Bookmarker tag: project/teacher-story (39 notes)

“I have to go to the other patients. I’ll be back when the doctor comes.” She nods, resigned. She has that hopeless look you see on battered women. God forgive me, because I am a woman too, but when I see women with that look I want to slap them.

Seeing pictures of Mamma when she was young makes me sad. She is lovely, her eyes are happy and full of expectation.

Why doesn’t life turn out as we hope and plan?

Why is Time so merciless, stealing our opportunities if we are not swift enough to grasp them immediately?

Why is it so frightening to reach sixty because one was once sixteen and believed that time existed in infinite supply?

Why couldn’t one know that Time moves on with ever-increasing speed and plays havoc with all things we once thought we could leave for tomorrow?

Given that other people hold the key to survival in the world, histrionic patients tend to also hold the basic belief that it is necessary to be loved by everyone for everything one does. This leads to a very strong fear of rejection. Even entertaining the notion that rejection is possible is extremely threatening to these individuals, because this reminds the patient of his or her tenuous position in the world. Any indication of reje tion at all is devastating, even when the person doing the rejecting was not actually that important to the patient. Feeling inadequate yet desperate for approval as their only salvation, people with HPD cannot relax and leave the acquisition of approval to chance. Instead, they feel constant pressure to seek this attention in the ways they have learned are ef- fective, often by fulfilling an extreme of their sex-role stereotype. Female histrionics (as well as some of the males) seem to have been rewarded from an early age for cuteness, physical attractiveness, and charm rather than for competence or for any endeavor requiring systematic thought and planning. The more “macho” male histrionics have learned to play an extreme masculine role, being rewarded for virility, toughness, and power rather than interpersonal competence or problem-solving ability. Understandably, then, both male and female histrionics learn to focus attention on the playing of roles and “performing” for others.

I care about fine wine but not about food, and because the terrine is efficient—comes in its own container and can be consumed unheated—I stole two jars of it from one of these travel centers, the weight of the jars giving a new tug to the leather straps of my handbag as I purchased my wine.

It wasn’t that I believed the wine I bought was payment enough for my jars of human cat food. Stealing is a way to stop time. Also, it refocuses the mind, the senses, if they become dulled, for instance by drinking. Stealing puts reality into sharper relief.

You’re in a highway travel center, people in a great flux and flow, coming and going and milling and choosing, the cashiers in a fugue state of next and next and next. And in order to locate the precise moment when you can take unseen, you slow it all down. You make time stop. You insert into reality what composers call a “fermata,” and while time is stopped, you put something in your bag.

In this way, I test my fitness. I test my ability to see. I gauge what other people see, and also, what they fail to see.

As they watch her go, Bernadette reaches under the table and touches him, softly at first, then more boldly. It’s amazing, she thinks, how you can just do this to people. Like stealing. Luckily, the youngest girls don’t know it.

Jann looks at her and swallows. She decides that he is younger than she thought. She sips her beer, which tastes of smoke, and does not move her hand. “What does this remind you of?” she says.

He shakes his head. Color fills his cheeks.

“Let’s go upstairs,” says Bernadette.

Ellen found her mother seated on the living room floor, her hair in a scarf. She had the dreamy look she often wore after spending several hours by herself. “I’m rearranging,” she said. “Dusting.”

Around her lay things she had bought on her various trips: inlaid wood chests, corn-husk dolls, animals carved from ivory. In a glass dish were the colored marble eggs she had bought with Ellen’s father in Florence. Ellen felt a nervous fluttering under her ribs.

“I’ve lost perspective,” her mother said. “Can you see any difference?”

Ellen wished she were back at the age when she would howl shamelessly while her mother used a tweezer to pick bits of gravel from her skinned knees. Her mother looked as delicate now as the blown-glass vase she was holding.

“Mom,” Ellen said.

Her mother looked up. The room was very still. Ellen felt the weight of the old house, its dense curtains and clean, swept kitchen. Her mother’s world was pure, steadfast, decent. But it wasn’t enough for him.

