My Body, My Self: One Story

There is a screen as big as a skyscraper. There are three blocks of color. The top half of the screen is blue and white, the bottom half is tan. The right third is filled with a big white curve—the left hip of a bikini-clad woman, swinging as she walks. With every swing, the size and shape and relation of every color block changes.

Thus another woman’s lifelong relationship with her body begins.

* * *

There is a beach-bunny movie. It is on at the drive-in theater.

Mom and Dad fold down the back seat of the station wagon, make up a bed big enough for three or four little girls, depending on how well they are getting along. Early on, when the novelty—the skyscraper screen and the metal speaker that hangs on Dad’s window (he drives from parking spot to parking spot to find one that works) and the girl whose orange-trimmed-in-white uniform gives her an air of supreme competence such that I would trust her with my life and sometimes do when I get lost trying to find my way back from the kiddie playground brings a Coke for everyone to share (because Dad feels he owes a little extra to the drive-in’s owner in return for packing seven people into one car on flat-rate night) along with the fruity drinks and snacks we have brought in a cooler--when everyone is too excited and hyped up to sleep, then four little girls pack into the middle seat and one gets the prize seat up front between Mom and Dad.

The best seat in the house is the least comfortable one. It’s the bed in the back. If you kneel up straight like a good girl in church, you can see right past all the obstacles—heads and dash and rearview mirror. Your legs get tired, and you had better have a pillow for your knees, and you can’t quite shake the saintly feel of it all, but there you are.

The cartoons are bright but pointless. This is the time to eat snacks, or wander among the cars pretending they are a maze, or say you are going to the bathroom but really hitch a last ride on the fire engine that circles the lot like a good-natured racehorse that in retirement has found its vocation.

And then it is dark and the uniformed girl has returned you safe and sound to your mothership and you take the scolding because it’s a fair trade for a ride on a fire engine.

Now the grown-up movies begin. The sound from the window-speaker does not carry to the back of the car, but it doesn’t matter because adult conversation is unintelligible anyway.

To a four-year-old who has never met a teenager or a beach, this movie is a National Geographic special. There are the exotic setting, tan sand and blue skies, the teenagers who look just like grown-ups but don’t behave like any people you have ever seen. They smile and laugh all the time, but they don’t really play. They don’t have chores. The boys don’t wear shirts, and the girls wear bikinis.

There is one girl in particular. Her name is Ann-Margaret. She wears a white bikini, a big, old-fashioned one. There is a scene, an expanse of beach with teens lounging in the distance. Ann-Margaret walks into the scene from the right with her back to the camera, and she must be very close to the camera, because on that part of the screen all you can see are her hips in that big white bikini, and they are going la jumba, la jumba.

Soon I am fast asleep. I’ve had my snacks, my ride on the fire engine. Who cares about teenagers?

Who knows of what the little girl dreamed? Felix the Cat with his magic bag of tricks? Playing cops and robbers in the sand, a much better movie for the four-year-old mind? I was a chubby kid, maybe I dreamed of the snacks.

I suspect that I dreamed of Ann-Margaret. How else did this image so clearly endure? The shot lasted only a few passing seconds; I have not seen the movie again, I do not even know what movie it was. I do not know if the memory-image is accurate. It is what I remember. But we do not remember what we see; we remember what comes of it after we make it our own.

What does the four-year-old make of those hips? It is not the sexuality that adults are bound to see, but its precursor: the affinity for pure physicality that young children have.

When you’re a little kid, you enjoy your body in motion, the vigor, your little muscles and bones working away. The physical sensation is a wonder, you cannot get enough!

At four years old you have been an embodied being for only four years—and you have been self-propelled only part of that time. With every move you make, your muscles and bones create a miracle. You did that! You did that!

What did you do? You created relations.

What is motion but a relation? A relation of self to body and body to space. With every move, you stake a claim. You toss a line from self to body, from intent to effect. You create a new spatial relationship between your body and the space around it and the objects in the space.

When you are a baby you are not the boss of anything. People can pick you up and put you down where they please. But now … look at you go! You invade this space, you occupy it, and by occupation rearrange the relative positions of all it contains. You are the boss!

When you have been at this for a long time, you become blind to the wonder. But when you are a kid, you still notice. When you take up a new body language, like tango, you notice again.

What did little One Heart make of Ann-Margaret’s hips? Three blocks of color, blue and tan and white, two stationary and one flowing. Every swing of her hips was a kaleidoscope’s twist, shifting the shapes and sizes of each block, their relations. All the colors and shapes loose in their sockets, all dancing to La Jumba together.

The next day I walked like Ann Margaret. I liked using my muscles in a new way, the big, wide swing, the twist in my waist. I liked invading the space around me, on this side and that. This was my first foray into dance.

You look like a duck, Three-of-Six said. Stupid … retard … all the typical big-sister things.

Other things were said as well. Also yelled. If you want to know the truth, it was a shock. Not so much what was said as the out-of-the-blue, disproportionate-ness of the response. How are you supposed to be a good girl and stay out of trouble when merely walking across the dining room inspires such a storm?

I understand my mother’s concern: This is not appropriate behavior for a four-year-old. If it were my daughter, I would want her to stop. What might the neighbors suspect? What dangerous attention might she attract? And really, what kind of child draws attention to herself in such a way? Wouldn’t you say whatever was necessary to get her to stop?

At this late date, I would like to interject: I was not trying to draw attention; I was just being my weird, artsy, experiential, experimental, self-absorbed self.

Nevertheless.

It worked. All of it did. The wonder and the shaming.

I fell in love with my hips and my body power and remained defiantly, covertly, so. Even when the fashion models were sticks, even when the boys called me Hippy, even when I studied ballet, even when I got skinny, even though Levi's never fit right, even though I walked like a tin soldier, even though construction workers’ lewd comments shamed me all over again, even when, even though ….

Ask any woman: What is new under the sun?

Thus another woman’s lifelong relationship—fascinating and problematic as any lifelong relationship can be—with her body begins.