Skin Game: A Memoir (6 page)

Being a girl in the strictly biological sense, however, did not necessarily condemn you to girlness, so long as you remained unrepentantly scabby and exercised the proper vigilance against lace-trimmed ankle socks and dotting your i’s with little hearts. Yet I suffered furtive fascinations with alien girlness. When I was six, seven years old I used to linger over the pink ballerina costume in the Sears catalog, wondering with delicious horror what it would be like to prance about in that stiff tulle skirt and those silken slippers. As the salesman at the shoe store fitted me with yet another pair of stolid, serviceable Buster Browns, I glanced surreptitiously at the glossy black patent-leather party shoes I would never in a zillion, trillion years consent to wear but, oh, if I could just try them on, just once. I would never, however, have admitted to such shameful yearnings. I begged for a doll for my eighth Christmas—an ordinary baby doll—but when she came to me, crystal-blue-eyed and propped up in a pink plastic baby seat behind the cellophane window of her box, I was so ashamed of her that when I took her to play at someone else’s house, I would smuggle her there in an anonymous brown paper bag, scurrying along in dread of the possibility that someone would stop and ask me what I had in the bag.

*   *   *

I’m not sure precisely how I’d formed such a low opinion of girlness, except that I lived, of course, in the Boy Center of the Universe. What’s more, in my favorite books it was always the boys who had adventures in the wilderness and pursued mythic quests and poled their rafts down the mighty Mississippi, while the girls got stuck making sandwiches and running for help. Who’d want to be the girl?

What a cruel fate, then, to find myself at twelve suddenly in desperate want of a crash course in girlness. It seemed to me that an easy mastery of the art of being a girl was the necessary precursor to elevating myself to that rarefied Olympian status of being, like my sister, someone’s Girlfriend. Girlfriends were personified, in my mind, by the mascaraed and miniskirted girls who arrived by the busload from St. Margaret’s and Madeira and Foxcroft for school dances. Their hair bounced and swirled like a shampoo commercial. They could do that girl business of leaning forward and glancing up shyly winsome from under a silky cascade of bangs—a trick that would, a few years later, become the trademarked Princess Diana look. They gave off exotic scents and clustered giggling in the bathroom with a mysterious array of implements spread out on the chrome shelves over the sinks—wands and brushes and puffs—with which they dabbed at eyelashes and cheeks and lips. The evidence of their passage remained behind in powdery residues and crumpled tissues imprinted with lipsticked kisses.

I felt like I was way behind the loop in this girl business, with no possible hope of catching up. How did other girls seem so natural, so easy in their girlness? When, at my mother’s insistence, I wore my first bra, I felt as awkward as if I’d been strapped into a suit of armor. I felt sure everyone in the world would know. Attention would be called. Great hilarity enjoyed at my expense.

This same apprehension met my every furtive flirtation with makeup, powders, perfumes, the whole girl paraphernalia. I just knew I would be the subject of endless mockery and derision if anyone caught wise to what I was up to.

Apparently I’d been such a reluctant recruit to my own sex that I wasn’t invited the day they took the other girls aside and explained to them how the whole girl business worked. Not the nuts-and-bolts stuff with body parts that you learn in health class. No, this was some secret conventicle in the girls’ hut where they anointed the postulants with body splash and went over the essential ground rules: how to make yourself comfortable in your girl self, how to use eyeliner or wander into the lingerie department without feeling like an impostor who at any moment might be unmasked and denounced.

9

When an avalanche is on the very verge of breaking away, the weight of a single footfall can set it in motion. A boy says to you one night, there in the lobby, “I was hoping you’d show up,” and something shoots through you hot, fizzing, dizzying.

Then I was on the inside, just like that, as though I’d slipped through Alice’s mirror. There were boys who plopped down next to me in the lobby, boys who after breakfast, before I left for school, would lean against a doorjamb talking just to me, their books slung under their arms.

