Little Sister

Little sister, I knew you were in trouble.

He was an odd choice—a math teacher from South Africa eager to master American slang and customs. He consistently made diction errors, like calling a place a “stop” instead of a “spot,” and using superannuated terms like “fuck buddy” instead of “friend with benefits.” He was fairly handsome, but nothing to write home about. His wardrobe was three years too young for him. You asked me not to laugh when you confided your crush.

We were all stuck in the mountains for three weeks, on a pretty, isolated college campus. What else was there to do?

At breakfast one morning, he plunked his tray down next to you and puckishly asked if you were hung over. You thought he was impertinent. The TAs get drunk and carry on at night, not us! Instructors are too busy communing with their subject matter. You pushed your sunglasses higher up your nose and pretended he hadn’t made this gaff. A lot is forgivable in a tight, temporary community.

He started following you around. He’s not shy, and you’re not the first woman to receive his attention here. Still, he made you feel newly desirable, like a long-forgotten silk scarf.

He teaches chaos. You cringe a little; this detail is too insipid even for you. Sitting with Chaos on a bench outside the library, you give him your patented naughty smile. He lets his hand rest gently upon yours.

Such encounters between strangers thrown together (highly educated and relatively young strangers at that) have all the ingredients to alchemize into pink and sparkling memory. It starts to feel like a memory even while it’s happening. You and Chaos could have been a Noel Coward play, or a Cole Porter song, except…well, except.

In your room that night, with the door closed, the Cocteau Twins playing, the joint lit, Chaos may have played with your hair and stroked your face. What you remember most vividly is him asking, “Do you want me to leave?” He had to ask a couple of times before the question took.

After he was gone, you curled up on your bed. The sheets were pulling away from the twin mattress.


You spent the whole next day hiding and throbbing with guilt. You went to neither lunch nor dinner. You avoided all common areas in the faculty dorm, especially the first floor lounge, with its elegant wood floor, brass lamps, and antique chaises. Much too romantic.

This dorm was for the teaching staff only. Why not? We were adults; we didn’t need our behavior monitored. We didn’t have to stand a minimum of eight inches apart like our gifted young charges. Our handbook did legislate that “Relationships between staff must be conducted with the highest degree of discretion.” But since the students slept all the way over on the other side of campus, you weren’t sure who this rule protected.

It’s tiresome to be the wife of the Great Man, you said during a walk we took to the Seven Eleven. You’re not married, but it feels like it—you’ve been together five years. Not that you are eager to commit. You both remember the scene when he thoughtlessly installed a toothbrush and a razor in your bathroom.

His philosophy dissertation is a Ceylon sapphire; yours in literature is a Hummel figurine a despised late uncle bequeathed to you. Your mother makes you keep it. Concepts that ceased to fascinate you a long time ago continuously roll from his mouth. He points out cultural incongruities in The Simpsons while you raise the television’s volume in a passive-aggressive attempt to silence him. He forgets his own birthday. You hate that.

This is why someone would cultivate an active fantasy life, I observed, hoping you were listening.

Unfortunately, you couldn’t avoid the farewell dinner. You tried the shabby excuse that you did not RSVP, but I assured you that no one would check. Your suitemate wanted you to go, too. She thought you do not socialize enough.

You wore your sundress. Its spaghetti straps exposed your bony shoulders and your breasts. You picked at some salad and ignored the special steak dinner.

Chaos arrived. After all, he never missed a meal, and he talked to everyone. There was no room at our table, but he sat as close to you as possible at the next one over.

You mumbled that you were going back to the dorm to change. You’ll be back, you promised. But this was the last time I saw you.


I opened my own suite door at around two in the morning to use the bathroom across the hall. At the same time, Chaos was leaving your suite. We kept our heads firmly down.

Perhaps you really did change clothes when you went back—you may have genuinely intended to return to dinner. But there was a knock on the door, and Chaos’s welcoming, coarse face with its big nose and thick eyebrows appeared through the peephole. He had noticed your dining hall exit.

