project/teacher-story

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.)

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.