I can’t tell you why any of them ever gave me a second look. Out of boredom, maybe. To amuse themselves? It would be easy to say that they were manipulating the situation, manipulating
me
to their advantage, but the most inexplicable thing of all is that I think they were, in their own way, sincere. I have still the letters they wrote me, and today their words seem almost pathetically earnest:
I will never, ever forget you, not as long as I live.

There is no other time in your life when just sitting around in idle, pointless conversation will feel so fabulously significant as it does when you are twelve, fifteen, sixteen; hanging out is the consuming passion of adolescence. Sometimes we’d cram, two or three of us, into the narrow box of the projection booth in the auditorium, full of empty movie-reel canisters and misplaced notebooks and random lengths of discarded patching film, while one of my coterie served as projectionist of the Saturday evening movie. I felt important just to
be
there, in an inner sanctum of cool, tipped back on two legs of a stool with the rough cinder-block wall against my shoulders and the noisy clattering of the film spooling through the projector.

Mostly, however we sprawled together in that lobby, arguing, bantering, shouting, remonstrating, all of the talk shot through with subtext and suggestion. It was an orgy of insinuations, an erotica of implications.

I can’t remember now anything of what we said, but I can remember the feeling of those highly charged interludes. There was something powerful and narcotic and forbidden throbbing just below the surface of our conversations, the way a glimpse of naked skin is so much more seductive than a body simply laid bare. If a faculty member walked by, we’d all fall into sudden silence.

*   *   *

Out of a frequently fluctuating assembly there in the lobby grew a tight, intricate entanglement of only four of us: me, that dark-eyed boy with the football, his roommate the blond boy from that same afternoon, and that other one, the scofflaw, the rebel of indifference.

At first it was all talk. Then it was letters scribbled feverishly during the long, dull school hours that separated us. Letters we folded into tight squares and thrust surreptitiously into each other’s hands after a quick glance about for the disapproving glare of any faculty, like spies effecting any information exchange. Letters alternating long plaints of school-induced boredom with sudden declarations of passion and pragmatic discussions of opportunities we might steal to be thrown into each other’s company.

Then there was an afternoon when they told me they would teach me how to kiss.

“You gotta know how to do it right,” they said.

“Okay,” I said, feeling a low trill of daring curl through me, co-conspirator, willing accomplice. And then they kissed me one after the other, spinning me in a circle of hands, arms, lips, tongues. Oh it was intoxicating, heady, delirious, as though I had suddenly discovered just at the edge of my grasp a world of vertiginous excitements I could never have imagined existed.

“There’s a lot more I could show you,” said the dark-haired boy on another afternoon.

I knew it was mere speculative boasting—throw it up against the wall and see what sticks. I knew, and what’s more he knew that I knew, but that was part of the game; you had to burst out of the gate with all your colors flying and brazen your way through on sheer bravado.

“Oh yeah?” I said, and I managed to convey in my reply both skepticism and challenge, as though to suggest that there wasn’t one damn thing he could show me that I hadn’t already mastered and put behind me.

That was the pose I struck, jaded worldliness, though half the time I didn’t even know what was being talked about. Whom would I have asked for a translation?

I thought I was just playing rather cleverly at an exciting game, dancing along a step ahead of the implications and the innuendoes. Nothing else interested me but those brief, dizzying moments in their company. When we were apart, I filled the hours in dreamy reverie. I tried to imagine the boys imagining me. Did they lie in their beds at night staring at the ceiling, as I did, replaying every word of the day’s conversation? Did they daydream of me during class? Did they talk about me together in their dorm rooms? In these hours by myself I colored reality freely with shades of fantasy, imagining something along the lines of Zeffirelli’s
Romeo and Juliet
—blank verse and giddy passions and a boy who’d be willing to die for the love of me.

We had maybe half an hour after dinner on weeknights, a few hours here and there on weekends, but even when we were apart I could feel their presence like a constant whisper. They were there, somewhere, and anytime I left my house they might see me. I imagined, even, that the boys might glance a thousand yards across the lake and see me in my bedroom, so every time I crossed in front of the window, it was like stepping onto a proscenium stage, me thinking,
Now they will see me brushing my hair, so I must brush my hair as women do in movies, lingering and dreamy.
Sometimes I crouched low beneath the level of the windowsill, to play secretively with my toys.

