Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Chapter Four

Whenever I think of the house I grew up in, in Painesville, Pennsylvania, I think of the entire structure enveloped by, oppressed by, and exuding a dark, dank purple. Even when I don’t think of it, it lurks in miniature form, a malignant doll house, tumbling weightless through the horror movie of my subconscious, waiting to tumble into conscious thought and sit there exuding darkness.

Objectively, it was a nice little house. It was a good size for three people; it had a slanting roof, cunning shutters, lovable old doorknobs that came off in your hands, a breakfast nook, an ache of dingy carpets and faded wallpaper. It was our fifth house, the one we collapsed in after a series of frantic moves which were the result of my father’s belief that wherever he lived was hell. Eventually he became too exhausted to move again and made our sedentary status a virtue, gloating as he gazed out through the cracked shutters at the arrivals and departures of several sets of neighbors on both sides — the Whites, the Calefs, and the Hazens on the left, and the Wapshots, the Rizzos, and the morose, relatively stationary old Angrods on the right. “We live in a society of cockroaches,” he said. “Scurrying all over the face of the map with no thought of community or family, nothing.”

The Painesville house was the most significant point of my upbringing, and it unfolds from its predecessors with the minor inevitability of an origami puzzle in several pieces. With each house the puzzle becomes more sinister, then more sad, then simply strange, the final piece made from a grainy photograph of Anna Granite’s face. I imagine Justine Shade picking up the various paper constructions to examine them, furrowing her brow, tapping her lip with her pen.

I was born in Blossom, Tennessee. I think of grape arbors, trellises clotted with magnolias, the store downtown that sold white bags of candy. (There actually was a grape arbor in our backyard in Blossom, but our second, more lived-in Tennessee house near Nashville had a square backyard full of short grass and festering sunlight.)

One of my succession of therapists used to say that “the body remembers everything,” meaning that on some level so deep you don’t even know about it, you’ve stored compressed yet vivid details of everything that’s ever happened to you, including, she was later to assert, everything in your past lives. This could be true, I guess, but these bodily memories are so unevenly submerged and revealed, so distorted — as the deficient yard is garnished with imaginary arbors and trellises — that they may as well be completely invented; it’s only the hideous physical shock that attends the mere shadow of one remembered gesture, that fraction of some past agony that reminds you they were real.

My mother, whose name was Blanche, came from a poor but respectable matriarchal farm family. She was the oldest of three girls, but she was the shortest, the shyest, the one most likely to be teased. As the oldest she was responsible for taking care of her sisters, Camilla and Martha, when there was no school and their mother went into town to clean rich people’s houses. This was a hopeless arrangement, as Camilla and Martha were strong, boisterous girls who banded against their sister, barred her from their games, and ridiculed her. They refused to get up to eat her carefully prepared breakfasts, they wouldn’t help her with the dishes, they ran around the house like cats, knocking things down while she tried to clean. The sole factor that enabled the harried girl to maintain any order at all was her intense and agitated seriousness. Her idea of the world was a pretty picture of shiny pink faces and friendly animals in nature scenes, of dulcet conversations and gestures, a lively but always gentle and harmonious world that could not accommodate (and could be totally undone by) sarcasm or cruelty. Out of the need to impress a lacelike pattern on brutish reality came her unshakeable determination to clean and sew and mop the floor. She got up before sunrise to get cream and eggs. She wreathed her table settings with clover and daisies. She made jam and arranged the jars so that their colors complemented one another: mint, plum, cherry, apple. Her sisters’ jeering hurt her, but it also roused and locked into position a surprising element of strength that dignified her melancholy zeal, which caused her unkind sisters to remember her, in their broken-down middle years, with pathos and respect.

The same frantic need to prettify informed her mothering. We spent a lot of time together when I was five, more than I spent with other children. On Saturdays, we sat at the kitchen table, intently drawing crayon animals in their jungles or under cloud-blotched skies. We made stories illustrated by pink-earred families of mice. We built homes for my animals that ranged across rooms, and my mother always consented to “hold” the wicked frog who lived in a penthouse atop my dresser. Or my mother would read The Wizard of Oz aloud. Other times we would sit on the couch and my mother would show me art books and prints, inviting me to invent stories about the little boy in red and ruffles standing alone with a bird on a leash. And at night, she would sit on my bed and tell stories of her girlhood. I would hold her hand as she constructed airy balloons that floated by in the dark, bearing glowing pictures of her and my father holding hands on the porch swing, or of her lying in a meadow of clover, dreaming and looking for fairies while horrible Camilla called her home.

My father entered this magic world in the evening, when he returned home from work in grandness, and our phantasms and elves stood at attention to receive his directions. He would put on one of his records — opera, marching music, or jazz — and turn up the volume so that it trumpeted aggressively through the house, ramming his personality into every corner. My mother worked in the kitchen, stirring a big pot of chili, or peeling potatoes, and my father would pace excitedly between kitchen and living room, drinking beer after beer and eating the dry roasted peanuts, sliced Polish sausage, and hot green peppers that my mother had arranged in little dishes as, against a thundering soundtrack, he expounded upon his day. He was an office manager in the clerical department of a sales firm in Nashville. He would talk about the office intrigue as though it were symbolic of all human activity, as though he were enacting daily the drama of good versus evil, of weakness versus strength, of the fatal flaws that cause otherwise able men to fail, of the mysterious ways of the universe that make the rise of “bastards” possible. He would start on some tiny incident — how “that socialist shit-ass Greenburger” had tried to undermine the unfortunate clubfoot Miss Onderdonk in order to cast favor on a pretty new typist, and how he was publicly exposed and deplored — and then link this to some greater abstract principle, cross-referencing it to events in his childhood, or his stint in the army, as though one had led, inexorably and triumphantly, to the other. The room filled with overlapping scenarios from the past — his past, as created by me — that appeared in a sweet-smelling, melancholy wave of events, picnics, days at school and old ladies that had clasped him in their perfumed arms before slipping away forever, carrying on its crest, and depositing safely in our living room, the scene now transpiring.

He paced as he talked, now and then walking close to the windows to peer out, rubbing his fingers together as though grinding something to powder, nibbling zestfully at the snacks that occasionally dropped down his shirt front, and drinking beer. My mother moved about the kitchen in a frilly apron, her hair bound into a ponytail with a rubber band garnished with large plastic flowers. She listened enthralled to the stories of betrayal and redemption, nodding vigorously, shaking her head in disapproval or agreeing, “Absolutely! That’s right!” as the music underscored her husband’s stirring rendition of his eventual triumph. “You can’t throw your weight around like that in my office, buddy. It’s okay to be a tough guy, but you’d better be sure I’m not tougher. And nine times out of ten I am.” I would listen gravely as they talked. It seemed as though they were arranging the world, making everything safe and understood. By the time we sat down to dinner, life was friendly and orderly, and we could regally feast on chili over spaghetti noodles, with chocolate ice cream in little ceramic cups for dessert. Then there would be TV — soldiers winning, dogs rescuing children, criminals going to jail, women finding love — and then my mother would carry me to bed singing, “Up the magic mountain, one, two, three. Up the magic mountain, yessiree.”

When I was five years old, my mother had a friend named Edwina Barney who came almost every afternoon to teach her how to drive and later, how to swim. She was tall, slender, and gracefully slow-moving; she had a large benign face with slightly pouchy cheeks, a relaxed mouth, and heavy-lidded eyes that, in glasses, had a slightly crocodilian look. She wore loose clothes with big, bright patterns on them and sandals with red cherries on the toes. She towered over my nervous-moving little mother. When I went with them to the “Y” for the swimming lessons and sat in the tiled “pool area,” rolling ungnawable jawbreakers from cheek to cheek, I admired her gliding through the pool like an imperious seal, my mother dog-paddling behind, her sincere obedient head lifted tensely out of the water. After class, Edwina drove us home with one long arm hanging halfway out the open window, talking about small subjects with a manner that made them big, all her words planted firmly in the low, relaxed sound of her voice. When we got home, she and my mother would sit in the kitchen drinking coffee, their swimsuits hanging on chairs placed before the stove, Edwina stretching her legs out over an extra chair, talking in her strong, melodious voice that my mother’s voice responded to or complemented rather than met. It was clear to me where the authority lay between them. Our family was self-contained and hoarding, with a clear sense of separation from other people, and Edwina was like an emissary from another kingdom, an ally who traveled through the chaos of cars and strangers and traffic systems to share this authority with us, this quality that enabled her to say whatever she wanted to say and have it be so. That, along with her physical grace (and in my eyes, beauty), made me love her. I rushed to meet her when she came to the door, I introduced her to my stuffed animals and showed her my drawings which she would study and say, of my portrayal of a lion, “That’s a real lion all right. It may not look exactly like a real lion, but that doesn’t matter because it’s got lionness,” and it would be so.

I loved her even when, one day after class when we were all in the kitchen, there was a sudden change in the tone of conversation, and Edwina jerked her head in irritation and said the word “stupid.” I was busy working on a drawing and I didn’t hear the entire sentence, but I knew from the way my mother suddenly turned her head and reflexively picked an already chewed nail that she had been called stupid. There was only a moment of silence, and then they went on talking, my mother moving with stiff animation when she got up to get a plate of cookies for them to eat. Edwina sat with her head and face presented regally to the room, her oddly self-righteous expression that of a person who has successfully imposed her personality on someone else.

Like Edwina, my father could say it and it would be so. Sometimes he would come home when Edwina was still visiting and he would say, “Hey, it’s old Ed Barney!” and invite her to stay “for a few brews.” When that happened, we would all move into the living room, and my father would put on a record, and they would talk, each telling truths and agreeing with one another, organizing the world with their words and deciding what was right or wrong as the music ranted. “That’s right,” one would say to the other, as they all vigorously nodded their heads. “You’re absolutely right.”

Once though, Edwina did not agree with my father. He sat in his chair with his neck craning angrily forward, rubbing his fingertips together as though crushing something into powder. He used words I didn’t understand in a tone of voice that filled the room and pressed down on my neck, making me want to compress my bones and breath. My mother said, “Oh Al.” He ignored her, crushing her voice with his yells. Edwina sat stiff and bristling in her chair, her long hands deliberately loose on her wrists. She talked, and he interrupted her. He stamped over her words, but her face and body held the weight of his voice off her, and she occupied the little space around her with the same imperious face she’d made when she called my mother stupid. My father strained forward as though he would spring.

“I’m not going to stay and listen to this,” she said, and she stood, knocking over her glass of beer. As she walked to the closet to get her coat, my father did spring, and I was shocked to see Edwina break into a run, which she controlled almost immediately. My father followed her out the door yelling at her, his fists balled. I understood that he was telling her she was bad, evil, she had aligned herself with the terrible things in the world. I don’t remember if I felt anger or sadness or fear. I can only picture myself frozen and compressed, staring at my crayon drawing. I can’t remember what my mother did.

It was a long time before Edwina came to see us again. When she did, she and my father were friends again, but their faces held little reservations that prevented total agreement. He would look at her as though she were a naughty but lovable child, and she would look at him as though he were not as smart as she was but that she liked him anyway. There was no change between Edwina and my mother.

This and every other image from that time is faded, small and surrounded by a thick border of fuzzy, quavering blackness. The images aren’t connected; there are large spaces between them filled with the incoherent blackness. The emotions belonging to the images are even more unclear; they seem a slur of abnormal happiness, as if my childhood were characterized by the cartoons I watched on TV. This is probably because the adults around me, believing childhood to be a pretty thing, encouraged me to feel that way, talking to me in baby talk, singing about itsy-bitsy spiders and farmers in the dell, laying an oil slick of jollity over the feelings that have stayed lodged in my memory, becoming more and more grotesque as time goes on. But the feelings continue to lurk, dim but persistent, like a crippled servant, faithfully, almost imbecilicly trying to tell me something in the language of my childhood, my own most intimate language which has become an indecipherable code.

I remember the time a kid fell off our porch and cracked his skull. It was Halloween, and I wasn’t allowed to go out because my mother thought that, at five, I was too young. My mother dressed for the occasion in her red terry-cloth robe that reached the floor and made her look thick and imposing. The ordinary packaged candy looked special in a large crystal punch bowl. She handed it out with a gently officious air, enjoying herself as my father sat quietly in the shadows of the dim, radio-mumbling house. Most of the kids in our neighborhood were close to my age, and they stood bashful and ungainly in their monstrous wings and clown feet, incredulous and feeling slightly guilty that a stranger had put on a ceremonial dress to give them handfuls of candy. Sometimes a crowd of big kids would come and bellow “trick or treat” like a threat, or even thrust their masked faces into our living room to scream right at my mother, who screamed in return and hurriedly thrust the candy at them. It was during one of these screaming moments that we heard the real screams of a small child who had just fallen off the porch. There was a scramble of movement amid masked children in the dark, and then the boy was in our bright kitchen, sitting on a stool, bundled in a blanket, sucking his thumb. Probably his parents were there somewhere, but I don’t remember them. My mother was on the phone to the hospital, picking her nails while my father paced in and out of the room, coughing and wiping his mouth. He said something that made me think we could get into trouble because the boy fell off our porch.

I was frightened and fascinated by the boy. It terrified me to think that you could be standing on a porch, my porch, receiving official candy in a spirit of goodwill and then, with one wrong movement, be pitched into darkness, cracking your head in a way that could kill you. I stared at his eyes. They were a garish painted mask of red and blue, his sole costume. His lashes were long and beautiful, his eyes serene and wide, completely undisturbed by the large red gash in his head. I stared at the gash and at the brown hairs mashed around in the blood. I thought I was looking right into his brain. It seemed glowing and wonderfully mysterious. I felt very close to him. I wanted to put my hand in his head. We could get into trouble for this.

He started to whimper and tremble and to suck violently on his thumb. My mother got off the phone and came to him. “Poor little one,” she said. “Soon everything will be all right.” She put her arm around him, and suddenly I wanted to do the same, to protect and heal the boy.

I ran out of the kitchen and got my stuffed animal, a little limp dog named “Greenie.” I thrust it at the boy and said, “Take Greenie.” He did. He held Greenie tightly with one arm, sucking his thumb, quiet again, his beautiful eyes looking at me with what seemed like curiosity. I stared into his deep red brain until my mother bundled him in her sweater and took him to the hospital.

I let him take my toy. I felt that Greenie had helped him in some way, and it made me feel good to think that I could help a person, especially a person whose brain I’d seen. When I got Greenie back the following week, I valued him all the more as a healer and personal emissary of my goodwill.

When it was over, my father held me on his lap. He held me as though he was frightened of what had happened to the boy and thought I must be frightened too. The house was dark, the radio was singing to us in the background. His hands encircled the ankle of one of my legs and the knee of the other, and I rested in his body as though it were infinite. He said, “The Daddy will never let anyone hurt his little girl.” He said it as though the sentence itself was grand, as though saying it turned him into a stone lion, immobile but internally watchful and fierce.

Once my father took me with him to watch a basketball game. These were the games he talked about when he walked around the house, rubbing his fingers together and saying “the Mighty Reds” or “Hey hey! What do you say? Get that ball the other way!” as though the words were inflatable cushions of safety and familiarity with which he could pad himself. The Reds were clearly one of the good forces in life, playing basketball against bastards and viciousness. Even my mother said their name in the way people talk about doing right; it wasn’t fun, but you had to admit it was important.

The game wasn’t fun either. The auditorium was hot and muggy, full of muffled senseless noise and strangers with invulnerable gum-chewing faces. Sweating men ran with meaningless urgency, straining to prevent each other from doing something that changed from moment to moment. Strangers sat on benches roaring at intervals. My father sat with his neck stretched forward, his face set in the expectant, placated look he had when the world was forming a pattern he approved of.

When it was over we walked home in the dark. “The old Reds won,” said my father. “Don’t you want to cheer?” I cheered into the damp night as I ran up the sidewalk. The houses and trees were remote and strange in the dark, the mailboxes lonely and disoriented on their corners. Cars swished by in mournful sweeps of light, and we walked in triumph.

At home there was cinnamon toast and hot chocolate and my mother in her special white Chinese robe with black dragons on it. We marched into the rec room, Daddy carrying me on his shoulders, my legs dangling down his chest. Fat old Walnut the cat thumped behind us, his tail low and steady. My father put Carmen on the record player, and I darted around the room, swirling in an invisible lavender skirt. Daddy and Mother kissed on the blue-flowered sofa. Mother’s legs were folded and tucked against her body like the wings of a plump bird, and I saw the jagged shred of toenail and the hard little callus on her pink incurved baby toe. Her husband’s hands covered her face as he kissed her. “Olé, olé!” shouted prancing me. Scornful Carmen, with an aquiline nose and a rose in her teeth, silently leered from the velvety dark of her album cover where she sat propped sideways against a tall blue lamp. She had been stabbed to death by the time Daddy swung me into his arms. “Up the magic mountain, one, two, three. Up the magic mountain, yessiree.” We left Walnut curled beside the heat vent. Mother followed behind, smiling at my head as it rested on Daddy’s shoulder, hitting light switches as we passed from room to hall to room to staircase. “She’s going to sleep with Mama and Daddy tonight because the Reds won and because she is such a good girl.”

My memory of that night is a swollen, rose-colored blur that shades every thought venturing near it. The pink bed was massive. The quilts and blankets were rumpled into low mountain ranges with frowning indentation eyes and brows that stretched and melted when Daddy pulled the blankets over me. Tiny curls of hair and granules were the worms and earth of the pink bed world. The smell of Daddy’s hair oil and Mama’s perfume penetrated me like a drug too strong for my system to metabolize.

I lay cuddled in the arms of my softly pajamaed father, waiting for Mama, who was lazily brushing her hair at the vanity table. The rest of the room with its furniture, curtains, glimmering bottles, and snakes of Mama’s jewelry was a dream of objects that claimed to be familiar but weren’t. Then the light went off, and Mama slid between the sheets, her fragrant body heat lilting from the open space between nightgown and skin, and there was no longer any world outside the bed. When my eyes adjusted to see the gray squares of window and the trees beyond, they were faraway as stars, and the lumbering furniture was ephemeral as the half-dreams that bother you when you’re trying to wake up.

Chapter Five

Justine Shade had unusually attractive parents, something she came to hold against them for reasons unknown to her. Even when she was five, she says, she knew that they were socially beautiful, although that concept is foreign to five-year-olds. They weren’t exquisite or perfect, but they had a reassuring, bigboned blondness (her mother), an elegant, slouching, Cary Grantesque authority (dad) that people responded to as though a cerebral complacency-center was stimulated by the mere sight of them.

When Justine thought of her childhood with them, she thought of the shoeboxes of color photos stored in a living room closet in their Deere Parke, Michigan, home. As an adult, Justine used these photographs as a set of icons, talismans against her fear that there had been something unusually nasty about her childhood. She would take the photographs out of their shoeboxes and vinyl albums and arrange them in bouquets that spanned the floor before her as she hunched near the radiator, holding her white-socked feet for warmth as she brooded over these proofs of family happiness and genetic beauty. There they were, eager, rosy, smiling young parents, kneeling to hold their tiny daughter upright between them as she stood on her unsteady legs like a worried poodle, her face quizzical, solemn, and concentrated. At age four, she was caught in a wild charge across the living room in her white gown, her cheeks pink, her eyes glittering with a flashbulb-induced diamond pupil. She smiled on a swing set. She squatted shyly in a sandbox, squeezing the ruffles of her red swimsuit; she stood with her slender legs in bathing beauty position, one hand on her hip, her face demurely composed as an uncouth neighborhood child holding a garden hose gaped. At nine she dolorously examined the contents of an Easter basket; beyond a piece of cockeyed floor, tilted by her mother’s weird camera angle, her pajamaed father sat on the edge of a couch, holding a green coffee cup with both hands and looking bitterly into space, his glasses on the end of his nose. She stood in the doorway, a princess in gauze and yellow spangles, a delicate rhinestone tiara, and cheap sandals spray-painted gold, holding her Halloween bag and smiling as her mother captured her creation on film.

She could find nothing to link the charming world represented by her little photographs with the squalid, sweaty-pantyhose situation that became her adolescence — even though the pictures taken of her adolescence recorded a smiling, vulgarly pretty, confident young girl surrounded by friends wearing white lipstick and flowered miniskirts, her handsome, bemused parents in the background. Justine hated to look at these pictures, which, in her eyes, had the queasy, urgent, side-tilted quality of a dream that is rapidly becoming a nightmare. Her earliest memories though, weren’t as clear, and she was thus completely seduced by the bright old photos.

When she was five, they lived in Lancelot, Illinois, in a large apartment with two floors. Her father, having just graduated from medical school, was in residence at the hospital there. She pictures him returning home in his white coat, exuding safety, duty, and cheer. He is sitting slouched before the coffee table with little Justine tugging at his pant leg, a tuna sandwich on the plate before him. He is talking about important things. He sounds angry, but the anger is sleek and shaped to look like something else; it makes Justine feel afraid and reassured at once. Her mother replies as though she knows exactly what he means and has known all along. Her voice isn’t angry. It’s strong and almost proud, yet it has a curiously unstable quality as though the strength can’t sustain itself but needs to plant itself in some other form of energy to thrive. It makes Justine feel uneasy and confident at once. Their voices weave in and out of each other; they construct their conversation like a bridge of concrete high above Justine’s head. She watches solemnly.

They got up at five for breakfast because Dr. Shade had to be at the hospital at six. There was less talk then; Daddy was grumpy, not triumphant. He would say, “Lorraine, these eggs are mucusy,” or “How do you expect me to drink this?” The anger pulled against its sleek shape, and Justine held her breath. Her mother was subdued and obedient, but the strength in her voice was vibrant, as though rooted in her husband’s peevish demands. As to a corporal in the army, obedience to a respected superior was not degrading, rather it ennobled, it scornfully subsumed feelings that didn’t serve it, it gave a hard, elegant shape to every movement and object that embodied it. Mother’s grace and efficiency as she moved to pour the juice, the beautiful, fragile flowers in the vase, the stirring classical music coming from the radio were all performing a duty, augmenting and uplifting the campaign to get Dr. Shade out the door in the morning. Yet all this beauty and order could be disturbed by mucusy eggs. Her daddy could still get out the door, but it would be that much harder to do the important things. It was a puzzle.

When Daddy marched out in his white coat, Justine and Mama went into the living room to do their exercises. It built discipline, said Mama in a voice of conviction that had its roots in something Justine didn’t know about. Mama would change from her robe into her leotard, and Justine would stay in her pajamas. Mama would put on the exercise record of surging yet sedate music supporting a man’s voice which said, “Up ladies! Down ladies! Very good ladies!” Justine loved the record. The man’s voice had a mysterious foreign accent, and on the cover were pictures of a beautiful serious woman wearing a gray leotard, who was swinging her legs or touching her toes or kneeling and putting her head to her knee, just like the foreigner said. Justine and her mama would face each other as the music began, they would move up and down and back and forth together. Mama’s chest would get red and blotchy where Justine could see it exposed by the plunge-necked leotard, but her chin and face remained upright and intent as she rose and sank or knelt and swung. “We must learn to push ourselves, Justine,” she said.

After twenty minutes, the record was dispensed with, there was five minutes of stretching and then the mysterious pleasure of a “spit bath.” They would strip off their sweaty clothes and hang them on a towel rack to be hand-washed later that night and stand naked to the waist (except for Mother’s richly embossed brassiere) before the mirror, daubing their armpits and necks with washcloths and deodorants. Sometimes Mama would let Justine daub her back while she applied her modest lipstick and mascara, her face absorbed by the mirror as she licked her fingertips to remove the stray smudges of makeup from her eyes. During the winter, the rattling electric heater would be on, and the windows would fog, and the smell of their sweat would rise off their bodies like the sighing sounds you make in sleep. Justine hated leaving this warm, safe room to go out into the world. She wanted to stay with her mother always.

But they would get dressed and into the car, and Mama would drop Justine off at kindergarten and then go to work herself.

She remembers this morning ritual with great vividness, probably because they repeated it so unwaveringly for so long. Most of her other memories are snatched in arbitrary fragments from the deep past and fraught equally with emotion and meaninglessness as they float by for her half-conscious perusal as she lies daydreaming on her back.

She remembers the way her mother would push white wax suppositories into her ass with a slow gentleness that made her feel her body was being turned inside out. There was no place in her body where she could hide from the feeling. Her mother’s face wore the pursed look of duty it had when she made breakfast or put on her makeup, and the memory of the expression combined with the inexorable, horrible gentleness filled the adult Justine with loathing.

She remembers the way her mother came to her at night, with her nightgown undone so her moist breastbone gleamed in the light from the hall. Her blond hair would be rumpled, her unmadeup eyes tired, with damp little bags under them, her body warm and vulnerable, totally unlike the brisk pink Mama who did squats and knee-swings and made breakfast with the same purpose and strength. There was a different strength here, a kind that didn’t have to be planted in anything else to survive but rather infused her mother’s body and voice like blood. She put her arms around Justine, and stroked her face and told her stories. She was like a mama tiger licking her cub, and Justine never wanted her to go away.

Then there were the walks in the park on Sunday when they would lead the ducks on a bread-crumb parade, Daddy showing the way. They were admired; Justine especially was admired standing next to Mama in their almost-matching yellow dresses. There were spaghetti dinners while they listened to classical music on the radio and pretended they were in Italy, and Daddy stood at the table to conduct the orchestra while Mama cried, “Bravo, Dirk!”

Sometimes Daddy’s colleagues would come to the house for drinks. They stood in the living room, dark pant legs and deep, utterly sure voices, holding the drinks. Mama would stand in her flowered dress with her hands folded, her voice ringing with approval, and Justine would climb on the men’s laps. There was one she liked to climb on in particular, a man named Dr. Norris. Dr. Norris didn’t speak or move in quite the same confident way of the other doctors. He was somehow tentative, with numb, helpless-looking hands and eyes that seemed to defer to whomever he was with. Justine climbed on his lap and said, “If I were in trouble would you come like Popeye?” and he said, “Yes.” Mama told Justine in passing many years later that he liked her “especially,” and that he spent a lot of time with her. Justine remembers this; she remembers one time in particular.

They were walking in the park with him and his son, the contemplative, nose-picking Sam. They were by the swing sets when she told Dr. Norris she had to go to the bathroom. He asked which kind, and she said to pee. He took her hand, and they walked for a while until they were away from people. He began to take off her pants. She didn’t stop him because he was an adult, a gentle adult she trusted. But she didn’t want to take off her pants in public, even though there were no people around. She felt horrible standing naked except for her shoes and her shirt. He told her to spread her legs and pee on the ground. She spread her legs, but her whole body was suddenly stiff and she couldn’t pee. It felt so stiff it felt like wood. Even her face felt like wood. There was something wrong, but Dr. Norris didn’t seem to know it. “This will help you to pee,” he said. He said it in his kindest, most deferential voice. He knelt before her and licked his fingers and rubbed her between her legs where she would pee from. Her abdomen contracted like a crouching insect. Her bladder was full and it hurt. She looked at Dr. Norris’s face. He was looking between her legs with his numb eyes, and she saw that he knew there was something wrong but that he was going to do it anyway. He rubbed her briskly and numbly, and he talked to her, his voice coated more and more thickly with an expression she had never heard before. A strange and horribly powerful sensation flexed its claws in her body.

