EM BROUSSEAU Someone not Someone’s

EM BROUSSEAU | SOMEONE NOT SOMEONE’S

The first time he calls me his girl, we’re in the laundromat, and I’m watching as he folds a black t-shirt, talking with his phone tucked between neck and shoulder to an unknown caller. I’d love to, man, but I’m with my girl. Cool if she comes?

He looks at me like I know who he’s talking to—an expectation too big for the short time I’ve known him. He wants a sense of familiarity before it’s earned. He wants me to be his girl before I know him. Alright. See you then, brother.

The phone falls from shoulder to laundromat table, clattering. He keeps folding, relaying no details about the plans. I finally break the faux familiarity and ask what I’ve been roped into. I don’t ask why he called me his girl, and I don’t ask why he asked if I could come, but not if I wanted to go. There are a lot of things I don’t ask.

We’re going fishing. The caller is his friend Nate, who’s bringing along his girl Caitlin. It’s a grey fall day, and just the swing of the laundromat door sends the cold seeping into my bones. I imagine how cold it will be by the water. I don’t like fishing. Or new people. Or being cold. I don’t say any of these things. There are a lot of things I don’t say.

Caitlin is very nice. Very sweet. She comes with a blanket and two cans of hard seltzer, ready to sit and watch. The girls don’t fish; they observe. This is the routine: the men fish and the girls sit, watching without interrupting, existing without making an impression. To be someone’s girl is to accept that you are not there to be yourself.

So we sit and watch, and occasionally the men toss us a line. Nate comes over to offer Caitlin the rest of his cigarette. Myles flashes an ignorant smile, too excited to bring me into this world to consider if I want to be here.

Fishing is fruitless. It’s too late in the season to catch anything, and the cold is getting under everyone’s skin. Myles packs the tackle box; Caitlin shakes out the blanket. I stand awkwardly with Nate, who reminds me of my high school principal–tall, authoritative, old.

So how old are you, again? he asks, inspecting me as if I were a lure, shiny and bright.

Twenty-two, I say. Quiet. Embarrassed.

He nods. Nice.

There’s nothing left to say. I begin to realize he asked my age as if he already

knew it. I begin to realize why the bad weather wasn’t important—that it wasn’t the fish being shown off. I begin to realize a lot of things.

My most vivid memories of being eight years old are Sunday mornings. My mother would putter around the house, cleaning up Cheerios, putting mix CDs my brother and I burned into cases, folding already-folded throw blankets. Finding anything to do that wasn’t taking me to watch my father play softball.

My brother always left with my dad. He loved watching the men crack open eight a.m. beers and practice their swings, seeing his future through the bright optimism of a child’s eye. I didn’t like the men, the cold, the pressure to play with the other kids. Instead, I brought books and hid behind my mom.

My mom kept score for the team even though the league paid a tired high schooler to be the official scorekeeper. She didn’t like socializing with the men’s girls–not because she didn’t like them, but because their lives were so immensely different.

While much of the team was around my parents’ age, the other men and their attendees differed wildly from my own family. By 28, my mother had been married for a decade with an eleven-year-old and an eight-year-old. That, plus some social anxiety, made for a lot of difficulty talking to the players and their partners. She went right from child to mother and wife—this was all she had ever known. It felt disingenuous to sit with small-town girlfriends and talk about things she had never experienced—break-ups and bars, spontaneity and shopping. Everything she had, she gave to us.

So it wasn’t a dislike of the girlfriends that made her stay in her camping chair with her scorebook. It was an inability to relate, to talk about boyfriends and if they’d propose, if they’d have kids. They came enthusiastically, because being included in their emotionally unavailable boyfriends’ softball league meant they wanted their girlfriends to watch them. And to them, that meant something.

My mother resented this, or perhaps she didn’t understand it. She never had a choice, so she didn’t come enthusiastically. She waited until the last minute, dreading the expectation to be someone she was not. But she did show up, because it was easier than saying no, than fighting. They did fight about it, sometimes, and I would lay awake and listen.

So you don’t care about me?

That’s not it, you know that.

Oh, so you don’t want to support me and hate my friends? Everyone else comes. You think you’re better than them? What could you be fucking doing that’s more important than this?

Then came the silence. And after the silence, Sunday morning, my mother and I toting camp chairs and a book and something quiet, something heavier, to the field.

In December, Myles quits his job and goes to visit a friend in Texas. It’s been two months since the fishing outing: two months of being a tagalong toy, biting my tongue. Amidst the outings, fights that reminded me vividly of lying awake in my childhood bedroom.

