the lemonade test
(or: the heat is unbearable, and so is growing up)
1.
The year I was born, a researcher at the University of California conducted an experiment in which they made lemonade with salt instead of sugar, and then they served it to children. None of the boys finished their glass. They were eager to express how bad it was. Meanwhile, “[a]gain and again, the girls politely drank, even a girl who looked as if she was choking it down.”1
The point being that boys are taught to be honest, and girls are taught to be polite.
2.
I only like lemonade when it’s mixed with sweet tea. On Friday, I was sweating just waiting for the bus going home. I got off the bus at the grocery store and picked up a pint of sweet tea and a pint of diet lemonade. When I got home, I made a glass of Arnold Palmer and drank it all in ten minutes.
3.
I learn about the lemonade test because I’m scrolling through comments on Instagram from one white woman to another. I don’t put much stock into this kind of thing. The story is like a parable, a silly example of a specific kind of gendering.
Still, a part of me resonates with it. I went to a courtesy camp for girls the year Hannah Montana: The Movie was released. I suppose we were taught about the proper, polite way that we should all behave, but I only remember one kid singing “The Climb” at our talent show and our final exam: a dinner at Macaroni Grill, napkins folded in our laps like good, polite little girls.
Before you knew me, I spent my childhood getting told off for being a troublemaker. I threw playground rocks at cars. I pulled red cards and was accused of making messes. I got in trouble for talking back. I guess the courtesy lessons didn’t stick.
4.
If boys are taught to be honest and girls to be polite, then what the fuck am I because I’m neither honest nor polite.
5.
We grew up in the suburbs, so we know the unspoken summer rule: always buy from the lemonade stand. It’s not even being polite, it’s just common sense.
Before I got my driver’s license, you would drive me home, and if no one was around, we’d go careening around the traffic calming circle in the middle of the neighborhood. Usually we’d be coming home in the dead of night, and I was one of four teenagers in the neighborhood, so hardly anyone would be awake. We’d drive around in circles, squeezing in one last laugh before saying goodnight.
Once, though, you were driving me home in the middle of the day. It was summer. (All my best memories of you are in summer.) Some kids set up a lemonade stand at the traffic calming circle. The littlest one was blond and had a bowl cut and reminded me of every photo I had seen of you as a child. We bought lemonade and told them to keep the change, and it was almost better than driving in circles.
6.
One of the family farms at the Clark Park farmers’ market lets their young kids handle checkout. I look for your face in all of them but never quite see it. I like telling them to keep the change anyway, just to see them smile.
7.
When I was four, I was accused of dumping yellow glitter all over the bathroom floor at school. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it, I swear. I had walked in and seen the glitter and walked out without saying anything because even at four, I wasn’t a narc. I served my time out because it isn’t polite to make a mess. I served my time out because who believes a four year old is telling the truth?
You don’t believe in destiny, but I do. I was told at four that I was an impolite and dishonest little girl, so here I am.
That pre-K teacher loved me anyway, and so did you.
8.
I’m sitting cross-legged on the bus again. There’s an office birthday next week, and I’m hoping someone will bring cupcakes.
I used to bake. I made lemon cupcakes once, at a yellow-themed dinner with all of our friends. We got to the house and then went last minute grocery shopping because—and the details escape me here—someone forgot something. But I remember vividly how fun grocery shopping used to be. It was a love language. Do you want to go grocery shopping with me? We can walk every aisle even though we have them all memorized. You can convince me to impulse buy something stupid. Mom asked me to pick up lemons on the way home, but she probably expects I’ll come home with a golden watermelon too, just to try it.
I still don’t know how to tell if a watermelon is good or not. And I wouldn’t want to lug one home anyway. Not walking, and not in this heat.
9.
My first (and last) winter home, it was an unlikely 80º. I drove home with my windows down but music off. I didn’t want to get a noise complaint in the HOA Facebook group. Before curfew, I went careening around the traffic calming circle by myself. It just wasn’t the same.
10.
Out of necessity, I cook more than I bake now. I’m making a corn salad. It’s too hot to eat anything other than a salad, and I may be twenty, but I still don’t like most leafy greens. I’m juicing a lemon because the grocery store was out of limes. There’s something cathartic about squeezing a lemon, the sick satisfaction of feeling it give in, the hollowed out corpse of a fruit when it’s finished.
There’s satisfaction too in the way the sourness of it seeps into my skin through every tiny open cut. After we stopped knowing each other, I developed eczema on the knuckles of the third and fourth fingers of my right hand. It flares up in the summer because I’m allergic to grass and pollen and trees and all the good things that grow. The lemon juice coats every irritated bump, and it stings.
I’m allergic to everything but dust. I can’t help but feel like that says something about me.
11.
At this age, joy feels so hard to come by. I wish I could turn twenty-five already, brain magically fully developed. I’ve made so many stupid choices because I’m still searching for the joy of being seventeen.
12.
When you grow up religious, everything has a deeper meaning. Every good thing is a blessing and every bad thing is a punishment and when it isn’t always clear (and it never really is) you question everything. Like why were you there that day? Why did we meet? Were you sent to punish me? Or are you a tribulation that I’m still struggling to overcome?
Are we all just humans who are meant to hurt other humans? Were we ever meant to be forgiven? Was I ever meant to forgive?
13.
In the worst of the heat, I want to zest my skin off in spirals. I want to bite into myself and taste sour flesh.
14.
I’m carrying a pint of lemonade on the way to your house. It’s raining because of course it is. I’m twenty and still afraid of thunderstorms. I pass by the street corner where I had a panic attack because you held my hand. Because I’m so guilty all the time for you.
After you, in my first session with a new therapist, I say that I am angry. She says anger isn’t a real emotion. I wish I could tell her that I’m not feeling angry; I am angry. Like flood angry. Like plague angry. Like punishment angry.
Like I could be the lemon juice that stings your cuts. Like I could be the lemon seed you choke on. Like I could be the salty lemonade you’d spit out.
15.
I used to chew on lemon rinds when I was stressed, steal scraps from my mother’s chopping board until my jaw was sore from the waxy, bitter cellulose. “Bitterness is a term people use to dismiss those of us who are angry.”2 Since the second time I got COVID, I haven’t been able to taste bitter things at all.
16.
Maybe anger is an acquired taste. It only becomes you when you reach a certain age, like when you’re too old for the suburbs and learn you’ll never go back home. Sour, too, is acquired. Like how I craved it after I got my first period in another sticky summer, years ago. Like how I crave it every time since then. These are just milestones of growing up.
It’s always the boys you date at nineteen, say women on social media. Like you’re another milestone.
17.
I think if I see one more person from my hometown getting engaged, I’ll throw my phone through my window. I’m still a child, trying to finish a pint of diet lemonade, watching teen TV shows and missing a time when I believed any kind of love was in my destiny. I feel both older and younger than I should be.
18.
The girl who choked down her glass of salty lemonade is probably in her twenties now too. She might be in grad school now. She might be lying on a beach. She might’ve gotten her heart broken, once or twice or a dozen times. Maybe she had a life-defining relationship in high school. Maybe she dated someone at nineteen, too.
I wonder if she’d still be labeled polite. I wonder if she ever learned to be honest. I wonder if she wields both like weapons or if they sit in her closet like old scarves.
It doesn’t really matter though. I just hope that the lemonade she drinks now is sweet.
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123726&page=1.