Many years later, when she told a man about this incident, he said he believed that child molestation was bad only because of the negative social rules that made the child feel sullied. Otherwise, he said, it would be good because it could only give the child pleasure, and children didn’t have reservations about pleasure until they were taught to. Another man told her it was good that she’d had the experience because “that man taught you something.” She didn’t argue with either of them because she didn’t know how to explain that this uncomprehended attack of invasive sensation had not felt like pleasure at all but rather like the long claws of some unknown aggression that had gripped her organs and her bones and never quite let go.

Dr. Norris and his son and she went to the park after that, she doesn’t remember how many times. Once she told her mother that “Dr. Norris touches me here,” and pointed to show her. Her mother was standing in the kitchen making dinner. She didn’t stop what she was doing. She said, “He just doesn’t know that little girls don’t like to be touched there.”

Chapter Six

My family moved to Ohio when I was seven. We lived in a large, cool, damp house outside Cincinnati. I couldn’t walk to school anymore and instead rode a bus with other children who sang, “The worms go in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.” There were lots of tornado warnings. Sometimes they would be followed by local news footage of some neighboring town that had been devastated. These broadcasts thrilled me; I loved to look at the destroyed houses and ripped up trees, the dazed, unkempt victims standing around in overcoats, mumbling for the spruce newscaster who asked them how they felt.

Once there was a tornado warning when I was at school, and the teachers led us all down the hall into the bomb shelter and kept us there an hour after school, talking about what to do in case of nuclear attack and singing about bottles of beer on the wall until the warning was over. We rode home in the twilight, exhilarated by our brush with death, loudly bawling the worm song. When I got home, my mother said, “I didn’t know they’d held you at school. I waited at the bus stop for half an hour. The wind whipped my legs until they were red and sore. I was terrified when you didn’t come.” She said this in the same girlish voice that she used to tell stories of Motherdear and Joedaddy, punctuating certain words with a tight, uplifted voice, as if she were describing a tasty dessert. Her voice wasn’t angry at all, which made me feel uneasy; it seemed as though she should be angry. I asked her why she hadn’t gone home. “Because I had to be sure you were safe. I stood there and stood there and my legs just burned.”

I hastily constructed a fantasy in which I came sailing through a full-blown tornado on the bus. (They’d tried to hold me at school, but I’d faced the principal with tears in my eyes and pleaded to be allowed to go home and be with my mother. He understood; gruffly he allowed me to go, and the bus driver, the old salt, was so overcome by the spirit of this brave, lone child that he volunteered to take me. “You’re mad!” cried my teacher, Miss Clutch. “Well maybe I am, and maybe I ain’t,” he said. “All’s I know is, I gotta kid, too, an’ if there was a tornado, I’d want ’er to be with ’er ma.”) In one version of this fantasy, he and I leapt from the bus together, he scooping my swooning mother into his arms and carrying her home, me clinging to his pant leg as we struggled through the ferocious wind. In my preferred version, I leapt out alone, and the driver tootled off into the tornado, waving a leathern hand and wiping a tear from his eye. Supporting my fainting mother on my shoulders, I struggled mightily through the storm, despite her gasps of “Leave me! Save yourself!” When we got home I bundled my mother in a blanket and bathed her short, plump legs in bubble bath.

I liked this fantasy so much I kept it nearby all day, and by nighttime, I no longer believed that my mother had suffered at the bus stop.

My mother always came to say good night to me when I was in bed. She would lean forward to kiss me as a prelude to leaving, and I would grab her robe and say, “Wait, I have to tell you about the squirrels versus the cats in school today,” or, “Tell me about when you and Daddy skipped school.” She stayed and stayed, and it never did any good. No matter how many stories she told or listened to, no matter how many times she stroked my back with her fingertips, I felt the same emptiness and panic when she left. I didn’t even enjoy her stroking; I devoured it with feverish passivity, my mind lunging forward ahead of her fingers to consume her touch before it came. She’d leave and I’d be left with my hideous, rearing thoughts. I would fixate on the strip of light coming from my partly open door, listening to the TV and radio voices, trying to figure out where my parents were and what they were doing from the sound of their footsteps, chair-creakings, and voices. Then they went to bed and the light was gone. Some nights I lay in such anxiety that I could sleep only when morning came. Throughout the day, the residue of the night’s tension stayed in my body.

My father didn’t like Ohio. It was only two states away, but to him it was the last decisive step away from civilization into gum-popping, transistor-blasting subhumanity. He saw evidence of this everywhere. He’d go to the drugstore, and sullen teenagers, smirking and scratching themselves behind the counter, would rather tell each other jokes than wait on him. When he said “Thank you,” they didn’t answer him. The clerks at the grocery store didn’t answer him either, and once one of them rang up his bill wrong and then was rude about it. None of this, he said, ever happened in Tennessee. “And that’s the last of Alfred A. Footie’s business those sons of bitches will ever get.”

At night he’d put on a marching record and walk up and down talking the same way he had at the house in Tennessee, only now it was more desperate in tone, as though everywhere the bastards were gaining ground. The music battered the walls, and my mother moved in the kitchen as if his voice were the force behind her movements. During dinner my father would talk about moving back to Tennessee and tell stories about ordinary people foiling criminals: Gas station attendants had sprayed a thief with gas and threatened him with books of matches until the police arrived. A husband beat his wife’s escaping rapist half to death. An entire family ran out of their house and pounded a youth who was wrestling an old lady for her purse. “A society,” he warned, “has to protect itself. Just like old Jim McCann and that big bastard in the south of France. The big sonofabitch stood outside his tent for half an hour calling him filthy names because Jim was a nice little guy and he didn’t think he could do anything about it. But he did. He came out of that tent in the goddamned rain and beat that bastard’s ass. And that’s just what I’m going to do to anybody who thinks I’m not big enough to fight back. Knock their teeth down their goddamn throat.”

In awe, I locked the gray, twilight scene in my memory. The morose sheet of rain, the small decent man roused from his sleep by the ominous shadow outside. The outpouring of vileness, the weary flap of the tent, the squaring off in the dark, the fight to the finish in the mud. My father had been there. He hadn’t taken part but he’d observed righteousness taking place, he’d recorded it, he’d approved of it. It was like Combat! on TV.

We watched Combat! every Tuesday. I loved the theme from Combat! and can remember the final bars even today. The theme was about fighting and winning but it was also about something more subtle and intimate, something voluptuous. I didn’t know exactly what this something was, but it had a lot to do with Lt. Hanley. Lt. Hanley was a slim, boyish person with large, flowerlike eyes. He was always getting captured or wounded. Even when he wasn’t getting captured, there was something about him that made his capture seem imminent. Episode after episode featured Lt. Hanley bound on the floor or to a chair while a large German stood over him, arrogantly resting his jackbooted foot on a table or something. (“Why does he put his foot there?” I asked. “Because Germans love their boots,” said my mother. “They love to show them off.”) Of course, Sgt. Saunders, a grizzled, stocky man, would come rescue him, and they would go on with the plot, but there was always a small moment when it was so nice to have Lt. Hanley tied up and looking at his captor with those brave, flowerlike eyes, and somehow the music referred to that moment. It was a very human theme song, I guess.

It was in Ohio that I developed what my mother came to call my “unattractive habits.” First, I stopped brushing my teeth, except on rare occasions. All at once, I hated putting the paste-laden brush into my nice warm mouth and scraping the intriguing texture of food from my teeth, annihilating the rich stew of flavors, the culinary history of my day, and replacing it with the vacuous mint-flavored aftertaste, the empty cavern of impersonal ivory. So I did it as infrequently as possible, even though the girl down the street called me “green teeth.” In addition, I began giving in to gross and unhealthy cravings: candy bars, ice cream, cookies, sugar in wet spoonfuls from the bowl, Hershey’s syrup drunk in gulps from the can, Reddi Wip shot down my throat, icing in huge fingerfuls from other people’s pieces of cake. Like my mother’s presence at night, it was never enough, and no threats or shaming lectures could stop me. The most offensive habit, at least according to my mother, was my way of deftly peeling back the edge of one nostril and delicately stroking the soft hairs inside. “If you do that in public,” said my mother, “no one will want to be your friend. They’ll think you’re a nose-picker.” I tried to wait until I was alone to feel the tiny hairs, but sometimes I would emerge from a daydream in, say, the middle of the A&P, to find a hand blissfully at a nostril.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized I’d gotten this hair-stroking habit from my father, who did it as he absently wandered the house.

Chapter Seven

When Justine was seven, she ordered the Catholic boy who lived down the street to tie her to his swing set and pretend to brand her, as she had seen Brutus do to Olive Oyl on TV. Sometimes she made him chase her around the yard with a slender branch, whipping her legs.

His name was Richie, and she remembers he was Catholic because his mother, faceless in memory, told her that if she lied there’d be a sin on her soul and she’d have to go to hell.

“Mrs. Slutsky is a good woman, but she is ignorant,” said Justine’s mother. “You must be kind and respectful to her, but don’t listen to anything she says.”

But Justine liked listening to Mrs. Slutsky talk about hell and encouraged her to do so every Saturday morning when she went to play with Richie. The Slutskys’ apartment was close and ramshackle. Once Justine put her finger on the wall and dirt came off on it; she felt like she was in a story about poor people. She loved the picture of the beautiful doe-eyed Jesus with a dimly flaming purple heart wrapped in thorns adorning the middle of his chest which hung in Mrs. Slutsky’s bedroom. She loved the ornately written prayer to the saints in the den. She loved to stand in the kitchen, which smelled of old tea bags and carrot peels, and question Mrs. Slutsky about hell.

“What if you do something bad but you believe in God? What if you believe in God but you’re always doing really bad things? What if you do something bad but you’re sorry?”

Mrs. Slutsky would explain everything as she did the dishes or ironed or smoked, expansively delineating the various levels of hell and purgatory. Sometimes Justine and Richie would sit at the kitchen table and draw pictures of a smoking red hell with the victim’s snarled-up arms writhing skyward. Justine liked to draw angels floating at the top of the page, looking down in sorrow and raining pink tears of pity into hell.

She and Richie spent hours watching Saturday morning cartoons on the Slutskys’ sagging, loamy-smelling green couch. She wanted to be tied up and whipped after watching cartoon characters being beaten and tortured by other characters for the viewer’s amusement. She watched the animated violence with queasy fascination, feeling frightened and exposed. It was the same feeling she had had when Dr. Norris touched her, and she felt a bond with docile, daydreaming Richie, simply because he was near her while she was having this feeling.

When she began making him tie her up, she couldn’t tell if he wanted to do it or if he were passively following her lead. She recalls his face as furtive and vaguely ashamed, as though he were picking his nose in public.

One day she saw a cartoon about hell. In it, a wily dog with paw pads like flower petals plotted against a kitten he was jealous of. He locked the kitty out of the house in a snowstorm, then settled down to rest before the fireplace. He fell asleep before the fire and suddenly, through a series of hallucinatory sequences, he went to hell. Hell was very hot and populated by demon ice cream vendors who sold blazing Popsicles on which the desperate dog burned himself while seeking relief; it was overseen by pitchfork-wielding devils who chased the hound, breathing fire and stabbing his bottom. He was tormented, howling and weeping, from one end of hell to the other until a coal leapt out from the fireplace and awakened him from the nightmare. He raced to rescue the kitten, but the happy ending did not mitigate Justine’s dismay at seeing an eternity of torture and punishment presented as an amusing possibility. She sat with the now familiar sensation of violation coursing through her body as if it could split her apart.

She was at home when she saw this, and she ran to her mother, crying.

“And they stuck him with pitchforks,” she wept. “He tried to buy a Popsicle and it burned him and they laughed!”

“That is very bad. They shouldn’t put things like that on television.”

Her mother consoled her with statements that cruelty and violence are wrong, and then helped her to write a letter to the TV station on the widely lined manila paper she used in school, in which she told them how much the cartoon upset her.

It had upset her, but she thought of it again and again. At night she would lie in bed and imagine being tormented forever because you had envious thoughts or were angry at someone. She didn’t have the vocabulary to express, even to herself, the feeling these images evoked in her; it was too overpowering for her even to see clearly what it was. It seemed to occupy the place that all her daily activities and expressions came from, the same place Dr. Norris had touched. It felt like the foundation that all the other events of her life played upon.

Of course, she didn’t think of it like this until much later, when she could only look at the ancient, entrenched feeling as an animal looks at a trap on its leg. At the time she soothed the demanding feeling by tying herself to her bedpost, gagging herself, and forcing morose but compliant Richie to beat her, or to pretend to.

Some time after she wrote the letter to the station, she received a reply from them apologizing for the cartoon and thanking her for writing. Her mother read it aloud to her when it came and then again at the dinner table.

“This is very good,” said her father. “It is a civics lesson. She can see how she can affect her environment, make her views known. Isn’t that right, Sugar?”

Justine nodded even though to her the letter was a surprising but irrelevant development that had nothing to do with affecting her environment.

When Justine’s father went to work in his own private office, Justine’s mother went to work with him as a receptionist. This was ostensibly to save money but was in truth because Mrs. Shade could not bear to be away from Dr. Shade during the day. On the rare occasions when he went somewhere without her, she would clutch his shirt and look at him with an expression that seemed to come all the way from the back of her head. She would ask when he would be back in a way that made Justine wonder if he might not come back at all. He would answer with a hearty certainty that did not acknowledge the expression in his wife’s eyes, as if it were normal for her to look at him that way. Then he would turn to leave. Justine’s mother would let go of him and turn back to Justine, the boundless need in her eyes replaced by her usual brisk confidence, as if she had stepped out of one world and into another.

But this didn’t happen often as her mother usually accompanied her father to work. Sometimes her mother left the office early so that she could be home when Justine arrived from school. Other times her mother stayed late, and Justine came home to Gemma, the housekeeper. Justine would then call her mother at work and ask when she was coming home. “Soon darling. Can’t you go play with Richie?”

“I don’t want to play with Richie.”

“Well then do your multiplication tables with Gemma.”

“I already did,” she’d lie.

“Sweetheart, I cannot stay on the phone. I am a receptionist. Keep busy and I’ll be home in an hour or so.”

“But Mama, I want to tell you what Miss Grub said today.”

“Were you good in school today?”

“Yes, but—”

“The phones are lighting up, darling, I have to go.”

Sometimes she would only be on the phone for bare seconds before her mother’s voice would swell with threat and rejection. Other times she could stay on the phone for a long necklace of lovely minutes, shifting her weight from hip to hip, relishing her mother’s words. It was hard to say what made her mother respond differently.

When she hung up, she’d go to her room and change her clothes, feeling like a survivor in a spaceship after a meteor storm. Then she’d drag through the house looking for something to poke into or violate. Without her mother there, her vigorous energy connecting every object with a bright ribbon of purpose and sense, the stark utilitarian furniture seemed alien, ugly, almost frightening. This was especially true in contrast with her hours in school, sitting in rows of desks, each desk and its inhabitant a world with its own system of tasks and exercises. Justine regarded other children as spacecraft one could signal to, either peacefully or in war, and school, with its organized hours and lunch period, facilitated this impression. She wandered the apartment, wanting to smash a vase or carve something on a table. She was so lonely.

She would try to think of other things, or tell herself a story to keep from calling her mother again, and sometimes it worked. Other times she held off making the call, as she’d sometimes hold off going to pee — the mounting pressure, so uncomfortable it made her squirm, doubled the voluptuous pleasure of letting go, or of rushing to the phone to obtain the loved voice, no matter how scolding.

“Justine, really, you cannot do this to me. I told you, I will be home. The more you call, the more you delay me.”

She sounded angry, but Justine had once heard her talking on the phone to Mrs. MacCauley about how Justine called her at work, and she’d said, “Yes, but it does make one feel good to know one is wanted.” Thus, although her mother would speak angrily, and Justine would apologize and whine, she knew they were simply having two conversations: the one on top in words and the one underneath, which was conducted in tones of voice, silences, and breaths. Still, it was humiliating to have to make these calls.

Sometimes she would go sit in the kitchen with Gemma, who would be moving around the stove making dinner or sitting at the table, reading a paperback and smoking a cigarette while a pot of food simmered. Gemma was a young black woman with luminous purple-hued skin, a straight slim back, and serious, silent eyes. She would talk to Justine and occasionally play cards with her, but she always held Justine away from her, somehow using the very words of their conversations as a fence to emphasize the stretch of territory between them. Justine often felt that Gemma did not like her, and further, that her dislike had nothing to do with who Justine actually was. Sometimes this made her want to charm Gemma, to make her like her. Sometimes it made her want to hurt Gemma. She couldn’t get near enough to do either.

One night when her mother had come to say goodnight to her, she said, “I don’t think Gemma likes me.”

“Why do you think this?” Justine could hear an unfamiliar element in her mother’s voice. “Has she been unkind to you?”

“No. I just don’t think she likes me.”

“Nonsense dear, I’m sure she likes you.” Her mother patted her vigorously for a second, and then the movement of her hand slowed and strayed over her leg, as though uncertain and considering. Then she took it off Justine altogether and put it in her lap. “I am going to tell you something very adult.” She paused again and Justine nodded. “Negroes are not in a good position in our society because at one time they were slaves. A lot of white people believe that they are inferior because they are dark-skinned and do things to hurt Negroes. They keep them out of restaurants and jobs and sometimes hurt them and kill them. We do not think this way. We believe all people are equal. But because of these prejudiced white people, many Negroes do not like any white people. You cannot do anything about this. You must respect Gemma and be extra kind to her, but you cannot have a normal relationship with her because of this. The lives of white and Negro people are very separate. But there must be politeness and decency between them. Do you understand?”

Justine nodded, unhappily regarding this bloodless world of decency and politeness that had just opened before her.

“But if Gemma is ever rude to you, you must speak to me immediately.”

Justine nodded again; she could no more imagine silent, gliding Gemma being rude than she could picture Miss Grub, her teacher, taking her clothes off in class.

“And you must never, ever repeat any of this conversation to Gemma. Do you understand?”

Justine thought of Gemma’s dark, veiled glance, which was piercing and indirect at once. It made her puzzled and sad that they could only have politeness and decency between them.

After this conversation, she watched Gemma and her mother together with interest. Her mother would usually come home as Gemma was getting ready to leave. She’d sweep into the kitchen with Justine at her heels and say, “Hello, Gemma, how are you?” and then look all around the kitchen, seeing what Gemma had done and what she had cooked for dinner. She might say, “Gemma, do you think you could bag the garbage a little more securely?” or “Would you have time to mop the floor tomorrow?” or “Gemma, you’ve done a wonderful job, I don’t know what I’d do without you.” And sometimes they would stand at the back door talking about an advance in pay that Gemma needed or a possible day off. Justine would look admiringly at the two tall women, especially her mother, who could tell another person what to do and have her do it.

But sometimes it worried her to see the two of them together, Gemma speaking from behind the shield of her cold dignity, her mother from the height of her impenetrable politeness. She wasn’t sure that Gemma knew that her mother wasn’t one of those white people who hated Negroes. How could she know for sure when her mother told her to bag garbage and mop floors? Justine wanted to tell Gemma that her mother liked her and that she did too.

Then other times it would seem to her, from the way Gemma nodded and answered her mother, that Gemma understood this perfectly, that the talk the two women had in the kitchen was a code for some other kind of conversation, like when Justine called her mother and her mother pretended she didn’t like it.

Into adulthood, she remembered Gemma’s still face, her measured voice, and the words that disappeared in the air between them. Their empty companionship was like a small void in the larger emptiness of the house without her mother.

Her father said that she was lonely after school because she didn’t have enough to do, and it was decided that she should take piano lessons three times a week.

“We will see if she has inherited my gift for music,” he said, referring to his brief fling at composing before medical school.

After school Gemma would take her to Miss Elderblau’s apartment, a few blocks away. Miss Elderblau was a thin, short, nervous woman who wore a black leotard and heavy blue eyeshadow around her large brown eyes. The way she looked fascinated Justine: she was nearly as old as Justine’s mother, but she had no breasts and almost no hips, and her brown hair was practically as short as a boy’s. Her living room fascinated Justine too. It was square and bare-walled except for two posters, one a set of bright stripes and the other a close-up of a crying woman holding a pistol against her cheek. There was almost no furniture, just a couch, a table, a stereo, some records against a wall, the piano, and a big stone horse. Miss Elderblau (who turned into Judith later on) smoked cigarettes and sat at the piano with her slight body in a graceful, seemingly spineless droop, speaking with toneless gentleness as she guided Justine’s hands over the keys.

After a half hour she’d say, “Ready for a break?” and they’d have tea, sometimes with frozen cake, sitting on big pillows on the bare wooden floor. Miss Elderblau would talk to Justine about her childhood, in which she had been a misfit. Justine had never heard the word “misfit” before, and Miss Elderblau used it constantly. “If you’re smart, you’re almost always a misfit,” she’d say. “And when you’re young that can be tough. But when you get older, you can make the world into what you want it to be, not the other way around. Remember that.” She asked Justine questions about her life, asked so seriously that it made Justine anxious. Miss Elderblau seemed to think that they were both misfits linked in a secret understanding, which was nice because Justine liked her piano teacher, but mystifying as no one had ever considered Justine a misfit. Miss Elderblau listened to what Justine said carefully but strangely saying “That’s right,” and “Of course,” and, “Isn’t that just the way?” or chuckling knowingly at junctures that could be interpreted as examples of Justine at odds with the world. Instead of asking why or making it harder for Miss Elderblau to do this, Justine exaggerated the things that she knew would elicit the most response just because it was so nice to have a sense of understanding with this breastless woman, even if it was groundless.

She had been taking lessons for a month when her father said it was time for “a performance.” After dinner one night, the three of them rolled the top up on the old piano in the dining room, and Justine played while her parents had their coffee. She played a whole song, with only one mistake and one fumble. When she was finished they applauded loudly and her father yelled, “Bravo!” and called her to him to give her a kiss. As he cuddled her against his leg, he said to her mother, “She is like me. Competent and quick, but she doesn’t really have anything.”

One night Justine dreamed about hell. She dreamed hell was right under her backyard, and in the dream she saw the devil come out of a trap door in the lawn while she was hiding behind a bush. He was small and red, and if you hadn’t known he was the devil, he wouldn’t have looked so bad. She decided she wanted to break into hell. She opened the trap door and snuck down a long flight of stairs, prying large jewels from the walls as she went. When she reached the bottom, she found a comfortable room. There were bookcases, a roaring fireplace, ornate furniture. And, in an armchair that fortunately faced away from her, sat the devil, reading a book. Behind the chair was a bag of treasure. She tiptoed up and grabbed the bag and ran back up the stairway, slammed the trap door, and piled rocks on it. Gloating over the candy and toys she could buy, she put the bag under her bed so she’d be sure to find it when she woke up. She thought: Hell wasn’t so bad after all.

Chapter Eight

When I was nine I read “The Little Match Girl,” the fairy tale about a starving child who freezes to death outside the home of a middleclass family as they eat Christmas dinner. I read with growing horror as it became clear that no elf or genie was going to appear to take her to a magic land or grant her wishes. She used the last of her pathetic matches to warm her fingers and finally lay down in the snow to die. For days I was obsessed with fantasies in which I appeared in the story, a wealthy child philanthropist, to sweep the match girl away to my opulent home. Then I switched to a fantasy in which the match girl appeared huddled in our backyard one snowy night, and I took her in and fed her bowls of Cream of Wheat. We gave her clothes and money, and in the end adopted her. She slept in my bed with me, her bony back pressed against my front, my arm wrapped around her waist.

“Mama, if we found a girl in the yard who was starving and cold, we’d take her in, wouldn’t we?”

“Of course we would.”

“We’d feed her and let her spend the night?”

“Yes, but there aren’t any starving people in our yard. Why do you ask?”

“Well, in case there was.”

“People don’t starve nowadays, honey. Everyone has enough to eat.”

“Even poor people?”

“Yes, even poor people.”

Still, I clutched the fantasies to me for days and kept them within reach when, months later, the idea of the dying girl would pierce me.

It was during the summer of that year when we moved to Chiffon, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. We moved because my father had spent the happiest summer of his boyhood there with an aunt before his parents sent for him in Tennessee. We drove to Chiffon during a noisy downpour of rain. I sat between my parents in the front seat, comforted by the moist car-warmth of fresh sweat and damp vinyl. A friendly little snake of scent (apple cores, old potato chip bags) crawled out of the plastic Disposan bag that dangled from the knob of the glove compartment. The windshield wipers rubbed the water back and forth on the glass, and Michigan appeared to us through rivulets and teardrops as we slowly toiled towards Chiffon.

My father hunched over the wheel, squinting and talking about how wonderful life in Michigan would be. My mother sat cross-legged in her see-through raincoat and yellow paisley head scarf. For months I had been imagining this place of big beautiful snow and houses with front porches, where trees dappled the streets with their shadows in the summer and grocery clerks were your friends.

When we arrived at Chiffon, I was surprised to see rows of houses more squat and symmetrical than those in our neighborhood near Cincinnati. They each had a small square of concrete for a porch and short starved trees in their yards. My disappointment rose up like a silent creature staring at me from beneath the filmy green surface of a pool. But I put a sheet of optimism and determination to like the neighborhood over my feelings, and the creature sank. The square sod yards were very green, the tree bark was slick and black in the rain, and, before our house, there was a crabapple tree flowering in a dazzling pink burst, scattering its bright petals in the grass.

Exultant, my daddy took me in one arm and his umbrella in the other and carried me over the Lysol-smelling threshold. I ran across the thin maize carpet yelling “We’re here, we’re here!” my voice echoing from one square beige room to the next.

The next few weeks were a paradise of trips to the grocery and take-out dinners eaten in the basement rec room before the TV. We couldn’t get into a normal routine; there was so much to do. My father scanned the local newspapers for coupons and announcements of bargains, cut them out and saved them until he was ready to hit three or four stores at once.

“Well,” he’d say, walking into the kitchen, “are you ready to loot Farmer Jack’s and A&P and Kroger’s for all the ice cream and Kleenex and chicken pot pie we can carry?”

Or my mother and I would take a walk after dinner, through blocks of identical houses, with identical shrubs planted in each yard, to a stretch of dirt road that led to a little cluster of stores, one of them a drugstore with an enormous fluorescent-lit candy counter. We’d buy Almond Joys, Mallomars, Mellomints, and licorice ropes and walk back in the dark as the street lamps winked on. Kids standing on the sidewalk in groups would stop talking and turn to watch us, their expressions dimmed by the evening.

When we got back to the house, my father would be sitting in the dark in the living room with a flashlight at his feet. We’d come in and he’d flick it on, shining it in our faces, momentarily blinding us. “Were they friendly at Baker Drugs?” he’d ask.

During these first weeks I saw very little of the other kids in the neighborhood because I almost never went out alone. They would sail by on bicycles, watching but keeping their distance whenever they saw us. Or I would hear them calling each other in a ritual singsong voice that scorned door bells and intermediary parents. The neighbors on either side of us (the old, grinning, big-nosed Sissels and the faded Catholic Kopeikins) had introduced themselves, but the Sissels had no children and the Kopeikins had only two squeamish myopic girls who wore matching flounce dresses, watched soap operas, and were given Saltines to eat when they were especially good.

One day when we’d been there almost a month, I was sitting in the front yard in a lawn chair reading Tarzan and the City of Gold when two boys pulled up on bikes and looked at me.

“Hey kid,” they said. “Where’re you from?”

“Cincinnati, Ohio.”

“Ohio’s a queer state.”

“What does ‘queer’ mean?”

“God!” They looked at each other in disbelief. “You don’t know what ‘queer’ means?”

