One of the Guys

Nicole Walker

There’s a line in Jenny Lewis’s song Just One of the Guys that goes something like “No matter how hard I try to be just one of the guys/ but when I look at myself all I can see I’m just another lady without a baby” which may not be the actual lyrics but that something inside me, that desire for a baby, is why I was never fully included as one of the guys even though I could out-pee Scott and Caleb and Howie when we ran around the empty fairgrounds at Oak Bottoms, drinking beer and timing ourselves each time we passed a restroom, competing for fastest down zip, piss, and pant reorganization and although I had to take more time to undo more zips and sit all the way down and reorganize more pant, I still won but now I’m pretty sure that’s why I have the smallest bladder in the world and have to pee all the time like when I was at Jill and Mike’s and I drank bottle after bottle of water because they had so much ice and I love ice more than life itself and I also had been visiting students and professors and had talked so much that I must have dehydrated myself although I was also drinking wine which also does a number on my bladder so I kept interrupting Jill, who works as the marketing director for this innovative energy firm that was refitting a Liberal Arts College’s heating system with geothermal power, who told me she made half as much as her fellow directors but at least neither she nor Mike had to pee every fourteen seconds which was getting embarrassing enough that I promised to send them money for their water bill about which I was mostly kidding but only because I’m cheap and it would actually be weird to send friends money in the mail for flushing their toilet probably twenty-five times until we finally went to dinner and somehow my bladder zipped it up and I didn’t even use the restroom at the restaurant where I ordered the duck and Mike ordered the arctic char and Jill ordered the ramen and for dessert some kind of puffy marshmallow bomb(e) that I took one bite of and whichever one of my teeth is sensitive to sweets clambered like a bell so hard I had to stick my tongue against the filling to stop the ringing which it did but mostly because I washed the sweet away with my glass of wine which I had asked to be poured more generously than the first—at ten dollars a glass, three ounces of wine seemed unreasonable although I don’t actually carry a measuring cup in my purse but perhaps I should consider doing so since, especially when I travel, I can tell people like to short me because I look either like a lightweight or a drunk although I am neither, I’m just a thirsty gal who can keep up with the guys, drink for drink, except for those months I was pregnant—7.5 months with my daughter Zoe and all 9 with my son Max—which was maybe the favorite time of my life because just like words in sentences, I mostly sat around copying cell after cell, composing note after note until it resonated under my ribs like a song, this little something inside of me growing bigger by the day and for the first time in my life I didn’t want to be a guy. 


NICOLE WALKER is the author of several books, plus one forthcoming, Writing the Hard Stuff, from Bloomsbury Books. She edits the Crux series of nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press, teaches creative writing, and serves as the Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.

Photo by Frank Alarcon on Unsplash

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