The knife’s edge

It’s the summer of 96 and it’s my second year in America. I’m hiding in the electronics department at Costco, eating warm pieces of hot pockets and watching a row of silent TVs with my friend Nadia* while her mom wanders the aisles. Nadia is from Egypt, and her mom, involuntarily single and angry with the world, takes us to Costco once a week to do her shopping and then leaves us there until eventually a salesperson finds us and asks gingerly where our parents are. Mine are at home, blissfully unaware that their kid is eating every processed food the Costco sample ladies have to offer. Her mom is somewhere, doing something she does not want us to know until she has to be called back to Costco. I just want some peace and quiet and some time to myself, she whisper-yells while shepherding us into her green Toyota Camry. I always wondered why, when she already hated having to care for one child - her own - she would volunteer to take me along. It’s because she doesn’t want me to be alone, says Nadia. But she’s not alone.

Nadia’s cousin is waiting at the house when we arrive. A young man who should be in college but is instead working construction and spending too much of his free time at the house. He’s weird, I whisper to her and we rush to her room and shut the door. We are young enough to believe that’s enough. I go downstairs for water and when I shut the fridge door I see him standing there, looking at me the way I’ve seen once before. When you encounter a shark in the water, you’re supposed to stay calm and slowly distance yourself, taking great care to keep the shark unaware that you see it, and that you’re getting away. Nadia is now standing at the end of the dining table, watching us. I turn to her and say I’m sick. Throwing up. He makes a disgusted face and walks away. Nadia, knowing, offers to go with me back to my house. We sit outside on the curb and wait for my dad to pick us up. We didn’t have the words to talk about what we escaped.

We spent that summer joined at the hip, bonded over an unspoken shared mission. But the school year eventually came and we drifted apart. I think a lot about Nadia, what may have happened to her with an absent mother and that person always around, but I quickly shoo the thoughts away. I don’t have the strength to really face the guilt of having abandoned her to save myself. We were children.

My grandmother once told me that being a girl is like walking along a knife’s edge.

It’s several years later and I’m a college freshman, in a relationship with a man in his late twenties. Somewhere between don’t worry about that and why don’t you let me handle this, I have allowed myself to become completely reliant on him. It’s early evening and we’re about to leave for dinner when he looks at my dress and says you look like a slut. Forgetting my precarious place, I snap back that what I wear is none of his business. In a flash, my back is against the wall and his forearm is at my neck, his eyes wild and his voice dark. You are nothing without me. Later at the restaurant he smiles sweetly and asks me why I’m so quiet. Sorry, I have a headache.

A few weeks later I take a home pregnancy test during 18th Century British Literature and I sit through the rest of class with waves crashing upon my body. Later my doctor confirms the news and tells me my options, leading with the most obvious: we can terminate immediately. It was simple, gentle and incredibly right. One of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

I think about the ways in which we talk about reproductive freedom now. Women and girls - children - allowing an entire country access to their darkest traumas. Men, again, with their forearms against our necks. Discussions of when life begins inside the body of a person already living. Long accounts of how we got here, trying to make sense of something that refuses comprehension. Fear and shame and guilt and mistrust and betrayal.

But when it’s all quiet, I think only of that summer in 96. I think of the little girls who already knew something much bigger than their years. Something they should never have had to know. Girls walking along the sharp edge of a knife.

And then I think about how truly exhausting it is to be a woman.

*obviously not her real name.