I shook my head. Their voices were sarcastic, with a hard quality that didn’t allow for softness at all.

“It means retarded. Ohio’s a retard state.”

I felt my parents’ house behind me, and it felt vulnerable and weak. “Then what’s Michigan if Ohio’s a retard state?”

“Michigan’s a cool state. What’s your name, kid?”

“Dotty Footie.”

“God!” They looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “See you around, kid.” They got on their bikes and pedaled away.

I folded the lawn chair and went into the house. My mother was sitting on the hard new orange couch, reading a magazine, so I asked her what “queer” meant.

“It means odd, or unusual. Why?”

“Some boys came up while I was reading and said Ohio was a queer state.”

“That just means they don’t know much about Ohio.”

I didn’t go out and read again. But when I went with my parents for bargains or sight-seeing, I looked at the kids in the street more closely. I noticed that the boys and girls played separately, the boys standing in groups or walking with baseball equipment, the girls sitting on the concrete stoops with Barbie dolls, their blue plastic Barbie homes and accessories laid out in a format. I told myself that I was just the kind of person who liked to stay inside a lot.

“Territory is very important,” said my father. Somebody had thrown a paper cup on the edge of our yard, and he’d brought it in and put it on the kitchen table. “That’s why people have yards and fences and decorations and flowers in their yards. To establish a territory and mark it. Whatever bastard threw this on our yard has violated our territory, and if I see him do it again, I’ll kill him.”

Before the summer ended there was a serialized TV special on Anne Frank. We all sat in the basement and watched it in the dark, eating plates of cookies my mother made when The Wizard of Oz or something special was on. The Anne Frank show was a live play on a bare set of rooms with actors and actresses who had lines on their faces and pieces of hair hanging on their foreheads. It was preceded and followed by a man sitting in a chair talking about Nazis. They showed concentration camp footage at the end, as they were rolling the credits.

I loved the Anne Frank show. It made me feel something for other people, an awful connection with dead strangers more intimate than any relationship I had with my living peers. It made me feel vindicated and angry and self-righteous. The television presentation padded it enough so that it induced a mild feeling of sorrow and sensitivity instead of actual pain. After all, the actress who played Anne Frank had said in the end, “I believe people are basically good,” and the announcer had talked about the triumph of the human spirit, even though there were all those corpses.

In September I had to go to school. The trip to school was a gray sleepwalk through bathroom and breakfast, then through a neighborhood that was by now as familiar as a bad taste, surrounded by groups of other children who swung their lunch boxes and ferociously snapped their gum. In memory I see it from an aerial view; the square green lawns, the rooftops with the same chunk of space between them, the maze of sidewalks, the little human clusters progressing through the maze like disease moving through the body in a science diagram. The sight of myself — the lone toiling dot among the lunch box-swinging clusters — instantly recalls the fear and isolation that I took to be a normal state when among people other than my mother and father.

The school was a low concrete building surrounded by asphalt that had seesaws, swing sets and other iron instruments of play welded on to it. The halls were wide and monstrously echoed the shouts of children. We were assembled in the “Multi-Purpose Room,” given speeches, and told where to go. There were roughly thirty children assigned to big, full-skirted Miss Durrell, who had brown eyes and a burst of pimples arrayed across her forehead.

The days were defined by the tasks we had to accomplish such as making numbers jump over and under lines on the blackboard, reading about people on the Prairie, memorizing the imports and exports of Nicaragua, or why people in Turkey no longer had to wear fezzes. A map hung over the blackboard at all times to remind us that other countries were delineated by particular shapes and distinguished by different colors. At intervals we were made to go out on the asphalt where, for the most part, boys would run up and down screaming and fighting and girls would huddle by the door talking in low voices. The most formidable group was made up of big girls in short skirts that cut tight across their thighs and clung to their buttocks, who had hair that was teased and knotted until it stood straight up on their heads. I was afraid of them and I walked out to the edges of the playground and daydreamed until it was time to go in and memorize something else.

At the end of the day I would go home, strip off my dress and leave it on the floor of my room, put on pants, and go sit in the basement rec room watching Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, and Hullabaloo until dinner was called.

During the first week I made friends with Eileen Iris, who sat next to me. She was a small, sedate child with long wavy brown hair who wore a pale pink sweater with white sequin leaves on it, which seemed the essence of femininity to me. Soon we were exchanging “friendship bracelets” made of fake shells, walking together on the outer reaches of the playground, collecting pretty pebbles, and eating the tiny strawberries to be found in the fitful undergrowth. She introduced me to tiny Darla Rice, a brown-skinned girl one grade younger than us whose short dark hair was set in a fashionable adult style. Her mother took the three of us to the wonderful Ice Capades in Detroit, to watch skaters in ballerina attire or grinning papier-mâché heads glide and leap to solemn recorded music as they were raked by mystic blue and white spotlights.

My friendship with Darla and Eileen did not, however, ease my feeling of isolation as I sat in class or walked home alone from school. It was like an aberrant pocket of comfort that could not emit enough warmth to extend into the coldness surrounding it.

I was still afraid to venture out of the house into my neighborhood, although I didn’t think of it as fear. It felt more like a natural aversion; the very air outside our door seemed unbreathable, the voices of the neighborhood children, hard and bounding as rubber balls, cut into my sphere and left no space for me. Where were the friendly Michiganders my father had spoken about so confidently? I watched him and waited for an answer, which came in the form of a speech. “They’ve ruined everything that Michigan ever was,” he said. “They ripped down the old buildings and paved over the old roads and put crap up all over everything. It’s terrifying.”

He spoke in the dark of evening after dinner, from his vinyl reclining chair. My mother sat on the edge of the couch, examining her nails.

“It’s all part of the general trend,” he continued. “I thought Michigan would’ve escaped it, but I was wrong. We’re being destroyed, like the Romans.” He was answered by the tiny click of my mother’s thin nails being peeled into her cupped palm.

He said these things again on many other nights as he paced through the house like a soldier, rubbing invisible granules and making bitter comparisons between our neighborhood and the Michigan of his happy summer, sometimes punctuating his words by rushing out into the yard to seize a piece of litter or a crumpled beer can which he would bring in and hurl onto the kitchen table. His words seemed to hover over the house in a useless attempt to shield it.

Then it was October, and we found out about Devil’s Night. There had been a Devil’s Night in Ohio, too; the night before Halloween, teenagers could go around ringing people’s doorbells and throwing toilet paper over trees, and nobody would mind. In Chiffon, it wasn’t just one night. It started a whole week before Halloween, and it wasn’t just ringing doorbells and throwing paper. Gangs of kids would wander around, rubbing layers of soap onto people’s windows and walls, setting fires on front stoops and splattering the houses of unpopular people with eggs.

Our house was “egged” the first night, and my father screamed with rage. “These are the people who pick on old people, who terrorize the small and the defenseless!” The next night he turned off all the lights and, with me at his side, waited in the living room for the next pranksters. We hid behind an armchair together with a flashlight, some crackers and peanut butter — our “rations,” just like in the army. I was proud to be part of my father’s battle against juvenile delinquents. The first pranksters were a gang of doorbell ringers whose faces registered shock as my father burst out upon them with his machete, who scattered and fled in all directions as he chased them down the block shouting, “Come back and fight, bastards!”

By this time my parents had made friends with the neighbors on both sides of us, the Sissels and the Kopeikins. They had put on their bathing suits and gone to swim in the Sissels’ pool; my mother had many afternoon snacks with bespectacled, limply grinning Mrs. Kopeikin. But for me the friendly presence of these kind people was only a thin layer of civility that could be peeled away to reveal the gangs walking the streets on Devil’s Night, or, on the next layer, my father and me crouched behind the armchair, waiting.

My mother and I began having story times again, mostly on the weekends. Our favorite thing to do was sit at the kitchen table with paper and crayons, drawing stories for each other. If we couldn’t think of a story, we’d draw heaven. My mother’s heaven was blue and almost empty except for one or two angels with yellow hair, large silver stars, and a rainbow of many colors that she would work on for several minutes, slanting her crayons on their sides for more subtle hues. My heaven was full of grinning winged children, candy bars, cake, ice cream, and toys. When we were finished drawing, we would put our best pictures on the wall with Scotch tape and sit admiring them over dishes of cake and ice cream.

At night on Sunday, she would read me books like My Father’s Dragon, Little Witch, and Peter Pan. When she read Peter Pan, I stopped drawing pictures of heaven and began drawing Never-Never Land. Never-Never Land was pink and blue and green, it had trees with homes inside them, cubby holes and hiding places, tiny women in gauze robes, and flying children with rapiers in their elegant hands. Its very name made me feel a sadness like a big beautiful blanket I could wrap around myself. I tried to believe that Peter Pan might really come one night and fly me away; I was too old to believe this and I knew it, but I forced the bright polka-dotted canopy of this belief over my unhappy knowledge. And I tried to conform the suburban world around me to the world of Victorian London described in the book — which resulted in a jarring sensation each time I was forced to look at my true surroundings.

My mother’s presence protected me from these moments. Sometimes when we would go out on our drugstore errands — sailing forth in the car with our elbows thrust out the window, the radio playing cheerful music — we would encounter kids my age slouching in a group outside the store, teasing their hair, gnawing their gum, and they would turn to look at me, and I would see myself in their eyes, a fat girl wearing white ankle socks and heart-shaped sunglasses. If my mother hadn’t been there, they would’ve made jokes about me. But she was there and she bustled by them wagging her hips, saying, once we’d reached the store, “Do you know those girls? They look like gun molls!”

My closeness with my mother was physical as well as emotional. She washed my hair and rubbed my feet, and at night she would rub my back as I lay in bed. Occasionally, she would have me bend over her lap and, lifting my cotton nightie, she would spread my hips and check to see if I had worms up my ass. I could’ve questioned why she thought this was possible, but I didn’t. The certainty of her movements made it seem perfectly natural that I’d have worms in my ass and that she’d better check. It was to me as normal as the massages she gave my father almost every night.

I would often say good-night to them as my father lay in his reclining chair with my mother kneeling at his bare feet with a bottle of baby oil. Or he would be lying on his stomach on the floor in his pajama bottom with a sheet spread beneath him while she knelt over him in her nightgown with her bottom facing toward his head, rubbing his back, bending forward so that her long, loose hair brushed his hips.

Sometimes I would be allowed to take part, and we would both sit on Daddy in our gowns, massaging him with oil while he said, “Oh, that feels so good to the old father.” We would change positions often — I’d start at his feet and she at his shoulders, and then we’d switch. His skin would glisten with cheap oil, and he’d give off a hot, glandular smell that mixed with the smell of my mother’s light sweat and perfume. The little gold locket she wore around her neck swung back and forth as she moved, and her nightgown came away from her body so that I could almost see her breasts. I loved massaging my father with her.

When I started the sixth grade, our neighborhood was rezoned. Eileen and Darla now had to take a bus to a school half an hour away, and I was transferred to yet another school. The new school was filled with crowds of strangers with ratted nests of bleached hair, makeup, and breasts. The girls wore pointy boots and stood with their legs apart and their hips thrust out; the boys wore cleats and had faces like knives. I once saw two boys standing in the hall by their lockers, one boy passive and expectant, the other gently holding the passive one’s face with his palm, and then, with a sudden movement the touch turned to a slap, leaving the slapped face hot red. This caress/slap was repeated again and again, with varying gradations separating the caress from the slap, on one cheek and then the next. The slapped boy’s expression remained impassive, even insolent.

Both boys and girls covered their notebooks with drawings in hot Magic Marker and decals. Their drawings were of monsters with dripping fangs, long, roiling tongues, bugged-out veiny eyes, and short hairs all over them. The monsters were surrounded by Magic Marker words in huge ornate Gothic letters—“Cool,” “Eat Me,” and “Suck.” Almost everyone drew, with the same ornamental flourish and precision, a huge swastika or Maltese cross in some central place on his or her notebook.

It was pretty much the same situation as the last school except this one had more audiovisual aids, and instead of the teacher giving the usual talk during science period, she’d have one of the boys wheel in a television, and we’d watch a program called Adventures in Science. It was awful, and during the first week, a girl behind me said “I’d rather fart than watch Adventures in Science.”

I asked my mother what “fart” meant, and she said it was “a vulgar word sailors use when they mean to say ‘poot.’”

Sometimes on my way home, I’d see the fart girl walking a block or so ahead of me. She was big, with adult hips brutishly packed into a tight skirt, large knees with raw bumps on them, and eyes that wandered blankly as she gnawed her gum. Her name was Barbara Van Bent, and I was surprised when one day she waited for me to catch up to her on the sidewalk and said “Hi.” She was the kind of girl I was naturally afraid of, the kind of girl who pushed me out of the lunch line. But she said “Hi,” her eyes avoiding mine in the guarded, deferential way some children have of making friends.

She lived in my neighborhood, and the next day she waited for me to walk with her. I went to her house, and she showed me her autographed pictures of pouting boy rock stars and television personalities. She showed me her collection of naked bug-eyed rubber dolls with stand-up hair, and she shared a bag of orange and pink candy with me. Her mother, a big woman with stiff hips in stretch pants, gave us sloppy Joes on paper plates. She came to my house, and my mother made us hot chocolate and gave us paper and crayons. Barbara seemed surprised by this, but she took her paper and made drawings of girls with breasts wearing white go-go boots and boys with big eyes in Nehru jackets. I drew a picture of Never-Never Land and explained it to Barbara, as she had never heard of Peter Pan. I think she said “Cool,” but I don’t remember.

I can barely remember her face, just her mouth, full, dark-colored, and often slightly open, her fingers pulling and pinching it together. Her mouth could slide sideways in an expression of such sudden disdain that it would frighten me — then I’d silence my discomfort, and she’d be my friend again. I told her I never wanted to grow up. She said she did. I asked her why, and she said because then you could wear lipstick and sexy pants. Once I heard a boy say, “I’d like to make Van Bent strip,” and I imagined her naked. Later I saw him trying to pull up her dress on the playground. She tilted her hips and defiantly posed.

The last time she came to my house, we went into the backyard. Wretched pocked hunks of leftover snow sat near the house. Barb wore tight stretch pants and a blue ski cap with a big pom-pom. She wanted to throw snowballs at a target on the fence. I didn’t want to because I wasn’t any good at aiming or throwing, but I did it to please her. Her snowballs almost always hit; mine fell apart in the air. She got bored and didn’t want to play, and I felt it was because I wasn’t good enough. We stood talking in the damp yard, shifting our weight from leg to leg. She told me about the Nasty Club. She said it was she and three other girls who got together and showed each other pictures of naked people, or whatever else they could find that was dirty. Becky Pickren had once brought a rubber cock she’d found in her mother’s drawer, and Marsha Donnelly brought a used condom. To get into the Nasty Club you had to strip from the waist down in front of everybody, and according to Barb, Denise Biddle had hair between her legs.

Hearing about the Nasty Club shocked me and made me uncomfortable. My mother would hate it if she knew I was listening to such things. Why did they want to see these things? It seemed violent and humiliating to me. I tried to ignore these feelings. I tried to make Barb think I liked the Nasty Club.

For a while I didn’t see Barb after school; I’d wait for her in our usual place, but she didn’t come. Then I saw her walking a few blocks ahead with Sharon Ringle, a girl with a pushed-in face who I didn’t like. I quietly settled into my disappointment. I didn’t look at her in class, she didn’t look at me. “I didn’t think she was a nice girl anyway,” said my mother. “She just didn’t seem like a very high type.”

Then one day in the hall, someone said to me, “Hey, Footie. Van Bent says you’re a sweathog. She says you believe in Peter Pan.”

“Hey,” said a girl on the playground, “do you believe in Peter Pan?” I knew what had happened and I could see how the Peter Pan stuff sounded. I wanted to explain that I didn’t believe in it exactly, it was more that I wanted to believe it. But I didn’t know how so I just said “No.” That didn’t make any difference. The next week I was followed home from school by three big girls who walked right at my heels saying things like “Sweathog,” “Retard,” and “Hey, where’s Peter?” Barb was one of them. I didn’t turn to look at her or speak. I couldn’t even separate her voice from the others.

The next day there were five or six girls walking a foot behind me yelling “Footie is a sweathog!” over and over again. I tried to leave school ahead of them; I walked so fast my forehead sweated in the dry winter cold. Most of the time I escaped them, sometimes not. Sometimes I would see them blocks behind me, festively waving their Monkees or Barbie lunch boxes, confident as buffalo, and I would feel, for all my bulk, empty.

I told my mother what was happening. “Hoodlums!” she said. “Ignore them, honey, just pretend like you don’t even see them.” What she said was stupid, but I could hear that she was angry and hurt for me, and this caused me pain. She called Barb Van Bent’s mother and talked to her about her daughter “picking on” me. She called the school and tried to get them to protect me. My father said, “You’ve got to fight dirty with thugs,” and told me to smash their insteps and kick their shins.

The crowd continued to follow me down the street. My mother began walking to meet me after school. She would come marching up the block with a tight, upcurving smile that wrinkled her face and made naked the expression in her small gray eyes, twinkling with succor and cheer. There was nothing in her expression that acknowledged what the other children were saying to me — and continued saying, in her presence. She would bring me home for cookies and tea and put on a recording of a Broadway musical about a tropical romance, where soldiers and grass-skirted girls sang and danced in formation under coconut trees.

Part of me accepted my mother’s comfort, shutting out, with a huge effort, the rest of the world. But another part of me saw that the world created by my parents and me was useless. It was not translatable into the language of the tough, gum-popping kids around me, and it failed to protect me from them. I dimly recognized this world as pathetic, functional only in my parent’s house, but as there was no bridge between it and the outside, I had nowhere else to go.

One day when I was being followed by a group of five or so, one of them pushed me. This was too much and I turned, terrified but unable to stop myself. I faced startled Nona Delgado, a strong athletic Cuban girl with a soft mole on her cheek who, because of her beauty, style, and quick mouth had a place among the coolest in spite of the dark skin that relegated the few other Latinos to social obscurity. I had never looked at her up close; I had a second to register her sleek brows, the tiny white fleck caught on an eyelash, the parting of her dark colored lips, the glimpse of wonder and vulnerability that flared in her large eyes, momentarily stripped of their tough kid sheen. She was beautiful, and I felt a second of bitterness that this beautiful face was my enemy, then I punched her nose. She opened her mouth and stared. Convinced that I was about to be beaten by them all, I hit her again and again — about five times before she dropped her books and fought me. Surprise one: she did not know how to fight at all. Surprise two: her friends did not jump on me. They stood around us and yelled “Get her Nona!” while I, a fat girl, pounded her. After I recovered from my fear and anger, the fight became a squalid embarrassment I couldn’t find a way out of. We rolled and sweated on the ground, my Sears coat torn, her nose and tender mouth ribboned with blood. Finally a housewife came out and told us to stop fighting in her yard. As I walked away, my enemies stood around the angrily weeping Nona. One of them shouted after me “You fight like an animal, Footie!” My mother and father praised me for fighting, and I was glad I had. But I was only glad in the abstract; I was sorry I’d hit Nona, who I’d always secretly admired. I felt she couldn’t really be my enemy; she had simply been drawn into a bad crowd. I remembered the feeling of my fists on her face with a strange mix of disbelief, repulsion, and pride. Her tears and blood I remembered with tenderness. When I thought of her, I didn’t feel contempt or anger or triumph; I felt warmth and unhappiness. One or two times after our fight, I saw her face in the hall in school and saw in its sudden stiffness that I had affected her. It made me feel excited and troubled.

One night almost a month after the fight, I called her house. Mrs. Delgado, who had her daughter’s large liquid brown eyes, answered and told me Nona was skiing. I said, “Tell her that Dotty Footie called. Tell her I’m sorry I fought her.”

The next time I met Nona in the hall, I was shocked to see her look directly at me, her eyes holding an almost unbearable expression of receptivity and humanity. “Hi,” she said, and disappeared into the yelling mass of kids. I felt as if I had been stripped of clothing; her second of kindness pierced me and touched a naked private place so unused to contact that I cringed with shame and discomfort, as if a stranger had put a hand down my pants.

And it didn’t stop there. To my dismay, Nona began calling me at home and inviting me out to play. My mother was delighted; even I could see that here was a chance to make a friend. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go out into the barren squares of neighborhood snow and play with this television-beautiful person in a pink ski cap. I didn’t know how.

But I couldn’t refuse, so out I went. A nature walk, a game of catch, a cup of cocoa in Nona’s pink room checkered with photos of rock and TV stars. Our activities were burdensome, tense affairs devoid of the girlish giggling and trash talk I had never learned how to do. I wanted to go back in the house and draw pictures of Never-Never Land elves or listen to a musical with my mother. Strangely, unbelievably, I had the feeling that Nona liked me. In her cautious conversation I sensed discomfort, curiosity, a sense of duty that had somehow been irrevocably triggered by my phone call. But I also sensed actual interest and liking waiting for me to show myself.

I wanted to show myself but I could not. I vainly groped for words that would let her see what I was like, things to say that she would understand. Desperately, I called other children “retards,” “niggers,” and “queers,” something she seemed always ready to do. But when I talked this way, her face would become confused and remote, as if she knew these words from me were lies, and she didn’t understand why I was lying.

The awful climax of our attempted friendship came in early spring, as we were crouched stiffly in my backyard near our shelterless wire fence, moving our naked rubber troll dolls around my mother’s tomato plants. Suddenly, across the Sissels’ exposed yard, I saw Barbara Van Bent and her gang. And they saw us. They paused for a second, registering the shock of seeing Nona in my yard with me. Then they began to yell, “Delgado is a spic! Delgado loves the sweathog!” For a second I saw Nona’s body fractionally withdraw from me; I saw she had been wounded by what they said. I saw her stop and pause. I saw her slowly return to me. I felt her stay by me, defying the other girls. On her face was a look of mild puzzlement, as if she couldn’t imagine what she was doing in this situation.

I began turning down Nona’s invitations, and soon they stopped. She kept looking at me and saying “Hi” in the halls, and this made me so uncomfortable that I avoided her the same way I avoided Barb and her friends.

One day just before school was over, something unusual happened. As I was struggling down the pavement on my way home from school, my fingers sweating around my lunch-box handle, I almost bumped into Barb Van Bent, who was hustling along almost faster than I was. It had been so long since I’d seen her alone, I didn’t recognize her. She was completely different without her group. She seemed relieved when she turned and saw it was only me coming up behind her; her eyes had been uncharacteristically wide with terror. “Hi,” she said.

I was so nonplussed I fell into step with her, and we walked at breakneck speed in sweating silence.

“Did you see Donnelly back there?” she asked. She meant her friend Marsha.

I hadn’t.

“She says she’s gonna beat my butt,” explained Barb. “That Jew bag.”

This was a very interesting idea and an altogether plausible one. Barb was a big girl, but Marsha was bigger, with huge, frozen-hamhock hands and tiny, brainlessly sparkling eyes flanking a giant nose that looked like it could live independent of her face. What was strange was that Barb should tell me about this. Was it a weird form of companionship? Or did she simply have no sense of irony? Did she not care that I saw she was even more cowardly than I?

Bewildered into silence, I listened to her describe Marsha’s hideous body and warped personality. “. and she’s got pimples on her butt and holes in her underwear,” she said. “And she’s a bitch. Do you know what she’d do?” Barb paused while a tiny kindergartner came within range and addressed herself to him. “She’d say, ‘Get out of here you nigger lips or I’ll beat your butt.’” The child fled. “That’s what she’s like,” finished Barb.

By the next day she must’ve decided these qualities weren’t so bad, because I saw them in the cafeteria together, giggling over their lunch boxes.

Summer came, and I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. I never went out of the house. I stayed down in the basement rec room all day watching Dialing for Dollars and eating Sara Lee cheesecake, bags of potato chips, and diet pop. When that was over I’d watch the gladiator movie and then go upstairs to play with my troll dolls or draw pictures of Tarzan and the Lion Queen. Then I’d sit and talk to my mother while she made dinner, and then we’d eat in the anesthetic wind of three fans trained on the table as we watched Walter Cronkite. My father would walk around, talk. I’d see the kids of the neighborhood wheeling dreamily on their bikes in the lamplight and feel that all was as it should be. They were outside and I was inside. I gained fifteen pounds that summer.

Chapter Nine

When Justine was ten she read a poem about French resisters during the Second World War in her children’s classics book. In it, a French hero was crucified to a barn door with bayonets and tormented by SS men before a crowd of weeping French patriots. The poet dwelt voluptuously on the hero’s torment, and the poem climaxed with the death of the smirking SS captain. It excited her even more than the cartoons that had induced her to make Richie tie her to the swing set. She kept the children’s classics under her bed so she could read it at night with a flashlight and masturbate.

They had moved from Lancelot to Action, Illinois. Richie was no longer at her disposal, and she hadn’t yet found anyone to take his place.

Action was a thriving industrial suburb outside of Chicago. Justine’s father was a successful cardiologist at the Action Medical Center, an interesting building that appeared to be made of plywood and concrete. Her father had told her mother that she couldn’t be his receptionist because they already had a receptionist, so her mother did volunteer work at a center for emotionally disturbed children instead. Their house was a large, wandering, one-story with a flamingo worked into the aluminum grille on the front door.

They had moved there during the summer, when the sidewalks of the new neighborhood were alive with lounging, bicycling, roaming kids. When Justine ventured out onto the pavement, she was accosted by three gum-chewing girls who looked like they were trying to find something wrong with her. But suburban Michigan kids have almost the same laconic, nasal speaking style as the kids of suburban Illinois, and she was immediately accepted into the group.

Justine was drawn to the most sexual of the girls in the neighborhood, Pam Donovan and Edie Bernard, who wore the tightest pants and tightest shirts over their tough little chests. Edie, the blonde, was even sophisticated enough to wear pink powder and black mascara. Although their friends described them as “cute,” they were not pretty. They were skinny and sharp-boned, with sullen, suspicious eyes, thin, violently teased hair, and faces generic to thousands of suburban little girls. But they were made beautiful by the erotic ferocity that suffused their limbs and eyes and lips.

Yet these girls, who harbored such power, were the most passive of the neighborhood gang. The three of them didn’t like to play tag or baseball or even to ride bikes. They liked to sit on the small squares of concrete that were called “porches,” sometimes getting up to walk around the block, getting whistled at and sprayed with light stones by boys. They talked about boys with a nervous mix of fear, disgust, and attraction, about girls with malice or displays of alliance, about their mothers with contempt, and about their bodies with a range of emotions from protective, reverent secrecy to loathing.

There were race riots in Detroit that summer and there was a lot of talk about that. Darcy Guido stood up to imitate Martin Luther King, tap dancing, rolling her eyes and pulling her lower lip down and sticking her tongue up to make weird wet lips that looked like the genitals of an orangutan. The day the national guard flew over their rooftops in helicopters, they stood in the streets and cheered. Even Pat Braiser’s mother came out on her concrete slab and said, “That’ll teach those animals to be decent!”

Justine sat quietly during the first days of the riot, hearing the distant people called animals and watching the genital-lipped, eye-rolling clowning. Her memory of Gemma rose up and stood mute, like a sign forbidding her to laugh at Darcy’s joke, even when Pam, her best friend, nudged her and said, “Why don’t you laugh?”