Once he was inside, you offered him some additional marijuana. He lay down next to you, and the two of you examined the cracks in your ceiling. You decided that they made a map of continents, which the two of you then named and described. This one’s major export was the honey produced by its indigenous purple queen bees. The adjacent island was known for the aphrodisiacal properties of its spring water.

He kissed you. It was innocent and exploratory. You almost imagined that you could tell the Great Man about it. It was an epistemological experiment: I made out with the math teacher for you, my dear. I wanted someone to compare you with so that I could love you all the more. But you know you don’t have the intellectual chops to convince the Great Man of this.

Your jeans crumpled off. So did Chaos’s. But your shirts remained on. These dorm rooms are drafty even in the height of summer.

He left, and you hastily packed. Some time before dawn, you slipped your keys under the main office door and drove off down the mountain. You couldn’t face Chaos again. You couldn’t face anyone—not me, not your suitemate, not the TA you lectured about snogging. What a shame it was, you thought, that you couldn’t drive away from yourself.

The Great Man wasn’t expecting you until early evening. He planned to take you to dinner at your favorite Eritrean restaurant. First of all, you wanted to shower. Again, the banality was crushing.

All of her stuff’s gone, your suitemate told me later in an alarmed voice. She left without saying goodbye! She sounded so sad and surprised.

I wish I was surprised, little sister. But I wasn’t.

Vanity Fair

“[Masculinity is] a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness).”

So says Paul Theroux, travel writer. This aphorism drifts around my brain like a detached pixie wing. It’s true in some ways; men do seem expected to roam thelandscape all covered up. The man’s coat might also be an ill-fit because it is his father’s; society has forced him into Dad’s constrictive mold.

Femininity can mean nakedness—women are often considered an earthy lot. “I am a body farm, I am produce,” 22-year-old-poet-me wrote. Since then, I’ve read enough about capitalism and sexuality to observe that women attract men with their bodies and then make babies with those same bodies; we offer a complete mode of production.

I certainly don’t want to wear the ill-fitting coat of masculinity. How uncomfortable. Nonetheless, a body farm may want protection and cultivation; it may wish to appear lavish and welcoming, like an English country house or a Caribbean villa. Would I prefer a corset to an ill-fitting coat, then? What about a pair of merciless control-top pantyhose, or Juicy Couture sweatpants that cling more tightly than skin and stop just centimeters from exposing the tip of my vulva?People’s dresses are really addresses; makeup and clothes write a social language. In 1899’s Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen notes that as the “chief slave,” the Anglo-American rich man’s wife is primarily responsible for displaying his wealth, and she often creates this display via her person (think trophy wives or “Real Housewives”).

Some contemporary circles view enthusiasm about adornment as a sign of a woman’s shallowness or as a badge of her submission—we should not give precious time and energy to such frippery. Life is a serious business—no lip gloss. If you appreciate beauty commodities, you commodify yourself; thou shalt not Bluefly! “Real” women, apparently, should not care about how they look.

Keeping all of this firmly in mind, I still feel that material self-fashioning generates pleasures that are both mental and sensual. I love a low neckline, for example, especially if it creates a teaspoon of gentle curve. I love the soft brush of a powder compact, the caress of a thick mascara, and the smooth soufflé of a lipstick. The lines of a bias-cut skirt appeal to me, and I appreciate a close fit through my hips.

I could put Pope’s Belinda to shame. Shallow frippery? Why, yes. Hand me those blue dangly earrings—the ones that float like cumulus clouds.

Elizabeth I’s cousin, Arbella, once remarked, “I must shape my own coat according to my cloth, but it shall not be after the fashion of this world but fit for me.” I’m with her. I may not be Juicy, but I try to be refined. If I must be one of our culture’s peacocks (female, ironically), I will select my feathers with care, and I will attempt to flutter them with grace and discretion. I remain pretty naked underneath the fancy tail.

The Ex-Wife

 

Alcohol and I are getting a divorce.