It had not always been that way. Though she did not state, like London’s notorious Mrs. Wilson two hundred years earlier, that she would not reveal the circumstances that had made her the mistress of an older man at the age of fifteen, Teddy had had something of the same experience. The first great episode of her life had been with a writer, a detoured novelist more than twenty years older than she was. He had first seen her at a bus stop. She was not, even in those days, exactly beautiful, but there was a body that spoke, at the time, of much that youth could offer. He took her to get her first diaphragm and she was his mistress for three years until he left town and returned to literature and in the end a large house in New Jersey.

She had stayed in touch with him for a time, her real link to the grown-up world, and read his books, of course, but slowly his letters became less frequent until they simply stopped and along with them the foolish hope that he would come back someday.

Soon Lydia was round at Kensal Rise almost every day. She didn’t see much of Alex, though; mostly she was babysitting for Sandy or drinking coffee or wine at the kitchen table with Juliet, who poured out to her all the dissatisfactions of her marriage. Actually Lydia liked Juliet. Lydia was really very impressionable, although she appeared so disabused and knowing, and had such decided opinions. She was drawn into strong connection with women she met, studying them for clues as to how to grow up, what kind of person to be; she admired Juliet’s bright little house, her tidy cupboards, her competence and toughness – and was rather afraid of her, fascinated by the idea of her intimacy with Alex. She could not imagine achieving for herself any existence so strongly flavoured, so deep.

[...] There was an internal click as an actual idea of Cassirer's broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense [...]:

The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language.

He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority God had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circumnavigating my insides like a bluebottle fly for a week, and at last I got hold of it: words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion--not drugs, not boys. That's why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.

As she spoke Nicola was looking, not at Keith, but at her bikini and what it framed. She rightly imagined that he was doing likewise. The interproximate breasts, concavities of throat and belly, white pyramid, the racing legs. Keith did not know, could not have guessed, would never have believed, that half an hour ago this body had stood naked before the bathroom mirror while its mistress wept - drenching the feet of the god of gravity. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Which is fun for the beholder; but what about the owner, the tenant? Nicola wondered whether she'd ever had a minute's pleasure from it. Even at sixteen, when you're excitedly realizing what you've got (and imagining it will last for ever), you're still noticing what you haven't got, and will never get. Beauty's hand is ever at its lips, bidding adieu. Yes, but bidding adieu in the mirror.

What these qualities meant, how they conjoined to form a human being who looked and moved a certain way, I had no idea. As a teenager, I first became aware of people’s eyes catching on me as I walked down Michigan Avenue with my mother and Grace during shopping trips to Chicago. They glanced, then looked—each time, I felt a prick of sensation within me. I knew how transistors worked; my father had shown me a picture of the very first one, at Bell Labs, a crusty, inauspicious-looking rock that had performed the revolutionary feat of transmitting and amplifying electrical current. The jabs of interest I provoked in strangers struck me as an unharnessed energy source; somehow, I would convert them into power.

That was the best body I ever had, and the worst mind. I was seventeen. I was slender and strong and I also had swollen C-cup breasts. I had never even worn a bra before my milk came in for her, and I had always been ashamed of my breasts before then. The way they looked if I leaned over. Sad little triangular flaps of skin just holding my nipples to my chest. If I was lying on my back they disappeared completely and I could have been a boy except that my nipples were big and square. I had no breast tissue. I didn’t feel like a girl when I was a child. I didn’t feel female. I felt neutral. Then I had her and I had breasts and I felt like I had become a girl. Femininity is shocking. Women always seem smaller and softer than I expect, when I hug them. Even if they don’t look small or soft. When I had breasts I was aware of them all the time. They were something new in my field of vision and they made my body intrude into another plane of space. But my mind was an open sore. It was black. I couldn’t tell if I was deep inside it or totally outside it. I would imagine being fatally cleaved all day long. By a gallows axe, the T-shaped kind. By a heavy medieval sword like Excalibur. Or bludgeoned, usually blows to my head, usually by the butt of a rifle.

I don't flirt, I never flirt, I often say no and sometimes say yes. It doesn't really have anything to do with sex, let alone love. I'm starting to realize I can have just about anyone. You just need to have the guts, because everyone's so bored, everyone's waiting so desperately for something to happen.

