What Is the Sisterhood to Me?

Do you know yourself? I thought I did at 19 when my boyfriend called from the hospital to say he’d been hit over the head with a fire extinguisher and got kicked out of school becauseof some dumb bitch. Who’d predict I’d drive to Westchester General that night, four hours, to see how bad it was, like a bus accident localized to his face? Maybe I already knew a girl did it, not a coked-out male friend, not a band of Yonkers thugs, but I wanted to hear, in person, why a woman tries to split the skull of a man like the seam on a baseball. He knew what so many men know: if you don’t admit it, it’s not true. That in a year I would still bake cookies for him, wrapping them in a coffee can bound for Fort Jackson, and see her in the faces of women at school, where we spun pots and talked about Plath like we weren’t talking around it. I thought I didn’t know myself at 13, when the softball team captain cornered me in the bathroom, held my face in her hands and spit in it, sneering Why don’t you talk? Or when my father told me in the car one day it was okay, with him, if I never got married. I am the stringy teenager who picked out “Stand by Your Man” on the guitar and just fucking got that song, its notes already vibrating in me, the woman who lives in the queasy strobe lightof the lie. Don’t say you know yourself while I am holding a fire extinguisher. You don’t know what either of us will do.