What restaurant was that? It was a Denny’s, I think. That man.
Yes.
He was so tall. He was hovering when Mom and I were done eating and we were at the register waiting to pay.
Yes, it was very busy and crowded. It was the beginning of our fame. Had you realized it yet?
I didn’t know how far-reaching it was then or would be down the line. But that man at Denny’s.
He was tall and in his 60s. Looked like he could have played football at one time. Enormous shoulders. Fat. Glasses. Older retired khaki WASP shorts. A face like an empty shell with a charmed existence. A body like a man who eats a lot of steak and potatoes and rides a lot of golf carts. He was milling around you. And then he reached his closed hand out casually. A test.
Yes, but I only realized in retrospect it was a test.
When he extended his closed hand to you, this man you’d never met a day in your life, he looked at you with that smirk, slight but perceivable. What did you do?
Really how dare he. How exploitative and intentionally humiliating.
You extended your own hand. You opened your hand. Under his closed fist. He was handing you something, and it was your job to receive it unquestioningly.
My job?
Well…
Who is he to give me jobs?
When you extended your fully opened hand to receive the unknown object in his closed fist, what were you thinking?
I was thinking nothing.
You must have thought something to extend your hand.
I don’t remember. Nothing.
Your brain opened your hand.
Maybe I thought it would be something nice. A present.
Did you think it was a present?
I thought there might be an outside chance.
He made eye contact with you as he opened his fist and dropped the “present” into your hand.
I was smiling a little by then. I felt like a little girl and he was a nice man just innocently admiring me.
You were flirting with him like they say little girls flirt with adult men when they giggle at their antics.
I was reading his behavior as playful, so I was reflecting it back to him.
What was it?
Little girls don’t flirt with adult men. Or anyone, for that matter.
In his hand?
I’ve never understood the instinct people have to impose sexuality on little girls. It’s a sign of a highly sexist culture.
What was the object the man dropped in your hand?
A crumpled sweaty straw wrapper.
He handed you garbage.
I mean, it wasn’t like really dirty or anything.
It was something that needed to be thrown out. It was refuse.
He never said a word either. It was all just a game to him. He might even have been a member of the Goon Squad.
He was showing you how weak you were. Absent-mindedly accepting garbage off nefarious strangers. What did you do when you saw it was garbage?
I felt stupid.
What did you do?
I felt angry. I wanted to give it back to him and say, “You can keep that.”
You saw your mistake accepting it.
Yes. I felt dumb and small and angry.
What did you do?
I laughed uncomfortably. I looked around for a garbage can, and when I didn’t see one, I put the crumpled wrapper in my pocket.
You put a stranger’s garbage in your pocket.
I didn’t know what else to do with it.
It weighed 5,000 pounds in your pocket.
I threw it away later.
For all your protests and warring and all of the scarring, your insistence that they never were able to “get” you, to expose you as weak, to prove that you should be subjugated, punished, in that moment in Denny’s, that strange man did “get” you.
I never have understood why they need to destroy me until I’m nothing, until I’m erased. Why do they hate me so much?
You will never understand this.
I will never understand this.
You will never destroy them completely.
I don’t need that.
You will never change their minds.
I never expected to.
You will never “win.”
I’ve lost too much.
What would you do if it happened again? If that same man with that same sweaty crumpled wrapper tried to hand it to you?
I’d take it from his hand and shove it down his throat.
…….
I’d tell him to go fuck his mother.
You would not extend your hand. You would look at him confused, annoyed. It would be awkward, but he would relent.
He would know he was wrong about me.
He wouldn’t care.
I would have won.
He goes through life thinking of himself as the permanent victor of everything.
I wouldn’t have felt humiliated. Or angry. It wouldn’t have stayed with me all these years as evidence that some of their old accusations about my ingratiating personality were true.
They wanted to exploit it.
They have. I was what they said I was.
You never were who they wanted you to be.
I always overcome.
You survive. Mostly.
Have I survived them? Have I overcome this?
Have you survived them? Have you overcome this?
Diana Spindler 