At first it was boys the same age as the subject, or only a bit older. The boys were brainy classmates from her progressive prep school, with Guatemalan spreads on their beds and climbing gear stashed in their closets and calculus textbooks on their neat desks. By the time the girl was sixteen, though, she had branched out. Her school was small, and she’d run through anyone of interest. It was easy to be picked up by men in coffeehouses—almost as if they were there waiting to be picked up by a teenage girl, which would have been terribly wicked of them. Though the subject was experienced beyond her years, she was too innocent to believe that wickedness like that could exist—though it was in fact exactly what was happening to her. The subject loved the power she held over the men. She loved the Moment: when the grown-up would turn to kiss her for the first time, and his eyes would go soft with lust, and she wouldn’t be feeling lust in return, just as she hadn’t with her first boyfriend. But now that emotional inequity felt like power, felt like control: to make a grown man go soft (and also: hard) like that! It made her feel kind of crazy with power. She saw it as a specific power unto herself, and didn’t or wouldn’t see that any ardent young girl would’ve sufficed. (There should be a specific name for this fallacy, the fallacy where you fit another person’s sexual proclivities very well, and feel that it’s because of some quality inherent solely in you, when of course it could easily be satisfied by anyone of vaguely similar shape and form. And age.)

All of these factors contributed to the subject’s sluttiness. But this study feels the most useful explanation, perhaps, is mythological. A mythology of sex itself. The subject infused the act of sex with unconscious mystical power. Why did she put that power into sex and nothing else? She wanted sex to achieve something for her, something outside of itself. This something could have a name: connection, redemption, purpose, pleasure, pure feeling. But really what she wanted was for sex to make her known. You have edges, you are something, you are here, you exist, defined by these hands, this mouth, this penis. Sex was supposed to do all that. It didn’t.

But back to my phonecall, because inhering in it is the cultural ghost of the whole perplex of women waiting in agony to be phoned by some man or other. I didn’t leave Africa to come back here with the covert purpose of waiting for a phonecall that would set me dancing and playing maracas. I left to leave. In junior high we were forced to read a short story about a girl who meets a boy when she goes ice skating and who then goes home and waits in agony for days for him to call. This is a famous story by a woman named Maureen Daly, who got elevated into the very top level of women’s magazines by it. The story is called Seventeen, and I think she was sixteen when she wrote it. The story won prizes. I had a very strong reaction to it. It sank into my soul and I vowed never to be her or anything like her. I vowed this. Also — and this is something I just now realized, thanks to the phonecall that’s driving me to the edge — it has to do with why, when I could have, I didn’t go after Nelson and stop him while he was still on his horse and heading for Tikwe. I had time. And I started to, but somehow I couldn’t do it. I realize that I was very moved, but in the wrong direction, by Jean Peters running out to stop Emiliano Zapata from going someplace he was determined to go. I may be confusing two different scenes, in one of which she presses a freshly ironed shirt on him, pleadingly, or tries to. I hated her. This would never be me. I wasn’t going to be Jean Peters in Viva Zapata when in fact the sensibility on the horse was who I really was. That was me.

I had my reasons. Do you want to hear the good news first, or the bad news? The good news is that Martina called this morning and we’re having lunch tomorrow. The bad news is that the good news made me feel so relieved and excited that I ran out to a bar and drank a bunch of big ones. Yeah? you’ll say. And? Nothing new in that. Agreed, but the bad thing about the bad news is that the alcohol had a really bad effect on me. It didn’t make me drunk, which was what I was confidently expecting it to do. It made me hungover instead. It did. I kept incredulously ordering more drinks, in a doomed bid to stave off this conclusion. That’s why I had so many. All the more ironic, too, because I woke up this morning feeling bloody marvellous after a really late and heavy night with the TV and the B & F. Was the phenomenon a new jet-lag deal, or the terminal mutiny of my whole bodybag? Oh man, I’d better get to California soon, while the transplant people still have something to work on. Maybe I’d better wing out there right away and have them fix me up with a temporary. And the mind was suffering too. Yes, the mind had its sufferings also. It was crammed with sin and crime, the thoughts nowhere, all in freefall and turnaround. I’ve got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I’ve got to get my system out of my system. That’s what I’ve got to do.

