Darkheart

The Present: Push & Pull

When Cris got the call from Jess, she knew she'd finally have to show up at her sister's house. She'd been dreading the prospect for some time, but surely the circumstances precluded any potential suitors being present. Why Jess had been trying to set her up for years was somewhat mysterious to Cris. Obviously, Jess thought what many other women thought--one needed a man to be happy; any single woman was surely only so because she hadn't found the "right" one. But Cris was fairly certain she'd not spoken to her sister about boys or men in at least a decade and a half, and nothing about her life presented as particularly unfortunate to any outsider. She lived alone, but she wasn't lonely. She drank alone, but she wasn't an alcoholic. She worked alone, but that worked for her. In fact, everything about her life was, from an observer's perspective, fine. No great scandals or crimes followed her name (beyond the days she'd tried to leave); she wasn't a town sleep-around or degenerate or shit-stirrer. But Port Killdeer liked to box things, she knew, liked to classify what it contained, and as she fit no clear boundaries, she stood out. She was a little quirky with her healing practice and introversion, so without any other reason to do so, her sister and brother-in-law (and by extension much of the town itself) had pegged her as a lonesome eccentric, a crazy cat lady minus the cats, and that, of course, meant a man was necessary to save her from spinsterhood.

Cris couldn't even give Jess the benefit of the doubt, couldn't even pretend her sister "meant well" or anything close to it. Didn't people set others up to satisfy their pride? To ascertain their skill? To be able to say "They wouldn't be together if it weren't for me!"? Jess was no different. If she'd actually cared about her sister, she'd stop feeling sorry for her. Pity was demoralizing.

They'd used to get along so well; that was the sad part. The two of them had navigated the curious and intimidating waters of girlhood together, Cris always looking out for her younger sibling, pretending at the mother neither of them ever quite had. They'd spent so much time wandering through forests both corporeal and imagined, whiling away hours in their secret dilapidated barn and biking through familiar and friendly streets, splashing in the lake and licking ice cream off their hands as the cones dripped in the heat, setting off furtively-obtained firecrackers and sparklers on the Fourth and rolling balls of soft snow into cats and unfortunate-looking images of one another. There'd been secrets and coded letters and MASH games and ghost stories.

But when it came to the actual shift from girl to woman, that ambiguous passage of self-becoming, Cris herself had been on her own. She'd had no older sister to guide her--she'd had Jeremiah and some old romance novels and Cosmos she'd found either the library or her mother throwing out. Puberty had been, for Cris, a jarring and continuous process of mortification, a constant source of anxiety and shame. Every reminder that her body was without her consent turning itself into a vessel for procreation, that like it or not her physicality was inextricably designed to form and carry and sustain some other creature, deeply disturbed her. Everything inside of her protested the immutable biology of what she was and the expectations that were sure to come with it. The snide and callow comments of pubescent boys, of adults on television and in music videos, and of her own female coevals about menstruation and sex and birth, genitalia and fluids and positions and pleasures, roles and names for those who practiced or didn't practice preconceived notions of normalcy--all of it concocted a toxic and immature understanding of who and what she actually was. The lack of communication within her own household served only to exacerbate the cognitive dissonance within, the disparity between where the world placed her and her confusion about where she placed herself.

Jess, fortunately, had fared better. Somehow, the friendships she shared with other girls had aided her clarity far more than her sister could, and yet in her own way, Jess's understanding of femininity was skewed as well.

In any case, a man was the last thing Cris wanted. There'd been times long ago when she'd envied other girls' ability to divert and hold male attention, when she'd been sure she felt something about certain boys, but if any of those general notions had become specific interests, they hadn't lasted long enough for her to remember. Cris couldn't say she was happy with her life, with who she was, with her self-imposed sequestering--far from it. But she was absolutely certain that any man would merely complicate rather than enhance her existence.