μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά,

Mathilde I was not a nice little girl. One time when I was eight I saw a fawn eating dandelions in my backyard. Its legs were spindly, like my friend Clotilde’s legs. Clotilde had three freckles under her left eye that looked like tears; when she laughed it was always because someone else was suffering. She told me she wanted to leave home some day, and I told her that she shared her name with a slave ship.

“I don’t like smoking, but I’ll put up with cigarette breath to watch a woman curl a lit butt into her palm like the Marlboro Man. I like femaleness – the curves, the wet spots – and I like femininity displayed, lace and lipstick and manicured nails, but it doesn’t turn my head like worn Levi’s and rolled tee-shirt sleeves, a stance like James Dean hustling on 42nd Street, the kind of womanness that isn’t taught in school. Simone de Beauvoir mused in The Second Sex that lesbian desire is related to desire for the mother, and that may be so, but honey, my mother was never like this: Strong, I mean physically strong. Sexual, with a look in the eye that caresses and undresses. Attitude that comes from never fitting in, maybe from never even having tried. Butch.”