When I came out again, an hour later, my mother was in bed reading a magazine; she looked as if she had been wounded in a dozen places. My sister sat in her room, in front of the mirror. Her hair streamed down the back of her neck and lay in touching, defenseless little curls on the towel she had over her shoulders. She was studying her reflection thoughtfully. (Are flowers vain? Are trees? Are they consumed with vanity during those days when they are in bloom?) She raised her finger and pressed it against her lower lip to see, I think, if she would be prettier if her lip, instead of being so smooth, had a slight break in the center as some girls’ did.

The White Knight, who Alice meets towards the end of the book, is clearly based on Dodgson himself, a bumbling, incompetent eccentric who so wants Alice to be okay and ultimately helps her to find the final square of the chess game, where she will turn from a pawn into a Queen, thus abandoning him. In these scenes, with Tom Wood playing the White Knight, I played a peculiar concoction of love and scorn. These dynamics were familiar to me. I had spent a life on film sets, my puberty unfolding in front of dozens of men with no sense (or care) of what was appropriate to say or not say in front of children or of the boundaries between adulthood and childhood. The size of my breasts had been commented on, often, through the years. I had experienced unhidden yearning from people three times my age. I had heard explicit conversations about sex or had had them directed straight at me. I dealt with all this by wielding the only power I had, which at the time felt very real and potent: I could mock these men to their faces, I could say whatever I wanted, I could be as mean and bad and hurtful as I pleased. Because we both knew that, as a child who had felt their desire, I had something on them.

After he left I started to cry. Then I fell asleep again. At two o’clock I woke up, suddenly remembering I’d made a date with Judy’s Frenchman, the painter Claude Tonnard.

He took me to his studio, poured me out some perfectly ghastly tea and we looked at his paintings a while. Then, as if it was the only thing left to do, he made love to me.

The studio was dark and cold when I left. I felt experienced without feeling that I, personally, had been through anything. I’d really shocked myself, to tell you the truth. I was a long way from St. Louis. My past was receding a little too rapidly.

Rain fell. Every day, heavy rain, and I sat in my apartment and waited for sirens. Just after the rain began, there were always sirens. Rain and then sirens. In a rush to get to where life was happening, life and its emergencies.

Do you understand that I’m alone? I thought at the unnamed friend as I stood in the phone booth on Mulberry Street, the sky gray and heavy, the street dirty and quiet and bleak, as a woman’s voice declared once more that I’d reached a number that had been disconnected.

It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

She examined herself in the mirror with a worried look. What did she see? Being a woman, being beautiful, how does it feel from the inside? How does that silken caress along the thighs feel, that glossy satin against the warmth of a belly? 'How does she think of our night?' he asked himself. 'Has her voice spoken other names in the night? Which? Pierre, Victor, Jacques? And what does the name Henri mean to her?'

[...] 'Sooner or later, I'll have to tell her about Josette. But not just now,' he said to himself. He spent every night in the pale-green room, and they were very passionate nights; but when he got up the following morning, Josette never tried to keep him there. The day of the contract signing, they had agreed to stay together until late in the afternoon. It was she who left him at two o'clock to go to the hairdresser. Was it discretion? Indifference? It isn't easy to measure the feelings of a woman lavish with her body, who has nothing else to offer. [...]

Twenge has a wholly different theory than Shorter and Trivedi about the increase in anxiety , specifically when it comes to young adults. A 2010 study by Twenge and her colleagues found that a shift from intrinsic to more extrinsic goals has mirrored the increase of anxiety and depression among young adults.36 Where previously intrinsic pursuits, such as strong relationships, community , and competence were more central to young people’s life goals, Twenge’s team found a pronounced shift to extrinsic goals, such as appearance, social status, and wealth in the young adults they studied. Peter Gray, a psychology professor at Boston College explains that Twenge’s findings represent “a general shift toward a culture of materialism , transmitted through television and other media ,” in which “young people are exposed… to advertisements and other messages implying that happiness depends on good looks, popularity, and material goods.”37 Where intrinsic goals “have to do with one’s own development as a person — such as becoming competent in endeavors of one’s choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life,”38 extrinsic goals, by contrast, require an audience. And, as luck would have it, we each have an ever-present audience, at all hours, conveniently located in our pocket.

