It all happened last night. I was sitting alone in a restaurant. A man asked to join me.
“No, thank you,” I said, kindly.
I travel alone. I work as a speaker, a performer, a master dance teacher. I go where I’m hired. It’s nothing for me to eat out, alone — even at a restaurant or bar on a Saturday night, even at 9 in the evening, after my event or workshop is over and I’m luxuriously alone again.
Even in Wenatchee.
The man jutted his chin toward my empty chair and said, “So, who’s going to sit here?”
“No one.”
“Women your age shouldn’t be so picky.”
How dare he.
At first, I thought he was kidding, but when I realized he was snickering, because, granted, not all that many women over, say, 30-ish were in the place, I felt myself heat up. I stared back, wide-eyed.
“For a man with a belly big as yours, you assume a lot about women.”
And then I turned my back.
It doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but, believe me, it was. Suddenly, in every limb, I felt frightened, sure, but more alive! The speed at which my mouth discharged what I was thinking was worth the awkwardness I had to face if I wanted to use the restroom (he sat by the door) or leave.
Worth more, actually.
Throwing paunches
I’ve waited my whole life for this. How to raise my jaw, just inches with a tilt of the head — like how a dog listens, sharp-eared — until I know just what to say and how to say it.
It’s as if I stand in my own corner at last.
All along, all I had to do was say how I felt. But, as a younger woman, it wasn’t only that I’d go blank inside, disarmed by my own clumsiness — I didn’t know how to trust myself. I didn’t have the nerve, the confidence to wait a few seconds before shooting back.
I remember the exact morning, not too long ago, when I decided I would no longer take an insult quietly. I was chewing a corner of an English muffin over the sink, lots of olive oil dripping through my fingers, and along with the extra virgin, another lipid slid in, an essential structural component of my every living cell that might as well have said, “All these years of faking it, taking it, smiling when I should have said, ‘You idiot, who do you think you are?’”
Still, I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I said that about his belly. My own lovely hubby has a bit of one himself. I know how he struggles with it.
Wait, I know. I was thinking that I had to aim below the belt, just as he had.
Maybe, in the moment, I recognized a cute but clueless guy, in love with his own beefy-ness but not all that fond of women, really, who snorts when he laughs at us but lives in fear of us and masks it with muscle — rejected one too many times (go figure) and now he likes to throw the first punch whenever possible.
So, shoot, I threw a punch, too.
A story to tell
Keeping the insult to myself will be impossible! Describing the incident to my friends will be far more fun than handling the guy. It’ll likely to intensify to suit whichever friend I’m relating the incident to.
Or maybe I’ll write a column about it.
I think most women will understand my cause célèbre, that the speed I dealt with an insult is a real passage. Before they say aloud to themselves, “I know what you mean,” because they do, they absolutely do know how important this passage is. What an accomplishment it feels like to a woman.
MARY LOU SANELLI’s latest book is “Among Friends.” Visit her website: www.marylousanelli.com.