For days there were pictures of the riot on television. At dinner, Justine and her parents would sit at the table, eating and watching the dark figures run around on the screen while flames flickered in the blackened buildings. Her father would speak on the reprehensibility of rioting and violence, smartly wielding his utensils, the very posture of his haunches expressing the rightness of his disapproval. Her mother would agree, adding praise for Martin Luther King. The people on the TV apparently felt the same way; after showing clips of rioting or angry black spokespeople, they would console their viewers with old footage of Dr. King giving his famous dream speech. Justine became tired of seeing him, and of hearing him, and of hearing him praised. She didn’t see what was so great about him.

Then the riots were over and it was time to go to the Wonderland Mall for clothes. Justine loved Wonderland. It was dotted with shrubs and waste containers, there was a fountain with a rusting cube placed in the center of it. Muzak rolled over everything, decorously muffling sound and movement. Huge square portals led into great tiled expanses lined with row upon dizzying row of racks hung with clothes. Signs that said “Junior Miss,” “Cool Teen,” or “Little Miss Go-Go” in fat round letters protruded from the tops of the racks, some of them illustrated by teenaged cartoon girls with incredibly frail bodies, enormous staring eyes, tiny O-shaped mouths and large round heads with long straight swatches of brown or yellow hair.

The dresses on the Cool Teen racks seemed to have been manufactured in a country where no one sat at home waiting for their mother; it seemed that in wearing the hot orange and yellow polka-dotted “hip-hugger” skirt with matching vinyl belt, the paisley jumper with purple pockets, or the high-collared chartreuse dress, Justine would suddenly occupy a place in which her mother didn’t even exist.

She did real shopping, ironically, with her mother, but what she loved best was to go with Mrs. Bernard and Edie and Pam. All the way to Wonderland, she and her friends would lounge all over the back seat giggling about pubic hair or how stupid somebody was while Mrs. Bernard, a strangely thin woman with a face that looked like it was held in place with tacks, talked to herself in a low, not unattractive mutter. (Edie said her mother had a mustache that she tore off with hot wax, but Justine didn’t believe it.)

Once at the mall, the four of them would comb the grounds like a gang of cats, rifling the racks, plunging into dressing rooms, snacking savagely between shops. Mrs. Bernard would wander ahead, continually bush-whacked by salespeople who thought her mutter was addressed to them, leaving the girls to stare and giggle, and to furtively admire the groups of tough older kids lounging on the public benches, smoking cigarettes and sneering. Sometimes glamorous older boys would follow them saying “I’d like to pet your pussy” and other dirty things; this was exciting, like the poem about the crucified man, only it made her feel queasier as it was real and in public. It was horrible to be in front of people having the same feeling that she had while masturbating and thinking about torture. She was sure that Edie and Pam didn’t have feelings like that; probably they didn’t even masturbate. They blushed and giggled and said “You guys better stop it,” but they swung their purses and arched their backs, their eyes half-closed and their lips set in lewd, malicious smiles. Justine would imitate them, and when she did, sometimes a door would open and she’d step into a world where it was really very chic to walk around in public with wet underpants, giggling while strange boys in leather jackets and pointed shoes called you a slut. The world of Justine alone under the covers with her own smells, her fingers at her wet crotch, was now the world of the mall filled with fat, ugly people walking around eating and staring. It was a huge world without boundaries; the clothes and record and ice cream stores seemed like cardboard houses she could knock down, the waddling mothers and pimple-faced loners like dazed pedestrians she was passing on a motorcycle.

Once, at Sears, she was sullenly picking through the dressing rooms, trying to find a vacant stall, when she flipped back a scratchy yellow curtain and saw a strange person. She was about Justine’s age and weird-looking, Justine thought, ugly, with pale cold skin, a huge exposed forehead, and blue plastic glasses on her face. She was fully dressed and slumped on the floor in a position of utter passivity and defeat, right against the mirror, staring at herself with the lack of expression that comes from extreme mental pain. Their eyes met for seconds — the stranger’s face faintly reflecting embarrassed humanity — and then Justine backed out. The sight of such mute, frozen pain was stunning and fascinating, like an animal with its legs hacked off. Justine had never seen such a naked expression on her parents’ faces, let alone on the face of a stranger. It made her feel queasiness and fear; it also made her want to poke at the queasiness and fear so she could feel it all the more. To see and feel something so raw in the mall was obscene, much more obscene than the whispering boys. She went to get Edie and Pam.

“Come and see,” she said, “there’s a drooling retard in the dressing room.”

Naturally they hurried back. Justine had imitated her deranged slump with embellishments of jaw and eyeballs, and they approached the dressing room with a sense of cruel, illicit excitement. But when they got to the dressing stall and flung the curtain back, there was no one there. They sighed with disappointment and turned to go, and there was the girl again, standing up and peeping at them from behind the curtain of another dressing stall. Her face was accusing and almost snotty. Edie and Pam knew it was her, but somehow they couldn’t make fun of her, even though they would’ve liked to; her staring face made them feel caught.

“God, what a queer,” said Pam as they left the dressing room.

They found Edie’s mother eating candy necklaces at the coffee counter of Woolworth’s and left.

When the first day of school arrived, Justine had accumulated ten interchangeable outfits. And, in spite of all the fussing, picking, and mutual encouragement from her friends in the purchase of them, she was afraid that when she walked into the classroom she would be ostracized for fashion reasons that would become horribly clear to her as she made her way to her desk through a blinding sheet of jeers. What if none of her neighborhood friends were in the class, or even if they were, what if they turned out to be hopeless retards so low down on the social scale that association with them condemned her forever?

She was so numbed with fear that she accepted, without retort, her mother’s breakfast table assurances that she looked “adorable” in her yellow and turquoise checked skirt and yellow knee socks.

The drive to school would’ve taken place in silence, if it hadn’t been for infuriating Adventures in Good Music, which she hadn’t the strength to object to, on the radio. She felt the whole magical summer of huddling safely with her friends, talking trash, and rejecting black people in a blur of hot bright days amid the changeless squares and rectangles of the trusted landscape had taken place in another world that would have no bearing on this terrible new place she was headed.

This was not true. The assigned classroom was filled with murderously aggressive boys and rigid girls with animal eyes who threw spitballs, punched each other, snarled, whispered, and stared one another down. And shadowing all these gestures and movements were declarations of dominance, of territory, the swift, blind play of power and weakness.

Justine saw right away that she’d be at home here.

When they were let out on the asphalt playground that morning, she found Edie and Pam, and they huddled together, chewing their gum and sending sharp stares of appraisal over their shoulders. They told each other who was cool and who was queer. By the afternoon recess, they had gathered three other girls about them, Debby, Dody, and Deidre. The D girls were all big and tough, charmed perhaps by Justine’s sullen beauty and the sophisticated style of Edie and Pam.

Justine had made friends with Dody, the pretty one of the three. Her prettiness was of an unusual type in this time of anorexic cuties with ironed hair and white lipstick, she being a big raw-boned girl with large fleshy shoulders and hips, and big active hands and feet attached to long, confused arms and legs, multidirectional like rubber. Her eyes were extraordinary, huge and brown, shot with mad glowing strands of yellow and gold which, in conjunction with the tawny mass of hair sprawling frantic and uncontrollable on her head, gave her the look of a restless, fitful lioness. Her size and weight gave her no center; Justine’s first retrospective image of her is of Dody splayed, arms and legs, as though in the middle of a tornado, only laughing, open-mouthed and loud. The next image is an actual memory of the time Dody, humorously displaying her size and strength, picked up a scrawny fourth-grader by a fistful of hair and swung her in a complete circle three times before letting the screaming creature fly. Justine remembers her strange vulnerability, her terror of thunderstorms and spiders, her moment of wide-eyed panic that time she and Justine were making out in the Mall restroom with two boys they’d met, when Justine had to hold her trembling paw. Ten years later, it had not surprised her to read by chance in the paper that Dody LaRec, college junior, had become an unusual statistic, one of the few females to commit suicide with a bullet to the brain.

The others, Debby and Deidre, were not pretty, but they exuded an awful cynicism that impressed people and they knew dirty things — Deidre claiming, at the age of eleven, to have “done it.” Besides, they were brutal. The six of them terrified the other kids as they patrolled the playground, looking for trouble. In gym class they were always on the top team, hand-picking the ablest girls to be on their side, pitting themselves against the feeblest people, whom they happily pounded. Parents were always calling to complain about them pulling down their son’s pants or dropping someone’s lunch in the toilet. Teachers cajoled, pleaded, and occasionally ranted, but they couldn’t do anything and they knew it. Justine believed teachers to be secretly on their side as they trampled the weak and the uncool, people adults have to accept, and, as a result, become like.

There was only a small group of boys who weren’t afraid of them, on account of their being so tough themselves. They were small, sinewy boys whose main strengths were their monstrous voices and inhuman indifference to pain. They were always getting bashed with baseballs, splitting their skulls in rock fights, chipping their teeth, ripping open their elbows and knees, beating each other up as often as they beat retards and queers. They hung around with Justine and her group on the playground, pushing and pinching and pulling up their skirts. Sometimes they’d stand quietly and talk together, and Justine would feel her private torture feeling glowing through her lower trunk. She particularly liked little Ricky Holland, whose beautiful, almost dainty hands were such a contrast to his morbidly cruel personality. He was a loner within his gang, almost protected by the other boys in some unconscious way, as if they knew that just a slight shift in their perception would render him a victim rather than a cohort. He seemed happiest when torturing small animals by himself, yet he had an inexplicable kind aspect that appeared randomly and could lead him to risk rejection, like the time he protected a crippled girl who had been circled by the others. He was the first among them to smoke cigarettes, which, since drugs had not yet come to suburban playgrounds, was as chic as one could be. Justine loved his expressionless face, his blank, lusterless eyes. There was nothing in that face anyone could hurt or even approach. Love would find no opening there except perhaps in that quirky kindness which appeared for no reason and vanished again, too transient to support a reckless prepubescent ardor ready to crucify itself on a heartless boy. He paid no attention to her.

Meanwhile her mother worked at the home for emotionally disturbed children. This was very embarrassing to Justine, and she took pains to make sure her friends never found out about it, forbidding her mother to mention it in front of them. “I’d die if they know my own mom works with the ’tards,” she said, hoping her mother would be ashamed. But her mother just answered, “There isn’t any need for them to know. I understand darling, peer approval is very important at this age.”

Justine alternately despised and admired her mother. It was hard not to admire this tall still-beautiful woman who dressed so well, who kept active, who led the dinner conversation with a ringing voice. Compared to other mothers she was an athlete, still rising in the morning to exercise in her leotard. She impressed all of Justine’s friends, who thought she looked like somebody on TV. Her mother never told her she couldn’t buy a dress because it was too short, like some mothers did. She did talk to her about being “nice” in reference to boys and to bullying other kids, but Justine understood from her tone of voice that “nice” had nothing to do with what anybody really felt or thought or observed but was something everybody had to pretend. Justine could also tell from her mother’s voice that her mother believed this pretense was very important.

This was where she began to despise her mother; once she started she couldn’t stop. She despised her earnest expression when she talked about a “breakthrough” made by some mental case at the center; she despised her straight posture, her diets, her exercises, her humming along to Adventures in Good Music. When they were in the same room together and her mother farted (silently, of course, but Justine could smell it), she felt such revulsion and hatred she wanted to hit her mother in the face. She wanted to see the attractive propriety of her mother’s face collapse into tears, loud, ugly tears.

She never saw this, but once she heard it. She was awakened late one night by the sound of it, although at first she didn’t know what it was; at first she thought the ungainly sounds were a dream. Then she heard her father’s voice. He was angry. Her mother was crying, a deep moaning cry, saying something over and over again to him. Justine was stunned with horror and disbelief. Her father raised his voice and said a bunch of words, out of which Justine could only distinguish “stupid cow” and “off the floor.” And then her mother was quiet. Justine’s heart pounded deep and hard in her chest.

The next morning she watched her parents at breakfast. Her mother was pink and perfectly madeup, briskly leading the breakfast conversation as usual. What Justine now noticed was the reason she was leading it; her father, dourly pushing his eggs around on his plate, was making polite noises, not really responding to her. At first she thought it was because they’d had a fight, but as the week went on she realized he was acting as he always did. Justine thought: He doesn’t like her either.

The thought was disconcerting, and she pushed it away, but it kept coming back, especially when her father began staying away for overnight conferences. Sometimes it would make her gloat, sometimes she’d try to hurt her mother with falsely innocent questions about where dad was. Other times she’d imagine her mother looking old and weak, crying on the floor while her father scorned her, and it would fill her with fear and pity. She would hate her father then and have fantasies of yelling at him, warning him to leave her mother alone. But she never heard him say those things to her mother again, although some nights she lay awake listening for it. Sometimes too, her father would stop ignoring her mother and would act the way he used to, smiling at her, hugging her shoulders, standing beside her, handsome and proud, calling her “my lady.” When this happened, the things Justine had heard that night seemed like something that had happened between people who were only pretending to be her parents.

At the beginning of October a new kid entered Justine’s class. Her name was Cheryl Thomson. She was big, she had acne, and she wore old plaid skirts what were obviously not from Sears or Wards. This would’ve been all right; some very cool kids — Dody among them — dressed this way. But they had a sloppy panache, a looselimbed grace that made their flapping shirt-tails and shifting skirts seem sassy; halting, thick-bodied Cheryl did not. She sat in her seat with her stubby hands in her lap, talking to people politely before class, a dull dreamy look coating her gray eyes. Then the teacher came in and, in an innocent effort to help everyone get to know the new student, opened class by asking Cheryl questions meant to gently reveal her, for example, “What is your favorite food?” Cheryl did all right with that, but when asked about music, instead of saying “the Monkees” or “the Beatles” she answered “country music,” causing a ripple of disbelief to alert the room. From that point on, every answer she gave confirmed her to be a hopeless alien in the world of primary-colored surfaces. She wanted to be a fire fighter when she grew up! Her favorite TV show was Andy of Mayberry! She liked to go fishing! Every answer seemed to come out of some horrible complex individuality reeking with humanity, the clarity and trust in her soft voice made them squirm with discomfort.

In the lunchroom, everybody was talking about how queer she was. Her second day at school, somebody tripped her in the hall; the following week somebody put a tack on her seat. When she sat on it, she cried, and little Marla Jacob sneered, “God, what an emotional!” From that day on she was known as “Emotional,” the worst insult imaginable.

Her presence changed the whole composition of the class, uniting everyone, even other unpopular kids, against her. Everything she said became further proof of her stupidity, her social failure. Every ugly and ridiculous thing introduced into any discussion, in the classroom, on the playground, at the mall, was “like Emotional.” She was most often taunted verbally, but there was also physical abuse — a shower of orchestrated spit balls, an ambush by a dozen or so boys and girls who struck her legs and arms with their belts.

Emotional’s reaction was by turns angry, hurt, bewildered, but her most constant expression was one of helpless good nature. She was too even tempered to remain angry or brooding; she always tried to reverse the tide against her, to make jokes, to be positive, to join in. Once Justine saw a smiling face drawn in Magic Marker on her notebook with the words “Happy-Go-Lucky” written underneath and knew, sickeningly, that it was true, in spite of everything.

Of course, Justine took part in the Emotional pogrom. As with all the other little social massacres she’d taken part in, she was more a goader and abettor than an attacker; she was too small to be a real bully and not aggressive enough to be a ringleader. Besides, she was secretly too ambivalent. When she looked at the chalky, rigid face of some kid who was being shoved to and fro between Deidre and Debby, she felt deep, excruciating enjoyment as well as equally deep discomfort that she deliberately provoked, like she’d chew a cold sore. These two feelings met and skewered her between them while she giggled and cajoled and incited her friends to riot, making her feel monstrously alive and enlarged beyond the boundaries of herself, exploding into the world like her memory of tornado-splayed Dody — yet unable to bear being in the world, turning in on herself like an insect run through with a needle.

These feelings were magnified by Emotional, who, within a few months, became something other than human. Justine always joined in the teasing, yet the sight of Emotional’s unhappy face brought darkness up from some thoughtless pit within her, made her turn away and frown when she should’ve been laughing. When she looked at Emotional she looked into the face of her most private fantasy, the victim crucified before a jeering crowd.

To Justine’s discomfort, Emotional began appearing in her dreams. The most outstanding of these dreams featured her and Emotional in the front-line trenches of a war. There were other people in the trench, but there existed between her and the class queer a deep unspoken friendship that was expressed in meaningful glances and, at one point, a fraught hand clasping. The height of the dream was reached when Justine lay injured and paralyzed from an enemy blast, and Emotional ran to her side, ripping off a piece of her blouse to bind Justine’s wounds.

It was perplexing: in many of the dreams Emotional helped or even rescued Justine in various ways, which in real life she couldn’t possibly do. If anything, brooded Justine, she could help Emotional if she wanted to. If she wanted to. Of course, she didn’t want to, but what if she did? She began to nurse strange fantasies of advising Emotional on how to improve her wardrobe, even accompanying her to the mall for a shopping trip, sitting with her at lunch, walking home with her, hearing the weird things that doubtless went on in her mind.

Emotional reappeared in her dreams, smiling and waving.

One morning after a particularly mysterious and moving dream, Justine found herself in a gym class that had been divided into groups, each group performing various athletic acts. Emotional was in her group. As usual, whenever it was Emotional’s turn, the others would try to make her fail. When everyone had to jump over a pole held by two kneeling girls, all would finish their jump with a pause by a pole-bearer and a whispered “make Emotional trip!” Which they did; when Emotional made her jump, the pole came up mid-leap. There was an amusing facial wobble, a mid-air flounder, and Emotional thudded down on her hands and knees. She cried; everybody laughed and said, “God, Emotional!” But Justine, although she laughed too, felt unwanted remorse. This remorse became a secret weight of gentleness and sorrow within her which stayed, no matter how hard she tried to kill it. That afternoon she decided she was going to stop hurting Emotional.

She didn’t want to voice her new tolerance to anyone at school, but what good was it if nobody knew about it? If Emotional didn’t know about it? She would see Emotional and itch with curiosity about her. What did it feel like to be despised and victimized by everyone? How would Emotional react if she knew that in this nest of enemies she had an ally?

One day when Justine’s pack of friends was not with her at the end of the day, she found herself a bare three feet from Emotional, both of them in the act of closing their lockers. Justine couldn’t help it; she turned her head and held the other girl’s flitting glance. “Hi, Cheryl,” she said.

They left school together and continued walking for a few blocks before they had to part. Justine did this because it was late and she didn’t see anyone she knew and because the novelty of talking with this outcast was too fascinating to let go of quickly. But mainly she walked with Emotional because when she allowed contact to occur between them, she was touched by her in a way she had no experience with and therefore no resistance against. Every aspect of Emotional’s body — the shy ducking motion of her head, her injured eyes, her small steps, her arms held protectively close to her body, her soft dislocated voice — was the manifestation of a deep woundedness which Justine, without the harsh interference of her friends, felt acutely. She wanted to salve this wound, to shield it. It was a feeling she hadn’t had for a long time, not even for herself, and it was such a tender feeling that she wanted to prolong it.

That night as she lay in bed, she fantasized about standing between Emotional and the whole brutish world, protecting her, creating a little place between them where she’d be free to like her hillbilly music and wear her uncool clothes and nobody would mind.

She unexpectedly got the chance to act out this fantasy when the next day, before school, she was confronted during the usual pre-class homeroom melee by Debby, Deidre and another girl with terrifying big black hair. They wanted to know: “Are you friends with Emotional?”

She was only telling the truth when she said “No,” but then they wanted to know if it was true she’d walked with her.

“I just wanted to see the queer kinds of things she’d talk about. I just wanted to know what weirdos say. I was pretending to be nice, but she could tell I hated her.”

Later that day she and Dody were alone, ratting their hair in the rest room after school. “Do you really hate Emotional?” Justine asked.

Dody stopped in midrat and stared. “Of course I hate her, what are you, some kind of retard?”

“No really, why do you hate her?”

“Because she’s retarded.”

“Yeah but if she’s retarded, shouldn’t we help her? Shouldn’t we be nice to her if she can’t help being weird?”

“God, Justine, sometimes I wonder about you.” Dody produced a compact and vigorously ground some pink grit into her skin.

The next day Justine had to put up with a lot of sarcastic comments. But she found that once she’d begun expressing what she felt, it was hard to stop; she became reckless, irritated by the choke collar of public opinion. Although she was frightened, she couldn’t help yanking against the restraint, and the more disapproval she got, the harder she tugged against it. A tough little person within her rose and asserted itself. She stuck by what she’d said, more and more vehemently, until finally she exploded. “I don’t care what you douche-bags do. I’m not gonna hate Emotional anymore so just shut up, okay?” The other girls stared at her, shocked.

They began savaging poor Emotional even more viciously than before, especially in Justine’s presence. But there was a lack of confidence in their voices as they picked and abused. After a few days it became half-hearted and then stopped. The subject of Emotional was all but dropped in the lunchroom, where Justine sat in her usual place among the others, defiantly eating her dried-up burger and fries.

It was during gym class that the miracle occurred; the girls were dividing into teams, the most popular ones ritually selecting their team mates, when Debby suddenly bawled out, “I want Cheryl! Cheryl Thomson!” There was a moment of silence, and then someone on the other team said, “Aw! I wanted her!” in a voice usually used to coo over the cuteness of babies and bunnies.

Emotional took her place on the team looking like she’d been hit in the head with a brick and was stoically preparing for another blow. She played her usual clumsy but serviceable game, and every successful move she made was wildly cheered with greeting-card enthusiasm while her fumbles were loudly excused in the same awful tone. Her expression throughout was the same as when she was abused: hurt, bewildered, remote. Did she have any suspicion that she was a new fad?

It lasted for a few weeks. In the lunchroom, in the halls, on teams of all kinds, Emotional was the hip thing. Her presence was demanded everywhere although she didn’t say or do much but stare, sad and frozen. This was further proof of her exotic idiocy, and they cooed and twinkled over her as if she were a wounded animal in a box.

Justine didn’t know what to think. She felt ashamed and angry. The sound of the others “being nice to Emotional” was even worse than their cruelty — her cruelty — which at least had been a clear, consistent message, potentially refutable by its recipient. This insulting mockery of friendship hadn’t been what she had imagined when she’d resolved to be kind, but she was afraid to interfere again.

Mercifully, they soon got bored with it, and the gym teacher had once more to force a reluctant, groaning team to accept Emotional. There was some change, however; after such an elaborate show of friendship and kindness, it was hard for them to revert completely to all-out sadism, and all but the meanest kids pretty much ignored her. She finished out the school year as a lumbering ghostly presence, her humanity unknown and unacknowledged.

When Justine started seventh grade in the new junior high, Deidre, who had breasts and hair between her legs, began seeing a boy from the eighth grade. He went to a different junior high school across town; she had met him while sitting beside the copper cube fountain in the mall, smoking a cigarette alone. His name was Greg Mills. He had a concave torso, thin legs, narrow eyes, long lank hair, and red pimples which only added to his lurid charm. He wore a black vinyl windbreaker and spoke in monosyllables. Justine was secretly uncomfortable around him and wondered why, if he was so cool, he didn’t have a girlfriend his own age.

Deidre described going with him and his friends to an empty housing development, breaking into one of the finished houses, and throwing a party with their transistor radios, smoking, drinking, making out, and doing it, leaving ashes and stains on the bedspread of the display bedroom. It shocked and thrilled Justine to picture them sitting in the cold deserted rooms with their jackets on, smoke and alcohol in their throats. She imagined Deidre pulling her ski pants off, her bottom on the bedspread, the mattress naked underneath. She would be all goose flesh and tiny leg hairs sticking up, her feet clammy, her genitals hairy and weird between her big thighs. Did Greg pull her legs apart and look at her or did he just stick his thing (reportedly hairy itself) inside her in the dark? Did he take off his pants and show his butt or did he just unzip? Justine would look at Greg and decide that either way was nasty and exciting. She admired Deidre tremendously.

Deidre began asking if they wanted to come with her some time. “Not to some scuzzy development,” said Justine. “I don’t wanna freeze my butt.” Neither did anybody else until one Saturday Deidre called Justine and Dody and told them Greg’s parents had left for the day, that he was inviting over some really cute eighth grade guys, did they want to come?

Greg’s house was just like Justine’s and Dody’s and everyone else’s. Greg and Deidre were on the couch, and there were two other boys, one of them with the empty pretty eyes of a TV star. Justine saw, with a rush of excitement and fear, that they were drinking alcohol mixed with Coca-Cola. She didn’t want to drink it, but she didn’t want to say no in a prudish way, so when one of them offered it to her, she turned it into an occasion for sexual tension, saying, “Uh uh, I know what you guys are trying to do!” “Yeah,” said Dody, taking her cue, “you wanna get us drunk and make us do things.” She smiled in fake innocence, fake sophistication, and real sexuality. Her gold eyes were half-lidded and glinting.

The boys liked this. “You’d better be good,” said Greg. “We’re baby-sitting you seventh graders, and if you don’t do what we say, you’re gonna get it.”

The game was on. They sat on the couch, moving closer and closer, the boys getting drunk, the girls getting giggly and excited. They teased and flirted and made fun of each other, the boys commanding the girls to do things, like pick a piece of paper up off the floor. The girls would fiercely resist and then do it, pouting and flouncing. There was a thick current of feeling coursing through the room, a wide band of glittering yellow-gold that swept them off the floor and into another sphere. At first Justine stood aloof and looked at this process with wonder; then she let it move her.

Greg and Deidre left the room, disappearing behind a closed door. The two other boys became rougher and more demanding; one of them told Dody to make him a drink, and when she didn’t move fast enough, he grabbed her hair and pulled her toward the kitchen. “You leave my friend alone!” Justine yelled in the phony little-girl voice employed by sluts and whores the world over (and she an actual little girl!) as she leapt up to grab the boy’s shirt, pummeling his back with deliberate futility. She and Dody overpowered him and pinned him to the wall, greedily savaging him with tickling fingers until his friend leapt off the couch and the girls ran screaming until they were cornered in a parental closet.

“You guys are really gonna get it now,” advised the blank-eyed boy. “You have to stay in here and wait while we decide what we’re gonna do. You have to stand back to back with your hands behind you.”

The boys left the room, and they did as they were told, standing and telling each other how afraid they were in thrilled voices. “Do you think we should try and run for it?” asked Dody. “No, we’d better not,” Justine said. “They’d really kill us then.” Justine thought of her parents sitting at the table eating dinner, her mother daintily picking an errant morsel from her teeth, and for a minute she actually did feel afraid. What if she really was in another sphere and couldn’t get back to the old one? Then she relaxed; but of course, it would be as simple as the times she lay in bed and, putting her hand between her legs, became a victim nailed to a wall, and then, as her body regained its tempo, became Justine once more.

The boys came back into the room. One of them said, “Okay LaRec, follow me.” And Dody sneering, “Oh, I’m really scared,” followed him into the bathroom, visible at the end of a short hall, leaving Justine to stare at this pretty-eyed creature with chiseled features, peachy skin, and no human expression. Her heart pounded. She wanted to sit down. He forbade her. He told her his friend was “going to strip Dody and finger her.” Her underwear became wet. She told him Dody was probably beating his friend’s butt, but no sound of butt-beating emanated from the bathroom. They stood silently, Justine’s breath getting quicker and shallower, every detail of the boy’s bored, sideways-looking face becoming larger by the moment. She felt as if he were right next to her, his breath filling her pores, his smell up her nose. The longer they stood the more genuinely afraid she became. The more afraid she became, the more bolted to the floor she was, her armpits damp, her throat closed, her pelvis inflamed and disconnected from her body, her head disconnected from her neck. She heard Deidre laughing in the bedroom.

