When I was a high school freshman, someone called my house’s landline at 2am on a Saturday morning. The ringing in my parents’ room woke me, and my stomach instantly dropped. I thought my grandmother was dead.
I could hear my mother moving quickly down the hall to my bedroom. She knocked curtly before entering and savagely flipping on the light. Clutching the cordless phone to her chest, she whisper-shouted: “There’s a young woman asking for you! I think she’s in trouble!”
At one of her NOW meetings, my mother had underwent past-life regression therapy and learned she’d once been a shero of epic proportions. She knew this because during her session she saw herself dressed in queenly furs, leading a large group of women and children across a Siberian tundra to shelter.
Might it now be my turn to lead? She passed me the phone with raised eyebrows, clearly stunned and a little thrilled that someone had chosen to call upon her mopey 14-year-old in their hour of need. Were her efforts to raise a wise, compassionate, feminist daughter already receiving recognition in the local adolescent community?
She lingered at my bedside waiting to escort my charge and me to an ER for a rape kit, a 24-hour drugstore for a pregnancy test or, at the very least, a Denny’s where I could console and advise this desperate soul over a Grand Slam. She nodded at me encouragingly.
“Hello?” I said.
“I hear you’ve been talking to my man,” said a girl obviously attempting to disguise her voice by lowering her pitch.
“Huh?” I kept my voice neutral, but I could already feel my face getting hot. My mother began gesturing frantically, so I motioned for her to leave. She threw her hands up in mock surrender and backed out of my room, gently closing the door behind her.
“You better stay away from my man,” the girl continued.
“Who is this?” I asked, though I already knew who it was, and she was no friend of mine.
“You better know who this is.” I could hear muffled giggling in the background, and it all made sense. A slumber party had reached its bold climax, and this girl had been dared to crank call her worst enemy… me.
“Who’s your man?” I humored her.
“You better know who my man is.” She and her coven of pubescent witches erupted into unbridled cackling.
I licked my lips, inspiration taking hold. I had, by far, the foulest mouth of all my friends and foes. Once again, I’d been summoned to dive into my deep catalog of derogatory terms for women. And I planned to deliver.
“You whore.” I began with a classic before forging ahead with every heinous slur I could conjure. It took some time as there were so many words to denote a promiscuous, subhuman female — possibly even more words than Eskimos had for snow.
Indeed, attaining my level of expertise was no easy feat. This was pre-Internet, so I had to earn my extravagant vocabulary the old-fashioned way. I religiously read profane library books, snuck into R-rated movies, listened to CDs with “Parental Advisory” labels at Tower Records listening stations, and kept a fine-tuned ear to the streets.
My opponent managed to land a feeble “bitch” here and there but was woefully outmatched. When I finally realized I was wasting my talent on this half-witted hussy, I concluded my impromptu address with my signature “Eat me, trollop” and hung up.
I triumphantly flung open my bedroom door to return the phone to its cradle and found my stricken mother standing there in the dark.
“Who was that?” she demanded.
“I don’t know, some dumb skank.”
“So that’s how you speak to women?”
I shrugged.
“Disgusting.” She snatched the phone from me and disappeared down the hall.
A few hours later at breakfast, my mother continued to berate me for my despicable language while also presenting a litany of excuses for my harasser’s behavior.
Maybe this girl actually needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it, she suggested. Maybe she wanted to be my friend. Or maybe she even had a schoolgirl crush on me.
I quickly tired of this dizzy broad carrying on as if that rank ho contained multitudes. “No, Mom,” I rolled my eyes at her naïveté. “She’s just a plain ol’ bitch.”
My mother sighed. Maybe so, she conceded. But what had possessed me to speak so deplorably?
I knew there was only one way to end this: I told her I’d gotten angry and blacked out, the temporary insanity defense. She seemed satisfied. I wasn’t a misogynist, just a hothead.
Sunday morning, as a peace offering, my mother said she was taking me to my favorite breakfast buffet. But, instead, she shepherded me to an anger management workshop filled with red-faced, middle-aged men likely in attendance under court order.
It wasn’t too terrible, we mostly just worked on breathing techniques. And it was there, while closing my eyes and holding my breath, that I was able to regress into the past. I saw my mother! It was just as she’d said: She was in her stately furs leading us across that frigid tundra. But it was not to safety. This treacherous wench was leading us all to the Gulag.