A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [9]
I have to do it now, before it becomes one more thing I meant to do. I stop, turn around, go back to the computer, and sign up to sponsor two women. I am one of six thousand viewers to sign up as a sponsor because of Oprah’s show. THE WOMEN’S FACES don’t retreat, though. And I continue to feel like something is missing in my life. I’m hungry for something all my own, beyond Ted and Lisa, Inc. I want to do something, but I can’t think of what. There is this faint sense, somewhere in the background, of a person I haven’t seen in a long time: the person I always imagined I would become.
I remember the day when I was eleven and my older sister, Marie, and I met my mom for lunch downtown, where she worked as a legal secretary.
Afterward, Marie and I walked to the bus stop. I took the last available seat on the bench, next to an African American lady. Marie stood beside me as we waited. A few minutes later, a disheveled homeless man, probably drunk, approached. He asked, “Can you spare any change?”
One of us responded. “Don’t have any, sorry.”
He turned to the lady next to me, who gave him the same polite answer. As he turned to walk away, he sputtered none too quietly, “F——ing n——.”
It was one of those moments when time slows, like during a traffic accident. My heart beat heavily. An impulse overtook me. I can’t just let that go. I jumped to my feet and blurted out, “You are a racist!”
My skin burned. Everyone milling around the bus stop stood still. My sister was shocked. The lady was shocked. I was shocked. Yet I continued. “I don’t want to hear your garbage!” I said. “You have no right to judge people by the color of their skin. You need to watch your mouth!”
The man looked at me for a moment, then turned around and shuffled away, murmuring, “Damned kids . . .”
Then there was that time after a gym-class volleyball game, during my freshman year of high school, when I noticed a group of boys swarming around the net. It was another problem with Trevor Samson, the school geek. This time he was in a verbal sparring match with a popular kid, one of those who commuted to school from their prestigious, sprawling West Hills homes in spanking new Jeep Cherokees. I didn’t care that Trevor and I had a lot in common—we’d been in middle school together, and we came from the same part of town. We weren’t friends. I didn’t like him. He was a nerd’s nerd: obnoxious. Vulnerable. Pathetic.
The confrontation heated up quickly as I edged in closer to see what was going on. No teachers were in sight. More than thirty boys, mostly of the West Hills breed, had gathered around and were egging on the aggressor. They wanted to see a fight. As people started pushing and violent threats were hurled, Trevor was saying all the wrong things—the kind of defensive garbage that only fuels the confrontation. Boys shouted from the crowd, “Kick his ass!”
Without considering the social risk, I pushed my way past the pack and stepped between Trevor and Mr. Popular. I stuck my finger in Chip-or-Chador-Seth’s face and declared, “Stop!”
A kid with the chiseled features and glowing tan that seem to come with a moneyed background shouted from the herd, “Shut up, you f—ing hippie bitch!”
I stood my ground, squarely in front of Trevor, shielding him with the hard fact there is no social status to be gained from hitting a girl. The crowd disbanded.
Later that year, I saw an ambulance in front of the school. Down the main corridor, covered in bandages, came Trevor; he was being wheeled out by paramedics. Someone had cornered him in the locker room and beaten his head against the cement floor until he collapsed, bloody. The teacher who found him called 911.
A lot of us, when we were kids, couldn’t stand to see a starving stray cat. It’s not right, we’d think. Something has to be done. Then, somewhere