#fridayflash: Stupid Women

  Self-portrait       

WOMEN ARE stupid. No one more so than you.   

  

Look at you perched there on the courthouse pew – on the seat beside you is your good purse stuffed with kleenex and humbugs and pictures of your kids; your plump legs crossed demurely at your thick ankles; your swollen feet stuffed into cheap pumps.   

   

You clutch a tissue in your naked fingers. There is an indentation in the puffy flesh of your ring finger that is just beginning to fill in. You fiddle with the tissue, you pull at the hem of your best dress, your only dress, that is tight at the hips and the waist. You haven’t worn it for years. You wish you could afford something better.    

   

Your hair is black silk, gray at the roots, tucked into a messy bun. You think it makes you look more sophisticated but your up-do reveals your thick neck, encircled with crevices like the rings of a tree, and the wiry hairs sprouting out of your double chin.   

   

Your eyes are downcast.   

   

You don’t want people to see you have been crying. Even though that’s all you’ve been doing for months. Your eyes aren’t blue anymore, they are perpetually bloodshot and swollen.

   

What once sparkled in you is now dead and muffled, like the airlessness of a soundproofed room.   

   

You were once the secretary at the optometrist’s office. You were a volunteer at the public school. You were a mother and a wife. You had friends.   

   

And now look at you.   

   

Charged with assault. Sitting alone in a sea of hillbilly heroin-addicted thieves and murderous drunk drivers, impotent slack-eyed rapists and hair-fisted, hair-triggered bullies. Waiting for your turn in front of the judge.   

   

You are afraid someone respectable might see you. But there is no one respectable here. Not the married judge with the hairless, empty sac who is banging the vapid recording secretary. Not the Crown attorney, who puts bad guys behind bars because it makes him feel less guilty about sexually molesting his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Certainly not the legal aid lawyer who feels cheated because he couldn’t land a job at a big-city firm and now takes out his resentment on the penniless, hopeless, useless clients he is forced to defend.    

   

Doesn’t matter, their own foibles. On paper, they look good. On paper, you are charged with hitting your husband of 19 years. You will likely be found guilty, because you did hit him. You will carry a criminal record for the rest of your life like Atlas would carry the world on his shoulders, or Christ carried the cross. You will bear the guilt, the shame, and it will crush your spirit, your pride, your soul.    

   

But the worst thing is this: because of your criminal record, you will never win custody of your children. They will be awarded to the man you once trusted and loved, the man who lied to you, who cheated on you, who ripped your world apart like it was made of tissue paper and then stomped on your broken heart and laughed while he was doing it.  

   

I don't feel sorry for you, stupid woman.   

   

This is your fault.   

   

And this is why: on the night you found out he was cheating, you threw him out. Which is good, which is smart, which is the right thing to do.   

   

You blew it three days later, though, when he came crawling back to you, crying his lying, cheating, no-good eyes out.   

   

He had no place to go, he said.   

   

He was sleeping in the car, he said.   

   

Could he stay in the house? At least until he got his life together and found a place of his own?   

"I guess," you said.   

   

It was like giving a vampire permission to cross the threshold.   

   

You became stupid at that very moment.   

   

There are some who would think you a nice person for allowing him back. Others would think you a martyr. Or a true believer in the sanctity of marriage. He was, after all, your husband.   

   

You owed him that much.   

   

Right?   

   

No, you stupid, stupid cow.   

   

A few days later, with emotions running on a tenterhook the shaved thinness of a sharp blade, you and he had a knock-down, drag-out brawl. He called you every name in the book. You hit him. And god, he deserved it. Your kids screamed. Neighbours called the cops. The next thing you knew you were sitting in the back of a police cruiser, your hands cuffed behind your back, your hair hanging in your face.    

   

The last thing you saw as the cruiser pulled out of the driveway was the faces of your babies staring open-mouthed at you through the living room window.   

   

And now you sit in a crowded courtroom, wondering how your respectable life disintegrated into this heaving pile of steaming shit.     

   

Don't wonder. It's perfectly clear.   

   

You were born stupid.   

   

You were born female.   

  

It is the cross we must all bear.