A List of the Reasons Women Feel Shame

The bus driver brakes hard and I stumble, my thirty-seven-weeks-pregnant belly stumbles, my whole big self stumbles into a woman in a baseball hat who mutters fat bitch and I open my mouth to say I’m pregnant, as if she’s right to say it. As if pregnancy is a holy state and fat worthy of rebuke. Even though I’m both.

I want to hold my belly gently and push the tiniest bit, push and push until my baby daughter consents to shrink, to get smaller until my belly is gone and she is an egg again inside me. Just how she was when I was born, when we were born together. Because what was I thinking? How will I guide this soft bundle of muscle and blood and thoughts? I can’t even decide between apologizing to the woman next to me or punching her like a hockey player until there are teeth scattered on the floor of the bus.

The bus isn’t moving, and the driver says it’s broken and we have to wait for a replacement. Everyone groans. We step off and wait on the sidewalk where there are no trees and no bus stop.

I want to say, hold on. Hold on a minute. I want to hold a velvet rope in front of my birth canal, say, before I throw this baby into this meat grinder, I have to admit that I never learned to sew. How will I put her back together after her skin has been ripped away? Can’t we all work together to fix it first?

We could make a new word for fat. A new word for ugly. And when the meanest girl in junior high says, “Look at that zeedee qua girl,” people would look around, bright-eyed, because who doesn’t want to get to know a zeedee qua girl?

It’s hot on the sidewalk. We keep having to move aside for people walking by because it’s not a bus stop, so there’s nowhere to wait, really. The bus driver is back on the bus in the middle of the road, the door closed, the air conditioner rumbling. Some ten-year-old boys are debating whether orange or grape is the best jelly candy flavor. A woman wearing earbuds is looking at her phone. A man taps her on the shoulder. After a long moment, she looks up, scowling. He gestures to take the earbuds off. She looks back down at her phone.

I want to say that if we all worked together, the words could get big, really big, so big the Oxford University Press would have to make a dual Word of the Year, and of course they’d both have to be defined.

zeedee (adjective)  A number on the scale that men don’t want to fuck.

qua (adjective) A face in the mirror that men don’t want to fuck.

And both words would have the same addendum:

“Did you know? Men feel so much anger about the injustice of having to rest their eyes on a woman they don’t want to fuck that it boils over like pasta water on a too-hot burner, it boils right over onto the nearest woman. And then the women are angry too, even though statistically quite a few of them don’t want to fuck any women at all. Not even the least zeedee qua woman in the world.”

Orange jelly candy wins by a landslide, after a bored teenage boy with a skateboard weighs in. The man taps the woman again. My maternity t-shirt is darkened with sweat. I want to squat over a glass ceiling, say, wait a minute. Just wait a minute. Let’s make a list of all the reasons women feel shame. I’ll start:

• ingesting nutrients
• shedding uterine lining
• unwanted sexual intercourse
• wanted sexual intercourse
• laughing
• etc., etc., etc. (we’ll have to use a laptop, there isn’t enough paper in this city/country/continent/planet, but I have confidence in us)

Let’s make the list. Then let’s work together to cross it all out.

The man taps the woman, and she looks up fast this time, her face a flurry of crow’s wings for a moment before she smooths it out, makes herself placid. Takes out one earbud.

What are you listening to, he says. She stares and stares at him. He takes a step toward her. You could at least tell me what you’re listening to, he says, and the last word he isn’t saying hangs in the air and I touch my belly and fill my lungs and roar at him, and there is so much I want to say but I’m afraid he’ll hurt me, I’m afraid he’ll hurt the fluttering wondrousness inside of me, so I roar instead, and everyone bustles around me and he steps back from the woman and joins the small crowd telling me I’ll be all right, asking if I need an ambulance, and the woman steps away and I meet her eyes and she mouths thank you and I roar again as she vanishes around the corner.