"she JUST wanted to know if you need HELP"
The aggression of American courtesy
A thing I have no trouble doing is opening car doors. I’ve hiked up mountains with multiple hairpin switchbacks and I can lift a fair bit at the gym and I can walk several miles and feel pretty good (as long as I have water etc.) so opening car doors? Not a thing. Really really really not a thing. The notion that anyone could look at me and assume that putting my hand on a handle and pulling is some sort of heroic endeavor is not a conclusion I thought I’d ever have to fight.
My failed superhero was very tall, very blond, and dressed head to toe in pale pink, very much a deliberate fresh-faced woman, maybe even an ideal woman, depending on your ideals. I went to open a car door and she raced up to me with an arrogant certainty I have to remind myself to breathe through when I think about it, because this was not the attentive, “Oh, can I help you with that?” that I get from strangers whose heads aren’t fully lodged up their rectums. There was no question in her approach, I assure you. She knew that I needed her, and she practically knocked me over to do the thing I don’t need anyone doing.
“I’ve done a LOT more challenging things than opening car doors, I promise you that,” I told her, emphatically enough that I hoped she’d react to all the not-positive emotions she’d engendered in me on a beautiful day. She nodded as though she was complimenting me and kept her gleaming white teeth in an unshaken grin. She didn’t hear a word I said, appropriate for someone who was determined to act without asking me any questions. I keep thinking about how many magazines I’ve seen with women who look exactly like her on the cover, how many years it took for me to accept that not only do I not look like them, but I don’t have to in order to be beautiful. And there she was, this image of what a lot of people would call “perfection,” assuming, in the manner of many dudes of her ilk, that I — visibly imperfect I — needed her to save me. To save me from one of the simplest actions I can perform.
“Well, at least I have something to write about for my next Substack,” I thought. I was satisfied with just the one event, honestly, but then I made the mistake of standing outside my apartment building talking on the phone for a few minutes. I had puposely stepped off the sidewalk to stand on the grass, so that I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. I was talking through headphones.
An elderly woman walked by with a younger woman in toe, likely a relative, and made a gesture for me to take off my headphones, something that, after two incidents of elderly women making me take off my headphones so they could spout ableism at me, I’ve learned not to do. “I’m on the phone,” I said, attempting to convey that it’s very rude to interrupt someone in the middle of a conversation with the presumptions that, from experience, I could already predict.
Her young relative seethed at me, silently, before explaining, “she JUST wanted to know if you needed HELP.”
If I need help with anything, it’s working through the rage I feel, but the gym does help with that. My trainer expressed gratifying shock at the current state of my now-defined back muscles and encouraged me to get serious about nutrition. “If you really committed,” he said, “You’d see results in like, two weeks.” Inwardly, I was telling myself that my natural habits formed by my terminally health-conscious mother are solid enough, but I can’t deny how my New Orleans genes kick in under stress. I can eat piles of pasta gleaming with rich sauces and I rarely skip dessert. Observing an elegant forkful of house-made Turkish delight from a Yemen cafe yesterday afternoon I thought, “But is it worth skipping dessert just to look like an action hero?”
I’m thinking yes, it might be. Not because there’s anything wrong with how I look now, but because morphing into someone that even the most presumptuous failed Samaritan knows not to fuck with is an immensely pleasing thought. I might not be able to actually climb the tree in order to get your kitten out of it, but I can at least establish to the general population that I am not the kitten.
