Battle of the Sex(es)

(Sometimes--okay, most times--I sit down to write with a few jumbled thoughts rattling around in my head and I'm not quite sure how they're related but somehow I know that they are. Today is one of those times, so bear with me.)

The hair on Zoey's legs. I noticed it the other day in the sunlight, tiny wisps of blond like wheat and soft. The first time I shaved my legs I didn't even do it. I was 12 and my friend Lisa said I had to, that it was disgusting. She sat me on her bathroom counter and shaved my legs for me with her pink razor and a bottle of Jean Naté bath oil. Later she gave me her colorblocked sweater with the oversized buttons and sent me home, insisting she was the Jessica to my Elizabeth.

The other day I had to get my tires aligned and rotated and sat in the office of the mechanic for two hours with a book that turned out to be boring. There were 5 men working at the place--I counted. 5 men in the office of the tire shop talking and joking, razzing each other, which is maybe why it took 2 hours to finish my car. But that is not the point of this story. The point is that these men in the tire place reminded me of an all-male Designing Women, and as I sat there I cast each man in his role. The one with the greasy ballcap and the pen behind one ear played by Dixie Carter, the large one with the railroad stripe overalls totally Delta Burke. I always wanted to work at a place like Sugarbaker Designs; too bad I know nothing about radials.

I am so Annie Potts.

If forced to choose I'd say I'm a girl's girl, the kind who will tell you if you've got a poppyseed stuck to your lip, the kind of girl from whom you'd ask to borrow a tampon. Growing up I always had guy friends but that is who they were: a guy first, and then yes, my friend. We flirted, the back and forth banter of the language of maybe. To this day when talking to a man I am always aware that it is a man. I feel it, that undercurrant of other and then some. (This sometimes makes me sad, although if pressed I couldn't say why.)

Zoey loves boys. Men. She watches Bryan's friends, repeats their names, Chris, Chris Chris until they listen, then she has nothing to say and so she laughs. She does funny little jump twirls at the playground when there is a boy, and Bryan and I look at each other and smile oh no. Maybe I should be worried, my own adolescence a cautionary tale of how not to act, not to feel, not to be, not to breathe. But I'm not not. Worried. I turned out fine. I love my father, my brother, my husband, my cat (although we did have him fixed and in doing so found out he only ever had one ball in the first place).

Yesterday I took Zoey to ballet class and she loved it, as expected. There were magic wands and tulle scarves, plastic daisies, at the end: miniature pink cupcakes. Miss Rachel, the teacher, wore a glittery stiff tutu with appliqued roses and spoke with a thick Canadian accent, so thick that it might have been faintly Eastern European, I'm not sure. Let's meke a slice of pizza with owr feet! And then gobble it op! From first position to whatever no position is called. Have you ever seen a three year old try to point her toes?

(Maybe none of this related, I don't know. But this is what I have been thinking about lately before I fall asleep.)

I'm a girl's girl, true; you've got a poppyseed on your lip and I support you in creating your life, family, work, a Lifetime channel of a house with no glass ceilings in a room of your very own. But I don't trust you. There, I said it. And I hate it, this feeling. I have my friends, girlfriends, woman friends, whatever, they are few and I love them to death and trust them, yes. But you? I don't know you, don't know what you want from me, something ineffable between the sexes when there is no sex but this. This, what is this? I hate this, this thing that I feel when I smile. I am a hard person to get to know and I wish this was not the case. I wish I were a Ya-Ya traveling with jeans and a sisterhood, a bad book and an even worse movie, but I am not. I am a girl's girl who once had to make a New Year's Resolution to touch people more, on the shoulder, the hand, hugs; I broke that resolution in early February of that same year, and this is what worries me most.

Not boys. Okaay everyone! Hold hands weth eh partner and dance like eh butterfly! Only Zoey refused to hold hands with the girl next to her, choosing instead to dance by herself, flit and twirl and collapse in a heap on the floor, a very loosely interpretive dance of a metamorphoses into something else, the hair on her legs glinting like the fine powdered scales of a butterfly's wings.