The bathroom door opened, and Dody paraded out with her boy lurking and smirking behind. Her face was red but her body exuded pride.

“Come on,” said Justine’s boy, “your turn.”

The bathroom was pink-tiled and green-rugged, the sink decorated with large, stylish shells and glass jars filled with bubble bath balls. The boy sat on the green toilet and looked at her. “You hafta get over my lap,” he said.

Justine thrust her hip out and tried to look like she was making fun of him, but she didn’t know how to do that without her friends. The music from a ballpoint pen commercial was playing in her head, and she imagined huge-eyed Cool Teens dancing to it. “I’m not gonna do that,” she said.

“You hafta.”

Back and forth they went. Heat and tension sat between her legs; the rest of her felt cold. He grabbed her hand and pulled her face down across his lap. She tried to appear graceful, feeling heavy and fat on his slim haunches. She looked at the toilet cleaning brush in the corner as he pulled down her pants. Her breath held itself as his numb fingers pushed into her numb contracting body. He fingered her with strange mechanical movements. His hand felt far away even when his fingers were inside her, as if he were doing something someone had told him to do and was pleased because he’d succeeded in doing it, not because he liked it. His remoteness made him authoritarian and huge, like a robot in a comic book. It inflamed her. She thought of Richie whipping her at the swing set amid the red flames of her little cartoon hell. His fingers hurt her. She gripped his thighs — and, in contrast to his hand, felt him there, a quick boyish spirit in the warm, feeling body of a young human. “It hurts,” she said.

Perfunctorily, he stopped, took his fingers out of her, wiped them on her bare ass and moved his hands so that she could stand.

She walked out of the bathroom feeling like a busty blonde on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; womanly, proud, almost inert in the majesty of her dumb, fleshy body.

Then she and the D girls went to Dody’s house and had ice cream and vanilla wafers.

She never saw those particular boys again but, although she had occasion to “make out” a few times after that, the boys who kissed her and felt her tiny breasts never made her feel the way she had felt while standing in Greg Mills’s house. The only person who provoked that feeling again was a girl — a girl she didn’t even like much! She was Rose Loris, a mousey pretty thing with thin lips and eyebrows who wanted with fierce anemic intensity to be “in the group” and who was tolerated on the fringes because she was Debby’s friend, although it was a friendship based mainly on Rose’s devotion to Debby, who was always standing Rose up at the mall.

This intent yet drooping girl with the shoulders of a rag doll and the alert, quizzical head of a bird, whose sleepy limbs seemed at odds with her straight spine, followed Justine around wanting to be her friend. This annoyed or flattered Justine, depending on her mood. Rose was always saying weird things that she thought would sound cool, and it embarrassed Justine. Still, she sometimes went to Rose’s house to watch television and to look at Mr. Loris’s pornography collection.

Among the many magazines, postcards, and books, Mr. Loris had a comic entitled Dripping Delta Dykes about two huge fleshy rivals who, through a strange plot with many perplexing changes of locale, battled each other in their changing lingerie ensembles. On the kitchen table, in the boxing ring, on tropical isles, in hospital rooms (where they worked as nurses), they met and settled one another’s hash, the brunette, after a lot of hair-pulling, arm-twisting, and tit-squeezing, generally trussing the blonde up in a variety of spread-eagled poses so she could stick different objects into her vagina.

Although Rose laughed and squealed “Gross!” while perusing this book, Justine noticed she kept coming back to it over and over. Rose’s reaction irritated Justine; it made her want to shove or slap Rose. Instead she said, “God, this is no big deal, I’ve done this stuff with Debby. It’s fun.”

Rose’s stunned face seemed to fractionally withdraw, and for a moment Justine was embarrassed at her lie. But Rose drew near again. Then, as had happened in Greg Mills’s house, they crossed a border together.

Justine went on talking, saying that not only had she and Debby done the things depicted in the comic but that everybody did this, didn’t Rose know? She never knew if Rose believed her, but at the moment she also knew it didn’t matter, that Rose was going to pretend she believed her. The torture feeling was roused and roaring as she wheedled and teased, moving closer to the agitated, awkward kid until she was all but cornered against the wall, pulling her hair across her lips, Justine whispering that Rose was a baby, a goody-goody, that she didn’t know anything.

It took surprisingly little to get her in the basement bathroom, where they were least apt to be discovered.

It is with a mixture of incredulity, guilt, and conceit that she remembers that dreamy session in the Lysol-smelling toilet with the concrete walls of a jail cell. She was incredulous at Rose’s docility; every cajolement or command elicited another trembling surrender, and every surrender filled Justine with a boiling greed that pushed her further into the violation she’d started as a game. The occasional feeble resistance — Rose’s pleading hand on the arm that rampaged down her pants — only increased Justine’s swelling arrogance and made her crave to rip away another flimsy layer of the hapless girl’s humanity. Justine felt her eyes and face become shielded and impenetrable as Rose’s became more exposed; she felt her personality filling the room like a gorging swine. Rose was unquestionably terrified and doubtless would’ve liked to stop, but she had been stripped of the territory on which one must stand to announce such decisions, as well as most of her clothes. For although Justine had only meant to cop a feel, within a few delirious moments Rose was placed on the closed lid of the toilet, her pants and panties in a wad on the floor. Her shirt was pulled up to reveal her tiny breast mounds, her legs splayed and tied with her own knee socks to conveniently parallel towel racks, her hands ritualistically bound behind her back with a measuring tape, her mouth stuffed with a small roll of toilet paper.

Justine stood and surveyed her victim. She was shocked at the sight of the hairless genitals; they reminded her of a fallen baby bird, blind and naked, shivering on the sidewalk. It disgusted her to think she had something like that too, and she focused the fullness of her disgust on Rose. There were no more cajoling words, the mouse had been hypnotized, she was free to strike at leisure.

Fascinated by the meek unprotected slit but too appalled to touch it, she plucked a yellowing toothbrush from its perch above the sink — pausing to glance at herself in the mirror as she did so — and stuck the narrow handle into her playmate’s vagina. From the forgotten region of Rose’s head came a truly pathetic sound; her face turned sideways and crumpled like an insect under a murdering wad of tissue, and tears ran from her closed eyelids.

But it was not the tears that brought Justine to her senses, it was the stiff, horrified contraction of the violated genitals which she felt even through the ridiculous agent of the toothbrush, a resistance more adamant than any expressed so far. Suddenly she realized what she was doing.

She left the sobbing child crouched on the cold concrete floor, pulling on her clothes with trembling fingers, while she bounded up the basement stairs and out the back door yelling, “I’m gonna tell everybody what I made you do!”

But she didn’t. Out of a muddled combination of shame and barely acknowledged pity, she kept it to herself, for her own frenzied, crotch-rubbing nocturnal contemplation.

Rose was absent from school for a week and then appeared like an injured animal dragging its crushed hind legs. No one remarked how her head, previously so busy and alert, had joined the collapse of her shoulders, or how her cheerful little spine had somehow crumpled. She avoided Justine and the gang, then tentatively approached and realized no one knew. She once accompanied Justine home from school in an abject silence that Justine was too embarrassed to break, except when they both mumbled “Bye.”

Although Justine told no one, the other girls sensed some new vulnerability in Rose, unconsciously recognized the loss of that nervous puppy spirit that had been her particular charm. They became aggressive and cruel to her; Debby was especially unkind. Rose walked home with Justine one more time and, at the corner where they would’ve said goodbye, blurted out an invitation to Justine to come play the game they played before, in the bathroom. Justine snarled and turned away. Rose never came near the gang again. Since she was not in Justine’s class, Justine only caught occasional glimpses of her in the halls or on the periphery of the playground, wandering by herself or standing with a crowd of other mousey unpopular girls.

This incident did not interfere with Justine’s other make-out activities, except in one way: after a squatting self-examination over a mirror, she vowed that while they could touch it all they wanted, she’d never allow anyone to look at that ugly thing between her legs. But she was only eleven and knew nothing at all about her future, so one can’t be too hard on her for breaking vows made at this time.

Chapter Ten

My family moved to Painesville, Pennsylvania, when I was thirteen. Physically, the neighborhood was as I had been expecting the neighborhood in Michigan to be. There were big trees, lawns, gardens, and a small main street downtown. Our house was a pointy-roofed charmer with shutters on the windows and rose bushes cuddling against the walls. There was a patio and a breakfast nook, and for months before we moved, my father walked around our house in Chiffon holding snapshots of the Painesville house and smiling. But, within months after moving in, he discovered we had been betrayed by the real estate people. The house was dark, drafty, weirdly put together. Doorknobs fell off, the basement tended to flood, and the roof was so moldy that a wind-blown seedling rooted in it and grew into a sapling. My father was bitterly disappointed, first with the house, then with the neighborhood, then with the town.

After Michigan, I was suspicious of Painesville’s alleged splendor, and so I was not disappointed. I employed the same methods I had learned in Chiffon to chop up and organize my life to lessen the impact of the outside world.

In the morning I would roll from my bed without turning on the light to put on my turquoise polka-dot girdle, my pantyhose, and my dress. In the bathroom my father ran water, coughed, blew his nose, rubbed the radio dial back and forth, spat into the sink, and flushed the unhappy old toilet. I finished my reluctant dressing ritual as he burst from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, and went to wash my face, brush my hair, and pee. The toilet seat was moist with steam, the mirror fogged, the bath mat damply rumpled on the floor, and the sink blobbed with his thick discharges of toothpaste. I performed my toilet cocooned in my father’s smell of hair oil, Old Spice deodorant, sweat, and faded urine, and then went to sit at the breakfast table with him. He hunched at his place eating his eggs while I chewed my cold cereal and my mother flitted from kitchen to table in her robe. On the radio was a morning show called Put On a Happy Face, hosted by a man who sounded as if he viewed happiness as the most hopeless, yet most necessary, form of human gallantry.

I rode to school with five other girls, whom I remember mainly as knees tinted beige by pantyhose and arms clasped around books. Four of us were ugly and unpopular. When the car pulled up at the school, the one pretty, popular girl would leap out and walk ahead with frantic briskness so that no one would suspect that she had any connection with us.

The rest of the day was divided into hours and rooms labeled “math,” “social studies,” etc. There were minutes of travel through teeming hallways and there was lunch. Of these divisions, I found the classroom hours the most painless because they were most controlled. I divided this time even further, first by the spaces between the clock’s numbers, then by the gestures and whispered conversations that took place without any words suddenly leaping out to injure me, then by the written exercises to be performed. Between these markers I toiled, slowly connecting one to the other. The moments in the halls were horrible because they were not divisible and because I was exposed to a striding, grinning, shouting chaos of people, many of whom possessed an unbearable youthful beauty, all of whom were connected to each other by feelings and conversations I could not understand, people with whom I could never connect, except when someone screamed, “Look! It’s Twiggy!” Lunch was less jarring, but, after I got through the various points in the line, there was no way to mark off my existence, and for a full half hour I was skewered by the sight and sound of others celebrating their youth and vitality. I began to eat my Choco Chunk bars and french fries in the bathroom in the company of two or three girls with nests of hair, threadbare skirts, and leather jackets. They drooped on the wall, put on lipstick, teased their hair, and smoked cigarettes, languorously blowing the smoke ceilingward as they talked about their boyfriends or how much they hated someone. I still remember, with useless clarity, the large pink bump that one of these girls had at the corner of her nose, a pimple that was always inflamed and set off by a delicate circle of orange makeup at its base.

The most rigid pattern was not the one imposed by the school system or the adolescent social system. It was the pattern I made of the people around me, a mythology for their incomprehensible activity, a mythology that brought me a cramped delight, which I protected by putting all possible space between myself and other people. The boundaries of my inner world did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my most external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded, like the force field of clouds and limitless night sky that surrounded the island of Never-Never Land. My mythology was based on images rather than words because I could not generally understand the conversation around me. A cluster of girls would sit behind me on the floor in the echoing hollow of the gym and say things about clothing — what they wanted to buy that spring, how much they liked pink or paisley or lacy cuffs, how cute Leslie’s dress was, as opposed to how ugly Kitty’s dress was (sometimes engaging in subtle battles over whether or not someone was acceptable through an exchange concerning her clothes) — what someone’s boyfriend did to her the night before, or a television program. Then suddenly, one of them would bite out, “Oh God, we don’t want that ugly scuz on our team,” or some other comment that I could not associate with dresses or television programs. It seemed to me that the rest of the conversation had been a mere basket for the snake of cruelty coiling under the banal weave of words.

Yet I knew that these were nice girls. I sensed that if their mundane words covered cruelty and aggression, the cruelty and aggression covered other qualities. Vulnerability, tenderness, curiosity, kindness — I sensed these qualities in the child harridans around me, yet I could not experience them. Even more bewildering, it seemed that they did not experience them either. Perhaps this was because these softer feelings were so immature, so frail, and, if allowed their full measure of expression, so potentially unbearable that the girls instinctively protected their gentleness with impenetrable harshness, unconsciously fearing it would otherwise not survive. If this were true then the rigid and complex social structure they adhered to, with its confusing rules of dress and conduct, must be a code for the deeper reserves that lay beneath, and thus, if this code were cracked, it would allow access to that friendliness and compassion I saw them sporadically express. So I listened desperately and tried to understand the code. But I could not do it, and on the rare occasion that someone spoke to me, I was struck dumb by trying too hard to discover the correct response. Either that or, having stood within earshot of a conversation on the cuteness of a particular TV show or the sluttiness of a heavily madeup twelve-year-old, I would blurt out a comment that seemed to me very like everyone else’s comments and be met with stares of incomprehension.

Thus the mythology.

There was a delicate underweight girl named Emma Contrell with round gray eyes painted stormily black and blue, and a curly bunch of short peroxide hair that made her small head heavy on her slight neck. She sighed and walked with her shoulders hunched and her arms held inward. She belonged to an elite band of girls who wore too much makeup and short skirts. They drank and smoked cigarettes and went to parties with seventeen-year-olds. They were gossiped about, envied, and feared. Emma was the frailest and dreamiest of these girls; even her vicious taunting of the wretched lone “special education” student was giddy and whimsical. She had a bad reputation with the other girls for being a “nympho” and she would’ve been outcast if she hadn’t been protected by her formidable friends. I saw her lingering in the halls or in the parking lot with one large lumbering lad after the next; their big bodies and limbs seemed to menace Emma merely by close proximity to her. Emma always appeared to be under some terrible stress; she carried a large bottle of aspirin with her, her hands trembled, she had urgent whispered conversations with her friends in the toilet stalls. I sat behind her in math, and I once heard her whisper to the lewd, snide child next to her, “Don’t you think Mr. Johnson has a fab bod?” Her voice was tiny and sharp, like an especially foolish bird. I decided from that moment on that Emma was in love with the cheaply suave math teacher and that she was involved with her apish series of boyfriends simply to kill her miserable passion under their stampeding bodies. But no matter how ardently they felt her up in the parking lot, her arched neck and open lips were not for them. Their fumbling paws only provoked her bitter longing for the math teacher until one day after school she put her hand on his thigh and gazed at him sorrowfully with her huge smudged eyes. He gloatingly took her hand and led her out to his car. He took advantage of the romantic child, enflaming her love and driving her to acquiesce even more frantically to her parking lot swains in an effort to divert public attention from her real love, in order not to destroy his family life and position, which he had warned her could happen. She was promiscuous also because he loved to hear her talk about her adventures in his overheated car.

I felt a throb of admiration every time I saw little Emma in the bathroom, her hands trembling as she applied pink lipstick to her plump lips. I pictured her clinging to the rutting math teacher in the back seat of his car, her face abandoned to love and despair, and I forgave her everything, even her cruelty, even the time she tripped my polio-crippled friend, poor dull defenseless Donna Doe.

I was astonished to hear one day, while sitting quietly on a toilet, a whispered conversation about the scandal at Bev Pawler’s pajama party, when Emma was found kissing Mona Prescott. I was taken aback only for a moment; then my loyalty and devotion swelled like an infected gland. I imagined Emma and Mona Prescott (a coarse girl with pockmarked skin and blank, intent brown eyes, who once remarked, as Miss Vanderlust, the bowlegged gym teacher, relegated me to an unwilling volleyball team, “Oh no, not that fat weirdo”) gazing passionately into each other’s eyes. I imagined Emma, scorned by the boys who had used her, rejected by the math teacher, tormented by rude phone calls in the night. I imagined Emma crouched in her underwear, sobbing on the floor of the deserted gym class locker room. Mona’s concerned face would appear from behind a row of lockers. “Hi. Wanna go for a swim?” They swam in the deserted pool, moving under the water in slow rippling bands of light. Mona, the stronger one, led the way. In my mythology, she had a large red flower tattooed on her inner thigh, exposed like a betrayed secret. Emma watched the flower through the rippling water and wondered how she could’ve overlooked it before.

I did in reality see them in the locker room together, padding around in their underwear, whispering and giggling. I did see them swimming together once, and perhaps, in some dim way, recognized two familiar prototypes as Emma, like my mother, paddled nervously behind while Mona, like Edwina Barney, cut through the water with brisk strokes. The rest of the class gamboled about them, their playful screams rising in the echoing air while I sat in my chair and watched with the silent group of girls who always had their period when a swimming class was scheduled.

There were many others about whom I formed such beautiful and elaborate fantasies. There were the D’Arcy twins, tall and bony-legged girls with curly black hair and prominent ribs. Their strident athleticism, their barking voices, in which they talked of “really creaming” somebody made me envision them in white leather, armed with bows and arrows, smiling as they entered a field of battle and carnage, perhaps looking for souvenirs of teeth or buttons.

There was Jana Morgan, close friend of Emma Contrell and even more of a slut, a dumb-eyed girl with a big oval face, big lips, and a graceful, acquiescent neck. She was loud, foul, and kind, she wanted more than anything to attract the attention of everyone around her. She sat straddling her chair in her short skirt and badly run pantyhose, twisting her torso coquettishly as she whispered to a boy or passed a note to a girl; she popped big bubbles of gum and flirted with teachers. She often had to report to the principal’s office, and she went with defiance in the swing of her hips, turning when she reached the door to whisper dramatically, “I’ll never tell!” in imitation of those handsome and noble TV prisoners of the Gestapo who always escape over the barbed wire on their motorcycles. In the frequent wars of my dreams, she appeared as the most valuable prisoner in the enemy’s detention system; she and I were among the unbreakable cadre that our captors had so far failed to brainwash. Although they led her away daily to be savagely interrogated, Jana still gallantly cried out, “I’ll never tell!” and she looked at me with eyes of such understanding and connection that I awoke feeling deeply and tragically moved, as though someone I loved had died in my arms.

I attached these bright phantasms and others like them to the people around me, like exuberant billowing shadows more real than the flesh they shadowed, phantoms living full lives that I was excluded from, even though I had created them.

When I arrived home from school, my mother would be in the kitchen, preparing dinner. She employed the same energy with which she had once cleaned the house of her girlhood, stirring the pot, prodding the meat, peeling the potatoes with concentration and zeal. I hated the careful, exacting way she watched the food. I hated it when she patted my lower back or squeezed my shoulder and said, “Hi, honey” as I lumbered through the kitchen. My mother didn’t care if I was fat and ugly. She seemed to like it in fact. In my diary I wrote, “I fear my father’s anger, but I fear my mother’s love.” This phrase was destined to sink slowly and heavily to the bottom of my memory and to sit there, undulating like a baleful underwater plant.

For, in creating the imaginary world inside me, I had abandoned the world that had existed between my parents and me, leaving them alone with their chipmunks and their triumphant heroes. It was a silent defection but they felt it, my father especially felt it. He would watch me as I moved through the rooms of his house as if trying to decide if I were his friend or enemy. Step by step I moved further away, and he registered each internal retreat with growing outrage and fear.

Sometimes when I came downstairs for dinner, my father would be resting in his black leather armchair; he would raise his eyebrows in greeting as I stumped down the stairs. I would set the table and talk with my mother. Dinner would be accompanied by television voices and the sound of my father gnawing his steak-bone. During warm weather, we would sit at the table long after we’d finished eating, with our chairs pushed out and our legs comfortably extended, drinking iced tea and watching television. I stirred so much sugar into my tea that it went to the bottom of my glass in a grainy swirl and sat there; I fished it out with a spoon and ate it when I had finished drinking. Newscasters would talk to us, and my father would translate, commenting on the bastards who were trying to undermine the United States in its fight to protect Vietnam from communism. Sometimes he would ask my opinion on what the newscaster said; I would give it and he would say, “Good comprehension. You’re following it pretty well,” and lean back in his chair, his mouth a satisfied line. Eventually, my mother and I would clear the table, scrape the food from the plates and load the dishwasher. My parents would move into the living room to concentrate on the TV, and I would go back upstairs to read. The evening would grade easily into night.

There were other evenings, though, when I lay upstairs trying to read while my parents’ voices floated up through the floor. I would visualize a part of my mind separating from my body like a cartoon character, tiptoeing away from the rest of me to listen at the door with cupped ear and then hurrying back to tap the complacent corporeal reader on the shoulder, gesticulating wildly. They were talking about me. My mother was telling my father how rudely I had greeted her that afternoon, or how I had told her to shut up that morning. The cartoon character reported sentences in scraps; “. it’s got to stop. ” “What are we going to do?” “I just don’t know.” Soon my father would be pacing the living room to the martial bagpipes of the Coldstream Guards, ranting about “little shits” who deliberately rejected everything good and decent in favor of ugliness, who selfishly disregarded the feelings of those who’d sacrificed for them. In between declarations, he stamped up the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door so hard that my door trembled. His close presence came through my wall in a heavy wave, and I unconsciously padded the air for yards around me with numbness. When my mother called me for dinner, the table would already be set, and my father would be sitting at its head, watching me as I entered the room. His face was bitterly red, his eyes glassy, his hair stood away from his head in an oily halo gone askew. “There she is,” he might say. “The one who doesn’t want to be a part of her family. The one who ignores her mother and tells her to shut up.” We would eat silently, my mother consuming tiny forkfuls, my father noiselessly but violently chewing, squeezing his napkin into a shredded ball with his free hand. Slowly, starting first with veiled attacks on “selfish turds” and “fat slobs,” he began to tell me how awful I was. Soon he would be leaning towards me on his elbows, his mouth forming his words so vehemently that he showed his teeth. “You sit there on your fat butt night after night wearing the clothes I bought you, stuffing yourself with my food, stupid and ugly, contributing nothing.” He paused to study me as I chewed. Tears ran down my face and over my lips as I ate, mixing in my mouth with my hamburger. My mother ate her salad and traced a little design on the table with her finger. “Not only do you contribute nothing, but you attack. You attack a woman who’s never done anything but give you attention and affection.” He retreated back to his plate to seize another mouthful of hamburger. I stared at my plate and wept.

Those dinner tribunals occurred with such frequency that I developed the ability to divide myself while they occurred; the external person who sat and cried while her father reviled her and the internal person who helped herself to more salad as he ranted, and noticed that the scalloped potatoes were particularly succulent tonight. With bitter pride I hugged the inner me to myself at night and thought how I had enjoyed dinner, no matter what. But my pride was marred by the dim awareness that it sometimes felt as though it was the external person who ate her dinner in dignified silence while the internal person hurt. “If you ever tell your mother to shut up again within my hearing, I’m going to knock you flat on your back. And if you get up, I’ll knock you down again. Every time you get up, I’ll just keep knocking you down.” I rose to clear the table. “I’ll help you, honey,” said my mother, gently patting my elbow.

After the table was cleared, I went upstairs to lie in bed. I would lie in the dark, sensing my body sprawled out before my head like a country I had seen only on maps. My thoughts formed a grid of checkered squares clicking off and on in an industrial pattern of light and dark. Once this grid was in place, what had happened at the dinner table became a tiny scene observed from far away, and I would turn on the light and get my book and read, eating from a bag of orange corn curls I kept under my bed.

It seemed that part of my father wanted to destroy me for leaving him, and that another part of him, which I could sense only at certain moments, wanted to follow me into my retreat, to wrap his arms around me and never let me go.

Sometimes after I had put on my nightgown and gotten under the blankets to sleep, my father would come into my room. I would wake to find him standing beside my bed in the dark in his pajamas, looking at me with an invisible face, rubbing his fingers together. I would pretend to be asleep, feeling his presence and wondering if he was thinking about how innocent I looked in sleep. He would stay in the room for several minutes and then leave, nervously wiping his mouth with his hands before turning to go. I would lie there feeling a vague sense of vindication and satisfaction from this silent nocturnal contact. I thought he was trying to apologize.

He did apologize once. I had been sitting on the floor beside the heat vent in the living room reading a paperback called Kennedy Days while my parents talked, my father pacing the floor with a glass of beer, my mother sitting on the couch. They were talking about a journalist who’d hoaxed the country with a book on the life of a millionaire who, as it turned out, had never existed. The journalist had gone to jail and was now writing another book from jail called Hoax. He had been offered a million-dollar contract in advance, which made my father furious. He was talking about how the writer, Irving Wiseback, had cheated not only the public but the memory of people like Obie and Aunt Cat, people who would never have cheated anybody, who died poor but honest. “Anyone who would enjoy reading that garbage is as worthless a bastard as Wiseback — and there’s one now. Look at her over there, reading that crap.” This was so unexpected that I had no time to create a padding of numbness. I dropped the book and walked quickly from the room. “Al.” My mother’s voice was full of gentleness and remonstrance.

An hour after I had slammed the door to my room, my father came up the stairs with slow, soft thuds. He knocked on my door and opened it to find me sitting on my bed with a blanket wrapped around me. He came and sat on the edge of my bed. He said that sometimes he got so “goddamned upset at all the vicious immorality in the world” that he couldn’t think straight, and that in his urge to punish it, he sometimes “lashed out” at people who weren’t to blame at all, and that he actually found it commendable for a person my age to read about the Kennedys. I said it was all right. We sat on the bed, my father smiling tightly. I didn’t want to swallow because I was afraid he would hear it, so I let the saliva build up in my mouth as we sat. I became warm, and the blanket dropped from my shoulders. My father wiped his mouth and coughed. “Would you like to go for a walk around the block?” he asked.

My mother looked away from the television and smiled as we filed down the stairs. “Just let me get a jacket,” said my father.

Our walk was dreamy even though we both walked with habitual quickness, my father rubbing his fingers together and staring down at the sidewalk with distant intensity. The tall street lamps cast pools of light that graded gently into the dimness of street and sidewalk, then into the strange darkness of other people’s yards. Our neighbors’ front doors stood open, letting patches of weak light out onto their porches. I listened to the faint sounds of their televisions and their voices, occasionally a piece of laughter, with the covetous loneliness of an eavesdropper. We passed a group of adolescent boys lounging under a lighted basketball hoop nailed to their garage, and they stopped their conversation to watch the middle-aged man and the fat girl walk by. I had a moment of shame as I felt myself and my father perceived as the representatives of a world foreign to those agile basketball players with their easy limbs and voices, a stunted world of graceless movements, pathetic wants and weaknesses. I buried this feeling, and we passed the boys.

