Read Online I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman - Free Book Online

another man said as I walked past, and again the image was disturbingly literal.
    When I tried to talk to my mother about these incidents, she told me to act as if such comments were compliments.
    â€œI always say thank you and smile,” she said. But then she saw my face, and understood that perhaps I could not do as she did. “Or ignore them,” she said then. “Don’t give them the satisfaction of a response.”
    My father’s friends, men who drank heavily, men who spent their days exploring and drawing their sexual depravity, men who had come of age in the free love of the sixties and had laughed at the new wave of feminists, began to treat me very differently. My parents, overhearing them, laughed as if their comments were only the jokesthey appeared to be on the surface. But I felt the menace underneath. My body was whispering to the adults around me in a language I did not understand. It was promising unkeepable promises.
    I felt as if I had awoken on a remote island and found myself wearing the body of a native. They recognized me as their own, yet I had none of their culture. It would soon be discovered that I was an intruder. There would be anger at my deception. There would be consequences. I did not want to be there, but I could not leave.
    My body was dangerous not only to me but to others. I saw this in the wariness with which my mother had begun to treat me. More and more now, she became enraged at my closeness with my father. If I walked arm in arm with him, if I tried to sit between them at the movies, if he and I laughed at a joke that she had not heard, she became angry and frustrated, sometimes to the point that tears sprang to her eyes. Between my father and me, the innocent closeness that had always been there remained unchanged. But my mother’s anger provoked in me the deep confusion of an answering guilt.
    As fully as I knew that among adults my body was dangerous, I knew that among those my own age I was neither feminine nor desirable. I had always been a heavy child, not fat but solid, with rounded limbs and too much strength. I’d envied my girlfriends whose mothers insisted that they eat. Now my body changed further and faster than theirs, and the gulf between us grew infinite. In one strange middle school health class, we sat in a circle on the floor and were made to list the qualities we found attractive in the opposite sex. The boys invariably listed petiteness and fragility, blond straight hair. I longed to be one of those girls, with bones like glass and legs still perfectly smooth, who could be picked up and spun around, who was still small enough to make a twelve-year-old boy feel like a man. I could have picked up and spun allof the other girls in my class, and many of the boys as well. In schoolyard jokes, in the pop culture I absorbed through my skin even though I wasn’t allowed television, I learned that there was nothing more shameful for a man than to be associated with a woman who wasn’t thin. At school dances in the cafeteria, where girls and boys solemnly placed their hands on each other’s shoulders and swayed, an arm’s-length apart, I knew that if I asked a boy to dance I would humiliate him. I found no power or pleasure in my changing body, only the deep unease of being found desirable when I didn’t want to be and undesirable when I did.
    It was in those years that I began, secretly, to buy Halloween-sized bulk bags of candy. I stole money from the grocery wallet or fudged the count on the change my mother gave me to get home. I was amazed to discover that candy cost very little. I shoplifted as well, for a brief time. Other girls shoplifted with friends, giddy with giggles and adrenaline, but I stole alone, slipping lip glosses from chain pharmacies into the pockets of my backpack. I gave out the lip glosses in the cafeteria, explaining that my mother had bought me too many. My mother did not buy me any makeup, or even