Cool

I'm seated in the Guthrie on a Wednesday night, about to be up way past my bedtime and risking severe sleepiness on the long drive home.The play starts and before I know it, I'm swept up, watching her and holding my breath as she utters some of my favorite lines from any play. 

The raven himself is hoarse/that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/under my battlements. Come, you spirits/that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full /of direst cruelty! 

You're not supposed to like Lady Macbeth. You're not supposed to find her in any way appealing or sympathize with her in meaningful way. She's a foil for Macbeth, an illustration of what goes awry when a woman takes ambition into her head.

I can't help it. Despite the fact that she's a complete and utter sociopath I adore her. I feel for her. I want her to make it through the play alive. I have more sympathy for her than I ever had for Juliette or Ophelia or Lady Anne. I was always annoyed by those women in my high school English classes and being an opinionated, brainy, snotty high school student I made sure that my English teachers knew how spineless I found them. In one paper I wondered "Does Shakespeare hate women? Because his lady characters suck."

My grade on that paper wasn't great.

***

I read the novel Gone Girl in five hours. 

Snuggled up in my armchair in January, I ripped through the entire novel in the course of an evening. It was exactly the right book for that month. Not terribly emotionally taxing, thrilling, with enough twists and turns to keep even me guessing. But what made me love the novel, what pushed it from "this book is great" to "I'm completely fucking obsessed with this book and I will not stop until everyone in my life has read it" was the that there are no heroes in the book. 

Let me say that again, it's a mystery without a Single. Solitary. Hero. 

Combined with its myriad unreliable narrators, and the brilliant Amy, the novel is probably one of my all time, top ten favorite books. Honestly, I can't say enough good things about it. Except that I think that it might be the kind of book that connects with, well, ladies. And I don't say that because the main and most sympathetic character is a woman. I say it because there are two or so pages around the 220 page mark that  cold-cocked me. 

Men always mean it as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind. I'm a cool girl. [ . . .] Oh, and if you're not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn't want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version--maybe he's a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he's a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed  bespectacled nerd who loves comics.  There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn't ever complain. 

In my copy of Gone Girl, this passage is is marked, starred, the page is dogeared, despite the fact that the diatribe is uttered by a(nother) complete and total sociopath. A villain of the first order. The rest of the book hasn't been marked.

***

The hardest part about dating isn't what you think it is.

It's not meeting people. It's not constantly lowering your expectations. It's not making small talk with three different guys on three different dates in the same week. It's not worrying about how the dress you're wearing makes you look. It's not wondering if it's impolite to see if the guy picks up the check or running to the bathroom to make sure that you don't have lipstick on your teeth or waiting to see if he calls you. 

Yeah. Legit(ish) concerns, but those aren't the worst part. The worst part is trying to keep yourself from faking the Cool Girl. I'm serious. It sounds dramatic, and it's possible that I'm being dramatic because it's February and I'm having my annual bout of winter madness and the universe keeps sucker punching me and someone recently ripped my goddamn heart out of my chest and did the fucking tarantella on it, but after ten years of dating, I'm convinced I'm right.

Over the summer I went on a date with a perfectly nice guy in the North Country. We were out for coffee, talking about the new Batman movie, the pros and cons of it and he was enthusing over Anne Hathaway (vomit) as Catwoman. I couldn't help it. I honestly could not help myself. I snarkily commented "Yeah. Just once I wish they could give us a Catwoman who wasn't doing backflips in stilettos."

We never had a second date.

The Cool Girl is so fucking easy. She's convenient and uncomplicated and it's tempting to pretend to be her instead of the person I actually am. The occasionally hotheaded, relentlessly ambitious girl with the sometimes inconvenient  loudmouthed feminism. The girl who sometimes gets a black thundercloud over her head for days, is deeply skeptical of children, and holds herself and everyone around her to a level of perfection that's unreasonable. The girl who despite her best efforts, still does not look like Christina Hendricks. The girl who eventually has to disclose to her romantic interests that she has obsessive compulsive disorder and should they someday get to a point where they start considering children they might want to consider adoption because this shit is genetic.

It would be so much easier to stop asking why there are so few kickass female characters in X-Men.

***

You know who was a Cool Girl? Juliette. "Kill my cousin, spirit me off to a wedding after two days, and oh yeah the priest conducting the whole thing is a goddamn idiot with a dumbass plan, and then, Romeo, take my v-card (my only real currency in this world), cock up said dumbass plan and, yeah, I'll kill myself."

Cool Girl.

Or Lady Anne. "Oh, hey, hunchback with a withered arm who killed my husband and my father-in-law whose casket I'm currently following to the cemetery. What's that? Repartee! The knowledge that you did this all for the love of me? Of course I'll marry you despite the fact that I know you're are murdering son of a bitch."

Cool Girl.

Or Ophelia, so sassy and so promising in the first third of the play. "Hamlet, you sent me a cryptic note, killed my father and faked being a crazy person just to find out of if your uncle killed your father. And I have Daddy issues? Oh, sure. You're right. I might as well go crazy and jump in the river."

Cool Girl.

I like Lady M. I like (and sympathize with) her ambition and to a certain extent, her ruthlessness. Her inability to let her boring, complacent husband keep her from realizing her ambitions. I like that when she goes crazy, she has a good reason for going crazy. Unrequited love, *blows raspberry.* Try high treason and homicide. I like the fact that she's not an easy character, that you can't just love her because her actions are so abhorrent, but you (I) can't entirely hate her either because she's a real, complicated character. And, yes, saying that your favorite Shakespearean character is Lady Macbeth and that your favorite passage from recent literature is a giant fuck-off to men with unrealistic expectations and the girls who fake personalities and perpetuate those expectations probably isn't, you know, great on a dating website. And it goes without saying that I'm not promoting either high treason or homicide, especially as a way of starting your career.

In the end, I don't know what liking these characters and hating Cool Girls means. Probably nothing. Maybe that I'm just angry about getting my heart stomped again and feeling more cynical than usual. Maybe that I'm unwilling to throw ambition and drive to the wayside just to land a signif. Maybe that I have really fucking good taste in villains. Maybe it's late and I'm tired and it's best just to close up shop and go to bed.

First I think I'll have a glass of warm milk. Laced with human kindness.