But this is not to say that genuinely wanted teacher–student sex is unproblematic. Imagine a professor who happily accepts the infatuated attentions of his student, takes her out on dates, has sex with her, makes her his girlfriend, perhaps as he has done with many students before. The student has consented, and not out of fear. Are we really prepared to say that there is nothing troubling here? But if there is something troubling, and the problem isn’t a lack of consent, then what is it?

Is it too sterile, too boring to suggest that instead of sleeping with his student, this professor should have been—teaching her?

What might it be for the professor to respond to the student’s transference-love, but not respond in kind—instead turning it to good use in the pedagogical process? It would involve, presumably, the professor “convincing” the student that her desire for him is a form of projection: that what she really desires isn’t the professor at all, but what he represents. To switch from Freud’s terms to Plato’s, the teacher must redirect the student’s erotic energies from himself toward their proper object: knowledge, truth, understanding. (Plato, like Freud, is often invoked in defenses of professor–student sex, but in fact Socrates did not sleep with his students—to the apparent frustration of some of them. Indeed, in the Republic, Socrates tells us that “sexual pleasure mustn’t come into” relationships between philosopher-guardians and the young boys they are educating, “if they are to love and be loved in the right way.”20) It is the bad teacher who absorbs the student’s erotic energies into himself. As Freud puts it, “however highly he may prize love,” the good teacher must “prize even more highly the opportunity to help” his student.21

When we speak of the power differential between teacher and student, it isn’t simply that the teacher has more influence on how the student’s life will go than the student has on the fate of her teacher. Indeed, to represent it that way is to invite the counter that, really, women students have all the power, since they can get their male professors fired. (That’s the premise of David Mamet’s Oleanna.) Instead, the teacher–student relationship is characterized, in its nature, by a profound epistemic asymmetry. Teachers understand and know how to do certain things; students want to understand and know how to do those same things. Implicit in their relationship is the promise that the asymmetry will be reduced: that the teacher will confer on the student some of his power; will help her become, at least in one respect, more like him. When the teacher takes the student’s longing for epistemic power and transposes it into a sexual key, allowing himself to be—or worse, making himself—the object of her desire, he has failed her as a teacher.

Regina Barreca, speaking of and to women who ended up as professors, asks: “At what point … did the moment come for each of us when we realized that we wanted to be the teacher, and not sleep with the teacher?”28 The default for most women, Barreca suggests, is to interpret the desire sparked in her by a (male) teacher as a desire for the teacher: an interpretation she must overcome if she is ever going to become the teacher herself. Male students, meanwhile, relate to their male professors as they are socialized to do: by wanting to be like them (and, at the limit, wanting to destroy and replace them: its own source of psychic drama). This difference between women and men in how likely they are to see their teachers as objects of emulation rather than attraction isn’t the effect of some natural, primordial difference in disposition. It is the result of gendered socialization.

To be clear: it is no less a pedagogical failure for a woman professor to sleep with her male student, or for her to sleep with a woman student, or for a male professor to sleep with a male student.29 But an ethical appraisal of the phenomenon of consensual teacher–student sex misses something crucial if it doesn’t register that it typically involves male professors sleeping with women students. The professor’s failure in such cases—that is, most actual cases of consensual teacher–student sex—isn’t just a failure to redirect the student’s erotic energies toward its proper object. It is a failure to resist taking advantage of the fact that women are socialized in a particular way under patriarchy—that is, socialized in a way that conduces to patriarchy. And, what is just as important, it reproduces the very dynamics on which it feeds, by making sure that the benefits of education will not accrue equally to men and women.

Imagine a student who, infatuated with her professor, pursues him and, thrilled when he returns her attentions, has sex with him, dates him, only eventually to realize that she was just the latest in a string of students, and that their affair is less a sign of her specialness than it is of his vanity. What happens next? Feeling betrayed and embarrassed, she can no longer take his classes, or spend time in his department (her department); she worries about which of his colleagues (her teachers) know about the relationship, and whether they might hold it against her; she suspects (rightly) that her academic successes will be chalked up to her relationship with him. Now recognize that this is an experience that happens to many women, and almost no men; and, further, that this isn’t because of some natural division of sexual labor, but because of the psychosexual order into which men and women are inducted, from which men disproportionately benefit and by which women are disproportionately harmed. I think it is clear that our imaginary young woman was not sexually harassed by her professor. But was she not denied the benefits of education “on the basis of sex”?

