The Athlete and The Prince

The beam, the city, the body — what girls endure to be called strong.

Last week, I took my daughter to New York for her thirteenth birthday. We did the things — Zara, Glossier, Drybar. Chicken schnitzel at Jack’s Wife Freda. Shabbat in Brooklyn. A Broadway show starring Max from from Stranger Things. Afterwards, we waited by the stage door so she could get her Playbill signed. I hung back while she stood, firm and focused, moving up toward the velvet rope in tiny, steady steps. By the time Sadie Sink appeared and signed her program, my daughter was at the front of the line, her arm outstretched like a blade.

Thirteen years ago I went into labor. My husband and I were watching the movie Bully at the Angelika. The contractions came fast. I asked him to press hard on my back as the pain built in waves. Minutes later, I vomited in front of the Mercer Hotel. By morning, I was a mother.

*

The first time I came to Manhattan, I was ten. I couldn’t understand how Central Park wasn’t a park at all — not a patch of grass with a swingset and a slide — but a vast forest that covered the entire center of the city. What I knew of New York came from Fatal Attraction, Tootsie, and The Cosby Show. I loved Cliff Huxtable, and I loved his daughter Denise, played by Lisa Bonet, even more. That same year, she starred in Angel Heart with Mickey Rourke, writhing naked, covered in chicken blood — and Bill Cosby publicly humiliated her for it. I couldn’t make sense of it: that a father could love his daughter in your living room on a Thursday night, then remove the love when she appeared onscreen in a sexy movie. It baffled me at a young age. Or maybe it did not. Maybe I understood it completely. I understand it now, writing this down.

Fatal Attraction had come out the year before, and my mother took me to see it at the 3 Penny Cinema, just down the block from the bookstore where we’d just attended a Spalding Grey poetry reading. I’m still afraid to pee in the middle of the night, convinced Glenn Close might appear behind me with a knife while I’m washing my hands.

When I rewatched the film recently, I was struck by how pitiful Anne Archer’s character is: her soft sweatpants, her watery eyes. She’s the basset hound of housewives — meek, loyal, exhausted — next to the sleek stallion that is Glenn Close, the high-powered, childless Manhattan woman who clacks through corporate America in sharp heels and tailored suits. And still, somehow, I feel sad for Michael Douglas. That’s the magic trick of the movie: he plays the victim perfectly. The poor, tormented husband. The cheating cad who can’t keep his dick in his pants. It’s Glenn Close who terrifies us — not just because she’s violent, but because she won’t go away. Her crime is her refusal to disappear. A lesson learned early: men get rewarded for desire. Women get punished for it.

It was 1987. My father took meetings; my uncle took me to the Automat. I wore a Star of David from a vendor on 47th Street. There’s a photo my dad took with a shitty camera, right after he bought me the necklace. I’m wearing my grandpa’s oversized men’s coat, French-rolled Guess jeans, and two pins on my sweatshirt — one for Huey Lewis and the News, the other a picture of the Wicked Witch that said: Go ahead, make my day.

That night, my dad and uncle took me to see The Fantasticks downtown. On the way, I saw a man swing a puppy on a leash like a lasso. He was high and wild, straight out of Fatal Attraction — ripped trench coat, feral hair, eyes like smashed glass. I remember the way the puppy flew into Sixth Avenue and skidded across the asphalt, limbs splayed, spinning through traffic like trash in the wind.

A few blocks later, we passed a shrine on a Greenwich Village stoop. A memorial. It was for a girl named Lisa Steinberg. A few days earlier, she’d been behind that door when Joel Steinberg, a lawyer, beat her — his illegally adopted six-year-old daughter— into a coma. While she lay dying on the bathroom floor, he went out for drinks. Later, when he got home, he freebased cocaine with his girlfriend Hedda Nussbaum, who was an editor at Random House. Lisa stopped breathing in the morning.

There was a woman tending the shrine—one of those women we used to call a gypsy or a witch, before we knew better. She wore a scarf knotted tight over her head, a dark mole on her cheek, and shuffled around the altar with a kind of sacred precision, adjusting candles, repositioning flowers and stuffed animals. The shrine was days old by then: wilted blooms, waterlogged teddy bears, wax pooled in dirty puddles. A filth had settled over everything, the kind I now miss and deeply respect about the city. She moved with quiet purpose. A child had been killed, and New York had carved out a small, reverent space for grief. The beauty wasn’t in the objects — it was in the tender way she touched them, these unwashed items that would, in any other context, be mistaken for garbage.

