There is a Crack in Everything

I’m on my deck co-working with a childhood bestie. We’re quietly but feverishly tapping away at our respective writing projects. After 3 decades of friendship, there is a profound ease between us. Our writing sessions remind me of toddlers in parallel play, each absorbed in her own process but also stoked to be in the presence of another kid her age. I’m building stacks of wood bricks and knocking them down while she’s pouring sand slowly from one jar to another. Sometimes we share our work aloud. She likes my brick stacks and I admire her sand jars, but there is no rivalry to spoil our camaraderie, as we are each fully committed to our chosen method of play. Like toddlers, we just need the occasional snacky to keep us happy. On this day the air is dry and warm, punctuated occasionally by existential exhales, grunts of frustration, or more rarely, small titters of delight implying that a turn of phrase we’ve written had tickled us. Oh, well done Self! those titters seemed to say. You may not be a total fraud after all! But then again… we have to continually prove it to ourselves by building taller stacks, and spilling less sand. The work of trying to say something of value is infinite and never feels good enough, but at least it isn’t boring. 

Usually when we hang out, our default is silliness, but when we’re writing we can be very grave indeed, deeply absorbed in the space of concentration I think of as The Vacuum. In The Vacuum, my consciousness gets drawn up into my head to the point where I don’t even notice my body anymore, and forget to attend to any of its most basic functions. While concentrating on stacking bricks- that is to say, formulating disparate impressions into cogent ideas- my brain sometimes even forgets to tell my body to breathe. I’ll suddenly gasp a huge lungful of air as if I’d swum the length of a pool and not just typed a paragraph. I may at any moment be sucked out the other side of The Vacuum only to realize that I’m on the verge of peeing my pants, so long have I been holding not only my breath, but also the floodgates of my bladder at bay. Or I may have generated a thirst that has rendered me too parched to speak, and I’ll have to run to the kitchen sink and drink straight from the tap. Clever body, it seems to know just when to pull me out of the Vacuum, for I’m proud to say I’ve never once peed or pooed my pants (while writing), nor have I yet perished of hunger, thirst, or oxygen deprivation. 

That said, it’s good to have a buddy system in place. Sometimes my friend will ask me a question and I’ll hear her as if from across a great chasm because the wind of my own thoughts is whistling so loudly between my ears. I’m not saying I’ll be having brilliant or worthy thoughts, they’re just really fucking loud. I’ll slowly surface and after blinking a few times, my consciousness will percolate back into my senses enough to respond. “Another word for deviate? I don’t know, how about digress? Is that too similar? What about stray?” Stray, like my thoughts, threads trying to be woven into some kind of coherence. It’s comforting to be in the company of another who is also wending along the long and lonely road of writing. We’re like twin Vacuums hoovering up the flotsam and jetsam of our brains and spitting it out- I mean arranging it thoughtfully- onto the page. And reminding each other to pee along the way.

It’s creeping up to 80 degrees and my friend, who I’ve known since 1993, is wearing cutoff jean shorts as if it was still ‘93. Having been a competitive gymnast back then, at age 40 she still has the hotsy totsy legs for shorts, whereas mine have gone quite soft and doughy, as is only right and correct in the mathematical equation of time plus gravity. My legs were never what you’d call firm or shapely- even adding in variables like working out and eating well could not subtract the genetics of a sturdy Northern European peasant. But add to that the function of middle-aged hormones and it’s like adding instant yeast to the dough. Basically the sum of my leg equation is that the dough of the thighs continues to rise and the fact of the cankles continues to rankle. And even with factors of self-love and self-acceptance, I still end up with a final product of “I just don’t wear shorts, OK?” 

