Slaves of New York (4 page)

he leave, Ray went over to the closet. He took off his shoes and socks and put on my favorite pair of high heels, red leather pumps. "How do I look?" he said.

A wave of rage rose within me. He walked all around the apartment in my shoes. I didn't dare say, "Listen, Ray, you're going to stretch out my favorite shoes," because he had just given me all that furniture, and I didn't want to embarrass him. My mother always said, "Lend people your clothes, but don't wear other people's shoes or lend yours, because your shoes conform to your feet and other people's feet are different shapes and will stretch them out." Ray didn't have very large feet, but I just didn't see how he could fit them into my shoes, which were definitely small. I didn't have the money to replace them, anyway.

Then Ray tried on my straw hat. Maybe he was trying to be playful. But it was almost one in the morning, and he was walking around in my straw hat and shoes. I couldn't laugh. I finally said, "Well, I'm tired and I have class in the morning."

At the door Ray kissed me good night and looked at me pleadingly. It was too late. I felt a rush of incipient hypertension, but I tried to calm myself. When Ray had finally gone, I examined the shoes. They weren't ruined after all, but I pushed them to the back of the closet.

I was the youngest in my family, but now I'm an only child. When I was eight, Ellen, my sister, then twelve, died of leukemia. When Ellen got sick she asked for a dog and got a Chihuahua named Midnight. It lived until four years ago. Now it's just my mother and I. I rarely think about Ellen. My mother doesn't like to talk about her, and for me she's become bleached to an image on a flickering movie screen. Photographs show me standing next to my sister: she had wispy blond hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a pointy chin. Once, during a squabble, I ran into the kitchen and came back at Ellen with a handful of pepper which I threw in her face. Just after that, she got leukemia. I also have three half-brothers, whom I've never met. After Ellen's death my father offered to

pay for a ticket to New Zealand for me, but I didn't want to go —or perhaps my mother didn't want me to—and the offer was never repeated. The boys are now fifteen, thirteen, and six. In September my father sent me a miniature jade baseball bat, highly polished, and a note congratulating me on my acceptance to the Women's Studies Program at Yale. With the jade bat was a card saying this was a replica of a Maori war club. I brooded about what my father had meant by it, but I was too busy with my courses and schoolwork to think about it for long. At the beginning of the semester my courses seemed quite interesting; but a few days after Ray tried on my shoes I was sitting in class, taking notes as usual, when it became apparent that not one word that was being said made the slightest bit of sense. The teacher, Anna Castleton, a well-padded, grayish woman with clipped, poodle hair, was discussing a conference she had attended the week before—a Poetics of Gender colloquium—where she was severely attacked for her presentation. I carefully wrote down everything Anna said but when I got home that night I reread the notes and found they still sounded as if they had been written in a foreign language.

Status of empirical discourse.

Post-structuralist account of dissolving subject precludes formation of female identity.

The notion of the subject in progress.

It was assumed she was calling for a return to fixed identity.

Post-gendered subjectivities.

If gender is constructed
—
a gendered identity 99% of the time is built onto a person who has a sex.

Here I had made a little sketch in the margin: a picture of a beaver, paddling frantically, with a tree stump clutched in its large buck teeth.

The only text of rupture is right wing.

To speak of identity is to speak of racism.

Anyone who throws out the word "essentialist" believes

that there is such a thing as real women who are trans-historical. ANYONE WHO THROWS THIS OUT AS AN OPENING

REMARK IS PROVING THEIR MIDDLE-CLASS

PARANOIA. The most important thing about Marxism is positing a

historical subject. Now, you can say as a Marxist you

want to dissolve "woman." Without using the word "class," she argued for a more

complicated view of women as historical subject. Yet she was attacked for this
—
brutally attacked.

Then I had written down the words of one of the other students: "Angela Davis said that Elizabeth Cady Stanton's decision to separate a middle-class reformist movement in the name of feminism was implicitly racist—there is such a thing as nonessentialism."

To this the teacher responded, at least according to my notes:

It isn't complicated, it's simple: the unreworked biological category, where you locate yourself to take action. The language becomes the primary basis for working things out
—
in other words, can you top this? The privileging of the complicated.

I wondered whether the teacher had burst into tears following the attack on her. The two hours of class were devoted to a retelling of the attack, couched in this language which so gracefully circled a subject without ever landing to make a point.

At the end of the semester I gave an oral report for the Castleton class in which I discussed mysticism and Eastern philosophy and some of the similar themes that emerge in the writings of Virginia Woolf. I had hoped to please the teacher; throughout my lecture she wrote furiously in a notebook. When I finished, she looked up and said, "You're wrong." The other women in the class all turned to catch my reaction. I felt as if I had been electrocuted on a television game show. Anna went

on to say that I had fallen prey to a traditional male put-down: placing women in the category of weak, dreamy mystics and thus denying them power. I knew that the most successful reports in class were those which merely repeated what the teacher herself had said; but how could I repeat what made no sense? I found myself arguing, trying to defend my position. I left the class feeling as if my leptons were no longer in orbit.

That evening I sat in my apartment, on one of Ray's chairs, trying to figure out what had happened. It was strange to find something that had once absorbed me so quickly transformed into musty, foul-smelling words. I thought of Dostoyevsky, chattering away in his icy locker room, seized with the flu or perhaps remembering his near-execution. Charlotte Brontë, trimming her cuticles by the open fire. Florence Nightingale, sanctimonious in her bandage-strapping. These people had lust, infectious greed to live, a passion in life. If smallpox and polio vaccines hadn't been developed, I figured I would have been one of the ones to keel over by now. Maybe I was just tired; it would be good to have a break at Christmas.

But I didn't feel any different during vacation; by New Year's Day I decided not to go back to Yale.

