Girlhood

by Selin Hos

When I initially set out to write this short story, I hadn’t yet made up my mind about many of the key details. I knew just one thing: I was writing a story about a girl. I knew that I wanted to write a short story that spoke to her lived experience of her gender identity — an experience that I knew well based on my own life and the lives of my friends. Perhaps the most challenging part of writing this piece was figuring out how my main character’s identity fit into the greater themes of our Native American and Indigenous studies class.

In the book Native Studies Keywords, there is a chapter devoted to the topic of Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge. The chapter raises the question of whether possessing a certain knowledge grants permission to communicate it with others outside of a given group. Within the context of this question, I was grappling with how to best present the main character of this short story, and the kind of story I wanted to tell about Girlhood. I heavily researched what girlhood could look like from an Indigenous perspective, similar to the main character in Erdrich’s “The Stone,” but ultimately decided that just because I have done this research does not give me the permission to assume this perspective for my story. Attempting to do so felt awkward, and I decided that I could not authentically tell this story from an Indigenous perspective given my own identity and limited knowledge.

This short story follows Hope, the main character, as she navigates her family identity and reflects on the theme of generational diaspora during her girlhood. It aims to exemplify the internal struggle of feeling disconnected from one’s familial roots, and the burdens placed on offspring, specifically young women, when starting anew. This short story explores the complexities of identity and highlights the nuances in the terms indigeneity and diaspora.

“Willfulness, the refusal of one’s will to be governed, is necessary for existence to be possible; this willfulness invites other possible worlds. Attending to how the ordinary, everyday lives of young women hold revolutionary seeds…”

— Karishma Desai

Upon waking up one day, Hope realized that she had never stopped playing dress up. When she was younger, she spent hours standing in front of the full-length mirror in her mother’s closet trying on one outfit after another. She always swam under a vibrant sea of clothes that were much too big for her, lengths of cloth pooling at her feet as she stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her brown hair was straighter back then, falling flat on her back, a sharp contrast to the paleness of her skin. She remembers lifting one of her arms, watching in the mirror as the extra length of fabric on her arm flopped over her hands.

Her mother would always tell her that she just had to grow into herself, and when she did the clothes would fit her better. “Grow into herself”…whatever that even meant. Hope didn’t even begin to know how to start growing, let alone grow into herself. She just knew she liked to raid her mom’s closet and play pretend with different versions of her future.

Looking back, Hope remembered days where she tried putting on her mom’s high heels, her toes sliding to the very front of the shoe leaving the backs of her heels exposed. It wasn’t very practical, and she would take a step forward only to teeter for a moment before falling down. It took nothing short of falling flat on her face for Hope to understand that the high heels were an object of danger. Somehow, that made her want to keep wearing them even more. Grow into herself. Hope didn’t know what that meant any more now at 23 than she did back then.

“Use your words, Hope,” her grandfather would say to her whenever she grew visibly upset, his accent thick as he pronounced each word. “No one will take you seriously if you cry.” She always grew quiet, tears springing from her eyes as she struggled to find the words to describe what she was feeling. The words seemed to evade her, and her tears felt tangible in a way that her words never could. It struck her as odd that the tears couldn’t be enough. Tears. The universal language. She was sad, so she cried. A six-word story.

Universal language or not, she hated crying in front of other people, especially in front of her grandfather. It made her feel so small to think about her grandfather when he was her age, a young child playing in the Anatolian mountains. Everywhere he had been! Everything he had seen! How did life bring him here to the States? Could he have ever guessed where life would take him? All of these decisions, all of these lives, the fate that brought her to this moment, and then to be sitting in front of him shedding tears. She couldn’t help but feel that her troubles paled in comparison. The shame of her ingratitude only reddened her cheeks more as she cried harder.

This time she had been crying because of her brother, as she usually did back in the day. “You know the tooth fairy isn’t real, right Hope?” he remarked offhandedly, scoffing as she triumphantly waved her fallen tooth in his face. He said it to spite her, having had the magic spoiled for him by his own classmate, Tomas, just a few months earlier. She knew that crying was inevitable, but she wanted to delay the tears for as long as possible. Maybe if she delayed the tears she could keep the magic alive for a little while longer. But the frustration won, and as she took a large gulp of air and struggled not to cry, a pressure and heaviness settled in her chest. The tears began to leak out anyway.

She was so tired of having things ruined for her. Just a few months ago, her brother had done the same thing with Santa. Having to be on edge, expecting the worst at any given time, had grown to be so exhausting. Why did she have to constantly be guarding her happiness? Couldn’t she just believe in something for the sake of believing in it?

Use your words Hope. She recalled her grandfather’s wisdom in the present day, the words ringing in her head as she stood in front of Jake. Her hands were clasped in front of her mouth in surprise as Jake was kneeling in front of her, his arms extended in a 90 degree angle. In his palm lay a ring-box, the diamond ring twinkling in the light as he opened it. Oh, this is really happening, thought Hope, her mind running a million miles a minute as she tried to figure out what to say. It wasn’t lost on her that she needed to respond with something and respond quickly. The silence was quite deafening.

She had met Jake in a mandatory freshman seminar her first year of college. He had sat down next to her, and warmth and confidence seemed to radiate off of him. He caught her looking over at him, meeting her eyes and flashing a smile. Hi, I’m Jake. She smiled back, “Hi, I'm Hope.”