The longer we sit here, like frogs in incrementally boiling water, our temperatures rise in diametric opposition to our waning concentration. I’m starting to feel less like a vacuum and more like a listless broom, the ornamental witchy kind that doesn’t really sweep, but instead stays propped up in a corner waiting for some magic to lift it into a midnight joyride with a cat. That joyride would be my next inspired idea, but the sun is almost directly overhead and my thoughts are deviating, digressing and straying further and further from cohesion. High noon. We used to get high at noon, but these days we wait until 4:20 like everyone else. Just kidding. We didn’t even get high in high school, not much anyway- we were too busy doing homework, memorizing Shakespeare sonnets, and making up awesome dance routines. 

After pulling her shorts out of her buttcrack for the 8th time, my friend finally huffs “can I borrow some loose pants? I can’t concentrate with a wedgie.” I send her off to the Little Mermaid treasure trove that is my closet, and she comes back outside wearing the elasticated white linen maternity trousers I wore during pregnancy. She is looking very much relieved. For comfort and class, she just struck gold. Coincidentally, I too am wearing linen pants, navy blue, and as she sits back down I’m struck by how fucking lady-like we look. 

“Good God,” I say, “would you look at how fucking lady-like we look? We’re sitting at a wrought iron outdoor dining table with matching chairs. We are drinking iced coffee I brewed in my stovetop espresso maker. We’re sitting under a white patio umbrella and we’re both wearing linen pants, for fuck’s sake. Do you see what’s happening here? It’s like a Brooks Brothers photoshoot. We’re like an ad for privileged cis womanhood. Wait, does this mean we’re women now?”

This is a running joke. No matter how many milestones we pass in our lives marking objective worldly maturation, when we’re together we feel eternally 12-16 years old. On paper we are decidedly smack dab in the middle of adulting. Her: founder and CEO of a branding agency, owns 2 properties, one which she rents out. That makes her not only a Lady, but a Landlady. She also has a cedar hot tub, which I think might be the most adult thing I’ve ever heard of. Meanwhile, me: mom of a tween, co-owner of a purpose-driven media production company that we incorporated for tax purposes. I mean, that’s like the second most grownup sounding thing I’ve ever heard, after owning a hot tub. I have a SEP retirement account, for fucks sake. There’s almost no money in it, but it exists, each year beckoning me at tax time to fill it with surplus income of which there never is any. But you see? That in itself is a total adult problem! I’m an adult! But despite knowing all of that, despite living through decades of physical, mental and emotional maturation, it’s seeing us both wearing linen that finally convinces me that we are not just on our way to adulthood- we have well and truly arrived as Grown-Ass-Women… Women-in-Linen. Grown-Ass-Women-in-Linen. 

I consider for a moment what it means to embody such a moniker and I propose to her, “Does it mean that instead of browsing thrift stores, we now buy our clothes exclusively from Chicos or J.Jill catalogs? And let’s talk sunhats. Are we graduating to straw visors, or is a trucker cap still acceptable headwear? Has the moment arrived to buy one of those spongy mats you kneel on while gardening, or can we still, like, squat-weed in bikinis? Is it important to use the vegetable drawer of the fridge exclusively for farmer’s market produce bagged in reusable cloth? Like, would a lady-in-linen stuff her fridge drawer with wilting veg from Grocery Outlet? Will it be required to always have an assortment of olives, charcuterie and chilled chardonnay on hand in case company should drop by? Will people know I'm a lady if I serve stale tortilla chips and the questionable hummus from the back of the fridge?” We stare meaningfully at each other, considering all this. I want to know these things for sure, because wearing linen pants is all fine and good, but unless we go all in, I suspect we’ll still be kids playing dress up.

