A PAINFUL VICTORY
After a 10-minute towel-and-water break, Julie and I come together on the grassy field and engage is a side-by-side headlock, with me to the right. My left arm is wrapped around Julie's neck, while my right arm reaches around and secures a tight grip on her left breast. My fingers sink in deep, and I can tell her chest is all-real, her growth in bust size since high school fully attributable to motherhood or some other hormonal cause. Julie's left hand is painfully clawing and gouging my right breast.
During the fistfight portion of our battle we were eerily quiet and wordless, but already we are shouting out in painful protest at the dirty tactics the other is employing. Stumbling along the pockmarked ground surface, our sneakers tripping over each other, our upper bodies remain locked side by side as our arms struggle to squeeze each others' air passages. Kendra and Renee shout encouragement at us, perceiving the closeness of the contest and eagerly anticipating its continuation.
Lightheaded from pain, I trip on a hole on the grassy field, falling in a tumble, but instinctively maintaining my balance by keeping my headlock gripped onto Julie. After a 540-degree barrell roll on the ground, Julie is on her back, and I have mounted her at the hips. With my torso lokking down at her, she brings both of her arms up and double fists both of my breasts, alternating between kneading and tugging at them, each motion generating in my varying types of excruciating pain. I respond by attacking her unprotected chest in a reciprocal manner.
After what seemed like a prolonged period in me pinning, but was probably at most a minute, I could perceive Julie's grip on my chest weakening. Even though we had an intermission between the two phases of our fight, the 15 minutes of exchanging blows hsd exacted a great price in muscle fatigue on our weary arms. With me pinning Julie, gravity was working to my advantage, and I was destined to prevail in any endurance contest, which is what this had now become. The fight was out of Julie, and unlike Danielle, I was too sporting to continue a fight against an opponent who wasn't fighting back.
> Get off, Stephanie.
> Do you give?
> Just get off.
> Do you give, bitch?
> Yes, just get off.
> Yes....what?
> Yes, I give, Stephanie.
Kendra gives me a tearful hug. We can hear in the background the Memorial Day parade ending. We better get out of here before we get noticed. Or before Kendra and Renee start fighting.
Kendra and I go home and turn on the TV. It's only 10 in the morning--what are we going to do all day. She lays next to me on the couch, but everywhere she touches me hurts. I remember girlfights breaking out at OA dances over boys--did the winners of those fights face the same problem? not being able to physically enjoy the fruits of their victory? Or was the fight between Julie and md more physical than any of those OA fights?
I think about hearing Julie give to me on the grass this morning. I'm more satisfied than ever with myself that Danielle never heard those words from me. Then again, maybe she knew I would never say them, so she didn't even bother trying.
I still don't know--7 months after it happened, in Octber 2016--if Danielle destroyed my condo before she beat me up or after. If she did it after, than she's even more sadistic than I imagined. How can a woman like her, with those urges inside of her, work a 9to5 job for 25 years in business.
Why hasn't she run into someone yet to put her in her place? Someone to take her down a peg?
Maybe she has. Maybe that person is me.
My hand finds the one part of my body not punched or mauled or scratched this morning by Julie--underneath my cutoff jeans. I picture myself going into Danielle's house, invited by her husband. I picture he and I stealing an afternoon of adulterous pleasure, me inviting him to do to my body whatever Danielle doesn't let him do to her anymore. We take in the variety of each others' bodies, and the sweet release of no-strings-attached sex. Suddenly, Danielle's car is audible in the garage, followed by her feet approaching up the stairs. "Why are you home?", she cries out, curiously but insistently to her husband of over 15 years.
She comes into the bedroom and sees me. Naked, in her bed. The cat-that-ate-the-canary grin on my face enrages her. We lock stares. She tells her husband to leave, and to not return until tonight. He dresses, and we hear his car leave.
Danielle and I have unfinished business. And a history--we don't fight in pre-defined "rings", in structured "rounds", like Julie and I did this morning. Fights between Danielle and I are wars, with no rules, and the entire building we're in is "in bounds". It's like hide-and-seek, with no boundaries, when you were eight--if you can walk there, you can hide there.
Danielle and I are alone in her house for the entire afternoon. We're thinking aboug how to worst hurt each other. Her outfit has a belt--she removes it, swinging it threateningly, the buckle directed at my head. I stand and grab the reading lamp from the end table, tearing thd cord out of the wall, throwing off the lampshade, and pointing the end of the lamp with the bulb in Danielle's direction.
I fantasize to Danielle and I fighting like that all over her house for an entire afternoon.
Kendra is lying across from me on the couch, touching herself too, remembering Julie and me fighting earlier this morning. It occurs to me, lying here now, that: If I had stood up to Julie at gym class in 1983, and she and I had fought at school, I would have come home, bruised, to this house, and plopped myself on a couch in this very living room. Instead of Kendra comforting me and keeping me company, it would have been my mom. Promising to talk to the school and smooth over the academic impact of any suspension. Promising to tell Julie's mom that Julie is a year older than me and better back off. Telling me she was proud of me for sticking up for myself.
And, perhaps, that day, in this room, she would have told me HER catfight story. The "real women fight hand-to-hand" story, in 1983, instead of where and when I actually did end up hearing it, later that week in 2017, when I tracked down one of "the ladies" from Weston RC, who told it to me.
My mom turned 18 and graduated high school in Boston on the same day in 1954. She was going to attend college at Vasser in the fall, do to toughen her up for the rigors of college life, she was sent to spend the summer at an equestrian camp in Roanoke, Virginia. My mom caught the attention of one of the boy counsellors there, and was bullied for it by a snooty girl camper who had her eyes on him, who was attending Radcliffe in the fall. Towards the end of summer, the girl cornered my mom in an isolated barn at the edge of camp, and tossed a horeswhip and riding gloves on the ground, challenging my mom to a fight , with the whips as weapons. My mom, unflappable as always, then uttered her famous, "I was raised with the belief that real women fight hand-to-hand." She and the Radcliffe girl then fought with fists until they were found by ranch hands, and were both expelled forever from the camp, a girl-on-girl fistfight offensive to the Victorian sensibilities of 1954 America.
Why had my mom never told me that story? Was she trying to not glamorize it, so as to shield me from girlfighting?
The dangers or girlfighting?
Or the thrills? The all-consuming urge to seek out a girlfight?
Because, that's what I had now.
An all-consuming urge to fight Danielle.
Hand-to-hand.
To be continued....