From that moment on, Jake kept sitting next to her, and she grew used to his presence. On days where he would be missing, she grew worried, imagining the worst of possibilities. Maybe he was ridiculously ill, sick in bed with no one to care for him. Or he had been walking and fell on a patch of slick, black ice and broke his leg. What if he had crossed paths with a bear that wandered onto campus—something not entirely unheard of for a school tucked away in the woods of Maine? Unlikely, but possible.

He would always show back up again the next day, his usual gregarious self, laughing and charming the rest of the class with tales of the adventures he had had while playing hooky during the previous class period. That particular day he lingered a little longer as Hope was packing up after class, catching her in the hallway to ask her on a date.

That one date led to another, and they never quite seemed to end. Hope liked the side of her that he brought out; with his charm and extroverted personality he had attracted quite a large group of friends. They were rather funny, and Hope loved the laughter and energy they brought to every conversation. However, they were all more rambunctious than the last, constantly getting into trouble. 

Her favorite heist of theirs was when they plotted to steal the main toll bell at the top of the library building. She half-heartedly tried to dissuade them but to no avail. They managed to break in and not get caught. “We were wearing ski masks and the campus police tried to run after us, but we were faster. Fletcher mooned him, it was sick,” one of Jake’s friends recounted to Hope one day as they were all grabbing lunch. The bell sat on a makeshift podium in Jake’s room for over a month. They would ring it during their frat meetings to establish quiet and order over the chaos of the hooting and hollering. One day, they hit it too hard, creating a small, hairline fracture that stretched across the slide of the bronze bell. Another operation was undertaken to return the bell. They left it on the front steps of the library, the cast bronze of the bell gleaming under the midnight moon.

 Hope couldn’t quite say that she agreed with all of Jake’s group antics, but it was often more work to try to dissuade him from doing something than it was to just stay silent. “Come on Hope, what is the worst that can happen?” he would often ask in response to her complaints. That was easy enough for him to say. His father and grandfather and great-grandfather all went to their college, each serving subsequent terms on the Board of Trustees. This campus was his playground, he was practically bred for it.

In fact, this country was his playground, and he was bred for certain success. His family still “summered” in a house in Nantucket that they had bought for a handful of nickels during the Great Depression. Their family friends were populated with Fortune 500 CEOs and he was neighbors with the Obamas growing up. Jake never had any reason to question any aspect of his life, this was all he knew. His purpose was defined for him as soon as his first ancestor stepped foot off of the Mayflower. He never had to grasp for uncertain straws, for unknowable answers to questions about his past.

She was invited to dinner with his mother when she came to visit. Hope spent the entire day in frantic preparation for the meeting later that night. She spent an hour carefully curling her hair, making sure that every ringlet fell perfectly in place. Her lint-roller became her best friend as she rolled it over her sweater over and over again. Not a single eyelash was out of place as she sat down for dinner that night.

After a while of casual conversation, Jake’s mom asked the question Hope had been dreading for the entire dinner. “So Hope, why did your family decide to move here?” she asked, her face stretched into an expectant smile, her hair curled in similar ringlets. Hope always faltered a bit when asked this question. To be honest, she didn’t quite know why her family had chosen to move here. She knew the basics — the classic reasons of political and economic turmoil that seemed to comprise most stories of immigration. But that was never an acceptable answer to those asking this question. Why would anyone choose to uproot their lives in that way, they seemed to be asking. What were they running from? What did they hope to find in this foreign land, in our home?

Maybe it was never that deep. Maybe they were asking out of genuine curiosity. Well, Hope couldn’t help them either way. She didn’t have the answers to their questions. She preferred not to know, as though not knowing her family’s immigration story would help her assimilate better. Despite being born in the States, despite having never lived anywhere else, she often still felt like an outsider. She oscillated between feeling proud of her transatlantic heritage and yearning for continuity and belonging in a country whose history didn’t begin with her.

She wanted to feel connected to a national history that began long before her and would extend long after. Marrying Jake would root her into an American legacy in a way that she never could on her own. It would let her children feel entitled to their “American” identity in a way that she would never feel. It meant the stability that she so often longed for.

Hope still had not given Jake an answer. She could see as his regular, self-assured smile faltered just a little as met her gaze, his eyes searching for the answer he wanted her to give. Looking into his eyes, she could see the rest of her life as it stretched out before her. Saying yes to him meant a lifetime by his side as he went through the designated hoops, uprooted once again from the life that her family had so carefully built here. It meant a life as a supportive wife and a doting mother proudly steeped in her American heritage.

Use your words Hope. A single tear fell down her cheek, as she opened her mouth to respond. “Jake, I don’t think I can,” she said, the single tear quickly turning into a stream. Hope thought she had it all figured out, but tying her legacy to Jake’s felt reductive, a snub to the long, storied ancestry of her own. By rooting herself so deeply in a privileged American history, she would also find herself implicated in the darker chapters of that identity. Was the stability worth the entitlement? Hope wasn’t sure. All she knew is that she hadn’t yet wrestled with her own identity enough to know the answer.

References

Desai, Karishma. “Girl.” Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by the Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective et al., vol. 13, NYU Press, 2021, pp. 101–05. JSTOR, https://www-jstor-org.dartmouth.idm.oclc.org/stable/j.ctv2tr51hm.34?seq=1.

Erdrich, Louise. “The Stone.” The New Yorker, 2 Sept 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/09/the-stone