The full weight of our womanhood descends, not as a burden so much as an overly warm mink stole we’ve just noticed has been draped casually over our shoulders by society while we weren’t looking. We’ve had this dawning realization of our womanhood many times over the years, but it always seems to slip right off again. Of course womanhood is not as simplistic as the picture I painted. Womanhood encompasses literally anything to do with any person who identifies as a woman. There are women with uteruses, vaginas and breasts and also those without, with menstrual cycles and without. Old, middle-aged, young women, with and without children. Poor, middle class, rich women. Women with and without disabilities, degrees, earned or unearned privileges. Women who have sex with others or themselves, and women who don’t partake in matters of the flesh. Skinny, heavy, curvy women, corporate women, cleaning women, globe-trotters, home-makers. Sure, some women wear crisp white linen and sunhats and snip gingerly at rose bushes, and others muck horse shit and ride bareback. Some eschew nature completely. Some women, like my friend, run 7 figure businesses while wearing cutoff shorts. Others, like another friend, were born male and transitioned to womanhood later in life: still shredding on bass and guitar, hiking solo into the wilderness and fixing cars, but now doing all those things in earrings and lipstick, gorgeous and happy knowing that the person she presents to the world is aligned with the person she is inside. All of that and so much more is womanhood, so god only knows why wearing linen and sipping espresso suddenly seemed to me to be the very pinnacle of womanliness. I can only attribute it to my society’s white supremacist patriarchal conditioning and also those preppy-ass clothing catalogues we’d get in the mail when I was coming up. I should definitely know better, as my own daughter challenges my notion of gender every day by identifying as a girl while dressing “like a boy” in nothing but Nike sweats and kicks, hoodies and sports caps. She wouldn’t touch a dress with a ten foot pole. Me, I love to dress fancy, but I also love to don androgynous coveralls and paint houses. I’m no less a woman up a ladder and splattered in paint than I am dolled up for an evening out or lounging on my deck in linen. Oh God. This puts me in mind of an incident from the previous summer which also, incidentally, involved a hot day and linen pants. 

Rewind a year. I’m at the hardware store grabbing paint and supplies for a forthcoming job. I’m not wearing my coveralls because the job isn’t till the next morning and on this particular day, I had the rare urge to put on a nice outfit before venturing into the world to run errands. I’m dressed in nice trousers- linen, obvi- a silk tank top, hoop earrings, mascara, you get the picture. Quite the vision in linen.

As my Navajo white eggshell shimmies away in the paint shaker, I ask a passing salesman if the foam rollers come in packs of 4, and he starts to mansplain foam vs. polyester and how different nubs produce different textures. That wasn’t my question, but I expect he’s not getting a "painting pro" vibe from my rich lady outfit. That’s on me for wearing silk and linen to the hardware store. To his credit, he’s just trying to help a broad out; how could he know I’ve poly-rolled enough square footage to cover the state of California? Well, Rhode Island maybe. In my androgynous coveralls I’m taken seriously at the hardware store. “There's that dolly-bird who knows her polyester from her foam,” they probably remark to each other as I swagger by, pumping a gallon of primer in one hand while deftly flipping a roller in the other. Imagine me doing this in slo mo with a backing track of Whitney Houston singing “I’m Every Woman, it’s all in meeee, anything you want done baby, I’ll do it naturally” and you’ve got the picture…

So I want to assure this nice fellow that it isn’t my first tango with a paintbrush, not my first pony ride on a foam roller. But that sounds dirty, so I don’t say anything. I just drift further down the aisle, pretending to peruse brushes and hoping to gently launch myself out of the orbit of his unsolicited advice. Then he’s called away and all is blessedly quiet again. I do actually see a brush I need, but as I’m squatting down to grab the Purdy Pro-Extra angled 3 incher, I hear a disturbing ripping sound originating from my nether region. Oh, fffie. My lovely linen pant hath surrendered its stitch. (My actual response was not so Elizabethan or lady-like, I think it was more like “aww, fuck-a-duck!”) I reach around to scope the extent of the damage and end up with a handful of butt flesh. Well if that doesn’t beat all.

I don’t always go commando, but when I do I make sure to rip my pants from the taint all the way to the top of the ass crack. I simply had not factored undergarments into my outfit today, not wanting to spoil the snug linen silhouette with a visible panty line. I’d not foreseen an escape plan being hatched between my cunning ass and its soft, complicit linen prison guard. I paid good money for these pants, too! On principle, I'm a thrift store gal, but once in a while when the coffers are full, I invest in a really nice item of clothing. These pants, purchased only the week before, were one such splurge: organic light blue indigo-dyed cloth from an ethically sourced clothing company. I’m super bummed the stitching quality is not commensurate with the price tag. Bum-falling-out-of-pants-level bummed. It’s hanging out now in plain sight for all the store to see: the mansplainy sales clerks, the weathered contractors, the muscled painting pros. All of them with backstage passes to the ass arena. 

