I Was Taught to Be Unmovable. I Still Haven’t Moved in Years.

“I didn’t learn composure. I learned how to hold my face when I wanted to scream.”

At my aunt’s dining table, the women never raised their voices. They could be called a bitch at a dinner party and keep chewing. They could be called a whore in front of their coworkers and fold a piece of paper in half and ask nothing.

I was taught, from roughly the age of seven, that this was the whole point of being a woman in my family. What they all agreed on: stillness when everything around you is falling apart is the real prize.

By the time I was thirteen, I could be told my parents were getting divorced in the same breath as someone asking me to pass the salt, and I would pass the salt. My aunts would exchange glances over my head — the kind of glance that means good, she is becoming a woman. Nobody checked whether I wanted to become one.

I’m thirty-six now, and I’m still passing the salt — I passed it last week at my mother-in-law’s house, I passed it through the entire meal.

I’ve avoided writing this for ten years. And then there was Mia.

Mia was the kind of woman who made you feel like a child just by entering a room. Not because she was beautiful, though she was. It was the stillness. The way she would sit at a dinner party and you would feel, somehow, that the room was being held together by her posture alone.

A few years ago, she was co-hosting a corporate gala. Black-tie. The kind of event where your dress cost more than your rent and whether you smiled right could make or break your career. She and her co-host, Teresa, had both chosen floor-length gowns, deep emerald, almost identical cuts. I remember the small zipper pull on Teresa’s gown catching the light every time she moved.

Twenty minutes before they were due on stage, Teresa rushed over, breathless. Mia. Mia. Your hem. Someone stepped on it. There’s this huge gray smudge across the train.

Mia looked up from her compact mirror. She was finishing her lipstick, a nude shade she’d had for ten years. The cap of Mia’s lipstick had a faint scratch on it, a tiny crescent shape, the kind of mark things get when they’ve been carried around in the bottom of a purse for a decade. She held the wand steady, capped it, set it down. Then she said: Teresa. It’s the hem. Nobody walks behind the host. It’s not a thing. As if she’d explained this a thousand times before.

Teresa actually grabbed the lipstick out of her hand. Are you hearing me? It looks awful.

Mia took the lipstick back. I hear you. It’s still the hem. She put the lipstick in her clutch. Zipped it.

She walked on stage. Delivered the entire program. Smiled at all the right moments. When she came off, an hour and a half later, the smudge was still there, caked and obvious, dragging along the floor like a small animal had died on her dress. She had decided, somewhere in that thing her mother drilled into her, that reacting to it would cost more than wearing it.

I asked her once why she didn’t just go change. I’d had two glasses of wine by that point.

She looked at me for a long moment. Behind her, on the kitchen counter, the takeout containers were still sitting out from earlier. Someone had put a fork in the lo mein and not closed the box. She looked at me, and I could see Mia’s jaw working before she spoke — this little sideways motion, like she was moving something around in there she didn’t want to swallow.

Listen. If I changed, I’d have had to think about why it mattered that I changed. And I don’t want to think about it. That’s the whole trick. You stop thinking about it and then it’s just the hem.

I don’t know if that’s wisdom. I think it might actually be a confession.

I think about a different friend sometimes. One who worked, for years, in a place I will not name. A factory. A dorm. The kind of all-female workspace where everyone knows everyone’s bra size.

She told me once that a woman in her unit, a coworker she had never spoken to, had spent weeks loudly bragging about her romantic conquests on the production floor. My friend, June, had made the mistake, once, in a half-whisper, of telling her actual friend don’t worry about it, just leave her alone. The woman overheard. Began, the next morning, to scream at June in front of the entire dormitory. Calling her names I will not type. Names about her body, her age, her fertility, her dead mother.

June’s friend, Mara, stood up immediately. Don’t you dare talk to her like that. Say it again, I swear,

June reached up and pulled Mara gently back onto the bunk. There was a sock on the floor between the bunks, white with a navy stripe at the top. I don’t know why I see that sock every time I think about this story. June shook her head. Once. Almost imperceptibly.

The woman kept screaming. June sat on her mattress and slowly folded a shirt. Then another. Then she was aligning the shoes under the bed frame, toe to heel, the way her mother taught her at six. The woman screamed until her voice gave out. Then she left. The fluorescent tube above June’s bunk flickered once, the way they do when wiring is bad, and stayed on.

When she was gone, Mara turned to June. Why didn’t you let me say something. She just called you every name in the book. June, she just. In front of everyone.

June looked up. This is what she said, words that stayed with me:

If a dog barks at you, what, you bark back?

It came out tired. Not triumphant. Not wise. Tired, the way a thing is tired when you’ve said it to yourself so many times it isn’t even a thought anymore. It’s just your mouth moving.

And Mara nodded, because what else are you going to do. Everyone in my friend’s telling of it breathed out, and they felt a little proud of June, and they didn’t think about it after. That’s the part that wrecks me.

Where did it all go. It didn’t evaporate into the air-conditioned dorm. It sank into the mattress with the folded shirts. Or it got swallowed, held somewhere in the jaw until the jaw learned to lock.

I know only that at thirty-six, I am writing about two women I knew in my twenties because I still haven’t swallowed the fact that we were trained, from birth, to take whatever was thrown at us and arrange it neatly on a shelf. We have never, not once, been permitted to ask why am I arranging this. Whose shelf is this.

But.

I haven’t screamed in a public place since I was eleven. Last spring, a man at a conference dinner told me I was surprisingly articulate for a woman my size, and I thanked him for the observation. When my ex told me, three months into our relationship, that the reason he had cheated was that I was too composed in bed, too still, too controlled, too afraid of being witnessed, I nodded. I asked him if he wanted pasta, then I made him pasta, the water took longer than usual to boil that night, I stood in the kitchen watching the pot for what felt like a long time. The radiator clicked. The window was still open from earlier.

I know what composure costs. I’m not sure who I am without it. I think she has a louder laugh.

This is the part I cannot resolve. I’ve read the books about anger. They all sound so sure of themselves. I never am. Somewhere between the girl who learned to pass the salt and the woman typing this sentence, I lost the original impulse. The first want to yell, really yell, the ugly kind. I don’t have that want anymore. Or I don’t have it where I can find it.

And in the meantime I’m left with this, the cold, immaculate thing I was trained to call elegance. The porcelain stillness I wear like the smudge on Mia’s gown. Visible, if you know where to look. Dragging behind me into rooms I was supposedly invited into.

So I guess what I’m asking is a question I don’t have an answer for:

Was the composure the point. Was it the thing that kept us alive in rooms that didn’t want us.

Or was it the slow generational thing, woman to woman, mother to daughter, aunt to niece, that taught us the cost of being allowed in the room was never letting them see you move.

And if that’s what it was, then what are we supposed to do now. I don’t know. Maybe we just move, even if no one calls it anything.

I’m still passing the salt, my jaw hurts, it’s late, there’s nothing else here, I checked.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.