Member-only story
The Strange Calm of a Woman Who Stopped Performing
When she stops flinching, men read it as invitation or surrender. What she’s really doing is remembering she has a body.
I was at an opening in some warehouse gallery late last fall, the kind where everyone’s holding warm wine and pretending not to look at each other. Some guy reached out and grazed this woman’s elbow. Just knuckles, barely there. I watched for the tiny lateral step I always expect to see, the half-smile stuck onto her face. But she didn’t do it. She just stood there, very still, and looked at him without blinking. My own drink was distracting me. There was a piece of hair stuck to my lip I couldn’t get rid of.
From across the room it probably read like a green light. Maybe it was. I don’t actually know her, and that’s the part I keep forgetting to admit, because the story needs something cleaner. But I know the look. I’ve put it on my own face. It’s the look of someone who got exhausted, and I don’t mean tired. I mean the exhaustion that makes you stop pretending the script is worth following.
You spend your twenties and early thirties memorizing this exhausting choreography. You learn to wait a couple of beats before answering a text. You learn to laugh at the wrong jokes on purpose. You find yourself claiming…
