My Mother Says My Father Saw Me In A Towel by Lizzie Lawson
Managing editor Dacia Price on today’s short: In this close read of the female body as site of collision, Lizzie Lawson offers up seeing—through the mitigated male gaze of internalized misogyny—judgements of propriety, morality, and shame. In this delicate rendering of a benign witnessing, a body becomes something other, something to be hidden away, to be feared; a bastion of essential female badness that Lawson wants to subvert. You are good, Lawson tells us. You are good. You are good.
my mother says my father saw me in a towel
She confronts me in the kitchen of the cabin we’ve stayed in three summers now—family reunion on a Minnesota lake, sun-soaked cousins catching frogs on the beach, and my mother. I don’t know what she’s talking about, at first, don’t remember walking two steps from the bathroom to the bedroom I share with my sister after showering lake water off with hard water. I’d only been thinking of the humidity, especially of that sunken-floor bathroom, drops on wood panels, wrung bathing suits above the toilet, and the thin already-damp towel I wrapped myself in. And my father had seen. And the night before they snapped at me and my brothers to go to bed before the movie was over, turned off all the lights, and minutes later sounds were coming from their room, and it embarrassed me because my boyfriend could hear from the futon downstairs. I didn’t know anyone saw, I tell her, and I keep my face blank because even though I’m old enough to live on my own I’ve found myself under my parents’ roof again. What if it had been an uncle, my mother asks, or a cousin, who saw? What if the priest casually strolled through the screen door to grab cards for euchre only to be confronted by my bare calves and hair dripping? Her jaw is fixed like I always pull shit like this. I didn’t think anyone would see, I say again. I’d been trying so hard to be good. I wore shorts over my swimsuit, brought the children inside for prayers, didn’t stick my opinion where it wasn’t wanted. I tried to be the model oldest daughter, but now I’m pulled back to the girls I sat by in high school modesty talks and the church basement that stunk of mildew, the girls who wore rompers to class only to have the administrator take photographs, front and back, before making them change. I wasn’t thinking, I say. There’s desperation in my voice. I want to go back to those girls and tell them, you are good, as many times as it takes to hear.
Lizzie Lawson is an essayist and fiction writer from Minneapolis, MN, with publications in The Rumpus, The Sun, Wigleaf, Redivider, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and more. She received an MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University and can be found on socials @lizziemlawson and at lizzielawson.com.
