When mother tells you to act like a lady, you listen. You listen with your legs crossed under the cracked eggshell vanity table painted with Peter Rabbit. You hear her over the pain of the size-too-small shoes ringing in your ears. You are a doll in a dollhouse of muted pinks and greens.
Before you go to school for the first time, you learn how to talk nice. You know how to act when that boy with the loud laugh pulls your hair and calls you ugly. You aren’t ugly, you look like your mother and you tell him this, but he’s all, “I know you are but what am I?” and runs off.
So you lower your voice and you talk nice and when that bigger girl with the alcoholic mother pushes you down you take it like a lady. When she goes running to teacher, who asks you at Nutrition “What’s going on with you and that bigger girl?”, you just tell her you don’t discuss those matters.
Smile at your classmates but not with your teeth, unless you want them to think you’re some kind of loon. You do have one eye that tends to get all wonky. You’ll have to work on that. Cover your mouth when you laugh. Chew with your mouth closed. Sit up straight. Sit with your legs closed, unless you want some boy to get the wrong idea. Cross your legs at the ankle to keep from revealing yourself. Don’t rest your elbows on your desk. Don’t cuss, unless you’re in a group where others are cussing, but even then you really shouldn’t. Let men hold the door open for you. Are you really still trying to take some kind of stand? Don’t wear pants. Ladies prefer something that dances with them. Speak only out of the corner of your mouth. Say please and thank you. Ask permission to speak.
In Sunday School you listen and learn. You learn that a lot more can be said without words than can be said with them. A woman’s power comes from her silence. When the teacher catches you on the wrong page of Scripture you get a talking to, which is only right because what do you have to be daydreaming about at this hour? Is it that boy from across the way, because so help me.
You speak with your inside voice, even when you’re outside on the lacrosse field and the high school girls’ team is squealing about how Melanie Dondik got to second base with Mathew Lawrence. Simply remove yourself from the situation. You don’t have to say anything at all, just remove yourself. You can’t be caught around a bunch of gossips—you remember what their mothers said about your father at bridge night, don’t you? Imagine what they say about you.
Don’t talk back to the teacher. If you have a question, ask him directly before or after class, but wear your longest skirt that day and if you wear that one that clings to your hips, don’t be surprised. When you address him, look him in the eyes, but don’t look too long or he may start to think of you in a different way. (Imagine you’re looking at a cousin, but an older, more authoritative cousin. Not the one who kicked you in the shin for giving him the wrong password to enter the playhouse that time.) Don’t twirl your hair during class lest the teacher get the wrong idea that you like him and you want him to leave his wife and two kids and Labrador with the soft yellow coat that smells like your cousin Patricia did when she was just born. Don’t be too friendly. Don’t give him any of that side eye I know you’re wont to give. When that boy in your Chemistry class leans across you to get the Bunsen burner and brushes up against your chest, pretend not to notice. You really do jump to too many conclusions.
When you go to school for the last time, you know how to talk nice. You know what the professor means when he asks to speak with you alone after the lecture on the crisis in Yemen. You are alone in his office, only you aren’t alone at all because there’s a man there who’s twice your age and has taken a special interest in you. You try to talk nice but the words don’t come so easy. You bring your hand to your mouth to bite your fingernails but immediately place it back in your lap. Then suddenly there’s a new hand over your mouth. Through saliva-coated teeth he tells you that you look like a doll. Propped up on the desk, your hairpins coming undone with each thrust. You have to agree.