Self-consciousness crept over me like an itch, making its way into my skin, my pores, my blood, my bones; everywhere I went on campus I felt like I was appearing in performance as the Object of Desire. Her stage directions were not fully clear to me, but I patched together her character from the odds and ends of my experience: TV romances and the trashy novels circulated surreptitiously through the B
¹
, my sister, all those mixer dance girls I’d watch come and go on Saturday nights over the years. She had to be coy and ironic, worldly and flirtatious, clever and coolly sophisticated, apparently indifferent to their attentions.

The most agonizing and yet thrilling of my daily appearances was nightly supper in the dining hall. My sister swept through the heavy, swinging wooden doors at the entrance, the great roiling current of her passage almost visible to me. I scuttled behind in her wake, into the glare of an imagined spotlight in which each of my moves was a closely observed performance as I picked up my tray, moved through the line, reached for silverware, filled a glass with milk. Oh God, what if I dropped a glass or my tray, spilled ketchup or gravy on my shirt, left a morsel of cottage cheese nestled in the corner where top lip meets bottom?

The essential feature of the performance was that each elaborately stagy move—talking with my sister, laughing at a joke, biting into an apple—had to be carried out with no apparent self-consciousness. I had to
appear
blithely unaware. Act natural. I never dared look directly at any of the boys I knew, for fear of catching them in the act of watching me, and thereby acknowledging my part in the performance.

I have no evidence to prove anyone actually
was
watching me, but I imagined they were, and in the end there is no difference between the two. I could feel the strain like winter ice on the verge of breaking up, the hiss of fracture lines snaking across my nights as I sat alone in my bedroom, oddly desolate and unable to pinpoint why.

10

By the time my parents understood the situation that had developed, it was already too late.

“I don’t want you spending so much time with them,” said my mother. “They’re too old. It’s inappropriate.”

What did she mean, “inappropriate”?

“But they’re my friends!” I protested, frustrated that she seemed determined not to understand.

“They aren’t your friends. They’re too old to be your friends.”

What a ridiculous thing for her to say, I thought. Why was she being so unreasonable? Of course they were my friends. Didn’t they seek me out after dinner, on weekend afternoons? Didn’t their letters say
I hope I will see you tonight?

From my mother’s point of view, the whole situation was no doubt alarmingly clear, but to explore its implications and ramifications would have required of both of us a language of the uncomfortable that neither of us knew how to speak. She couldn’t have explained that she was only trying to protect me, and certainly I wouldn’t have been likely to hear her. I would have refused to believe then that a day would come when I would regret this too-early plunge into the Byzantine complications of desire. From where I stood, my mother’s effort to protect looked more like a cage in the making, and I the offender to be made prisoner therein.

I couldn’t quite see the crime in what I was doing, yet it was obvious that the grown-ups disapproved—not just my parents, but other faculty as well, who would pass our little conclaves in the lobby with a scowl of censure. Clearly I wasn’t supposed to like these boys, and not being able—not wanting, really—to help myself, I concluded that my feelings themselves must be my transgression, some sort of character flaw that a better person would have done her best to downplay and overcome.

In spite of my stubbornly contentious streak, I’d never been a troublemaker. I sought approval, I coveted it. I liked being a rule-abider, an upholder of standards, a champion of integrity. So the burden of this official disapproval weighed heavily on me as I skulked off to the lobby after dinner, to the movie on Saturday night. Yet the alternative was equally untenable; the company of those boys was like heroin, a rush so intense I had to have more and more of it. What dictate of my heart should I follow? Which preference should gain ascendancy over my heart?

The situation stumped me, and I kept my illicit, outlaw feelings to myself while I tried to puzzle out the proper answer, when no answer appeared to offer itself.