We talked about ideas and events; a new TV show, what I was doing in social studies, what had ever become of that awful little dog of the Rizzos. Brown toads hopped out of the grass and onto the pavement before us, oblivious to the threat of our oncoming feet. My father talked to me about the pressure of his job, how he had to fight with people all day in subtle battles of the will which were never named, in which enemies tried “to cut your throat.” I saw my father in his office behind a desk, watchfully holding a sheaf of papers like a shield as another supervisor approached him. I admired him as he sat there, the cagey champion of the office, ringed by formidable opponents. I saw myself and my mother standing vigilantly in the living room at home, ready for him to arrive. I saw a group of girls in the high school lunchroom, sitting around a table, talking out of their smiling, chewing faces. They seemed trivial compared to the vision of my embattled father with my mother and me standing behind him. They were pretty and happy, but my father and I aimed for higher things; we had relinquished beauty and pleasure and turned our faces towards the harsh reality of the fight against cruelty and falsehood. I saw his face and mine in profile together, like John Kennedy and Martin Luther King on a postage stamp, pressed against the stark gray sky, our expressions sad, yet resolute. Then my father did something he hadn’t done since I was a child: he took my lightly swinging hand and held it. I looked down smiling in embarrassment. He kept holding my hand, stroking it along its side with his thumb. I felt tension vibrating the length of his arm and hand, the tension of his complicated love for me, and I felt something like pity for him, as well as sorrow that I could no longer fully be a part of his life, nor invite him into mine.

Just before we reached the house, he stopped walking and I stopped with him. He released my hand and I looked at him. His face held an expression I had never seen before and which looked like the suppression of pain. He reached out, cupped my head in one of his hands, and pulled it towards him. He stung my cheek with a fierce kiss and roughly tousled my hair. As we approached the front door lights of home, I felt peaceful and happy.

The next day was a Saturday. My father and I spent the afternoon together watching Eerie Hours, four hours of old horror movies followed by The Arena, which featured gladiator movies hosted by a middle-aged man sitting at a desk in a gladiator outfit. My father sat in his black leather chair eating potato chips and drinking beer. I sat on the floor with Noxzema on my face eating popcorn, potato chips, corn curls, and diet grape pop.

I wished that I never had to go to school again. I wanted to spend all of my days in the comfort and safety of this living room with the dirty wool carpet, flowered couches with used Kleenex tucked into their cushions, crumpled bags of potato chips, and the little black-and-white TV. I went into the kitchen to see if there were any more bite-sized Heath Bars in the refrigerator and saw my mother standing by the sink, gazing out the window with her arms folded around her thick waist. In the light of the window, I saw the dust on her glasses. She stood in a bundle, her bell-bottomed legs and tennis-shoed feet together, her stomach sticking out. Her mouth was slightly open and her face abstract with bewilderment. I stopped on my way to the freezer. My mother turned and recovered her expression. “Can I get you anything, honey?”

One night my mother, calling up the stairs, asked me to set the table while I was on the phone talking with Donna Doe. I turned furiously from the phone, covered its receiver with my hand and bellowed, “Just a minute!” My mother called up again and I kicked the door shut. I snuggled against the wall and relished the phone. My father stomped up the stairs and opened the door so hard that the feeble old knob fell off. He tore the receiver from my hand, and Donna Doe became a planet hurled into oblivion by a tantruming god. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me from the room and out into the stairwell. I tried to steady myself by placing my hand on the wall; he took this as resistance and pushed me down the stairs. I tumbled briefly and broke my fall by grabbing a banister. He picked my hand off it and pushed me again. My mother sat watching quietly as he dragged me through the living room by my hair. “When your mother tells you to set the table, you move!” He shoved me against the dining room wall and yelled, “Do you understand?” again and again until I said yes. He let go of me, and I set the table.

I ate my dinner of pork chops and green beans in silence. My father and mother chatted amiably about our neighbors and the last letter they had received from Edwina Barney. There was boxed lemon chiffon pie for dessert.

I turned off my light earlier than usual that night, but I didn’t sleep. I lay having a fantasy about Jana Morgan and Emma Contrell as French waifs during the Second World War who had been driven to prostitution by poverty, but who doubled as resistance informants. My fantasy decomposed as I wobbled towards sleep. I dreamed I was sitting in social studies, but instead of feeling the dread that I felt in class, I felt a sense of triumph. A popular song overlaid the class scene, not its sound but its evocation of friendship and the eventual moment when everyone drops their public pose and exposes the goodwill they’ve harbored all along. I sat erect in my seat, smiling at everyone. The song said, “It’s so groovy now, that people are finally getting together.”

I wobbled back into wakefulness. The room was covered with sleep fuzz. My father stood before my bed. I closed my eyes, imagining my innocent face as it appeared to him. He sat on the bed next to me. I peeked at him. I was surprised to see that he wasn’t doing the nervous things he usually did when he came to my room at night; he didn’t wipe his mouth or rub his fingers together, he just sat there exuding determined presence. I closed my eyes, feeling the tension and suspended contact. I remembered his nighttime kiss. There was a movement that seemed gracefully swooping and swanlike to me, even though I knew my father was pulling up his feet and awkwardly laying his body on my bed. My sense of anticipation, my feeling of intimacy, impending resolution, and fear almost nauseated me. When he put his hand under the blankets, I was surprised and opened my eyes. He was waiting for me. He put his fingers on my lips and said, “Shh.” His eyes were bright and his forehead was lifted into friendly wrinkles. “I don’t want to wake your mother,” he whispered. “I just thought we could have a little talk.” I nodded, feeling a sensation like warm tears trembling in my chest. It was as I thought: my father came into my room because he wanted to apologize. I felt so moved, I wanted to cuddle against his chest as I had done as a child, burying my nose in his warm, detergent-scented pajamas.

“I just wanted to let you know,” he began, “that when you were born I thought you were the most beautiful little thing I ever saw. It wasn’t just me either. Everybody in the hospital thought you were special. You had the intelligence, the sparkle, the beauty — you had it all.”

I smiled spastically. My father twitched a grin and touched the tip of my nose with his finger. “And I still think so. Say, can I get under the covers? It’s cold out here.”

He kissed my face and neck as he had taken my hand during our walk: tenderly, the tenderness vibrant with inheld tension. He said how hurt he was when we “argued,” when it seemed like I just didn’t care about everything he’d fought for. I moved nearer him to protest that I did care, and I smelled him, the deep smell produced by his particular combination of organs and glands and the food he ate. He pulled me against him, crushing my face into the chest hairs exposed by his open pajama top. I felt the power and insistence in his embrace, felt how tight were the muscles of his embracing arm, and for a second I was afraid. Then with his other hand he caressed my breasts and nipples through my light gown. My breath stopped. Arousal rose through my body and seized it. My excitement terrified me and made me feel ashamed because I knew it was wrong to be excited. But underneath the fear and shame, underneath the excitement, it seemed that what was happening now between my father and me was only the physical expression of what always happened between us, even when he verbally reviled me. Tears came to my eyes; it seemed that his cruel words had clothed these loving caresses all along. I put out my hands and clutched his pajamas in my fists. “Yes,” he said, his voice crushed and strange. “Yes.” He moved his hand away from my chest, not loosening his grip on my shoulders. Through the gown, he touched between my legs. Shock impaled my body. As if he felt it, he snatched his hand away. He let go of my shoulder and lay silently staring at the ceiling with me paralyzed in a curl, my forehead touching his shoulder. At length he sat up and said, “Good night, Sweet Pea.” He left, stopping in the bathroom to pee before returning to his bedroom. I heard him cough nervously before he closed his bedroom door behind him.

For a long time I lay curled in the position he had left me in, held by shock and smothered feeling. My heartbeat threatened to break open my chest. It was not the same as sex, I thought. And truly, what had just happened seemed to bear no relation to “sex”: smiling big-breasted women in scanty bathing suits, modern couples winking and making jokes on television, boys whistling at pretty girls, the things I heard about Emma Contrell and Jana Morgan. This had been something secret, special, and symbolic; it had happened in a tiny place where only my father and I lived. I straightened my body and lay on my back, my breath returning. The room gradually slowed its disturbed pulsing. The shadows of branches moved back and forth on the ceiling.

During the day there was no external change in our behavior towards each other. But there had been a change. I felt it both awake and asleep.

It was many weeks before my father came to my room again. Then he began to come more frequently. Each time he touched me, the physical sensation I had felt the first night became more hardened with fear and shame until I couldn’t feel it at all. I would think of my mother asleep in her bed, and she seemed as far away as when she sat and watched my father yell at me. Sometimes I would pretend I was asleep or ask him to stop, but he continued. I could not resist him anymore than that because with each visit my body seemed less mine and more his.

When I say to people that my father molested me, I visualize myself sprawled on the living room floor with my pants pulled down or my dress over my head. My father storms around the room, gesticulating violently and shouting about something. My mother sits on the couch, looking into space. An almost visible bolt of horror and panic splits the room. This scene, even though it never occurred, is more real to me than what happened those nights in my room, mainly because my mind has flattened those real events, which now become three-dimensional only in involuntary screeches of memory. My father pressed tightly against my back, his hand pinching my jaw and mashing my lips together, his legs pushing mine apart. My flannel gown scrunched up around my shoulders and my buttocks rubbed by what felt like the blunt, hairless limb of a medium-sized animal. His fingers hard implements inside my body, gouging me.

The scene becomes static, frozen in flat subreality, a torn grainy photograph of my own stunned face. He is on top of me for several moments, breathing. He swings himself into a sitting position on the edge of my bed and sits there, both hands flat on the mattress. He seems to have forgotten about the glop he’s left on my body. My held breath is an obstruction in my throat. My feet feel cold and far away. I watch him from my side-turned head. He clears his throat and sits in a hunched, unassuming position, as though puzzled by something. He turns, bends forward and kisses the back of my head. “Good night,” he says. “Sleep tight.” Then he leaves the room, closing the door carefully behind him.

I became conscious again as I sat in study hall the next day before a pile of books. My French book, a faded green thing with a broken spine, lay open before me, ignored. I was listening to the group of small, slender girls in bright dresses and paisley tights. Sally Rose was talking about how she let Chris Hannewald “finger” her, and Emma Contrell was saying she’d go all the way with Todd Welsh any time. I felt stupefied to think that I’d done the things they coyly talked about. Yet it was nothing like what they were talking about. An invisible square of definition formed around the circle of girls; another square formed around me. I imagined myself sealed in an enclosure of darkness that could be seen into but not out of, only in my imagination I was a tall, beautiful woman with waist-length raven hair. I was a space traveler sent on a dangerous mission and captured on a hostile planet. I was condemned to eternity in the impenetrable enclosure that would drift through space until I floated out of my solar system and into a black dimension. Space travelers would tell stories about the legend of the beautiful lady trapped in the impenetrable column. Those who had actually seen me could barely refrain from weeping at the sight of my beautiful face, frozen and transfigured by pain.

“No really,” said little Emma. “I’d suck his thing, prob’ly.”

I read 1984, by George Orwell. I read it voluptuously, loving the pitiless description of a panicked fat man weeping as he vainly tried to escape machine-gun fire, of a terrified woman trying to protect a doomed child with her body, of the toothless old whore that Winston had mistaken for a pretty child-harlot. It wasn’t the brutality I loved, it was the bravado in Orwell’s monotonous treatment of horror, and the pathetic human efforts to stand against it, or even to believe in the existence of something else. The outburst of humanity between Winston and Julia was a feeble blow against the malign forces of Big Brother, beautiful only in the moment it dared to come into being before crumpling and dying like a leaf. The unbeautiful monotony of Orwell’s prose was like Winston’s affair with Julia: a slight, spare poem pitching itself against the horror it evoked, and dying in the attempt.

I read planted on the couch in the living room, oblivious to the televised news, or crouched at the dining room table after dinner, eating a teacupful of sherbet, or in my bed under the blankets, a bag of corn curls at my side.

“Do you understand what it is you’re reading?” asked my father. “Can you give me a plot summary?”

“It’s about a totalitarian government — a communist government — that’s taken over the world, and that controls everyone’s minds. And there’s two people — who represent individual freedom — who are fighting it.”

“That’s pretty good. You have better comprehension than a lot of adults.” He looked out the window, frowning, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “It’s a very important book, 1984. It’s a warning about what could happen if we don’t keep the destructive bastards out.”

As soon as I finished it, I began reading it again, from the beginning.

A song began playing on my transistor radio called “Love Is All Around,” by the Troggs. “It’s written on the wind,” sang the Troggs, “It’s everywhere we go. So if you really love me, come on and let it show.” A slur of violins and guitars undulated around the words. It spoke to me of hopeless passion fluttering on a wind that would bear it to its death. I bought the 45 with its pale blue label and played it over and over again on my little plastic record player. “Why do you play that record so much, honey?” asked my mother. We stood by the kitchen sink, me peeling carrots while my mother scrubbed potatoes. “Don’t you get tired of it?”

“It reminds me of Winston and Julia,” I said. “In 1984.”

“But why? Love wasn’t all around them.”

I couldn’t explain it.

I could hear my father in the dining room, shifting in his chair.

I sat behind an invisible shield while a classmate, possibly classmates, threw spitballs at me during intervals of lapsed teacher attention. Dozens of tiny white balls lay about my chair, like the seedlings for a field of white poppies. I thought of Hate Week. “You gave your promise to me and I gave mine to you,” sang the Troggs. Of course, Winston had broken his promise to Julia, and she had broken hers to him. But I believed that under the destroyed integrity, the broken bones and humiliated character, the ghost of love flitted amid the ruins, moving from broken pillar to broken pillar, hiding behind a pile of rubble. On some deep, unfathomable level, where the pressure would burst human lungs and flatten three-dimensional bodies, where life took the form of eyeless, headless creatures with wobbling tentacles and undulating hammerlike tails, their love survived, faithful, luminous and totally useless.

My ear stung. Someone had shot a rubber band at me.

My mother wanted me to make lists of the things that made me happy and the things that made me unhappy. On the happy list I put “reading in bed,” “talking to Donna,” “lime sherbet,” “watching horror movies,” and “George Orwell.” On the unhappy list I put “walking to school from the car,” “gym class,” “study hall,” “dinnertime,” “going to bed,” “getting up in the morning.” My mother took the list and tacked it up on the inside of a cabinet door, along with newspaper recipes, a grocery list, and a reminder to call Dr. Adams.

You are an argument for abortion,” said my father. “If I had known you were going to happen, I never would’ve had a child.”

I sat on the couch with my face in a knot. My mother sat in the red armchair, her mouth determined and straight, her eyes as distant as though she had, by intense concentration, sent her mind to bathe in an ocean of neural bliss which was reflected, crystal ball-like, in the tranquil, unseeing gray of her eyes. “Don’t sit there looking at me with that face. You attacked me, and when you attack me, I react. And when I react, I go right for the jugular.”

He appeared in my bedroom again and again. The air filled with angry shapes that rolled around the room, tipping the furniture, tilting the floor, suffocating me as he held me against his chest. My nose filled with sweat and baby powder, his hands possessed my breasts. Our bodies became white, ectoplasmic forms that stretched and contracted; my arms and legs flew from my pinned body to the corners of the ceiling, then back into their sockets, then back to the ceiling. My head was a white round thing with black holes for eyes and a mouth that stretched until my whole face was a scream. The image snapped back into my head, which was still a hard little skull and a face with open, staring eyes and a closed, silent mouth irredeemably connected to an inert fleshy body with hands that gripped the sheets of my bed in the dark room, quiet and still except for the squeaking of the bed and my father’s breathing.

I sat in study hall. The room was full of voices moving through the air like colored balloons. Urine trickled down the legs of my chair and made a puddle on the floor. No one seemed to notice. I delicately lifted one red and black shoe, shook it, and removed it from the puddle. It was a strange sensation to be doing such a private thing in public, even if I hadn’t done it on purpose. I tried to tighten my collapsing bladder, but warm pee continued to trickle between my legs, into my pantyhose, and down my chair as the giggly words from the next table floated by.

My mother began taking me to see a psychiatrist named Dr. Eldridge Mars. I liked him. He was a tall, thin man with dandruff and madly optimistic eyes burning behind a pair of dust-covered glasses that sat, with affable kookiness, in the middle of his nose. When I went to visit him, my mother waited for me in the lobby along with other mothers and two plastic toys with grinning faces on wheels. The front wheels turned at radical angles from the yellow and chartreuse bodies, as though grinning horse and grinning dog had violently swerved to avoid a collision. Dr. Mars took me down a hall to a candy machine and bought me a chocolate bar. Then we went to his office and he asked me questions. Did I have any friends? Did I like school? What did I want to be when I grew up? Then he produced a dog-eared manila folder of pictures and asked me to imagine what was happening in each picture as he showed it to me. He showed me a cheap reproduction of an early Flemish family portrait: the exhausted mother and father in the dull gray background, the young daughter in a high-necked dress in the foreground. “The daughter has just been raped,” I explained. “And she’s wondering how to tell her parents.”

I began reading The Bulwark during the winter of my seventeenth year. It was not exactly true that it became “the most important influence in my life” from the tenth page on as I would later tell Justine Shade, but I was deeply moved by the description of Asia Maconda and Frank Golanka, the proud outcasts moving through a crowd of resentful mediocrities, surrounded by the cold glow of their genius and grace. I was profoundly satisfied by the terse, brutal prose, blunt as a bludgeon. Granite drew ugliness and beauty with the same unveiling hand; there was no attempt at bravado, yet the elegant gesture with which she plucked off the obscuring extranea was exquisite. When I read the words of Anna Granite, I visualized a man with a splendid chest standing stripped to the waist in a moonlit snow-covered field. He stood erect, arms loose at his sides, fists lightly balled, waiting in the dark for something he alone understood.

“When I look at this stone, Miss Maconda, I see not only an object made up of mineral and material parts, but properties of color, curves and density that exist in their own point in space. This rock exists, Miss Maconda, because it exists. Not because I want it to exist, or because I imagine it exists, or because anyone else imagines it exists but because it does. And just as this rock and its properties exist, so do it and its properties exist on an abstract level. They are projected into being, Miss Maconda, by this mundane physical shape. It is those abstract properties that I represent in my work. As accurately and truthfully as I can.”

Asia listened, her perfect head tilted coolly to one side, her long jade eyes half-closed in their usual mocking expression. Her fragile form stood at such an angle that she appeared to be supported by air. Only her dilated pupils betrayed the surge of emotion she felt at his words. She looked at the canvas before her — at the arrogant strength of the line, the elegant hauteur of the spare details, the distinct bold use of color. There was not one element in it that shrunk from the fullest statement of what it was. It was a gauntlet flung in the face of everything cheap, trivial and false. The thought of it in a gallery full of conceptual, cubist and surreal trash made her want to die.

It was the same brave evocation of beauty that I had loved in Orwell — except that this was strong, contemptuous beauty, a beauty indifferent to anything but itself and its own growth. In Orwell’s world, beauty was unreachable, and the attempt to grasp it was fatal; the frail shadow you could hold in your hand was quite possibly not worth the attempt, however admirable that attempt might be. In Granite’s world, it thrived, proud and undeniable. It could be had by the strong and at least admired by the weak. As I read, the actions and words of Granite’s characters settled like a mantle over the people around me. Jana Morgan, Emma Contrell and the D’Arcy twins became spritelike partial elements of Asia Maconda: Jana the languid beauty Asia, sitting with her waist twisted so that her breasts were accented, not because she cared about making people desire her, but because she knew that Beauty is part of what makes life livable. Emma, the abandoned, passionate Asia, so deeply sensitive to the viciousness and dishonesty in the world that she would disfigure her own integrity and insult her body with subhuman lovers rather than let her natural purity exist side by side with corruption. The D’Arcy twins, one jumping into the air in a jackknife to slam a volleyball with two fists while the other bounded across the floor to help it over the net, were the vicious snakelike Asia who teases men and humiliates women.

And I myself was another aspect of Asia, as I sat silently at the dinner table while my father crouched above his plate, reviling me. I felt, in addition to the inevitable dislocated shame, a strange kind of pride; I was almost grateful to my father for hating me. I was accepting the discharge of an aggression that was an essential part of the life force.

The greater pain she was subjected to — every mediocre piece of trash she was asked to review, every fatuous ass she saw praised as a great artist, every empty conversation at every party, every night alone — only created a thicker wall between her and the rest of the world, a wall that protected her from being poisoned by its mediocrity. It was behind this wall that she really lived, in a small world of dazzling white. In this world, she was never cruel or cold, but gentle and wondering as a child in a garden. She was alone and lonely, and it was this cherished loneliness that gave her inner world its inviolate whiteness.

If I could see aspects of Asia all about me, even in myself, I could see Frank Golanka nowhere in my world. This did not make him less real than Asia Maconda — on the contrary. The absence of his reflection in my daily life rendered him exalted, immune to my vulgar fantasies, more inviolate than Asia behind her wall. His absence cast a silent spell over my world, he was all life’s potential suspended in a state of constant possibility, the prince who could awaken me with a kiss. At any moment he could appear, but if he didn’t I could spend the rest of my life caressing the possibility. Like Katya in The Last Woman Alive, I nurtured myself with dreams of what could be. On those nights when my father came to me, these dreams were the mainstay on which my listing comprehension attached itself, the immobile constant that stood watch while I struggled to maintain silence and stillness.

I didn’t speak to Donna of my feelings about Anna Granite. I lent her The Bulwark, but she was unable to finish it; she returned it with an indifferent mumble about big words.

I spoke to Dr. Mars about it only once. “I want life to be like it is in Anna Granite’s books,” I said. “I want life to matter.”

“Well, that’s very normal,” said Dr. Mars. “We all want life to matter. And sometimes it seems like it just doesn’t.”

“I want people to be like Anna Granite’s people. Perfect and strong.”

Dr. Mars nodded vigorously. “That’s very normal adolescent idealism.”

She crouched in the darkened room, her face almost contorted with fear. He stood still in the doorway, arms loose at his sides, an amused sneer on his mouth. She felt her lip curl. She darted forward and then she felt her body, helpless and frail, crushed against his chest. She felt her fists and elbows beating against his form. She thought she felt a deep, silent laugh well up in his chest. Effortlessly, he lifted her body and carried her to the stone sculpture. It was not an act of love, or an act of hate. It was an act of contempt, an act of detachment and brutality. Asia knew that she was being utterly debased by him. Yet the debasement was bound to an exaltation that made her moan. Their mouths locked; there was pain that tore her body and ecstasy that wrenched her soul. He crucified her on his stone.

The words I read were like tiny stars, pinpricks in the shield between me and my life, pinpricks of light that broke my heart.

Chapter Eleven

The Shades moved again right after the eighth grade year ended. Dr. Shade had been offered a prestigious position at a cardiology clinic in the lush suburb of Deere Parke, Michigan, and the Shades were ready to claim the rewards of his profession.

Kids in Deere Parke didn’t hang out on the street, at least not thirteen-year-olds, so Justine didn’t meet anyone the entire summer. This didn’t bother her. She drifted into a pleasant world of television and magazines which led, to her surprise, to reading books. Each book was an invisible tunnel leading to a phantom world that existed silently parallel to real life, into which one could vanish then emerge without anyone knowing. Hardy, Dickens, Poe, Chekhov — she could barely understand the way the characters spoke, but it only made the experience more exotic, more secret, something to which no adolescent social rules applied. How had the hard-edged furniture, neon signs, and minimal hot-colored clothes evolved from the baroque book world, the complex, multilayered universe populated by people who spoke so elaborately and died of tuberculosis? It frightened her to think the world changed so quickly.

Her parents deeply approved of her reading, especially her father.

Her father had grown full and hale during the Action years. He presented himself with his chest pushed out, his eyes vibrant with outgoing energy that allowed nothing in. He came into rooms and clapped his hard little hands together and said, “Well!” His silences were imperious excretions that nobly enshrouded him as he read The New York Times. When they went to eat at restaurants, he gave loud speeches at the table. When they rented a cottage in the Upper Peninsula, he stood calf-deep in the waters of Lake Michigan in his bathing trunks and pretended he was conducting an orchestra while his wife and daughter lolled on the beach. Justine watched him jerking his arms above the waves and wondered why he didn’t look ridiculous.

He took the entire summer as a vacation before beginning his new position, and Justine spent a lot of time with him and her mother. In Action an entire summer of this would’ve been unbearable, but in a new environment where no one was there to see, it was different. In the afternoon she went with her father on long car trips, during which they viewed the new neighborhood and discussed politics and art. He always wanted to know what she was reading and what she thought of it, what were “the main themes.” He would listen intently, vigorously nodding his head. “All art should be about the world,” he would say. “It isn’t just some pretty story about what’s going on in the artist’s mind. It’s about the universal truths, the social truths, the struggle toward decency and equality.” The words awed her so, she didn’t even notice that they were in distinct contradiction to what she read for. The stately lawns, delicate trees, and winding concrete walks of Deere Parke sailed past as though unfolding from her father’s words, a splendid physical manifestation of his orderly sentiments.

At night she sat in the living room with her parents and watched newscasters tell stories illustrated by dramatic film clips of men being led away in handcuffs, men talking behind desks, men giving speeches, men angrily shaking their fingers, and, at the end, smiling women serving muffins to old people or playing with children. Her father praised her for taking an interest in the world. She liked to hear him praise her, but she vaguely knew that she didn’t watch the news for the reasons her father thought she watched it. It simply relaxed her to watch the parade of events organized by newscasters who appeared in orderly sequence desk after desk. The nodding, smiling faces of posing politicians especially relaxed her. It was great to see these smooth-voiced gray images confirm that there existed an apparatus run by men in suits that on the surface had nothing to do with her life and yet supported everything around her — grocery stores, malls, schools — acting as a deep terra firma for her to run around on.

In mid-August the Shades joined the Glade of Dreams country club, and Justine briefly encountered her peers. They were older than she and tall, with round, buttery muscles, modulated voices, and oval nails with neat cuticles. They had none of the raw toughness of her friends from Action, and Justine, while not afraid of them, did not quite know how to approach them. She stalked around the pool in her tiny black two-piece, gloating when older men looked at her. The men were fat creatures mostly, baked pink and bearded, their self-satisfaction and arrogance expressed in their saggy-bottomed hips and their wide-legged stance as they stood staring, their thick pink lips smiling at thirteen-year-old Justine, as if they could know every single thing about her merely by looking at her in her swimsuit while they, on the contrary, remained sweating, lotion-oily sphinxes, about whom she could comprehend nothing, revelling in their complex ugly humanity. She looked at them with dumb, shielded eyes, an imitation of wide-eyed young girlhood she had seen in magazines. They were from the world of the evening news, like her father, part of the apparatus controlling even the little lapping lakes. They were hideous, she wanted nothing to do with them, yet she was happy to intersect with them in that way, playing a magazine girl, a creature they viewed with pleasure and relief. “You flirt well, Justine,” remarked her mother.

On the first day of school Justine was scared. She stared at the mirror again and again trying to decide whether she was ugly or cute, applying another layer of white lipstick, then taking it off. She was confident as a result of her social success in Action, but deeper than that confidence was the fear that had also accompanied her on the first day of school in Illinois.

At first it looked as though her fear would be confirmed: after ten minutes of home room, she could tell that the kids here were different from the old Action crowd. She was too young to think in terms of economic class, but she saw that skirts were longer and modestly looser, makeup lighter, shoes cleatless. Only a few girls with dandruff and submissive eyes ratted their hair. Everyone seemed to be wearing huge sweaters with soft fuzzy hairs protruding from them. She sat sweating, waiting to be made fun of.

But she wasn’t. All those hours spent running with mobs, tormenting other children, and having sex in bathrooms had created an aura of sensuality and mystique that she radiated without effort. Besides, she was pretty, even in her blobby eyeliner and subtly ratted hair.