The youthfulness of my students, undergrad and grad, has a lot to do, too, with the peculiar liminal space in which they, as students, exist. Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed. It is hard sometimes not to envy them. Some professors find it difficult to resist the temptation to try and assimilate themselves to their students. But it seems obvious to me—not as a general moral precept, but in the specific sense of what is called for in the moments of confrontation with our own past selves which are part of what it is to teach—that one must stand back, step away and leave them to get on with it. Jane Tompkins, in A Life in School (1996), writes: “Life is right in front of me in the classroom, in the faces and bodies of the students. They are life, and I want us to share our lives, make something together, for as long as the course lasts, and let that be enough.”

I looked you straight in the face. I looked with all my soul, directly. I collided with you. Your eyes were limpid, as if a pellicle of silken paper had fluttered off them—the kind that sheathes illustrations in precious books. And, for the first time, your voice was limpid too. “You know what I’ve decided? Listen. I cannot live without you. That’s exactly what I’ll tell him. He’ll give me a divorce right away. And then, say in the fall, we could …”

I interrupted you with my silence. A spot of sunlight slid from your skirt onto the sand as you moved slightly away.

What could I say to you? Could I invoke freedom, captivity, say I did not love you enough? No, that was all wrong.

An instant passed. During that instant, much happened in the world: somewhere a giant steamship went to the bottom, a war was declared, a genius was born. The instant was gone.

[...] regardless of what happened to me or to her, in between, we never discussed anything, as we never thought of each other during the intervals in our destiny, so that when we met the pace of life altered at once, all its atoms were recombined, and we lived in another, lighter time-medium, which was measured not by the lengthy separations but by those few meetings of which a short, supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed. And with each new meeting I grew more and more apprehensive; no—I did not experience any inner emotional collapse, the shadow of tragedy did not haunt our revels, my married life remained unimpaired, while on the other hand her eclectic husband ignored her casual affairs although deriving some profit from them in the way of pleasant and useful connections. I grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core which perhaps it kept offering me in a pitiful whisper. I was apprehensive because, in the long run, I was somehow accepting Nina’s life, the lies, the futility, the gibberish of that life. Even in the absence of any sentimental discord, I felt myself bound to seek for a rational, if not moral, interpretation of my existence, and this meant choosing between the world in which I sat for my portrait, with my wife, my young daughters, the Doberman pinscher (idyllic garlands, a signet ring, a slender cane), between that happy, wise, and good world … and what? Was there any practical chance of life together with Nina, life I could barely imagine, for it would be penetrated, I knew, with a passionate, intolerable bitterness and every moment of it would be aware of a past, teeming with protean partners. No, the thing was absurd. And moreover was she not chained to her husband by something stronger than love—the staunch friendship between two convicts? Absurd! But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?

Debevoise was thirty-four and took no part in adventure. He didn’t care for women and he couldn’t care for men. He lived in a corner second-story room of a rambling boardinghouse. The room had two windows, one of which overlooked the field and the other, the sea. There were no curtains on the windows and he never pulled the shades. He ate breakfast with the elderly owners, lunch every noon at the high school and drove to a hotel in the next town for dinner every night. He was stern and deeply tanned and exceptionally good-looking. As for the teaching, he barely recognized his students as human beings, considering them all mentally bludgeoned by the unremitting landscape. He couldn’t imagine chemistry doing any better or worse by them than anything else.

And the girls felt hopeless, stubborn and distraught, for they had come a long way on just a whisper more than nothing.

Every night the chemistry teacher was projected brightly behind the square window glass and watching him was like seeing something in a museum. The girls would often close their eyes and even doze off for a time, and the snow would fall on them and freeze in their hair. Sometimes he would take off all his clothes and walk around the room, punching at the wall but never hitting it. Seeing him naked was never as exciting as the girls kept on imagining it would be since no one had ever told them what to feel about this.

