Good Girl

If you want a prize for following the rules, cook yourself dinner

Auguste Toulmouche, The Hesitant Fiancée, 1866

Hey! Since today’s piece is extra personal, I decided to read it to you in addition to the written text. No matter how you interact with my work, I appreciate you.

Someone said I was vindictive in an email last week. I laughed as I read it. Imagine taking tens of thousands of dollars from a shared account, and then calling the other person names when they point out what you did was both against the law and shitty as hell. But logic doesn’t apply here. I had earned that person’s ire and betrayal, down to the penny, through my failure to be a dutiful, empathic caretaker of their needs. And then I had the audacity to expect repayment.  Who the fuck did I think I was? An old version of me would have been hurt by this characterization— but she’s not around anymore. So what if I am vindictive? There has to be a point where you are allowed to seek revenge, to be angry, and not fucking apologize for it. How sweet do you have to be to someone who likes to kick you in the face, and then complains that you scuffed their boot? It’s hard out here for a good girl.

I grew up as a pleasure to have in class. A little chatty, sure, but my homework was always done, and I got along well with my schoolmates. I loved the approval. I knew how to be good; I was always smiling, laughing, and ready to lend a hand. In her 2023 book On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and The Price Women Pay to Be Good,

Elise Loehnen

writes: “The need to prove our goodness as the price for protection and upward mobility has been coded into how we behave; it’s hard to recognize because we are inside the structure itself.” By high school I had it down. I was voted Best All-Around my senior year, I was on homecoming court, I had a job, and always made the honor roll. I was good. At home I was shitting blood so often that I had a colonoscopy at 16 to make sure I didn't have polyps or something else equally horrifying. I didn’t, so the doctors just threw their hands up. In 2001 we didn’t blame things on stress; we barely acknowledged it.

ready to climb trees and be home by dinner time

Like many good girls, all my jobs were in some version of customer service. I was your smiling hostess, waitress, sales clerk, and grocery store cashier. I honed my breezy small talk with each interaction. I swallowed all the negative comments, the terrible remarks launched at me and my coworkers because customers knew we couldn’t say anything back. I knew it was part of the job. My friend Nick didn’t have the stomach for it, and routinely got written up for customer complaints and pointing out unfair treatment. He was never wrong, but he wasn’t suited for the work. He’d ask me all the time “How can you be so fake?” and I’d just roll my eyes. I wasn’t being fake; this was the job. It was simple— just be good above all else— but he could never do it. I was jealous. My stomach hurt so badly during those years that I thought I was dying. I’d lay on the bathroom floor all night. I didn’t have the money to go to a doctor, so I drank mint tea and took a lot of baths. I pretended that it helped.

My good girl persona helped a lot when I eventually did interviews and public speaking events to support my job writing cookbooks. I could turn it on and keep it on for as long as needed. What’s a contentious 30-minute interview compared with 8 ½ hours of cashiering at one of Los Angeles’s busiest groceries stores? Nothing. It’s nothing. Cooking was the same. Of course I was a good cook, I had made it my life’s work to be as good as possible at everything. I treated life like a recipe: if I put good ingredients in, in the right order, then I was certain something amazing would appear. I just had to keep moving forward. There were plenty of signs that I should change course but I ignored them. I had a full body rash that I would scratch so hard I broke blood vessels all over my legs, but I figured that it was from my detergent or body wash or some new lotion allergy. It was just a coincidence that it cleared up when the press cycle died down a few months later. But I was still smiling, still laughing, so everything was fine. I was good.

In 2020, right after the world shut down, I had to write an email to cancel my wedding. COVID had made the event impossible but that was just a convenient cover. A few days prior, I had found out that my then fiancé was messing around with an untold number of people. I found messages where he and a woman invited to our wedding were planning on hooking up during lockdown and the night before our ceremony. It was the final straw. I had been good, damn it. I asked him to delete her email from the wedding list before I sent out the cancellation announcement. It felt like a simple request, a small concession to help me feel a whisper of respect. He said I was being mean. I got in the shower with my clothes on and sat until the water ran cold.

I’m almost 40 now. I don’t want to be a good girl anymore. It’s unsustainable. You don’t accrue points for good behavior, you only get them docked when you stop being a doormat. I thought that if I was perfect, it would protect me. If I was honest, followed the agreed upon rules, and tried my fucking hardest, then the people around me would do the same. But life doesn’t work like that; it’s just what they tell you so that you keep your mouth shut and smile. There is no recipe for a good, safe life. You can follow someone’s instructions to the letter and still fail. Recipes only work in the kitchen. That’s where all my good girl baggage goes these days— my little stories of controlling ingredients for a predictable outcome. The rest is in the trash. 

Laurie Stone

wrote about her love of contradictions a few weeks ago and said what I needed to hear: “No one rises above. There is no high road, and if there were a high road, which there isn’t—not honestly, not if you look at what it means to have emotions—if there were a high road, it would be as boring as Dante’s Paradiso.” Paradise and perfection are boring; being good despite the circumstances is boring and dishonest. I want to be a full person with all the wrinkles of a life well-lived. It’s a much more achievable goal. These socially prescribed rubrics of how we should each act to be deemed good are hurting all us. We are limiting the definition of what it means to be human. That’s not what this moment calls for- we need to grow. And if speaking my mind, demanding money I earned back, and deleting a mistress from an email list is mean, then fuck yeah I’m mean. Who wouldn’t be? I’m not performing my goodness anymore. If you want a prize for following the rules, cook yourself dinner. If you want to be a real person with your full, imperfect humanity, then pull up a chair. I’m only vindictive if you’ve earned it. 

xoxo,

Michelle Albanes-Davis

M A D