My Favorite Girl
The night my girlfriend gently dismantled my vocabulary
I left the office late and starving, already mourning the dinner waiting for me at home. Cold bread. The great German tragedy you eat standing over the sink, telling yourself this is fine.
Then Lisa texted. Three words. “Hurry up here.” No hint, no mercy, no promise of anything better than the bread.
So I dragged myself over expecting nothing. Instead I walked into a surprise: Chinese food, still steaming, ordered in secret while I was on the train pitying myself.
I sat down and said the most loving thing I could think of.
“You are my favorite girl.”
Lisa set down her chopsticks. “I am not a girl. Are you a boy?”
“What is wrong with girl? I meant it as a compliment. I thought it might make you feel younger.”
“I know you mean well. But girl was used, for a very long time, to keep grown women small. Junior. Manageable. You would never call your male boss a good boy for closing a deal.”
I paused, because she was right, and I hate being ambushed by a point before my food gets cold.
“Fine,” I said. “Then you call me your boy.”
“I could. But if I tell people Srini is my boy, everyone will assume you are my son.”
“Or your dog.”
“Or my dog,” she agreed, far too quickly.
So there it was. In one sentence I had been demoted from boyfriend to child, and from child to a medium-sized cute rescue animal.
“Just because a word is established,” she said, “does not mean we follow it off a cliff.”
This is the thing about Lisa. She studied linguistics, so she does not only teach me German, she teaches me my own borrowed English too. She never argues to win. She argues so you leave the table smarter than you sat down, which is far more annoying than simply losing.
I decided to fight back with vocabulary. “What about hysterical? I call your jokes hysterical. That is high praise.”
“Look up where it comes from.”
I googled, right there, holding a dumpling like courtroom evidence. Hysterical comes from the ancient Greek word (hystera) for uterus. For two thousand years, doctors decided that whenever a woman had any feeling at all, her womb had simply wandered off somewhere in her body and started causing trouble.
An entire human emotion, invented and filed under female malfunction.
“So when I call your joke hysterical,” I said slowly, “I am technically blaming your organs.”
“Now you are getting it.”
I looked down at my noodles. I no longer trusted a single word I owned.
“There is one word, though, that you may keep,” she said.
“Anything. Name it.”
“I like it when you call me bitch.”
I nearly inhaled the dumpling of evidence.
“It is endearing,” I said carefully. “At least it is meant to be.”
“It is. The beautiful part is nobody should be insulted by son of a bitch either. A bitch, back in the day, was a profession. Same as doctor. Same as lawyer.”
“Nobody storms out over son of a doctor.”
“Exactly. So even if my mother had that profession. Fine. Honest work. The person you should insult is the john. The man who pays money, shamelessly, to treat a woman like a thing he ordered. Son of a john. That is the real crime.”
I sat there quietly, holding cold noodles, the least surprising thing in the room.
I had come over expecting bread and silence. Instead I got dinner, a seminar in Greek medicine, and a full renovation of my dictionary, delivered by a teacher this smart and this good-looking at the same time. I am an absurdly lucky man.
“You know,” I said, “you really are my favorite...”
I stopped. Her eyebrow had already begun its slow, editorial climb.
“...woman,” I finished.
She smiled. The smile you give a student who finally, finally understood the assignment.
I was so proud of my girl.
Woman.
I will get there. She is not a patient teacher, which is exactly why the lessons stick.
I intend to keep her far, far longer than I will ever keep any word.
That was “hilarious”! I hope that doesn’t have any damaging meaning!