What Power

by Beth Ward

My father’s was the first male body I noticed. He wasn’t tall or big, but he was everywhere, so much of him in every room of our house. His body filled each doorway. His rage echoed off the bathroom walls, spilled out into the kitchen, sloshed over the tops of tumblers filled with Canadian Club whiskey. It swirled through the vents like air. 

On Sundays, when he sat in his brown recliner in the living room, my father became a center of gravity, his limbs flooding out over its seat and sides like a dare. Sundays were for the races and no one was allowed to change the channel. 

I watched him grip the handles of skillets full of scrambled eggs with his meaty palms on Saturday mornings, his fury leaving fingerprints. I watched him lay his legs like logs across couches too small to contain him. And when I was little, I would rest my head on his chest, looking out across its vastness like the sky. 

His death was galactic, too. 

I learned about it on a sunny, clear day in the middle of a Georgia summer. Rumor was congestive heart failure, complicated by diabetes, complicated by alcoholism. A body under siege. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, and I’ve never seen the death certificate. But when I found out he died on that bright June morning, he instantly became a monolith. 

Not even death could make him small. No, now he was quantum. I, meanwhile, was reduced by half. 

What luxury a male body affords. The promise of power. What he is capable of doing to you. 

I keep catching myself looking at men’s bodies. I watch the way their big shoes plod heavy against the concrete, the earth, the kitchen tile. Each step so sure. I catch myself glimpsing their thick, veined forearms hanging haphazardly out of driver side windows on the freeway, cigarettes dangling from fat fingers. I notice the way men move both forward and laterally. Up and out, the way a flower might bloom. An unwelcome palm spreading across a lower back, say, or a lap splayed open in a seat on the train. 

Wideness and girth are tenets in these bodies, enabling men to part seas of people like water, on sidewalks and in the cereal aisle at the grocery store. This width is cosmic, holy. 

How lucky for them, that most men are so often unaware of their own physicality. What freedom. 

John Berger spends much of his seminal 1972 book Ways of Seeing explaining the ways in which women are seen. How men get the privilege of observing, while women must endure being observed. “Men look at women,” Berger writes. “Women watch themselves being looked at.” 

I suppose in that way, then, all my staring at men has been a kind of rebellion. 

Sitting in the library the other day, for example, I was clinically aware of each move I made. Every paper I rustled echoed against the sacred silence of the room. So I tried to move less, be smaller. Then a man stormed into the main reading room, dragging a chair across the floor, disrupting the molecules in the air, rearranging sound and space with his arrival. His bag spilled open, sending books and keys tumbling out defiantly onto the table. He was an opus of disruption, loud but not sorry. No one else even looked up. I was the lone observer. 

What a feeling it must be to have a body that doesn’t constantly feel like a mirror, a negotiation, an apology. 

Berger wrote, too, that “A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies…A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you.” 

What he is capable of doing to you. 

The landscape of men’s shoulders, mountain ranges of muscles taking up whole slices of wall as you both wait in line for the bathroom—is that what Berger means? Is it the way that some men don’t say “excuse me,” the way that they ask “how old are you?” with their whole bodies instead of just their mouths. Is it the way that you can just feel it, that dangerous, tenuous distance, when a certain kind of man stands behind you at the gas station register as you wait to pay for your smartwater and Takis? Suddenly, you’re aware of your own spaghetti straps. Suddenly you’re asking, “Am I a solicitation?” 

Just yesterday, my boyfriend and I were taking a walk, making the little loop of our street, lined with a thick wall of magnolias on one side. I watched the muscles in his calves tense with each step, the bulk of his swinging arms pulling him forward. Slicing through air. 

He often made this walk alone, and, as we were strolling, he said to me that he’d love to make the walk one morning in the pitch of the predawn hours, before the sun came up. 

“Wouldn’t you be scared,” I asked. 

“Of what,” his reply. 

To take a walk in the dark was a desire completely uncoupled from fear—fear of the dark, of assault, of attack, of any type of war against his body. His body was the war, and he was free of any thought of what might be waiting behind those white magnolia blooms. It was a desire featherlight, weighed down by nothing, completely unburdened by the body it existed in. 

He took that early morning walk, in his big shoes, his heavy feet plodding against the concrete, the earth. Each step so sure. Each step liberated and unseen.

The male body is a boundary, one that even death can’t degrade. In Ways of Seeing, Berger writes “Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” 

Seeing my father’s pallid, grey body, decorated with a suit he never wore, inside his wooden coffin that summer, I knew that his rage would never touch me again. That his hands would never make eggs again, his body would never fill another doorway. I knew standing over him that he’d turned away from me. 

But the knowledge of that truth, as Berger said, is still irreconcilable to me. 

He still fills every room of my house. I see clearly his red Chevy truck, his meaty forearm hanging out the driver side window, the cigarette dangling from his fingers. He is still the sky. 

Published March 8th, 2020