That was the same year the Chicago Public Schools went on strike, and all the North Side kids got funneled into a local gymnastics center for “strike school”— a makeshift learning zone thrown together until the city gave the teachers the raise they were demanding. I loved strike school. I got to watch how the older girls moved, how they spoke, how they tied their combat boots. I got to wear black lipstick and pretend I belonged. I fell in love with a girl named Claire. She had a shaved head, smoked Newports, and had a dad who painted houses and molested her. She handed me her copy of Marilyn Monroe’s biography like a baton. I thought the book was boring — until I got to the autopsy photo. Black and white. Slack-jawed. Her eyes half-open. I couldn’t reconcile the corpse with the girl who danced in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the movie my mom and I rented when my dad was out of town. That image lodged in me. One woman, two faces. The truth of it settled cold in my gut: glamour was camouflage. Being looked at was not the same as being seen.

*

Three years later, my mom took me to New York City. By then, I went to a private school, had my period, and my favorite show was Beverly Hills 90210. I no longer worshipped bad girls like Claire. I understood the code of popularity: in order to fit in, you had to eat white foods or not at all, ski in February and compliment everyone no matter what. I was pretty, and aware that when I walked down the street with my mom in Manhattan, men catcalled both of us. We ate at a Chinese restaurant near the theater district, crammed next to a loud table of people in college sweatshirts, their faces ruddy from beer and hot broth. My mom leaned in and whispered, “I think he’s from The Princess Bride,” nodding at one of the men. When he got up to use the bathroom, she asked one of the women at their table, “Was he the prince in The Princess Bride?” The woman rolled her eyes — at both of us, these tacky tourists — then muttered something and gave a slight nod, barely looking up. It was subtle, but cutting. We’d broken some rule. I was thirteen—the same age my daughter is now.

*

I quit gymnastics in 1987, the first year I went to New York — even though I’d just made the A team that week, an accomplishment I’d been working toward since I was seven. I’d just landed a back handspring on the beam. It was the happiest I’d ever felt in motion. But that same day, a coach rested his hand on my thigh and left it there.

When people asked why I quit, I said I was too tall. But the truth was, something had been pierced. I still carry this little fracture today — this tiny fault line under my skin—the feeling of his hand on my thigh. Years have grown around it like roots under pavement.

By the time I was nineteen, I hadn’t touched my toes or flown through the air in almost a decade. I did not do gymnastics anymore. What I did was drugs. That was the year Kerri Strug won the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics, running full speed on a visibly injured ankle. She jumped, flipped, landed — but barely. She stuck the landed after her body buckled. Afterwards, Bella Karolyi ran out and scooped her up like a prize, hoisting her into the air as she grimaced in pain. The crowd clapped wildly. This image played on loop: a tiny girl in red, white, and blue, face pale with agony, lips pursed against tears. She became a national symbol. What no adult said out loud — but every girl understood — was that her value came not just from the landing, but from the fact that she performed through the pain. We watched America wrap a girl in gold when her bones broke, call her a hero, and then carry her off on a body that could no longer stand.

*

Sometimes I’m stunned by the sheer cast of them — these girls and ghosts and mothers and men — who live inside me like a second city. The coach with his hand on my thigh. The shrine keeper on the stoop. The girl with the black lipstick and the Marilyn biography. My father on 47th Street buying me a Star of David. The puppy midair. My daughter, at midnight, standing in the cold in Times Square, arm outstretched, waiting for an actress to give her an autograph.

They arrive in dreams, uninvited but not unwelcome. Some speak. Some watch. It’s not a haunting so much as an ongoing reunion. A chorus. The girls I’ve been and the girls I’ve failed to protect. The girls I’ve raised. The girls I’ve left behind. The city. The cities. The witches. The athlete. The housewife. The maiden guarding the prince who made fun of my mom.

And sometimes when I’m up for hours, waiting for the sun to rise, flooded with heat, their stories batter my bones like hail against a roof. Not breaking through, but threatening to. Every scream. Every time I didn’t speak. Every time I did. In the dark of night, I listen to my daughter breathe down the hallway, her soft, brutal life just beginning.