sullen

There is what looks like a French-Canadian family on the train this morning, one father wearing a very thin wedding band, so thin I can’t tell whether it’s silver or gold, and four children. There are three girls, all with the same low-slung, almond-shaped blue eyes and upturned mouths; one is a teenager close to adulthood, sitting quietly with her legs crossed and her stare fixed forward; another is a teenager close to childhood; and the third is a child who at present sits with her head tilted rightward into her father’s lap, legs in dingy cream-colored corduroys wrapped around the middle post of the bench seat, her thumb in her mouth, too old to still be doing this by any developmental standards but so content and comforted I can’t imagine anyone would dare take the finger out from between her lips. There is a boy, too, but this morning I am not interested in him. In fact, I am interested almost exclusively in the middle daughter, and in the contrast between her and each of her sisters.

Standing up from her place next to her father and walking to the post in the middle of the car, still within his eyesight and earshot but too far to be touched or fixated upon, then walking back to sit across from him and then, finally, after two stops, getting up again and sitting reluctantly next to him, her sneakered feet propped up on the seat in front of her, knees bent at chin height, she is an unwitting stand-in for the hand-off moment between childhood and adulthood. She’s not a child anymore, can’t unabashedly lean into comfort and self-soothing like her younger sister; nor is she anywhere close to an adult, can’t yet try on the cool detachment of someone about to receive the burden of independence. I can’t help but think she looks sullen, trapped inside of a gender she didn’t choose or have anything to do with building, handed an identity she’ll have to spend years figuring out what to do with. It’s not fair what we do to women, and at no point is that more visible than in the moment, laden with unhappiness, that a girl stops being a child.