Ours was a passionate attachment. I used to crawl inside her liquid pouch like a little kangaroo. I told her my most private thoughts, my most secret fears. She made me feel good.

We went everywhere together. I took her to elegant lounges where we luxuriated on plush stools and under low lights. Or I brought her to shady places with darts and graffiti on the walls; we liked slumming it. We also stayed home quite a bit, curled up on the couch together, massaging my delicate melancholy.

We laughed so many times. I remember joy and exuberance—every sip was Carnaval. If she had been real, I would have followed her anywhere, through any crowd of lesser revelers. I would have scanned the streets for the swish of her raiment and strained my ears for the chimes of her voice. It probably sounded like wet fingers circling a wine glass’s thin circumference.

She was my little deceiver. It was amazing what she could make me forget: my skull burning like an iron forge, bile coating the inside of my mouth, and the conviction that if I shifted even a millimeter my flesh would split open like a water balloon.

After a few hours, though, I wouldn’t remember how she abused me. Invariably, she forgave me for being so hard on her. Making up was very, very sweet.

She wasn’t who she pretended. She didn’t want what was best for me. In fact, the worse everything got, the more I relied upon her: exactly her office. She became misery’s cause and balm.

It’s possible that I liked the suffering. I have heard about people’s repetition compulsion, i.e., doing the same idiotic, destructive things over and over. Why repeat behavior that brings you pain? Well, as a friend pointed out, we’ve all met someone who makes imprudent object choices, again and again and again. That must be me.

Her hands used to rest softly on my shoulders. But her grip tightened, and I was no longer free to move. She dug in her nails, and I couldn’t pry her off.

She dragged me to a precipice. I had a choice. I could let her take us over the edge, and we could sail into an infinite cerulean sky that would render it difficult to tell where she ended and I began. I would be so wasted that I wouldn’t even feel the crash. I wouldn’t feel my back break or my soul snap. Or I could step back and walk away.

It hasn’t been the cleanest of separations. There is no way we can be friends. Nonetheless, we are connected, like two cells weaving a scar.

Recuerdo a Noir

 

What is it with me and bad girls? I used to love Bonnie Parker (or Faye Dunaway, at least). For years, Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire was my favorite book. I emulated rebellious, smart, even nasty women—just as long as they were autonomous. I loved femme fatales.

Hitchcock’s fatales in particular were sleek, beautiful, and dangerous. In graduate school, I read about the director’s near-obsession with the costume and makeup of his female stars—he was a tortured, caressing architect of femininity. I learned this at the same time I discovered that Freud genuinely believed that women were incapable of morality because of penis envy. I studied film noir through this brooding filter, suspiciously watching for oedipal trajectories and phallic symbols among the dim interiors and rain-swept streets. Lipstick never seemed so suspect.

But these days, I talk about fatal women and their motives with a 17 year-old Cuban boy with crooked teeth and eyes like chocolate mousse. I’m his high school English tutor. He wants to box, but his mother won’t let him. French is one of his electives, and he writes vocabulary sentences about girls in pretty dresses. Film noir appeared on his teacher’s list of pre-approved research paper topics, and I urged him to pick it. Despite his gentle protestations, I think he still would have preferred to write about the lost city of Atlantis.


I can’t discern what opinion he holds of me. Some days, he appears freshly shaved and a little nervous. He blushes and has a difficult time meeting my eyes. Other days, he yawns, gives one-word answers, and slumps next to me in his school uniform pants, belt undone and dangling. His manners are always inscrutable, however, which renders him opaque.

He and his classmates seem to be part of Miami’s Cuban American elite. His friend’s family, he told me wistfully one day, used to own one of the biggest houses on the island, right on the beach. Fidel seized it and turned it into a hospital. Upon hearing this, I sighed and shook my head—I’m wary of delving into such complexity.

