Womanhood

Is Carolyn Keene more than the sum total
of her flat arches and brow lines?
More than Clairol red, number 952,
self-assurance in a cardboard box?
I thought as much as a child.
Nine and ten and eleven…
Reading cover to cover every Nancy Drew mystery
in what seemed like flashes of time.

Keene’s creation, intrepid girl detective,
carried me through many a green
awkward is the night. Before long,
my attention shifted to more pressing matters like

Disco, Rock n’ Roll, Hollywood, Malibu
Barbie even had an incarnation as rocket scientist.
Eleven, twelve, thirteen…
In what other scenario could I study
a woman’s figure? I needed to know
what to do with what, and when to do it.

And though she lacked anatomic reality,
I learned feminine direction of a grander sort:
when to cry in front of Ken to get your way,
when to lean in too close, when to whisper,
when to let your gazes linger.

While peers moved on to real romance,
I still indulged in make-believe. And though eventually
my fealty was packed away in the attic,
that tendency lingered in which I fantasized the ideal,
never wasting a precious moment
on what was merely possible.

I had loved Robert, Don, Eddie. Adored them.
And as my hormones started throwing themselves
against metaphoric walls, I dreamt of these males
on a moonlit canopy bed, indulging in the impossible.
Not with me, not even with each other,
but with 21st century woman, ideal woman, perfect
“me,” version two-thousand one-hundred twenty
point-oh.

By the end of junior-high, I began to
re-acquaint myself with the lovely flippancy
betwixt author and character. Salinger had Holden Caulfield. Moriarty
ran circles ’round Keruoac. Irving’s Garp got him into
all sorts of trouble.

Meanwhile, this was all to know of womanhood:
heroines like Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore.

The r sounds in each of their names
resolute, ready, rolling like the rumblings
of a standoff-ish purebred.
Nevermind Ryan’s impossibly wholesome image,
or that Roberts’ husband was married when they met,
even Barrymore, addled, ill it seemed, for a time.

Pink, cotton candy, matinee women.
Skinny, tall, ‘made to complete men’ women.
Big smiles, eyes a warm, approachable brown.
Boobs big enough to satisfy but not
enough to threaten.