Even so, Julep would come back to the house smiling, as though someone had made a very exciting promise to her. No one was there to notice this, for her mother was always locked in her room, powdered and rouged and in a lacy bed jacket like an invalid, watching TV and eating ice cream from the store, and her father had been sleeping for hours, twitching and suicidal, dreaming of meat going bad in faulty freezers.

Morris had given Pammy a driving lesson in the Jeep. He taught her how to shift smoothly, how to synchronize acceleration with the depression and release of the clutch. “There’s a way to do things right,” Morris told her, and when he said this she was filled with a sort of fear. They were just words, she knew, words that anybody could use, but behind words were always things, sometimes things you could never tell anyone, certainly no one you loved, frightening things that weren’t even true.

I’m married, Maggie.

Whatever that means. It could mean a million things. One of those things could be, I am married so we make out all the time and of course when the ball drops I deposit my tongue deep in my chosen one’s throat even if our kids are clawing at our ankles. Or it could mean, I am married and so everything that is sexual between us is clinically dead. It’s hamburger meat at the restaurant where you work. Our passion would not be roused if you stepped on its tail in your prom heels. We pay bills together and occasionally share a late-night talk show, if the mood strikes.

Oh, she writes; then she looks around the room, though she doesn’t necessarily wish for anything to be different at all.

Like any young girl who has a crush on someone older, she doesn’t know what she wants to happen. She doesn’t know if she wants sex or no sex or to undress in her room while he watches from the sidewalk. Mostly she just wants a small suggestion of excitement. An anonymous bouquet left on a doorstep.

In the car he’s cockier than usual. As a teacher, she decides, he’s far nicer. He’s never entirely tender—even at his warmest, he exudes the pale sweetness of a cashew—but now he is armed and cool. Getting into the car has triggered an acute shift; she goes from feeling half woman and half child to feeling like a toddler. They’re talking and there’s no music on. The roads of Fargo are flung ahead like foreign airstrips. Maggie experiences a distinct feeling of doom. It’s normal, when you’re this close to thrall, to worry over losing it. This is nothing like what she felt for Mateo. With Knodel, it’s this thing that’s been building—has it been building since she was a freshman?—so it’s that much more important because of its history. Also, because of the quality of his person. He’s top-shelf. Being with him, she feels her own stock rise. She visualizes an actual accumulation of wealth. At the same time, she feels that she isn’t good enough.

The best part of her whole life happens next. He slows to a stop on a quiet street, parks his wife’s car at the curb of a house with no lights on, and just looks at her. He does it for ten seconds, maybe less. In those seconds, every bad thing she has ever thought about herself is erased, and she feels like a supermodel.

MY SENIOR YEAR of high school I worked in a coffee shop. I took the bus there after school and stole bagels to eat before my shifts, 3 PM to 11 PM most nights. I met a man there—let’s call him Mike. I was 16 when we met; he was 25. I was 18 when he took me to his place after work one night, poured us rum and Cokes until the stars spun above the roof where we sat, and then picked me up and carried me down to his bedroom. A few months later, I moved into his apartment. It was next to the airport, and the planes flew so low it seemed like we could touch them from the rooftop at night.

That same year I entered a contest and won a $2,000 writing scholarship. It was 1999, and my plan was to take the money and go to New York. I’d been accepted to an undergraduate writing program at NYU, but I soon realized the money I’d won was not nearly enough for that.

Mike was always broke. I loved him or I thought I did. He knew more than me or I thought he did. I didn’t know then how little men’s attention was worth. I still believed there was a scarcity of it. He needed fifty bucks and I gave it to him. He needed a hundred. Then a little more. Soon I had given him all my money. It happened so easily. One day I realized it was all gone. I sat on the floor and cried. I was afraid that he would leave me, and I was afraid that I would never leave.

Not long after that, we were in bed together in the afternoon. I was naked, on top of him.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, “people would pay to look at you.”

He had a friend who had a website. The friend and another man would pick me up, bring me somewhere, and we would take some pictures. I would get $200; Mike would get $50. “But I’ll give all the money to you,” he said.

He wouldn’t, but I believed him. I needed to. Recognizing one lie would mean recognizing all his lies. If that happened I would have nothing left.