He’s a fan of Double Indemnity, but I’ve been urging him to watch The Lady from Shanghai, too. To tempt him, I pointed out what a knockout Rita Hayworth was. She was married to Orson Welles when they shot the movie, and Welles made her bleach her hair blonde. As a result, controversy ensued. She was (I paused gingerly as I told him this) Latina. My student rolled his eyes, familiar.

The femme fatale engages in a typical pattern: first, she seduces the noir protagonist, betrays him, and then ultimately gets hers. The protagonist generally concludes the story in a state of bitter lamentation. In voiceover, he might say, “oh, what a fool I was.” When the kid and I talked about this, we both smiled. I assume it was for different reasons.

The fatale’s power lies in her sexuality; she arouses men and whips them into clumsy, quivering submission. In general, noir is a world of erratic, ungoverned emotions. Not long ago, I tried to crystallize this idea for my student. “How do you feel when you have a crush?” I asked him one late sun-drenched afternoon, at the fancy dining room table from the old country. “Are you in your right mind?”

No,” he replied immediately, his Spanish accent surfacing a little more than usual. “You think about nothing but her. Your world revolves around her. You ignore everyone else in your life. And then, she’s not who you thought she was.”

I gently explained that the betrayals typically come after a relationship has been established, that we were still discussing the pursuit phase. Internally, I wondered who had hurt him and what I could do to her.

Later, I asked him to tell me how noir was similar to a lush tropical forest. This question was part of an educational technique called synectics, which requires a person to create metaphors based upon other metaphors. He said that both things were beautiful and complicated. “Okay,” I said, “What else do you know that’s beautiful and complicated? It can be anything, an animal, a plant, an object.”

He paused, then answered, “Women are beautiful and complicated.”

I laughed a little and told him that he might not like the next step in the exercise.

“How do you imagine it feels to be a beautiful, complicated woman?” I asked.

He was quiet for a long, long time. He did not come up with anything.

He also did not escort me to the door that day; he shut his bedroom door firmly behind him instead.

He will be Papi someday. I might still be talking to students about love and power.

The noir paper is due next week.

~ Dispatches from Me-Ville

Why would I want to write a blog? I’m nothing unusual. I’m the kind of person you see regularly in TV commercials: a white, moderately attractive female, decidedly middle-class. I suggest the person lingering on the periphery of Pottery Barn ads—the anonymous one smiling with nonchalant ease, gently gripping a wine glass filled with photo-shoot apple juice. In one such shot, I might be playing poker with other anonymous, comfortable-looking people. I might hold a faux cigar between my teeth.

I guess what’s nagging me is the following passage from an old diary:

“I’m only inches away from becoming what I hate: a slightly pudgy, very funny, single girl who’ll never get out of retail, or if she does get out of retail, she’ll get some insanely dull, middle-of-the-road career, and she’ll never write again.” ~ May 3, 1996

(One should never read old diary entries.)

Let’s consider this moody prophecy point by point:

° Well, I am pudgy—but in a cute way. People describe me as “healthy-looking.” I carry my proportions well.

° I’m still funny, but I can veer off into mawkish, melodramatic self-indulgence, and I have an annoying way of snapping, “that’s not funny!” when others laugh at something I say.

° I’m not single, but I’m still a girl. My husband deserves an Outstanding Spousal Tolerance Award. He could need a trophy—maybe with Bassett’s Licorice and Klonopin stuffed inside.

° Yes, I have gotten out of retail. It’s been a long time since I was part of Barnes and Noble, the Great Green and Beige. But, as it has been observed, you can leave the store, but the store can never leave you. If necessary, I could probably still load a v-cart.

° Insanely dull, middle-of-the-road career? Only a little bit true. For the past seven years, I’ve been teaching college writing. I’ve adjuncted at four schools, and I’ve worked with an astonishing array of students. Some have been gifted, some cursed, some largely forgettable and some capable of generating wholly impure thoughts. As a group, they’ve been delightful.

Unfortunately, I’m not really making a serviceable living doing this. I need to look into that.

Here’s the tough part:

° Still writing?

Sometimes. But not enough. Thus, the blog.