What to do, what to do? I pretend to ponder paintbrushes while actually pondering my posterior problems. I’m traveling light, carrying only a phone and wallet. No purse to sling around my backside, no layer to tie around my waist. So the way I see it, this debacle has become a choose-your-own-adventure and there are 3 alternative endings:  

1. Hightail it for the exit, abandoning my specially ordered paint which has now finished shaking in the shaker. But this is my only window of time to get the paint for this job which the client expects me to start bright and early.  

2. Try to somehow fold the frayed fabric into my buttcrack? I don’t see that going well- I’ll have to clench my ass all the way to the checkout counter to hold the fabric in. I’m likely to attract more attention than not if I hobble through the store like a hemorrhoidal Frankenstein.

3. Just stand up and go about my business as if nothing in the world has happened, and hope that nobody pays me any mind. Swiftly, and without ceremony. Like a boss. Like a pro.

I dig deep and choose option 3. Energetically donning a bustle of invisibility, I casually collect my paint and head for the shortest line. But wouldn’t you know it, it’s the afternoon rush and people keep stacking up in line behind me, spaced every 6 feet per Covid regulations. This is unfortunate, as it gives anyone behind me a 6 foot viewing window, much like they would have at any Tenderloin peep show. I’m suddenly not convinced I’ve made the best choice, and it takes every fiber of my being to stay in that line- face neutral, ass relaxed. Whether or not anyone is taking advantage of the free peep show is, at this point, entirely out of my control. I am committed to this path, so, I add an extra layer to my invisibility force field and pray the patrons behind me are either staring at their phones or so absorbed in their own dramas they don’t notice mine. 

I pay for the supplies, gather them in my arms and leave the building briskly, with a quick manly nod to security as if to say “carry on, everything is fine, we’re bros so there’s absolutely no reason to glance down at my excellent female tush as I walk out this door.” If anyone at the registers has noticed, at least they haven’t announced it on the store intercom. Outside I whip off my mask and breathe a deep sigh of relief. It’s over.

Or is it? Because right there in the middle of the parking lot, the paintbrush slips off the top of the paint can and onto the pavement. No one is behind me. As I bend down to retrieve it the final inch of fabric rips, all the way to the waistband. These pants are trashed. I grab the brush anyway, and just as I do, a truck turns the corner and through the open window I hear a man say simply, “whoa.” That’s all. Just, whoa. I mean, he can easily be saying “whoa” to something else, right? He could have heard a worrying statistic about covid on the radio at the exact same moment as pointing his headlights toward my exposed bottom. That’s probably what happened. I’m sure he didn’t notice my ass rising like a full moon in broad daylight. Either way, I hold my head high and shuffle to my car with as much dignity as I can muster, then speed away as if the devil himself was snatching at my tail. 

I do realize that as lady-like as linen makes me feel (and look!), it’s truly not the clothes that make the woman. Perhaps instead, womanhood is the fortitude to rise to a challenge and stay the course. It is the ability to find equanimity when the fabric of our reality is ripped away and we are left vulnerable and exposed. It is, as with the Japanese art of Kintsugi pottery, filling the cracks of our brokenness with gold. I’m pleased I didn’t let a mere chink in my armor defeat my spirit that day. I could have fled in mortification, but I stayed and got the job done. And as heroic as that was, I think it’s safe to say that women the world over are embarking on much bigger and braver acts to illuminate the world with their golden cracks.

I’ll leave you with some well-known words from Leonard Cohen that seem appropriate: 

“Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering,

There is a crack, a crack in everything,

That's how the light gets in.”