Good Woman – Savala Nolan

Naughtiness passes. It’s a moment of delinquency followed by a moment of discipline. My mom spanked me once or twice; though I can’t recall the offense, I remember looking at the pale blue walls as her hand struck my naked backside. I called my dad a bastard once and watched him rip my doll from my hands and throw it out of the truck.

Occasionally my mom reprimanded me for being fresh. Ms. Stenger, my sixth-grade history teacher, refused to call on me for a month as punishment for speaking too often out of turn. Those rascally behaviors didn’t amount to a persistent flaw in my very being. But there are many ways for a little girl to be bad; I was the worst. Who knows why I was fat. Genes, surely. I come from big, substantial people, Mexican and Black stock, many of us heavyset and heavy-boned. Sometimes we pass it to our children, as my dad passed it to me.

Or maybe, I was fat because I ate more calories than I burned; I remember being told I ate too much and had internalized that idea by the time I was three, when, for several weeks, I put myself on a starvation diet to, in my words, solve my “problem with food.” Of course, a toddler doesn’t come up with starvation as a plan unless the onslaught of body control is already upon them, and they don’t talk about their “problem with food” unless they’ve heard the words many times before.

Indeed, I was scolded at home for how much I ate, and teased, and told I was a pig. After a week of my starvation diet, in which I consumed only broth and plain yogurt, my mom booked an appointment with a doctor. I insisted to the doctor that I wasn’t hungry and continued to refuse food. After almost twenty-one days and losing X pounds, I announced to my mom and siblings, “See, I don’t have my eating problem anymore.” I’m told they exchanged alarmed, guilty glances across the dinner table, where for weeks I’d intensely monitored what they ate and how they ate it but wouldn’t eat anything myself.

They thought of how they’d routinely harass me about my appetite, and about what I looked like, the roundness of my toddler body an affront. A therapist suggested a family meeting; in the meeting, I said, I don’t like it when you call me fat. I asked them not to anymore. They agreed. I asked, What if they forgot and did it anyway? They did forget, and did it anyway, repeatedly.

The only person in my family who never teased or berated me for my body or my appetite was my dad; I never had the chance to ask him why. I was forced to diet over and over—each stretch of restriction followed by an inevitable stretch of gorging.

I refuse to be good. This is a matter of survival, not inclination or mood. I refuse to be easy, and I refuse others’ preferences. I refuse to be amicable, and I refuse to appease. I refuse to go along, and I refuse to agree. I refuse to do what I was trained to do. Instead, I choose whatever lies beyond my social conditioning, even if I’m still looking for it, still spurring it into being.

This is work of the mind, cerebral and tough; this is work of new language, new concepts, new intonations, and my thinking must expand to fit the scale of all existence. It is also body work, work that is nailed to my flesh. It is the gestating of new bones and anointing of muscle and fat. It is passing through the stomatous, black opening of my own cervix to the bright field waiting on the other side, in the wilderness.

It is a lot to take on. But I welcome the challenge, and the mystery, and the darkness. It was in darkness that the universe was made; it is in darkness that each day is made new. I even welcome death. Not a death wish, not a yearning for the end of my life.

But a death of the thing. That thing. That thing I must describe, somehow, to my daughter, digging and groping for ways to prepare her to meet an iniquitous and sinister world, without fouling her innocence. There is no language for it. Patriarchy points to it, sketching roughly what it feels like to be a woman in a world that hates women and that seeks to compress us into domestic and sexual service no matter what else we achieve or might want.

But there is no word that viscerally sums up its cosmic scale, its shuddering reverberations, its microscopic slithering, that conveys the obliterating totality of living with it, and in it, and with it in you. There is no single word that comprehensively conveys the toll of being chased, one’s whole life, by that towering, unstoppable, spiny, screeching shadow, ominous like a sneaker wave—do not turn your back to the ocean—the nightmarish terror of its barbed, breathing, sentient presence gaining on you; you are never, ever out of its sight.

The thing is an enclosure limiting the scope of your life, of how you can be seen and what you are permitted to see. The thing is a process: a hand around your neck, the grip so tight you feel your pulse beating against it; then loose enough, for a while, that you think, perhaps, it is finally gone.

It isn’t. It is mummification while you’re alive, vocal cords snipped like a dog, like a bitch. It is a silencing.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 2f2766cb926084bb
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,370,538 bytes (2.261 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 199
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 328.45 minutes
• Total Words: 65,690
• Total Characters: 376,273
• Average Words per Page: 330.1
• Average Characters per Page: 1890.82

Most Frequent Words

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