His trip coincides nicely with finals. I had mountains of unfinished papers; he never wanted me to leave his apartment. Not to see my friends, not for class, not for homework. I did try, sometimes.

I’m going out to dinner with Cristina and Abbey.

Oh, you are? Are you bringing me?

No, it’s just going to be the three of us.

Then you aren’t going. I never go out with my friends without you. You don’t need to go out with your friends if I’m not there.

So I would cancel. Sorry, I would text. Headache. Lying. I spent a lot of time that fall hiding things. I was ashamed of how much of myself I was losing, betraying, by staying.

Myles’ trip is a chance for his insecurities to bloom into full-fledged accusations. He spends two hours texting me insult after insult; I spend two hours looking at my friends, wondering where I could even begin, wondering if they would ever forgive me.

Myles, uh…. I start, then stop.

They stop ragging on their D-list movie and turn. All eyes on me.

And it all comes out, months of yelling, accusations, the real reason I could never go out. This is the most I have shared with anyone–I drown them in a tidal wave of anxiety and shame.

Their eyes grow wide. They say what I’ve always known, but it’s different coming from someone else. There’s a common refrain when you struggle with selfcompassion: What would you say to a friend going through this? And as I hear my friends–I don’t deserve to lose myself, I am more than this, I am more than him–I think this is what I would say to a friend going through this. To anyone. How this is exactly what I’ve said to my mother.

I fell in love when I was nineteen; it made me simultaneously stupid and enlightened. I spent a lot of time thinking I knew more than anyone about love and life, and sometimes I was right.

One afternoon, at the tail end of August, my mother and I take a day trip to the malls. I grew up in a small town, and the nearest shopping plazas are thirty minutes away. We spend the afternoon at the Target Dollar Spot, enjoying a bad chain restaurant, and returning ill-fitting clothes at Kohl’s.

In the Kohl’s parking lot, my mother gets a text from my father. She doesn’t answer it, and she doesn’t tell me what it says. We sit, the engine idling, the A/C overwhelmingly loud. I wait.

He wants me to come watch the game at Bobby’s. All the wives are there.

I nod. I understand her reservations without needing to be told. I’m modeled after her, a wallflower—when I took the Myer Briggs assessment for a sociology course, the professor told me she had never seen someone so introverted. I wouldn’t want to spend my Sunday like that, the men watching the game and the women watching the men.

My father doesn’t get this, even after two decades of marriage. I think about my partner, the nights we spend driving around and listening to soft music, not watching sports.

Wouldn’t it be easier, I ask, to be with someone who spends their Sundays like you do? I don’t like sports or going out, and Sam doesn’t like sports or going out. It works.

My mom looks at me, then out at the parking lot, the muscles in her face softening as though they, too, are giving up.

Sometimes, she says, when you’re young, you don’t know you’re incompatible until it’s too late.

Even though I have known for much of my life that my parents were unhappy, it was never said out loud. It was a fact to me like any other. Their first date was at the mall; they were married in June; they were unhappy.

It was the implicit undercurrent in our household, sometimes stronger, sometimes at bay, but never gone completely. This was the first time she had admitted that the unhappiness was not lost on her. It had been part of her so long that she couldn’t imagine herself without it. The incompatibility was to my mother the same as it was to me: a simple and objective fact. She had two children; she loved sunflowers; her and my father were fundamentally dissimilar. All of these things true. All of these things unchangeable. All of these things too late to reconsider.

It is too late for my mother’s second thoughts, but it is not too late for mine. I think back on Sunday mornings spent reading and hiding. I think about being nineteen, stupid in love, smart enough to know when it felt right—because I had spent my whole life watching when it was wrong.

When I was younger, I wondered how my mother could stay when staying meant sacrificing herself. What I did not know yet was that there is a world of difference between knowing when it’s wrong and knowing what to do when it’s wrong.

A number of things can trap you. Your empathy. Never seeing healthy relationships growing up. The rush of being loved; the fear of never being loved again. Growing up in a family where you stay, even if that means losing yourself. It is indescribably hard to leave when you have no blueprint.

But a number of things can free you. A support system with people who keep you anchored. A reminder of a conversation five years ago, a Sunday morning fifteen years ago. Remembering who you are, or who you were. Who you want to be.

Because above all, I had only ever wanted to be my own person. I spent so long watching my mother exist as an extension of my father—and then I found myself in the same place. So I decided to act on what my mother never could. I am many things—my strength, my kindness, my love for sleeping late on Sundays. But most importantly, I am not someone’s girl—I am just someone, enough just as I am.