anyway, do you know who’s more intimidating than a bunch of booger-encrusted seventh graders? MY MOM. I talked to her all the time. I could do this.

I went up and did my presentation and I wasn’t scared at all and the only thing that happened was that people were bored because seventh graders don’t care about Thelonious Monk.





Step Four: Get a Show Dog


Mozart was a Tibetan terrier, a fairly uncommon breed—too big to be hilarious but too small to be useful—designed to sit on a mountain and keep a monk company. He had long, white fur, Crohn’s disease, and the personality of an Elliott Smith song. We got him when I was in eighth grade, from a woman named Linda, with the caveat that she be allowed to continue showing and breeding him indefinitely. We were forbidden to cut his hair or tamper with his testicles. He was allergic to all common proteins, so my mom would buy whole rabbits from the butcher and cook up mounds of rabbit meat for the dog. For breakfast he had scrambled eggs.

“Hey, Mom, can I have some scrambled eggs?”

“You know how to cook. Mozart doesn’t.”

At least one weekend a month, Linda would come pick up Sunwind Se-Aires Rinpoche (his show name, in case you thought I wasn’t dead fucking serious) and bring him back a few days later covered in ribbons. More often than not, we’d go to the dog show too and cheer him on, and Linda would prod me to become a junior handler.* I thought about it. I really did. A couple of times I even pawed wistfully through pantsuits in the basement of the mall. But there are some lines you just can’t cross.





Step Five: Join a Choir with Uniforms that Look Like Menopausal Genie Costumes


Okay, so it was these massive palazzo pants—like polyester JNCO jeans—with a long-sleeved velour shirt, a teal cummerbund, and a felt vest festooned with paisley appliques and rhinestones. The overall effect was “mother-of-the-bride at a genie wedding who hot-glue-gunned her outfit in the parking lot of a Hobby Lobby.”

I was in this choir for ten years.*





Step Six: Watch Trainspotting with Your Parents


Contrary to all of your body’s survival instincts, this is not, in fact, fatal.





Step Seven: Read High Fantasy on the School Bus


Oh, you think you’re a badass for leaving the book jacket on Half-Blood Prince? You think it makes you a “total nerd” because you’re trying to get through A Clash of Kings before the next season of Game of Thrones comes out? Try reading Robert Jordan on the bus in 1997 with your bass clarinet case wedged between your legs while wearing a Microsoft Bob promotional T-shirt your dad brought home from work. Then try losing your virginity.





Step Eight: Break a Heel on the Stairs in Your College’s Humanities Building and Fall Down So Everyone Sees Your Underpants