Leadership Lost and Found

Off The Wall

 an essay 

by Lee Marcus

I was having the best time in the back of that pickup truck. Joking and teasing, hair blowing every which-way, all of us looking from face to face and laughing, the way you do while registering the notion that this might be a moment you will always remember. Well, I thought that, but then I was the visitor. Also, the oldest, age nine.

That truck bed was full of my cousins, and there were more at home. The family was my mother’s sister’s opus: a rollicking 1950s version of Cheaper by the Dozen, a book I had read with relish. My uncle was a madman, and everybody, including me, adored him. “Who wants to go down to the shop?” he had hollered. We all did, though I thought a shop was a store, and I hadn’t known anything about my uncle owning a store.

The shop was a garage, at the highway department, where he worked. It was oily and stinky, and there wasn’t much to do there. Some of us wandered into the office, and that’s when I saw it. Saw her. 

On the wall over my uncle’s desk hung a poster of a naked woman, almost life-size. She was facing the viewer, on her knees with her back arched. She held her arms so that they lifted her breasts, like an offering. Her smile suggested that something was about to happen. I didn’t know what. 

One of the girl cousins kept looking at me looking at … her … and egging me on for a reaction. “I know, right?” she elbowed with a tentative giggle. Her frivolity did not indicate complicity so much as nervousness. She could have been looking to me for influence, but I was preoccupied, frozen in place staring at the picture. Actually, I was slammed breathless with emotion, something like grief. 

I lowered myself into my uncle’s chair. Of course, what had me transfixed was what we would call degradation, but I had no words for it, only feelings, such dark, sad ones. Gradually the feelings formed into questions. How did this woman fit in my uncle’s world? Right there for all to see? How did she fit in my aunt’s world? Was this part of that catalog of things that caused grownups to signal each other with knitted brows, shaking their heads almost imperceptibly and then changing the subject? Things kids couldn’t know because we were “too young to understand?” The poster reminded me of that actress, Marilyn Monroe, and how I always felt embarrassed by the way she talked, and dressed, and moved. But she was only somebody on TV, like a clown; it didn’t mean anything. Only now it did. Now I knew: this was about how men looked at women. And what women had to do to get men to look at them. Not see them, just look. This woman looked so stupid, naked on the wall, grinning at whomever came along, in the highway department! 

I was a girl. Girls grow into women, every time. Oh God, no.

That one cousin must have asked me ten times on the way home: “what’s wrong?” It was my first experience of depression: heart turned to stone; brain on fire with so much to sort out. I lay awake that night, working it over and over.

I figured out how to continue to love my uncle, though I stopped playing badminton in the back yard and stopped wearing shorts, for that summer anyway. I had learned that my body was not a safe place for me, and that I wasn’t up to living in this world I now saw so differently. I did not want to become a woman, but clearly had no choice.

. . . 

Now in my 60s, I find that I am still processing the knowledge of that day in 1958. It turned out, when the time came, that I loved sex, with men. But see, the shock of that day wasn’t about sex. It was about sexual humiliation. It was about a woman stripped of all that was unique to her, until she was only tits and ass, and a face pretending to enjoy her predicament. A smile that lied to please. A pretty thing who was all give and no take. An asset to a man, without concern for herself. She had to be beautiful, too, so that when we saw her, the rest of us ordinary looking women could feel inadequacy along with our embarrassment. In this way, then, the picture was code, meant to dispirit and defeat us. And that’s why it was on the wall. Not just to give men a few kicks, but to put women in their place. Did all men traffic in this code, or just some of them? If some, how would you know which ones were which? If all, well fine, then. But what if you weren’t pretty enough? Would you be invisible to men? It was a conundrum. A damned riddle.

I made it through grade school and high school as a smart girl (i.e., boy-repellant) with a sunny disposition. But college burst my bubble. I was a music major. Adult women didn’t really play the clarinet, everybody knew that. I was lost. And by the way, there was a sexual revolution going on, wahoo! Liberation! Most of the guys were Donald Trump. Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, so don’t worry your pretty little head about, you know, ambition. It was a jungle out there. I eventually leaned into the humiliation, gambling on the notion that to own it was to detoxify it. This dabbling in alchemy (aka sex, drugs and rock ’n roll) was a long shot. Turns out I’m not the type who can “own it” if it’s a sham, and I became fatalistic (i.e., went off the rails). You may use your imagination. I mean, what was the point of a “good reputation,” when the things you wanted were out of reach anyway?

Even at age nine I had known that men owned and controlled everything. All the teachers were women, but the principal was a man. Wherever there were women, there was at least one man telling them what to do. Were they pretty enough, agreeable enough to get a raise or some recognition for their work? So that was real life: navigating an endless funhouse maze that kept you from getting anywhere. Or you could drop out and get married and watch from the sidelines. You could be my aunt, with the diapers and the dishes and the PTA meetings and pregnant again. And a naked woman over her husband’s desk. (I hear some of you interjecting, really? how about a live naked woman on the desk!)

Well, navigate I did. After roughly surviving my twenties, also known as the 70s, I found that there were men who actually could see women as people, and I was lucky to have long-term relationships with two of them. I have loved and been loved. On the other hand, I spent my career careening from music to teaching to community organizing to corporate jobs to newspaper writing to office management, starting over each time I hit the wall. Having been warned, at age nine, you would think I’d have known better than to seriously seek rewards commensurate with my ability and effort, but silly me. I didn’t get far. Still, there were moments when I got a glimpse of the gold. For example, I was highly rewarded with the respect of parents and the love of children when I owned my own preschool. It was experimental and cutting edge, an approach to childcare no one had seen before. I was in my element and I owned it. But I earned something like $6.00 an hour, and I was in my 40s, so…ultimately, I couldn’t afford it.

I have seen women who got close, really close, to what I think of as self-realization. Hillary Clinton, bleeding before our eyes from a thousand cuts, yet still moving forward. Oprah Winfrey, whose rise has seemed to defy all the rules. Michelle Obama, now stepping out of the shadows. Meryl Streep, whose talent could not be denied, even without “the look.” Maya Angelou, gone but still rising, stfu! And numerous women who are not famous, but who followed their bliss into some cranny that men didn’t care about, and blew the roof off. Any woman’s success is a triumph for all of us, I know that now. Men are not going to grant human rights to women. We are going to take them for ourselves, and for our nieces, daughters and granddaughters, in the name of our mothers, our aunts, and grandmothers. We have a long way to go, but so much to look forward to, because equality is everything.