In history class she sat next to an intriguing girl in the back of the room, separated from the distant teacher by rows of heads and a lazy cloud of whispers and note-passing. The girl’s dress was a lowcut wisp of baleful black with a cinched waist, short flared skirt, and elaborate sleeves of lace and chiffon rolling off her shoulders in histrionic puffs. Her face was pale and intelligent, she had honey brown hair, an elegantly crooked nose, and wide, full lips. All of her features were larger and more adult than the pettishly powdered faces around her. She wore no makeup other than a set of obviously false eyelashes. She sat with her body twisted dramatically sideways, her long black-stockinged legs crossed once at the knee and again at the ankle, a Chinese puzzle of tension and beauty, while her torso leaned over the desk with exaggerated indifference. She was sketching in a sketch pad. Was she an artist? Justine noticed a huge book open in her lap, for the moment ignored. She was an intellectual! Her strange, temperate gray eyes met Justine’s. “Hi,” she said.

Within a week Justine was walking home from school with Watley Goode. Watley’s house was decorated in lime green, yellow, and cream — except for Watley’s room which was primary blue, red, and white. Watley’s mother was a fashionable woman who wore checked pant suits and high heels, who made complicated three-tier cookies, watercolor paintings, and shellacked découpage lunch boxes plastered with images cut from magazines. She was a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic who had to take special brain medicine and who would sometimes go nuts anyway and suddenly start yelling things like “Penis!” or “Vagina!” in public. Justine was very impressed; it was the first time she’d met a mother as glamorous as her own.

Watley herself was more glamorous than anyone Justine had ever known. Instead of pictures of TV stars taped to her walls, she had glass-covered museum-size posters of an art deco peacock, a vase of flowers, a woman with large breasts. The antique four-poster bed frame, the satin sheets, the down comforters, the vase of lilies, the full-length gilt-edge mirror, an imitation twenties-style phone — all these things bespoke a level of elegance Justine had never encountered in a girl her own age. Part of her wanted to hold herself aloof and sneer at Watley — as she had heard some girls doing while she was sitting on a toilet — but she was simply too seduced to do so.

Watley didn’t seem to care if she was being talked about; she simply did things and got away with it. She never made fun of the people everyone else scorned but instead reserved her considerable sarcasm for the set of girls she called the “vanilla wafers” who were as popular and formidable as Justine’s little Action gang but without the swagger and sensual style.

She talked about sex as often as the girls in Action but differently. Among the D girls, sex was dirty and mean, like throwing a rock at an old lady; you did it for fun and to prove how tough you were. With Watley it was an act of high style, sophistication, and emotion. While Justine bragged about her experiences to her new friend, she cannily changed the settings from rec rooms and toilets to moon-drenched beaches, rugs before roaring fires, canopied beds. Watley nodded, obviously impressed. Her own experiences had all taken place in her rattling four-poster where she had, with much drama, finally allowed her boyfriend of the moment to take off her bra and then, with many expressions of adoration, put his hand down her underpants. Justine was spellbound; she’d never thought of it that way before. She had grown accustomed to dividing girls into two categories: thin-lipped bores who read books and had conversations, and cruel, lolling beauties with heat seeping from their pores. But Watley was neither, or both. She liked to talk about important subjects like racism, hippies, and presidential elections. She got A’s on papers; she wanted to be a lawyer. She wanted to go out with a boy with whom she could discuss politics, not the greaseballs who tried to look down her low necklines and leered about her “advanced development.”

This was perhaps the reason she had no boyfriend for her entire freshman year. Justine didn’t have one either, and they spent most of their spare time together in Watley’s room, measuring their breasts and talking about imaginary boyfriends.

Their boyfriends had shoulder-length hair, high foreheads, mustaches, muscles and mouths, tortured pasts, complicated feelings, swords of flesh, and souls of silk. They were as feverishly perfect as Mrs. Goode’s découpage lunch boxes, festooned with gold unicorns, pink-faced harp-wielding girls, ladies with wigs and monocles, flying cherubs, rainbows, and wads of flowers, image after frozen image, cut with the tiniest of scissors so that no white edges showed.

They viewed their group-huddling peers with increasing scorn as the year went on. Justine occasionally received a flowered, coyly folded letter from one of her fading Action friends, tattooed with slogans like “Hippies are cool, greasers are fools.” She answered one or two and then thew the rest away after reading them with quick disbelief, no longer able to connect herself with the world she had belonged to so completely less than a year ago. She did talk to Watley about Emotional and, to a much lesser extent, Rose Loris, but without telling her of the conflicted pain these people had caused her. They became unpleasant, minor incidents, having little to do with her. It would be years before she would realize these incidents were lodged in her heart like gristle, ready to pop up into her throat at any sudden slap on the back — and there were lots of those later on.

Her father was away from the house often; he was home most on the weekends when he slept his numb ten-hour sleep and then rose to pace the house with his chest puffed out, telling stories about what had happened at the hospital, how he’d been called in for an emergency consultation during an operation and had knocked down a nurse while running through the hall. The patient was saved; Dr. Shade swam a vigorous six laps in the hospital pool and bought a milkshake on the way back to the office. Sometimes a patient would die, and he would pace around flailing his arms. “You know when this happens, what do you do, Lorraine? You are so close to it, that space where death and life come together for an instant and then, suddenly, there is nothing.” His hard eyes would shine with fierce opacity.

“He is so upset when a patient dies,” said Justine’s mother. “He cares so deeply.”

And Justine would feel the way she did when there was a dying dog scene on TV; on one hand she could barely control her tears, on the other she felt like being really snotty.

She felt like being snotty almost all the time to her mother, who didn’t have a retard center to work at and was thus at home a lot. Her mother suddenly wanted to be snotty to her, too. After ignoring the tight clothing and white lipstick worn by her daughter in Action, Mrs. Shade began to be obsessed with Justine’s clothing, about which they fought on the stairway and in the driveway almost every morning before school. “Really, Justine, you look like a cow,” her mother would snap as she regarded her daughter’s slight, optimally revealed bustline. “What kind of attention are you trying to attract?” One morning, the dog-walking Mrs. Kybosh next door was treated to the sight of Justine’s mother trying to pull Justine back into the house by her hair and skirt while obscenity-shrieking Justine beat her about the head and shoulders with her purse.

Her mother also censored the clothes she bought, leaning spitefully in the direction of sweaters and long plaid skirts — this when Justine was walking around with a girl like Watley! Justine was forced to shoplift chic ensembles, smuggle them to school in her big leather handbag, and change in the bathroom, stuffing her ugly plaids in her locker.

Once she adopted this strategy, there were no more morning battles, and the criticism shifted to Justine’s laziness and poor posture. The connection between mother and daughter stiffened and frayed down to a wire sharp enough to cut your hand on; it was through a long dark tunnel that Justine viewed her parents as they moved about the house.

The connection between her parents had further frayed as well. Although unaware of it at the time, in retrospect she could see it clearly. As a young child she had watched her parents create constructions of concrete and steel with words that swung triumphantly upward; now they dug circuitous tunnels around each other, one every now and then setting up a cul-de-sac for the other to stumble around in while he or she ran off in the opposite direction. Her father would tell a story about something that had happened at the hospital, emphasizing a particular part with his voice. Her mother would respond to some other part, and he would continue as if he hadn’t heard her. She would respond again to that part of his story he neglected, and relate it to some story of her own about, say, a neighbor. He would discount her story by stating, “Mrs. Kybosh is a stupid woman,” and then disappear behind his wall of important concerns. They seemed to want to create these mazes of crosspurpose and misunderstanding, and to need each other to do it, possibly because they needed the dry rasp of contact that occurred when they collided on their way to their separate destinations.

Justine’s own mazes led away from them both, and she minced around their house like an heiress on an ocean liner. She stayed up late at night, crouched near her radio listening to rock music on “underground” stations and fantasizing about the soft-voiced disc jockeys who played it.

She remembers a strange thing she said one night at the dinner table, without knowing why she said it. Her mother asked her how school had been that day, and, recalling a study hall conversation, she answered, “Sally Hinkel is going to fuck Jim Thorn tonight.” Her father’s eyes widened in alarm, her mother’s mouth opened in midbite, and a mallet of incomprehension flattened their previous conversation.

Perhaps it was this remark that prompted her father to ask her about Dr. Norris. She was in the car alone with him on a weekend errand. They were silently progressing on a scenic back road, when without any preamble he said, “Justine I want you to tell me what happened between you and Ed Norris.”

She didn’t say anything.

“There was an incident, wasn’t there?”

“I remember something,” she said.

“What? He touched you somewhere? Where did he touch you?”

Justine felt the full force of his surgical concentration, probing between her legs. His invulnerable eyes remained fixed on the sunny road. She held her breath.

“I want to know what happened, Justine, because I care for you. What exactly did he do?”

She remembered lying over the lap of some forgotten boy who stuck his fingers inside her. She thought of herself crouched over a mirror thinking how ugly her vagina was. Her pelvis became rigid.

“He touched me between the legs. He masturbated me.”

There was a moment of silence. “That is all?”

She said nothing.

“How many times did it happen?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I should kill him,” said her father. “I should find him and I should kill him.”

He sounded like he did when he complained about an incompetent orderly at the hospital. She listened, interested, but he said nothing more. She refrained from pointing out that it would be ridiculous to kill Ed Norris now, roughly ten years after the fact, if her father actually did mean to kill him, or even yell at him, which she knew he didn’t.

They continued to drive along, her exposed pelvis constricted like an animal in a trap. They went home, and the discussion dropped silently into the deep pool of their three-way life.

Everything was fine until she was caught shoplifting a miniskirt. The store detective took her elbow with such insinuating intimacy that she jerked her arm away from him and gave him an eyeful of the special scorn adolescents reserve for middle-aged mashers before she realized she was staring at a badge.

All at once she was the delinquent kid in the manager’s office, sitting with her legs crossed, staring at a corner and pulling her hair across her mouth. The manager, a thin stylishly suited woman, talked about juvenile correction facilities as she paced the office, adjusting papers and emptying the ashtray. “I could see it if you were some poor inner city kid who didn’t have anything nice to wear,” said the manager. “But for somebody like you to steal, it’s sick.”

Justine had to admit it was true. She felt ashamed, but the idea of being sick had a certain drama — or at least she could pretend that it did. Her mother swept in, Saks Fifth Avenue skirt swishing grandly. “Really, Justine, this is impossible,” she said. Justine shrugged her shoulders and scowled while her mother and the manager agreed on how awful she was. Her mother seemed gratified to hear official confirmation that her daughter was bad.

From there, it was a short step to her mother’s surprise visit to the high school, where Justine was discovered in an illicit outfit. She was summoned to the principal’s office for a confrontation, then walked to her locker by both principal and parent, where the hideous cast-off plaid was disgorged. Before the whole milling between-class student body, she was forced to leave school with her mother, clutching the wadded up woolly jumper to her chest. To her irritation, she encountered Judy Hollis and Becky Tootle, two popular girls she and Watley made fun of and who made fun of them in return. She felt acutely the ridiculousness of her position as they stared at her with greedily mocking eyes that lingered with particular satisfaction on the jumper. She’d already heard herself sneered at for “sneaking in clothes and changing so she can parade around in skirts up to here and necklines down to there,” and now, as she was being marched through the hall in this way, she saw a virulent strain of gossip germinate before her eyes.

There was a tedious scene at home, and Justine was informed that she would now have a weekly appointment with a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist was a very expensive private doctor named Dr. Venus. He had a burgundy waiting room decorated by large glossy photographs of Siamese cats. He had beautiful teenaged patients, some of whom had interesting personal habits. He was a large, very happy man with completely flat, almost nonexistent hindquarters, pigeon toes, and curly black hair. Justine thought he was an idiot, but she grew to like him. It was hard not to like someone who desired to talk exclusively about her and who also made her feel superior. She was genuinely touched by his obvious concern for her, his wish that she come into the fold of mental health. He was so pleased when she took an interest and joined in. She even told him the Emotional story, the whole thing, and sat there feeling the same tenderness and vulnerability she had felt for Emotional, feeling his approval, feeling like a little girl as they sat smiling at one another.

This is not to say she wasn’t deeply resentful at being forced to see Dr. Venus. She asked her mother: “Why don’t you find another mental health center to work at so you won’t have to use me?”

The summer was damp and uneasy. Dr. Shade took a month’s vacation and slept late every day. Justine’s nervous body awoke every morning at six o’clock, regardless of when she went to bed. She would pad through the silent house and make herself a cup of coffee with three spoons of sugar and sit on the back terrace drinking it as she stared at the bright wet grass and the insects walking on the lawn chairs, trying to decide if she were happy or miserable.

The following fall, Watley found a boyfriend. He was new at the school, a handsome, quiet, studious boy who Justine privately considered a little dopey.

At first the boy (his name was Donald) was a lot of fun for Justine. It was a continual source of entertainment planning strategies for Watley to get his attention, ways to let him know she was intelligent as well as beautiful, for example, by carrying around large volumes on Freud. They both knew these schemes were hare-brained and girlish, but that only added to their enjoyment.

Then Watley acquired the boy, and there wasn’t much for Justine to do except listen to stories about him or admire Watley in her frilly new dresses as she walked arm in arm with him in the halls. She did admire Watley for pursuing a social anomaly like mildmannered Donald when she could easily have had a more glamorous consort; it was in its own way as daring as taking up with some menacing greaseball, except Donald was a lot easier to control. His retiring, polite personality, although it contained the requisite intelligence, was like a nice big screen on which Watley could ardently project her needs. He was easy to direct in the big scene in which modestly weeping Watley lost her virginity, a scene which Justine imagined with a mix of interest, envy, and irritation. She felt abandoned by Watley and she began to resent her for it. Her resentment was exacerbated by Watley’s behavior when Justine visited her; Watley always wanted them to stand before the mirror with their faces together and then compare them, feature by feature, culminating in an analysis of their respective types, something like, “You’re the cute pixie type and I’m the voluptuous beauty type.”

She hoped that her envy of Watley didn’t play too great a role in her strange coupling with Rick Houlihan, a senior bordering on greaseballness. It was springtime; he was a big swarthy boy with muscles, cruel lips, and a long gum line. She met him at the cast party for the drama club version of The Man of La Mancha, in which he played a rapist muleteer. She was drawn by his large virile oiliness and his condescending manner. A skinny red-headed girl who noticed them talking said, “Stay away from the little girls, Rick.” They were sucking face within the hour.

They continued to suck face in the back seat of his friend’s car as the friend drove them home, all the while making sex jokes about sophomore girls. Rick joked back as he felt her breasts, and she giggled, feeling like a soft, palpitating baby animal that might be passed back and forth and petted by these noisy humans and then left by the side of the road.

But the way he touched was romantic, his embrace a thrilling combination of condescension, rapacity, and gentleness. She knew he believed her to be too stupid and passive to object to what he was doing, and that, while this made him view her with jovial contempt, it also rather endeared her to him as it meant he could fondle all he wanted and feel superior too, free of the guilt that a more human girl might’ve engendered. If he’d known Justine’s history of basements, rec rooms and johns, it would have been different, but he had no idea.

They dropped her off at her house, and he said, “See ya in school, kid.” She immediately called Watley, who was impressed and somewhat chagrined that her little pixie handmaiden had spent time in a back seat with someone so glandular and dashing as the rapist muleteer in The Man of La Mancha. All weekend, Justine fantasized him crushing her to his big pink chest while the very air about them exploded in ribbons of delirious color. On the verge of hysteria, she walked around with pimple cream on her face, her muscles furiously coiling and uncoiling under her skin. Monday came; she flew to her beloved.

He passed her in the hall with a smile and hand flap. She was wounded but she ignored that and submerged herself once more in the loud theme song of their great love. She saw him again in the cafeteria, standing in line with a tray. She noticed for the first time the slug-like curve of his fleshy shoulders, the way his bulky legs seemed to have been hastily jammed into his pelvis, but she didn’t let these details stand in her way.

She admired his manly reserve in greeting her, the way his eyes slowly dropped to view her hand on his arm and then rose to gaze enigmatically into hers. Chatting happily, she followed him to his table, then out of the lunchroom, into the hall, and to the door of his French class.

They didn’t have much to talk about, and the conversation that did occur was strange and arduous. This disturbed Justine, but she found the disturbance easy to ignore. Making out with Rick, his big tongue disporting itself in her head, was a little world which existed beyond the uncomfortable job of conversation and which could be literally touched upon at any moment. Even the distance of reserve and incompatibility had an odd charm; across this distance she could occasionally feel his desultory signals answering her ardent emanation, and the slight tickle of contact was so poignant in contrast with his coldness that it felt to her like a full embrace.

Then there were the hellish fantasies. All day, all night, they battered her until her body was alternately in an agony of sensitivity and completely numb. He lay on top of her in an enormous double bed, cossetted with chiffon and silk, his eyes waxy with desire. Their richly appointed boudoir exploded with flowers; lace curtains flailed the air as the thunderstorm raged outside. Everything in the room became monstrously enlarged and pulsated as the huge event transpired on the bed. He would hurt her but only because he loved her.

However, although her father, who did not like Rick, had intoned that boys that age go out with girls her age to “get one thing only,” she felt that she was more interested in that thing than he was. She began to drop hints. “I don’t know why people think rape is so bad,” she remarked. “I’d like to be raped.”

“No you wouldn’t,” he snapped. “You wouldn’t like it at all. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head — angrily, it seemed to her. She felt demeaned and hurt. He obviously wasn’t attracted to her, she thought.

It was a sticky summer day, just weeks after school ended, that her parents made a social call, and Justine called Rick, invited him to come over, rather bluntly explaining that her parents were gone. There was a moment of silence, and then he said he’d come.

He arrived wearing dark glasses. His whole body had a defensive yet tenacious look, like that of an animal creeping into a bush with a hunk of food in its mouth.

She invited him into the house, but he said no, he wanted to go into the rec room behind the garage. She reached for his hand and, looking the other way, he let her take it, locking a finger around two of hers.

The rec room was a damp space extending off the garage. It was carpeted with unconnected pieces of thin beige nylon and crammed with cheap hideous furniture which had been left by the people who’d lived there before and which was now covered by dust and cobwebs. On the walls were knickknack shelves and a huge plastic salmon. There was a radio the size and shape of a bread box. Rick turned it on and up very loudly, not bothering to adjust the dial, which was caught between two wavering, incoherent stations. They hit the floor almost immediately, he suffocating her with his weight, his shoulder scraping her face. She made what she hoped were attractive moaning noises as he worked her pants down with one hand, swiping at her mouth with his lips. She barely recognized his body. It seemed to be boiling with conflicting impulses contained by ironlike swaths of muscle. A feeling of alarm and disappointment rose in her, and she fiercely jammed it down. He grappled with his pants, raising his pelvis so that his chest mashed hers. A gasp interrupted her careful moans. He reached away from her and turned the radio up even louder, inadvertently adjusting the dial so that a hoe-down cavorted oafishly through the room. She felt him between her legs and in a burst of reflexive panic tried to close them. He pushed them open, gripped her shoulders and, as he had in her fantasy, hurt her, with a great deal of vigor.

“Hurry and put your pants on,” he said, easing back from her onto his knees. “You’re bleeding.” It was true; she sat up stiffly and saw bright red smears on her inner thighs. He was tucking himself away into his pants with a certain tender efficiency, straightening his shirt, standing up. She stayed on the floor and squirmed into her panties with a rocking hip-to-hip movement. She didn’t want to extend her curled-up body to get her blue-flowered pants out of their broken twist and put them on but she did. She finally stood. Her underpants were a fetid swamp. There was a rug burn on her lower spine. He stared at her from under his dark glasses. His jaw and lips were stiff and stony as if he were angry about something he couldn’t do anything about.

“Okay kid?” he said. His voice sounded like it always did.

She nodded yes.

“Good.” He put an arm around her shoulders. This gesture pierced her, and she huddled against him, nuzzling his chest with her nose and thinking at last they could enter their special make-out world. But instead of that remote condescending tenderness she knew and relied on, she felt him squarely there with her, every organ, synapse, and pustule in full operation, the whole hot engine of his body receiving her with utter indifference.

“Come on,” he said. “I have to go.” He kissed her on the nose and walked out, bearing her with him. When they got outside he let go of her shoulder and walked down the gravel driveway slightly ahead of her, as if he were going to get a beer or something. He turned towards her. “Bye,” he said.

She went into the house and into her room. She pulled her pants down and looked at the blood and sperm. Some of it had dried, but the center of her underwear was still slimy and rank. She stared at it a minute and then pulled her pants back on and sat on the bed, feeling the sticky gunk squish against her genitals and thighs. She thought of her little hairs mashed up in it.

The main problem was, she’d told Watley about her planned seduction of Rick. She could lie about what really happened, but at the moment she didn’t feel up to it. Instead she listened to album after album of soft music about love that lasted forever as she lay in bed under a blanket, feeling the bleak air-conditioned air all around her.

Eventually she called Watley and told her story, working an element of truth into it so Watley wouldn’t be puzzled to hear it was all over between her and Rick. “He probably was afraid of his own feelings, which he projected onto you,” said Watley. “He was probably intimidated by your intensity.”

Weeks after the event, she told Dr. Venus, not because she needed to tell someone but in response to a series of questions, the first being, “Did you take the miniskirt because you were trying to attract boys?”

The late afternoon light was pouring in like a visitor from space, which after all it was. She absorbed the burgundy atmosphere of plant fronds and crystal paperweights. In the waiting room she had been listening to “Hey Jude” on the intercom, and she felt wrapped in its residue. She looked at the pictures of dreamy long-haired girls on the walls and thought with mild astonishment, “This is what a therapist is for.”

So she told him about Rick. He nodded, his heavily lidded eyes widening only in their innermost muscles, which he had not learned to control. “And that has been your only experience?” he asked cordially.

It sounded to her as if she’d disappointed him, that he’d been expecting juicier stuff; what if everybody who came in here had better stories than she? A little cautiously, she talked about her Action adventures, checking his face for reactions all the while, seeing empathy and encouragement in his nods, leg-crossings, and head-tiltings. As she talked she felt as if she were talking about someone else — someone who was complex and interesting, a femme fatale, yet a sad sensitive femme fatale who’d seen and done too much too soon, like one of those teenagers in decadent-society TV specials who drank or something. She recounted everything as matter-of-factly as she could, even the things that had shocked and upset her, like the afternoon with Rose Loris.

Here she noticed a discernible change in Dr. Venus. His whole body seemed to constrict even before Rose had all her clothes off.

“Do you think this is weird?” she asked. She’d noticed an uncharacteristic twitching in his jaw, and it gave her pause.

He shrugged jerkily. “My job isn’t to judge,” he said.

At the end of the session she felt like a character in a rock song. Even the thing with Rick didn’t seem so bad; it seemed very cool to have lost her virginity on the floor of a garage, cooler in its own way than her florid fantasy. Now that was out of the way and she could have one desperate-youth-of-today experience after the next until she met Him, the one who would look past her tough exterior to her tenderness and pain and then—

“Justine, could you tell your mother to come in and speak with me for a few minutes alone? You can just relax and enjoy a magazine. We won’t be long.”

This was the first time Dr. Venus had made this request, but she didn’t think anything of it. She sat in the waiting room listening to the Rolling Stones and thinking about sex for at least ten minutes before the potentially disastrous implications of this unusual move sank in. She remembered the promise Dr. Venus had made early on not to repeat the things she told him to her parents. She was reassured for a moment and then wondered what else he would have to discuss with her mother for ten minutes; she remembered the tic in his jaw. She made eye contact with the young Nehru-collared secretary behind her lavender, triangle-shaped desk. “Sandy,” she said as she stood, nonchalantly replacing a magazine. “Could you tell my mother when she comes out that I went to the Burger Boy? I’m really hungry.”

Sandy said “Sure,” and Justine walked out of the building and down the block until she was out of Sandy’s sight. Then Justine, who never ran, not even in gym class, pumped her elbows and shaved knees and flew until sweat ran down her back.

A block and a half later she gave up, suddenly embarrassed, and out of breath. She continued to walk away from Dr. Venus’s complex, panting, her heart leaping in her chest, her right foot sliding out of her battered sandal. She was on a sidewalk separated from a four-lane freeway by a thin strip of bright sod, and the rush-hour traffic droned by as she walked against it, its familiar sounds of motion highlighting her aimlessness. She saw the Hudson Mall a few blocks away and walked towards it thinking she’d call Watley.

But Watley wasn’t home. She hung up without leaving a message and walked among the counters laden with jewelry and perfume, soothed by the gleam of chromium and the caress of Muzak. She tried to think of what to do. She imagined herself hanging around the mall with her chest out, making eye contact with middle-aged men. Perhaps one would eventually offer to buy her a drink, and they would drive to a motel together. She found a middle-aged man and fixed her gaze on him experimentally. He smiled back uncertainly. Emboldened, she tried another one, a big one with eye-wrinkles and a nose like a snout. His cold eyes zipped up and down the length of her body; his smile was both rapacious and dismissive. She decided she’d go try on some clothes instead.

She returned to the doctor’s office imagining the trouble and punishment waiting for her there. Dr. Venus and her mother gravely discussing her incipient emotional illness, the recommendations of intensive therapy, of tranquilizers, maybe of institutionalization! She felt almost tearful as she imagined Dr. Venus advising her mother of her daughter’s complex emotional difficulties and needs. How would her mother react? With anger at first, probably a few tears, and then? Justine steeled herself as she walked the last half block feeling frightened, revealed, yet resolute. She opened the door to the office and there sat Dr. Venus and her mother, her thighs tensely crossed, the sharp toe of one fashionable shoe jabbing the air. Dr. Venus rose as she entered, his face consternated, his eyes moving rapidly from Justine to her mother.

“Justine, this is the height of rudeness,” said her mother. “Where have you been? I only hope the roast isn’t ruined.”

Dr. Venus’s eyes continued to move to and fro. He lifted his hand in the beginning of a gesture and gave up. “Well then,” he said.

In the car they were silent as her mother furiously negotiated the rush-hour traffic, twice hitting the brake so abruptly that she and Justine jerked then stiffly bobbed in their seats. Her mother seemed angry but not necessarily at Justine; she did not seem shocked or worried. Justine waited, her anxious fantasies crowding round, her memory of the middle-aged man with the cold eyes gliding among them. He had been sexy in a way, she thought with a pang of regret.

“What did Dr. Venus want to talk to you about?” she asked.

Her mother tossed a lock of hair from her forehead. “He was just giving me a summary of your progress to date. Most of what he said was encouraging, but your rudeness does not speak well for his treatment.”

“He’s a shrink, not an animal trainer,” muttered Justine.

Her mother gripped the wheel more tightly and didn’t answer.

Perhaps Dr. Venus hadn’t repeated what she’d told him. Or perhaps he’d repeated it glowingly, seeing in her confession evidence that she was normal after all. Slowly, Justine’s images of punishment and drama decomposed, leaving a bewildering cloud of half-formed feelings in their wake. She sat in the uneasy silence of this cloud, relieved but unnerved.

A few days later, her mother told her they were going to end her sessions with Dr. Venus because it seemed she had recovered. Justine felt angry but, as she had always resented and complained of being forced to see Dr. Venus, she didn’t feel she could protest being forced not to see him. But after telling Dr. Venus those things about herself, she didn’t want to stop seeing him. She didn’t see how he could be sitting there knowing all those things about her and not be seeing her. It was like being on the verge of consummating your love and then being snatched from the arms of your loved one and borne out the door. She began to dream about him. Sometimes he would be standing on the periphery of the action, watching her with a mysterious, caring expression. In other dreams he played a more central role, such as the time he stood watching, fatherly and encouraging, while Justine had sex with Rick on his office couch. She had told him her secrets, and he had understood her — or had he? Perhaps he had been the one to end the sessions because he found her stories repugnant. No, she thought. The look on his face had spoken only of understanding and acceptance.

