On Friday after I heard the news, I rage-cried in a meeting. Our modern world afforded me this luxury: I turned off my camera and microphone and let it happen. I mourned the loss of my rights while the rest of my team talked about how green something should be and the size of a QR code. Twenty minutes later, in true capitalist drone fashion, I had pulled myself together to talk with a freelancer. She and I both stayed off-camera. Our perfunctory “how’s your day goin’?!” nonsense was more perfunctory than usual.
…..
Do you know what’s bullshit about this? Besides the obvious? It’s this: What is even the point of telling girls they can do anything, be anything, achieve anything if that is fundamentally not true? What is the point of being the CEO of your own company if you can’t control your body? Whitney Wolf Herd is a billionaire and cannot now legally obtain abortion care in the state where she lives. (Obviously, women like Whitney Wolf Herd will always be able to get the medical care they need. But this, of course, is also a problem.)
A woman could be elected governor of Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, or Kentucky and not be able to control her own body.
What a fucking joke this place is.
…..
My company has summer Fridays now, meaning we can bug out after lunch. It was good timing. I closed my laptop and decided to take some packages to the post office. I really hate selling things on Poshmark and eBay but it is the price I pay for being indecisive about pants Instagram made me buy more than a year ago.
At the post office, I parked next to a pickup truck. There was a dog crate in the truck bed with a dog inside, panting quietly. “Hi buddy,” I said (this is the proper way to address a dog you don’t know), trying to ascertain if the dog was all right. It was hot outside, not Death Heat hot, but also maybe that is not a good way to transport a dog regardless of the weather.
There was nobody inside the post office aside from the postal workers so I dropped off my packages and went back outside. Now I was starting to fret about the dog. I put my purse in my own car and noticed that oh, actually, there was someone in the truck, in the driver’s seat; I could see a pair of hands holding some mail. Buuuuuut the person wasn’t moving and the engine wasn’t running. I peered in a little more and guys I gotta tell you, this man looked dead. Slumped over, mouth hanging open. Fuuuuuck is he dead?!
I did not want to bang on this person’s window due to people are insane but it also did not seem right to file this under “not my problem,” either, so I called the police non-emergency number and told them there was a gentleman in a car at the post office who looked unwell. “How does he look unwell?” asked the dispatcher. HE LOOKS DEAD M’AM. “Uh like he could be asleep? Or…unconscious?” She agreed to send someone and I moved my car to another parking spot and waited.
The police came! He wasn’t dead! But he was asleep with his engine off and a dog in a crate on a hot day so I am glad he drove away under his own power, hopefully, to go home and have a nap. WITH HIS DOG INSIDE THE HOUSE TOO.
…..
I don’t know why this country bothers making up rules to police women anyway, we have been taught very well to do this ourselves. On Facebook, one friend asks her five-year-old daughter to name her favorite healthy snack. Then: “what is your favorite unhealthy snack?” My cousin opens an air fryer at her wedding shower: “GUILT-FREE FRENCH FRIES!!” Different cousin same shower: “I can’t eat that. I’ve been eating so much bread lately.” My mother, commenting on the jumpsuit someone’s daughter wore to a party: “I just don’t think that is the look for her!” Also my mother, on my second cousin’s new hobby of wearing bikinis in bodybuilding competitions: “That doesn’t seem to line up with her Christian beliefs!”
How about everyone just does and wears and eats what the fuck they want? And if you don’t like it, you don’t do it or wear it or eat it?
…..
After the post office, I went to get a pedicure. The nice woman who did my nails was hustling hard to build her own clientele, gesturing at her phone and pointing at mine. I finally grasped that she wanted me to take her phone number, so I entered it in my notes app in the interest of returning to a disassociative state ASAP. “Next time,” she said, “you text me!”
This isn’t the first time someone at the nail salon has tried to recruit me into some sort of backchannel appointment-making scheme but I have to admit I have no idea how this arrangement is supposed to work. Do random people just text this woman all day and hope she is at work? How do you time it so you show up when she is available? What do you say to the guy at the front who runs the place? Needless to say, I plan to pretend none of this ever happened.
Alone with my brain at last, I sat back and let my soul leave my body, floating up to the gilded rococo ceilings of the nail salon (it seriously looks like the fever dream of a Las Vegas wedding chapel designer) and looking down on my carcass, which I had allowed to be tenderized by the pedicure chair massage function. I never do this, it is too violent and jiggles my stuffing around too much, but the day had turned me upside down and wrong seemed right. I also chose the pricier pedicure that includes a vigorous salt scrub. My legs burned but it felt cathartic and I remembered how years ago, I’d gone to have my eyebrows waxed the day after my cat died, almost welcoming what felt like a stinging slap across the face.
…..
There have been a lot of calls for civility in the wake of this decision, and I for one – as a middle-aged suburban lady who is confrontation-avoidant and was raised to “go along to get along” – would like to say:
Fuck. A whole bag. Of that.
…..
After the pedicure I shuffled back out to my car, hobbled by toe separators. I drove to Dairy Queen and got a vanilla cone, which I ate slowly and contemplatively, listening to The Battersea Poltergeist and driving aimlessly. Eventually, I willed myself out of my fugue state. I went to the skanky grocery store by our house and bought stuff to make tacos, went home, whizzed up strawberry daiquiris in the blender. We didn’t talk much about the Supreme Court. This fucked occurrence might be what finally drives my husband to begin the pain-in-the-ass process of becoming a citizen; the fact that he would consider doing that in order to vote in this dumb country says more about his character than I ever could put into words.
We do what we can. We have to exist, don’t we? It will get worse before it gets better, count on that. I don’t know how we’ll save ourselves, I really don’t. Maybe tomorrow, someone will have an idea.