Her Shining Splendor

Melanie found the romance novel her mother wrote in a filing cabinet when she was 11 years old. She was looking for a piece of paper on which to take notes about Davy Crockett and instead saw the ream of dot-matrix paper closely marked with phrases that would never leave her. His rough hands pulling her close. His hot breath on her neck. Their impossible embrace. Her silken folds. Shudder and collapse. She understood enough about those vowels and those consonants, which read so raw together, to know she shouldn’t look at it. Her cheeks were flushed. Just like the heroine.

She started devouring romance novels, 600-page bodice-rippers with heroines coyly validating she-was-asking-for-it. There were thousands in the house, chronologically hidden away in plastic bins — too silly to give away, too useless to sell, and too wasteful to toss. The Christmas when she was 12, Melanie dug out every single one of them and made a spreadsheet, organized by nom de plume. Trisha Alexander, Jennifer Ashley, Penny Leigh, Amanda Chance. Her mother was awed by her daughter’s effort and by her assumptions. She waited a year to sell them in lots on eBay. Melanie burned with resolve to better empathize. Acts of love denied are maddening catalysts.

Melanie was 13 when she menstruated for the first time. She had lived the charmed and bloodless lives of concubines and orphans of the Ottoman Empire and Plains Indian tribes and the British Regency and knew exactly nothing about how to really feel about what was happening to her. The school nurse let her nap and read in the clinic for the next few days, and Melanie took the time to journal. For her, this was a time of reflection and empowerment and Simone de Beauvoir. Blooming buzzing confusion. Great and small born of woman. More in a sigh than a sermon. Soon enough she’d moved on to writing romances starring herself and a quarterback, one letter of his named changed. The tell-tale heart on college rule beat inside her locker until it was swiped one day and read aloud in gym class.

It was less than six months later when the quarterback’s next-door neighbor slid his hand down her pants while Homeward Bound 2 played across a screen in a dark basement. The water heater flipped on and the dogs were unintelligible and she stayed as stiff as she could. It was not a Spanish galleon lit by the dying rays of summer sun, and the three-time spelling-bee champion with too-long fingernails and too-apologetic smiles was no brigand. The next time he came over Melanie left the light on and found a way to sit on the far side of the couch. Shame and fear sat in her stomach when she should have felt mastery and power. Her fertility was a dark force poised to consume her. Her life had no place on the page.

She was 15 when he spent 45 completely unmemorable seconds inside her that she would never be able to forget.

Being a woman is being disappointed.