Indignities
in·dig·ni·ty
/inˈdiɡnədē/
noun
1. I lose my virginity just after my nineteenth birthday in the third bedroom of a rented house in Nashville. It’s around 3PM, reruns of Seinfeld playing on a small TV. The sex is underwhelming. My boyfriend’s roommate barges in immediately after: “Hey dude, can you do me a huge solid and drop me off at the airport in about thirty minutes?” My boyfriend responds, “Totally, bro. We’ll meet you downstairs.” And that’s how I ended up in the passenger seat with a sore vagina just thirty minutes after losing my much-talked-about virginity, listening to two dudes talk sports.
2. On my first day of class at the Sorbonne, I get lost and stumble into the classroom five minutes late for an 8AM class. When I walk in, I drop everything I’m carrying and just stand there. The professor turns to me, “Well, are you going to sit down or not?”
3. On July 4, 2011, I take too many Jello shots at a New Orleans house party. Someone has put a basket of Americana-themed temporary tattoos in the bathroom. My best friend and I cover our faces and bodies with eagles and American flag-patterned hearts. When my boyfriend picks me up after his bar shift, he does not find this cute or funny. I spend the next morning in his bathroom trying not to make any noise as I rub my skin raw with a washcloth. I emerge with clean skin, only a phantom outline of a heart on my right cheek.
4. Several months before my wedding, my sister-in-law organizes a big dinner to announce her second pregnancy. During a stunt to have us scratch off homemade lottery cards to reveal the baby’s gender, my eyes well up with tears. I am jealous and angry. I want my fiancé and I to have our moment of family spotlight. I want a baby. I want to accuse her of intentionally trying to outshine my wedding, but I know to do this would be seen as crazy. My almost father-in-law asks if I am okay.
5. On February 14, 2004, my mom dies in a car accident while driving home from a girls night out at the casino. I am absent from school for weeks after, but there is an overhead announcement made in my high school, informing the students of the death of their beloved elementary school secretary, my mother. I receive cards made out of huge pieces of white poster board, signed by kids I barely know.
6. My college boyfriend’s wealthy parents buy a large house in a gated neighborhood. They have a housekeeper and keep everything just so. One night at a sit-down dinner, I unexpectedly get my period and realize that I’ve bled all over the white dining room chair. Later that evening, I swap the chair I was sitting in with the one that my boyfriend was sitting in. A month later, I hear his mother on the phone saying, “I still have no idea what happened to that chair! I had to have it taken in to be re-covered.”
7. One weekend shortly before I flee New Orleans, I go out for drinks with my best friend. Several beers in, we see a giant roach scurrying around our feet and decide to teach it a lesson. We pepper-spray it. The roach walks off, unscathed. We both start coughing.
8. The professors in my French grad program announce to everyone how well we all did and that only one person had scored below a ninety—me, I find out later. My whole class speculates about who it is while I just shrug.
9. On a weekend visit to my dad’s house, I get my first UTI. I need to pee but there is no pee. I go downstairs, worried, and tell my dad about my symptoms while he drinks coffee before work. “You should go to the doctor, but I’m going to ask Carolyn to call you about it,” he says. And so my dad’s girlfriend explains to me, a twenty-four-year-old woman, what a UTI is and how I’d probably gotten it.
10. I have plans to stop by my work summer party in Park Slope and then go out to dinner with a guy I’ve just started seeing. I drink too much sangria and my phone dies, so I stumble around Williamsburg asking if anyone knows where to find the restaurant Sea. At dinner, I keep trying to arm wrestle my date, and on the train home I refuse to speak in English, only French. My now-husband says he felt really weird about taking me home, but he didn’t know what else to do with me.
11. At the fourth grade field day, I try to play it cool and dodge every possible activity that might involve looking goofy. Midday I sit in an ant bed and try to nonchalantly shrug off the fact that I have literal fire ants in my pants.
12. A boyfriend rents a hotel room in New Orleans for my birthday. Once we get there, in search of pain killers, he leaves me alone for several hours. When he returns, he says a friend had remarked to him how rude it was for him to leave me alone for so long on my birthday. I barely looked up from my book, not wanting to seem like I care too much.
13. The professor for my French to English translation class at the Sorbonne tells me to stay behind after class one day and then announces that he is going to fail me. “You can’t fail me,” I scoff. “English is MY first language.”
14. One Saturday I get up early to take a pregnancy test. It’s negative and I go to lay back down in bed to feel sorry for myself, but the exterminator buzzes our door and I have to hide, disheveled and tearful, in my own office with my snarling chihuahua.
15. My family is driving home from visiting my least favorite grandmother in Louisiana. I’m fourteen and sulky about not being allowed to listen to my Maroon 5 CD in our minivan. It escalates into an argument in which I end up sobbing and my dad turns to my mom with a look of disgust and says, “I can smell her.”
16. I date a coworker for a while and he brings another girl to our holiday party. A product manager I want to impress badly comforts me as I sit on the bathroom floor at Brooklyn Bowl, sobbing. Later that night, the coworker-ex drunkenly falls on me while trying to hug me goodnight and I start crying again.
17. The morning after my second miscarriage, I wake up to my chihuahua throwing up on my sweater. I cradle him to my chest as my husband tells me DO NOT freak out. Two hours and vomit all over the couch later, I am masked and gloved taking my beloved dog to the animal ER. I haven’t gotten into a cab since the beginning of the pandemic. My jeans are too tight and cutting into my waist. I am wearing a pad that feels like a diaper and still bleeding out the remnants of my pregnancy. “I was right to freak out,” I say nastily to my husband as we sat outside the animal ER, only to find out that our dog has a case of gastritis, or rather, upset tummy.
18. My dad allows me to go on a high school field trip to Italy. There are several juniors on the trip who are psyched to drink as soon as the chaperones are out of sight. One of them looks like Joaquin Phoenix, and after a few glasses of wine, he turns to me and says, “You’re that chick whose mom died and they announced it over the intercom, right?”
19. In the hospital after my second niece is born, I see my sister-in-law’s naked body, her stomach still bloated and round like there’s a baby inside, but the baby is on the outside. The baby still has blood in her hair. I want to throw up.
20. Two weeks before I move to New York, I spend an evening with my high school boyfriend. We go to a reading at the bookstore where I work, followed by drinks and more drinks with my friends. He holds my hand all night. When we leave to go home, he pulls me to him in his car and kisses me. We make out and he unzips his pants but then I start to cry, snot flowing from my nose and I can’t stop. The only words that I can manage are to remind him that someone we both vaguely knew had recently dropped dead at a party.
21. I buy myself a new bottle of Santal 33 for my wedding day. While I wait for my perfume to be bottled, I make conversation with the pretty girl behind the counter. She tells me that she’s writing a film script. I tell her I’m getting married next weekend. As I leave, she says, “Have a great wedding!” and I say, cheerfully, “You too!”