She wasn’t trusting enough of his understanding and acceptance to call him and see if it was still there. But it haunted her and she ached to experience it again.

She was at Watley’s house, in Watley’s bed with Watley, a pale fluffy comforter pulled up to their chests. They ate from a box of chocolates, some of which had ladies’ faces imprinted on them, and talked about sex. Watley was saying how unfortunate it was that it couldn’t always be like the first time, that possibly it got boring after a while.

“Watley,” said Justine, “I didn’t like the first time very much.”

“But wasn’t it very passionate?” asked Watley. “Wasn’t it an animal passion kind of experience? I thought it sounded incredible.” There was a subtle but firm insistence in her voice; Justine ignored it.

“I made it sound that way,” she said, “because I didn’t want to tell you the truth.”

Watley sat back and looked at her with wide impassive eyes, mouth serenely chewing a chocolate.

“I don’t even know if he wanted to do it with me in particular. It was my idea and I think he went along with it because naturally he wanted to have sex with somebody.” The truth of this stung her for the first time. “And at the last minute I didn’t want to do it but I couldn’t get out of it. And it really hurt.” This was not like it had been in Dr. Venus’s office at all. This hurt too, and to Justine’s fright she began to cry. “It wasn’t in my bed either,” she said in a trembling voice. “It was on the floor of the garage.”

“He raped you!” cried Watley.

“No,” said Justine, now really crying for the first time in years. “No, that’s not what happened.”

Like with Rick, it was too late to stop and she told the story in all its terrible physicality. “God,” said Watley, “God!” When it was finished Justine did not feel the warmth and mutuality which she had felt with Dr. Venus. She felt uncomfortable and resentful of Watley without knowing why. She snorted prettily, sucked in some tearrelated snot, and ate another chocolate.

It was hard for her to call Watley again after that, and an entire week passed without Watley calling her. She finally called Watley, not because she wanted to talk but to be reassured that Watley was still her friend. Watley sounded happy and relieved to hear from her. But when they saw each other, Justine felt discomfort bud between them.

School began. Watley spent most of her time with the enslaved Donald. She and Justine talked on the phone and sat together on the radiator before home room; the discomfort burgeoned. Once Justine saw Watley walking in the hall in friendly conversation with Justine’s enemy, Becky Tootle! And when Watley saw that Justine saw them, her face became first guilty, then subtly contemptuous, then friendly. “Hi, Justine!” they cried.

One day Justine was in the bathroom applying Erace to the dark circles under her eyes in the silent, bright-eyed company of two mascara-wielding girls. Justine rounded the corner to leave the bathroom, opened the door, and then paused in the short foyer to dig into her purse, letting the door sigh shut without going through it.

“God, can you believe the garage floor?” said one voice.

“And Watley says she told her that she had to drag him in there, that he wasn’t even interested,” said the other.

“No wonder they made her see a shrink. I don’t know how Watley can stand her.”

“She can’t.”

Justine walked out of the bathroom and down a long hall out an exit door into the parking lot. The smell of cars in the sun rose around her. She walked through the parking lot into a stunted huddle of foliage and trees where boys often gathered to smoke. She walked with her arms around her middle feeling loneliness and humiliation coupled with the sensation that she was, at this moment, absolutely herself.

Her parents got divorced that winter. They told her of their decision during a long drive that had been taken for that purpose. “Whatever happens,” said her father, “whatever unpleasant things we might say to one another during this time, you must know: your mother and I still love each other. And you, Justine. Relationships may not last. But love goes on forever.” His voice vibrated in the dry car air. A large muscle in her mother’s jaw twitched in smothered anger; her mother’s chapped fingers toyed with an errant strand of hair. They silently passed a snowy field in which some beautiful black-and-white cows posed.

Justine waited for the unpleasant things to be said, but they never came. Less and less was said at all as the household felt itself inexorably rearranged by the invisible machinations of papers being processed. The sharp gaze of her father’s eyes was focused somewhere far away, and his confident morning cough seemed to apologize for its confidence. Strange bottles of medication with her mother’s name on them appeared in the medicine cabinet. Her mother’s features seemed to be trying to draw themselves into the center of her face. The voice of the television followed Justine from room to room.

Her relationship with Watley had shriveled to saying “Hi” as they passed one another in the hall. Watley’s face would open for a second to allow Justine into her world, her eyes would briefly acknowledge the role Justine had played in it, and then her face would close again. Justine did not make other friends, beyond joking and talking with the skinny raspy-voiced boys who smoked cigarettes behind the parking lot. Her loneliness was painful yet it was strangely satisfying to her; in the same way that she had acutely felt her own presence at the moment of her betrayal by Watley, she now felt herself in her aloneness, and she savored herself bitterly.

When her father moved away to live in a large apartment in Ann Arbor, her loneliness drew her closer to her mother. During the divorce her mother had become swollen, dull-eyed, and unbeautiful. Justine looked at her and thought: this is what it means to be a grown woman. Fleshy, jowly, expensive clothes over big haunches, red veins in the hooded eyes, makeup in the facial creases. Her mother exercised still, and her pelvis and belly were strong and sturdy, full of deep sounds and smells, yet ugly and coarse, helpless and rejected in their ugly strength. Justine looked at her and wanted to be delicate and weak forever, never to have that strong womanly flab packed around her hips and thighs. She never wanted to make the slight grunting noise her mother made when she bent to lift a heavy object, a noise that briskly drew up her ugly pelvic energy and helped her do the things that had to be done. She closed her mouth and held her diaphragm still, shutting the door to her own lower body whenever she heard her mother make this noise for any reason.

Still she liked to sit with her in the evening, doing her homework while her mother read about current affairs in important magazines, so she could discuss events with women at Glade of Dreams. She liked to be in the car with her, both of them in sunglasses, listening to Adventures in Good Music. She even liked to shop with her mother sometimes, feeling protective towards this big, chic, but pathetically dreamy woman in the short skirt and knee-high suede boots. Sometimes they would go to Glade of Dreams, and Justine would lie next to her in a lounge chair, aware that they were objects of speculation, the divorcee and her troublesome daughter.

She liked being with her mother better than she liked visiting her father on the weekends. Her father was no longer handsome; his face had been weakened and coarsened by sagging and wrinkles, his body was paunchy and brittle. Their conversations were meticulous affairs about music, books, politics. He didn’t ask her about her life, and she didn’t desire to talk about it with him. There were occasional discomfiting moments when his sharp brown eyes would swivel into focus and he would seem to be looking right at her, wondering about her, perhaps pitying her. She hated that and tried to distract him immediately. He was easy to distract so they had polite dinners, and then her father kissed her, put his hand on her head and said, “Good night, my beauty!”

Thus she calmly moved from parent to parent to school, counting the months, holding her aloneness around her like a magic cloak.

When she moved to New York after graduating from college years later, the cloak was wound about her so completely she no longer knew it was there.

Chapter Twelve

When I was eighteen, my father paid for me to go to college in Blythetown, Pennsylvania. His decision to do so evolved over a period of months, during which he would sit at the dining room table with all his bills related to me spread before him, along with my high school report cards. Finally he announced that he would pay my tuition but that I would have to pay my other expenses.

Headley Cramer College was the benign experiment of a wealthy liberal nut who wanted to create an inexpensive two-year school for the working class with all the amenities of a university, including a dormitory, and without the tedious practical bent of the average community college. It enjoyed brief prestige as a uniquely cheap and high-quality institution and it attracted a number of enthusiastic MA’s and PhD’s with esoteric predispositions, as well as hordes of snobby working-class kids with boxes of art-rock records. Unfortunately Cramer went broke or lost his mind, I don’t recall which, and the school deteriorated into a squalid teen slum which occasionally made the papers when there was another stabbing in the special Male Bonding dormitory or something. But that wasn’t until much later, and anyway the main virtue of the place from my point of view was that it was a two-hour drive from Painesville.

Immediately after registering, I took a job in a restaurant owned by a stunted creature who sat in the back office with a bottle of whiskey, paralyzed before a color TV for most of the day. I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea. I walked to my classes on cold concrete paths surrounded by yards of snow upon which lay frozen piles of dog shit. There were always other students walking all around me, in groups or alone, a continuous flow of movement in crisscrossing directions. I would close my eyes at night and see a facsimile of this moving grid in the form of endless trails of light ticking on in the dark. I ate alone in a cafeteria filled with lively students who expended more energy in gobbling their ice cream sandwiches than I discharged all day. Their voices echoed in the dormitory halls as I walked back to my room at night to be greeted with a ritual “Hi” by my roommate.

I hadn’t thought college would be so like my previous life; there was an awful thematic sameness under the deceptive novelty of the experience. I had so wanted to do well and in a way I did; my passionate papers always came back with A’s on them. But something was wrong. Despite my relief at being away from home, I think I missed the dark, rank security of it, the reliability of having it to crouch in, feeling the huge violent energies of my parents encircling me like a fortress of thorns. Walking the concrete paths, I felt the world stretch out before me with sickening boundlessness. The people around me appeared more mechanical and remote every day, even though sometimes I passed by close enough to see their mouths working and their long hair swinging in their faces. I felt myself walking in place through a landscape that pulsed, swelled, and receded like a cell under a microscope.

One day as I walked back to the dorm from history class I began to cry. People focused their eyes on me briefly, then looked away. They probably thought I was crying because I was fat and didn’t have a boyfriend. I went into the Student Union bathroom to compose myself, came out, and began to cry again. The next day I made an appointment to see a counselor. I will always remember that kind, watery-eyed woman who sat looking at me with a gentleness and concern that made me cry again. She wanted to know about my family. I told her gingerly, planning to work up to the part about my father and I at night. But the more I minced around it, the more impossible it became to tell her. She sat, furrowing her brows and shaking her head at the scenes I described. I left to go to class and sat looking at the people around me, marveling at my difference from them. I had had sex with my father.

Sometimes I would gloat over this fact in a perverted way, feeling weirdly vindicated and special, enormous and corporeally real in comparison with the hateful skinny boys and girls prissing around me in their fashionable clothes. But most of the time I felt as if my body had been turned inside out, that I was a walking deformity hung with visible blood-purple organs, lungs, heart, bladder, kidneys, spleen, the full ugliness of a human stripped of its skin. I turned the facts over and over in my mind, trying to find some acceptable way to present them to my kindly counselor. But I never did.

It was during the beginning of my increasingly ghastly second year that I rediscovered Anna Granite. One Saturday night when my roommate was out being neurotic, while I sat on my bed with my French homework scattered about, a box of donuts and a bag of potato chips on either side, I heard the sounds of happy people walking past my window. Their warmth and pleasure caught in my protective screen and tore it. I remembered that afternoon, when I’d taken advantage of a quiet moment at work to lounge against the counter with a damp rag in my hand, enjoying the bit of pink and blue sky visible from the front window; during this moment of repose a tall handsome boy walked by and said, “You look like a real winner.” His friend said, “Really,” and they seated themselves in my section. The words cut me. I wrapped the wound in mental preoccupation, a binding shredded by the voices outside my window. I tried to concentrate on the stiff foreign phrases before me. That only made it worse. I crumpled my papers as I collapsed on the bed, dry sobs scoring my rib cage. I saw my college experience in comic book panels — at my desk in class, walking between buildings, in the dorm — and then I saw the panels come unstuck and spin away from each other, their borders torn, their images blackened and bursting into flames, disappearing into darkness. I ripped the blankets off the bed and sent French book and donuts sprawling (one donut rolling under my roommate’s desk, where it waited to start a fight over my loathsome habits) as I thrashed around, snorting and weeping as I tried to think of something that wasn’t terrible. I veered forward into the future, imagining myself as a lawyer, a fashion editor, a magazine journalist — all these possibilities seemed like cheap paper cut-outs moving up and down against industrial gray. I clawed backward into the past and found no comfort in anything there unless “comfort” could be had in the excruciating sight of brute, ignorant love, cowed and trapped, exposed by the wildly panning camera of my memory.

I felt locked out of my own fat body, as if I were a disembodied set of impulses and electrical discharges, disconnected rage and fear, something like what real humans feel in abandoned houses and call “ghosts.” I remembered my father on top of me, mashing my lungs, making my breath smaller and tighter until it barely existed, opening my body with his fingers, infecting me with his smells, his sounds, grinding his skin on mine until it came off as a powder and filtered into my pores, spewing his deepest poison onto my skin where it was subtly absorbed into my blood and cells and came out in my sweat, my urine and shit, even my voice and words. I felt so saturated by his liquid stench, I didn’t even think to wash it off when he left. I let it dry on my stomach or chest or ass, as I lay still with tears in my eyes. I sat in my dorm room and thought of taking a knife and cutting my face. I went into the bathroom and turned on the light and took off my shirt to stare at and hate my body. There were pimples on my chest and I welcomed them, wishing they were boils or scars, anything to more fully degrade this body, loathed even by its own parent. I had the fleeting thought that my roommate could come home at any minute, and I hoped she would so that I could display the truth of how loathsome I was and feel her contempt as well as my own. But she didn’t come. I sat on the floor and banged my head on the wall and cried like every homely girl who can’t be cute, can’t have a “good personality,” can’t be like the stuck up pretty bitches who throw their beauty away in bored flirtation and don’t have to be nice to anybody. Why, why, why can’t I be like everybody else?

The sound of my ragged sobs alarmed me, and I realized that my head was getting badly hurt, that I had better stop this now. I had to distract myself. Like someone running to put out a fire, I jumped up and shut the windows, closing out the hurtful sounds of other people. I put on my shirt and paced the room, hugging my poor body as if to apologize for the mean things I’d subjected it to. It was fat and nobody liked it, but it was mine, and suddenly I wanted to defend it and hide it away somewhere safe. I went to my bookshelves, my pulse returning slowly to a normal condition. I remembered how reading The Bulwark had made me feel in high school. I picked up The Gods Disdained and went to my bed, collecting my potato chips on the way, and sat wound in a blanket with the book.

The first thing I read was how utterly alone Solitaire D’Anconti was in the world and how much pain it had caused her. I could understand that. It described how she’d lived in isolation in the bosom of her family, how she was incomprehensible to her parents and resented by her siblings. I read on. It described her pain as a thing of beauty and grandeur, her isolation as a sign of her innate superiority, and, in fact, caused by her superiority, comparable to mountain peaks and skyscrapers. “Every loneliness is a pinnacle,” wrote Anna Granite. I had never thought of it this way before. I read of Solitaire’s physical beauty and intellectual brilliance, how she “grimly seized the rapier of hatred thrust upon her by the squalling mob and fought her way out, forcing the hot anger of her pain into the icy steel of her intellect.” So, not every social misfit was ugly and/or fat! They didn’t all lie on the bathroom floor banging their heads! Some of them ran corporations, which is what Solitaire grew up to do.

The book was about the struggle of a few isolated, superior people to ward off the attacks of the mean-minded majority as they created all the beautiful important things in the world while having incredible sex with each other. It ended with almost all the inferior majority being blown up in chemical disasters, perishing in airplane wrecks or collapsing buildings, all more or less simultaneously, all as an indirect result of their own inferiority.

My roommate returned that morning to find me pacing our shared unit, playing classical music on the radio, and devouring donuts in a state of exaltation.

The days during which I read The Gods Disdained were different from the days before. My life was no longer organized around the meaningless nightmare of dinner in the dorm cafeteria, the walk from class to class, or the classes themselves with their inadequate intellectual content on which I’d vainly tried to ground my flying psyche. Instead, it was the struggles and triumphs of Solitaire, Skip, Bus Taggart, and an array of other characters who now served as the support and metaphor of my existence. Sure, I knew they weren’t real people, but they had sprung from the mind of a real person and thus, according to an argument I’d heard in a philosophy class, were possible. These people were possible!

I finished reading at about four in the morning in a state of such poignant excitation that I went out and walked around Blythetown for hours, sweating, smiling, almost in tears, loving even the sight of brutish boys weaving heavily out of late-closing bars and vomiting in the street. The world, previously an incomprehensible prison, was now an orderly place where I could live with dignity. Even what my father had done to me — as a result of his denial of reality — was not too horrible to look at, could be explained and then rejected. I could determine my own world and reject anything that made it an unhappy place.

I skipped school the next day, went to a bookstore and bought everything written by Granite. I stayed home and read for days, oblivious to the histrionic comings and goings of my roommate. When I finished the last of the books, I started over again with The Gods Disdained. Between readings I went to classes and walked around the tiny campus, delirious with ideas.

In this state of intellectual euphoria, I found it almost impossible to pay attention to my school work. My new world view, structured through Granite’s philosophy, could easily be disarranged by the evil little weavings of the inferior thinkers who dominated my studies, or the noxious barrage of other people’s ideas I received when I sat in the cafeteria, or even the complicated probings of my well-meaning counselor. This did not make me think, as it might have, that perhaps my Granite-based structure was unduly frail. I thought the ease with which my new world was imperiled was due to its newness and my own inexperience in fending off challenges to it. I tried to bring it into contact with other people. I introduced Granite into discussions in history and philosophy and was dismissed by my philosophy professor (“I don’t deal with the work of dime-store ideologues”) and blankly stared at by my history teacher, who’d never heard of her. I was able to talk a little with my roommate, Lisa, as she dragged herself around in the morning in her red kimono and socks, chain-smoking and drinking coffee; she actually seemed grateful when I analyzed her miserable romantic experiences in Granite’s terms.

But gradually I had to cut out anything that threatened my new world. First to go was my counselor, with her puzzled assurances that any time I needed her, she was there. Then I stopped answering the letters from my mother, those crookedly scrawled missives whose words careened up and down and across the pages, oblivious to lines. Such urgent, frantic script about such a poor dull life. Finally I stopped opening them. Several weeks of silence brought the lounge phone to life and snotty co-eds into my territory with news that I “gotta call,” always from my mother, featuring the occasional tense deranged tenor of my father. It made me almost physically sick to squat on the lounge floor with the phone wedged between shoulder and jaw, corporeally in the sphere of giggling students and canned rock music, and psychically in the realm of my childhood with its listing floors and treacherous light. My mother wanted to know if I was all right. My father wanted to know about my grades. They told me they had new neighbors, and a new paperboy who “missed the goddamn porch every time.” I returned to my room in a state of paralysis.

I stopped going to the phone when they called. Soon I stopped going to my classes. It wasn’t a decision; I simply couldn’t stand going anymore. I couldn’t stand not going either. I would pace the dorm room as my aspirations of graduation and success crowded into one corner of my head, yelling and screaming. I thought it was already too late, I was ruining my life, I’d missed too much material. A phantasmagoric comet of historical facts, philosophical yammerings, and French phrases would fly about the room, impossible for me to grab. And then the phantom of my parents’ house would appear, trembling and weightless in my skull, and I’d think of the way I’d feel if I went out and walked among the people with their slabs of face and darting eyes. In contrast was the world of Anna Granite, clean and logical, sealed off and growing ever remote, Solitaire, Skip and the others, gazing at me regretfully as they floated farther away. To keep them near, I spent more and more time on my bed, reading Anna Granite while the rest of my life pressed in on me.

Then, within a two-day period, I read two pieces of information. One was that Anna Granite, who never attended college, had left her parents’ home in pre-revolutionary Romania, left the country at age fourteen, and never spoke to them again. Two was that Anna Granite was now living in Philadelphia where she was giving a series of lectures at her Definitist Institute. It was some time that week, as I lay in bed listening to tinny rock music seeping through the wall from the unit next door, that a path seemed to clear before me, a walkway through the writhing information I woke up to each morning. If Anna Granite could do it, why not I?

I stopped even thinking about going to classes. I changed from part-time to full-time at the restaurant and feverishly double-shifted. I received a letter from the administration which I threw in the drawer with the unopened letters from my mother.

I threw the letters away when I left for Philadelphia, but not all unread. The last thing I did before fleeing my dorm room (during the dinner hour so my gobbling fellows wouldn’t see me departing with my meager luggage) was to read letter after increasingly frantic letter, the last of which said, “We’re worried about you, honey.”

The bus trip to Philadelphia was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. The vinyl seats, ripped and exploding with dirty foam rubber, the greasy windows, the droopy heads of my companions, the odor of lavatory disinfectant, the merrily sloshing bit of blue at the bottom of the mysterious toilet — the foreignness, the oddity of it thrilled me. I felt I could ride around in the bus forever, going from one dismal, echoing station to the next, eating stale sandwiches and coffee from machines, talking to no one, my identity shrunk to that of fat girl on the bus. Strangely, as I rode through the concrete landscape, dreaming about a life of achievement, beauty, and excellence, I found repose in anonymity and ugliness.

I thought of my parents, fleetingly. I saw my mother standing in the kitchen, her arms limp, her eyes absent. She was exactly the type of person Anna Granite depicted as a vehicle for evil, and she had been. My father’s image I had no trouble rejecting. He was a bully, a weak nasty little man who had accomplished nothing. He was a denier of reality who had almost destroyed me. I shut a door on him forever as I rode the Greyhound eating potato chips and Junior Mints.

I ensconced myself in the Euella Parks Young Women’s Hotel, a maternal building with round scrolling flourishes on eave and cornice. According to the schedule I’d received via mail from the Definitist Institute, Granite lectured on Wednesday. It was Sunday. I spent the entire first afternoon and evening pacing the room, sorting and resorting my clothes in their rickety new drawers, arranging my few dresses in the closet, studying the traffic on the street below, rehearsing what I would say to Anna Granite when the moment came, and imagining what she would say to me. My heart swelled with anticipation and fear as scene after scene unreeled before me. I’m not sure why fear; possibly because the intimacy and understanding that I fantasized was such that it would rip my skin off. She would look at me and know everything I’d endured. I wouldn’t have to hold back; I could tell her about it all, I could allow her to penetrate that part of myself I’d held away from everyone, the tiny but vibrant internal Never-Never Land I’d lived in when there was no other place for me. I imagined how moved she would be by my inner world, how angry she would be at how I’d been betrayed. The mere idea of her powerful emotions were enough to make me weep as I circled the room, running my hands up and down the sides of my body. I imagined myself in a psychic swoon, lush flowers of surrender popping out about my head as I was upheld by the mighty current of Granite’s intellectual embrace.

But what if it didn’t happen that way? I had never seen this woman; how could I imagine she would care for me in a way that no one else ever had? This question made me feel a loneliness so insupportable that I’d hug my original fantasy until it hurt, then let go into the loneliness again.

At first daylight I rose from my snarled bed clothes (I’d vainly tried to sleep), got dressed and went out. It was a gray dirty morning; squashed milk cartons and eggshells lay in the street. People were walking with their faces against the wind, clothes flapping. I imagined them all in their offices and their apartments, living their fascinating lives (All the little knickknacks! The cartoons taped to refrigerators! The romances, the phone conversations, the families!), occupying their complicated inner worlds as full humans yet appearing in public streets every day to become walking knickknacks in someone else’s landscape.

I had spent almost my entire life in rooms, both literally and figuratively, and my awakened sense of private versus public hammered me in the head. I was absorbed by every face that passed me; the jowls, the eye wrinkles, the bumpy noses, the flower-petal quality of young female skin, the parasitic crust of mascara, the leakages of lipstick into tiny mouth lines, the delicate eyebrow hairs, the blue frond of vein at the temple — how could I ever have viewed these organisms as slabs! Even more unlike my campus experience, I didn’t feel either isolation or exposure as I walked among the citizens of Philadelphia. I felt as though I occupied a compartment of personal space that they instinctively respected as I respected theirs, out of which I could gaze with total impunity.

I roamed the city in this fashion all day, breakfasting on french toast, riding the bus, sitting in parks, strolling a museum, a department store, a Laundromat. I returned to the hotel with a bag of burgers, fries, and orange drink and slept almost immediately after consuming them. I woke in darkness, shoved out of sleep by a terrifying dream, unable to identify my surroundings or the menacing ear-piercing buzz which was, I finally realized, the big pink hotel sign outside my window. I had dreamed that my mother was under the ground in a container so small she couldn’t move. In the slow darkness of my dream landscape, she sent me telepathic messages from her prison. She said, “I’m in hell, Dotty.” In the dream this filled me with pain and terror and I tried to find my mother to comfort her. But I could only sense her locked deep underground, away from me forever.

When I recovered enough to turn on the light, I noticed that the Euella Parks Hotel had cockroaches, many of which were forming a living mosaic on my take-out containers. I spent the rest of the night fitfully pacing, thinking obsessively of Anna Granite until the sun came up and I burst out of my cage and went to have french toast for breakfast again.

The next day and night followed the same pattern and the evening of the Definitist meeting found me an exhausted nervous wreck, pacing before the hotel rented by the Definitists, eating from a bag of corn curls to calm my agitation. At eighteen minutes before the hour they began to arrive. I stood holding my balled-up corn-curl bag behind my back, studying them as they walked by, my excitement leveling into delight and solemnity. They were just as I’d imagined: tall, serious young men in suits, sometimes accompanied by a serious young woman. Almost all were handsome, all had a dignified demeanor and good posture. Strangely, I didn’t feel embarrassed to be the only fatty in the group, the way I usually did at gatherings of the normally proportioned. Still self-consciousness prevented me from entering the hall until everyone else had and the meeting was about to start.

When I finally did go in, I wasn’t disappointed. The Centurion Hotel was of the grand old variety, and the hall in which Anna Granite was speaking was long, thick rugged and crystal chandeliered. There were rows of magnificent chairs placed before a low dais and, on the velvet seat of every chair, a sheaf of vellum note paper and an expensive silver pen that caught and refracted the light of the chandeliers. The solemnity of the note paper, the intellectual heaviness of the pens from which sprang the airy nymph of light — these qualities were such a perfect analogy for the balance of rationality and passion in Granite’s work that really, it would’ve been enough for me to stand there in that room of hushed, attractive people for a few hours and then go back to the hotel and collapse.

But that wasn’t all I’d come for, and through a haze of intense emotion I made my way to the nearest chair and seated myself next to a devastatingly handsome man. He glanced cordially in my direction and executed an unnecessary but polite body movement acknowledging my proximity. Then there was a low communal murmur; I looked up and saw that people had appeared on the stage. A tall, broad, handsome man (who I would later know as Beau Bradley) and a graceful woman walked out like an advance guard and seated themselves on the dais. Then, with a dramatic flourish of curtain, she appeared.

The emanation of awe from the crowd was tantamount to a chest-thumping, fist-thrusting salute, but truthfully, I was a little disappointed. She was short, thick, and unbeautiful, her hair a tight cap of curls on a square, prematurely lined face. I struggled, my disappointment a dark wave under my need to worship. My fantasy listed feverishly, its crew collapsing on the starboard bow, yelling and frantically manning the pumps. Maybe I thought, maybe she really was beautiful, in an unconventional way. I looked at her eyes — they were truly striking, huge, blue, and electrical, as though the heat of her deepest body as well as the voltage of her cortex was streaming from them. Then the light caught the necklace she wore, the deep blue hunks of precious stone that encircled her, and in a flash, I saw her haloed by the brilliant wattage of blue, the air about her ululating with an iridescent current of energy. She began to speak. My fantasy mightily puffed out its sails and flew into the stratosphere, crew cheering. I burst into tears.