Free Sex Object by Jessica Valenti Page A

over the gate so fully that people walking by could pluck off cherries without breaking their stride. Every year my sister and I watched for the cherries—the greening of the branches, then the white flowers, then the fruit—and fought over who would climb highest on the ladder to pick the “best” ones without any bruises.
    The tree started producing more cherries than my parents knew what to do with—one or two hundred pounds a year—so my father filled brown paper lunch bags up with them and gave cherries out to neighbors, shop owners, or anyone who stopped to look at the tree. You like the cherries? Take a bag!
    My father joked that the shade from the tree, which reached over onto the sidewalk, made it “romantic” for the men who parked there with prostitutes. Once, though, when a cabdriver was getting a blow job as we were walking outside one Sunday afternoon, my dad started beating on his car hood. Get the fuck out of here! There are kids here, get the fuck out!
    I had been holding the plant pot for a little over an hour, I think, when my father walked out of the sliding glass doors and yelled for me to put the plant pot down and get into our car. He drove for a short bit and parked in front of a large factory building that took up almost the whole block. It looked closed down, but the windows were propped open with phone books and sticks. He told me that it only took a few mistakes to end upworking in a place like this. That if I didn’t take advantage of all that he and my mother had built for us, I could slip, easily, into something else.
    And so I did my best not to fail at things, but when I inevitably did I worked even harder to cover those failures up. I knew my dad loved me but I also knew he loved my successes just as much. That they filled something up for him that I could not on my own.
    It was for the same reason, I imagine, that my father talked me out of every waitressing and bartending job I thought about getting throughout college and in my early twenties. He told me that it was easy, when you had real money in your pocket, to just quit school because the alternative was so seductive. The part-time jobs I had in the mall or at his store selling older women clothing and lingerie, I suppose, seemed less dangerous to him.
    And though I couldn’t imagine a future in which I would quit school to wait tables—it was so far from the reality my parents had carefully cultivated for me—for them, for him, it was just one bad choice around the corner. But my family and aunts and uncles and cousins were made up of waitresses and butchers and a few people who worked in offices because my uncle—the only person in my family to have gone to college, night school in Queens for years—got them the job. I didn’t see anything wrong with that, with being like my family, but I knew to my parents there could be nothing worse. That these were not considered acceptable choices. I knew that what I did, what I accomplished, was not just about me. Maybe not at all about me.
    And so I did what I was supposed to do—embody the things my parents had wished for themselves, sometimes even against my better judgment.
    DURING A SUMMER TRIP AS A CHILD TO VISIT MY GRANDFATHER and step-grandmother in Florida, my father made a mistake. We were going to the beach every day, and on one of the mornings the sand was littered with the blue and white puffed-up corpses of jellyfish of varying sizes.
    I was a good swimmer but the sheer number of the dead bodies on the beach scared me, and I didn’t want to go in the water. My father tells me that he took me on a long walk that day along the beach, telling me about how important it was to go ahead and do things even when you’re afraid. That I didn’t need to worry so much, that I should go in. That there were no jellyfish in the water. And so I swam.
    I was only in the water a few minutes, of course, before I felt a