Smoothies
The first time a guy said I look like a man was at the Jamba Juice stand in the mall. He was still a boy, probably my age and sticky from adolescence. You look like a man. He said it as if he had the right to say anything to me. As if it was important for his survival, an echo of his ancestors who were my ancestors, long and black and muscled, though we were two strangers holding smoothies. His phone was three generations older than mine. I had superior sneakers, a designer sweatshirt, better moisturizer, and even my drink held more protein and complexity, but he wielded his right to possess them all in one note of disgust. I took a sip as a man in a suit too tall to have a head in my sightline jingled the change in his pocket.
You look like a man. It took a few seconds before I knew it wasn’t a compliment, that it was a lesson, an exchange, that he was learning, too, how to be a man by not being a girl. In Sunday school we were learning about the first man and first woman and how Adam must’ve been closer to God because God made him first, and pretty much all the problems of all time thereafter came about because of Eve and a snack. I chewed a hunk of ice that hadn’t broken down properly, and a woman hit the heel of that headless man in a suit with her stroller.
The boy could’ve said the words like he’d say hello or nice to meet you or where did you get that watch or what a wonderful day it is to be upright and breathing here together. But he said them in a different way, the way we tell strangers your shoes are untied or you have toilet paper on your ass. He saw himself in me and felt ashamed. He saw himself in me and felt proud, but pride wasn’t supposed to live inside of women, so he had to walk it back and cut its throat till the blood ringed around my neck.
You look like a man. Years later it would become You eat like a man. You walk like a man. You sound like a man. My chromosomes had not yet been tested. My birth certificate says female, live birth, seven pounds and three ounces.
I didn’t think I wanted to be loved by boys until that boy told me it was not possible. I don’t remember what I looked like then, a few years ago, but I remember him, his dirty Chucks, ashy corners of his mouth, and dry scalp. Back then I stared deeply at people the way children do, still curious. He existed. I didn’t expect him to look back though. Children are rarely seen, but I wasn’t a child anymore and had not fully realized that. Now strangers could assert their judgments on my whole body, my whole story without permission.
You look like a man. I was three sips into the smoothie before it hit. To be a woman seemed a terrible thing to have happen, and it happened at 3:54 on a Friday when I was fourteen to the sound of a blender jolted to life. Women have to be small, give birth, wear makeup. I could see all the women, the court reporters, the accountants, psychics and secretaries, biologists and senators, important but nameless with inconvenient hairstyles and morning routines. Men got to invent women over and over one generation after another by the grace of God.
The woman’s stroller spit out a toy from what must’ve been a child tucked inside. The mother cooed, then retrieved the toy and fed it back to the stroller. The mall was not a place to fall apart. It happened anyway. When I get hurt, usually the universe opens up a little like a bullet through a watermelon. Things separate and scatter. It feels like this is how we really are all the time and everything else is just pretend. We pretend to have legs and skin and penises and milk ducts. We pretend some skin looks one way while other skin is different. We pretend to have green eyes and brown eyes and yellow teeth and gray teeth, and the sky is blue to us in the day and black at night. We pretend lots of things that are only sort of true when we are the sky and time and memory and the center of the earth and destiny and gods and gravity and salted oceans and children of the gods who ate their mothers and birthed the constellations and nebulas and death is a myth because everything goes into itself to begin again. There was fear and doubt on the boy’s face when I finally turned away. The condemnation dissolved. I, a girl, would grow to be a better man than he and still be a woman.
The sugar pooled like acid on my tongue when the feeling passed. All the other customers departed, and it was just us under the fluorescent lights together again. There seemed nothing left to prove and a whole new point was born between us that we had not yet named.
Works by Venita Blackburn (@VenitaBlackburn) have appeared or are forthcoming in Apogee, Iowa Review, Foglifter, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award, and recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.