Half the reason I had decided to go to Yale was that I didn't get an apartment I fell in love with in New York. The summer before I had landed a job as editorial assistant on a magazine —I would be taking over for a woman who was going on maternity leave in September. I had a whole month to find a place to live, but after several weeks of looking I still couldn't find anything, not even a share. Nell, my mother, came into the city to help me look. She wore her tattered cardigan with holes in the sleeves and her Red Cross shoes, practical for walking. She said that the way to find an apartment was simply to wander up and down the streets until we saw a sign in a window saying apartment for rent.

"Ma," I said, "maybe that was how you could one time find an apartment, but not anymore." But she insisted, and on the afternoon of the second day we did see a sign on the first floor

of an old brownstone on Third Avenue in the twenties. Nobody answered the bell, but we went next door to an antique store and the woman gave us the key to the place and said that she was handling the rental for the landlady.

The place was fantastic. It held the sediment of many lives: gilt ceilings, molding in a pattern of vines and leaves, covered with many layers of paint, an intricate puzzle-parquet floor, like a Parcheesi board, cracked and dented in places, the wood still beautiful. The apartment was two stories high, with a spiral staircase in the dining room that led upstairs to a small balcony with a sleeping area. There was a second bedroom in front, off the living room, which had an ornate marble fireplace. The bathroom was elaborate, with a claw-footed tub and a pedestal sink. The place came with its own backyard, fenced in, though bare of plant life. How calm and happy I felt here! It was a place to sit morosely by the open fire in a velvet dress, entertaining an assortment of people I would surely meet. I would plant a willow and peach tree in the backyard, get a cat. "I'd never be able to afford this," I said. "I bet it's twenty-five hundred a month."

"You could get a roommate," my mother said. "Maybe it's not so much." My mother, on her stiff stilts of legs, never allowed her face to express much emotion, but I could tell she liked it.

We spoke to the woman in the antique store. She said the rent was $600 a month, and had scarcely finished the sentence before my mother wrote out a check as a deposit. The woman said she would call the landlady—she didn't see that there would be any problem. I took the train home with my mother; the whole trip we discussed the apartment. She said that maybe the landlady would reduce the first month's rent so that I could get metal security gates installed over the back windows. At $600 a month, however, it was hard to complain.

When we got home the landlady called: she hadn't spoken to the woman in the antique store when I saw the apartment, but it had been rented only a few minutes before we looked at the place.

"Goddammit," I said to my mother. "That was my apartment. It
felt
like my apartment." The flavor of lemons and chalk filled my mouth, the taste of disappointment. This loss was an indication that my whole life was out of sync. Nell was also disappointed. There was nothing she could say or do, but she did show me an article in
Fate
magazine which suggested that possibly I had lived in the apartment in another incarnation but was not meant to now.

Luckily I had something to fall back on; Yale had accepted me the previous spring, and though I had told them I wasn't going to come, now that I changed my mind they said I could still attend, but without the scholarship.

Though I had enjoyed living in my own apartment in New Haven, I didn't mind being back at home with my mother. She lived in Southampton, on a back suburban street, far from the large mansions that lined the waterfront. The tiny house had been built in the 1930s, before the Hamptons became so popular and expensive. Some summers, my mother went away on a trip and rented out the house for $5,000 a month; this summer she had a job as librarian at the Southampton library.

In her house we were constantly tripping over each other, but we didn't get on each other's nerves: we called each other, as a joke, "Letitia" and "Hermione." Though we had never seen the movie
Grey Gardens
—about a mother and daughter, related to Jackie Onassis, who never went out of the house and grew old and eccentric together—this was what we imagined we were like. We lived on quick-cooking Ramen noodles, spinach, and snow peas; tuna fish, direct from the can, frozen corn fritters heated in the oven; or baked potatoes topped with Cheddar cheese.

In the afternoons I rode my bike to the beach and walked up the mile stretch and back, scuffing my feet through the foam at the edge of the sand and waves. I spent a lot of time thinking: What makes me the way I am? Okay, I figured, I was a combination of genetic and environmental accidents. On the other hand, surely my personality wasn't
entirely
beyond my control. It disturbed me that I seemed to be totally uninter-

ested in men: when I went out with them, it was only in order to be able to study them as if they were natural history museum exhibits. Captain Ahab couldn't be blamed completely for this. That I
wasn't
worried about finding someone—this wasn't normal, according to the magazines. Even Anna Castleton had turned away from men only because they had proved to be so rotten.

The way I felt now, I wasn't really interested in any aspect of life. Not in the least bit. Perhaps I really would live at home, my mother and I growing older, more set in our ways, graduating to higher degrees of oddness. Yet what would become of me when my mother grew too old to support us both? Abnormal. I tried to imagine myself decked in a purple fez, smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder, sipping absinthe or crème de menthe and actually speaking to people—having what is known in books as "conversation." Murmured voices, the sound of brittle chatter across a ruby-lit nightclub. Yet my imagination couldn't pick up the words.

There were so many ways to fill up a day, let alone a life. I didn't see how I could possibly cram anything—anyone—else into my hours. For example, one afternoon I spent three hours reviewing the contents of a sweepstakes brochure that came in the mail. It took hours to figure out the rules of the sweepstakes; apparently one had to purchase an item of jewelry for $4.99 before the entry form could be considered valid. Though I knew I'd never enter, I felt obliged to read about each item of jewelry: elegant "love" ring with genuine diamond; Pegasus pendant with genuine ruby and swirl of faux diamonds; Princess Di's famous sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring; the Diamond Wedding Cross, Symbol of Eternal Unity. The descriptions were written in a style as interesting to me as my feminist crit. courses had once been.