Shaker Heights, OH
September 17, 1978
To: Gretchen Frazer
Harvard/Radicaliffe
Jordan Co-op J
93 Walker St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Dear Gretch,
They will not let me bring my lunch to school, after all, as I am expected to perform Lunch Duty. This involves shepherding my girls to the dining hall, the mingled aromas of which (hot margarine, hoofed beast) suffuse the corridor like some foul incense; glopping unnamable concoctions onto plates (today was something Tetrazzini, something au gratin (I think it had been cauliflower in a past life), and some kind of cookies); then, when every plate is clean, leading my table in prayer:
Behind the loaf is the flour; Behind the flour is the mill; Behind the mill is the sun and the rain And the Fa-ther’s will.
(Both days I substituted “Mother’s will” for “Father’s will,” sotto voce.) Naturally, I am expected to ingest the same slop the girls do.
What’s for dinner tonight at the Co-op? Solyanka, perhaps, with some Tassajara bread, and brown-rice pudding for dessert? The loneliest part of living alone is eating alone. (These school lunches should nourish my spirit, if nothing else.) The good news is, I found a health-food restaurant not too far from my apartment. Even as I write, I am communing with some baba ghanouj.
Speaking of the Co-op, when I called yesterday we didn’t speak of anything but the Co-op, which seemed unfair — I did want to update you on my life, such as it is (granted, it isn’t much). And another thing: in the middle of our conversation Amy knocks unexpectedly at your door and suddenly you have to hang up? According to your story, Amy’s the one who’s been coming on to you. She couldn’t wait five minutes? And why did you start whispering? It’s not as if Amy doesn’t know you and I have a relationship — she lived with us all last year, saw us come out of the shower together, and I distinctly remember her eating one of those Andrea’s-breast cupcakes you made for my birthday. Considering we hadn’t talked in a week, I felt shortchanged. I’ll shut up now because I’m sure I’m blowing this way out of proportion.
So, let me update you on my life.
From the front, the Flowers School looks something like a mausoleum (classical detailing; crumbling, ivied brick); the Lower School, tacked onto the back, looks like a shopping mall. The headmistress has a house on the campus, the Flowers School in miniature (minus the shopping mall) — sort of in the back yard, like a monstrous doghouse.
My classroom is in the mall: low ceiling, linoleum, forty-nine fresh blond desks, a row of lockers. I tried to make it more homey by putting up posters — Gertrude and Alice, Sappho with lute and papyrus — but the headmistress nixed them and issued instead a grim portrait of the school’s founder, which I’m obliged to display.
Besides teaching sixth- and seventh-grade English, I’m also homeroom teacher for the entire seventh grade, which consists of forty-nine girls who are impossible to tell apart as they all appear to be named Lisa and wear identical outfits — white blouses, green skirts, green knee socks. They all have stickers of balloons and happy dinos and such on long scrolls of waxed paper, and tubes of lip gloss that smell like root beer and peanut butter and watermelon, which they wear on strings around their necks. They all attend “dancing school,” belong to “the Racquet Club,” and will one day “come out” at the “Junior Assembly.” (I wish I’d come out at the Junior Assembly!) I sit at my desk and squint, and they look like forty-nine flowers, in their leaf green skirts and Easter-lily blouses. I have an incurable desire to plant them.
Actually, there are only three Lisas. Lisa Goodfellow, a sexpot with breasts like little plums, and Lisa McLaughlin, a heavy girl with a snout, are (inexplicably) bosom buddies. Lisa G., who claims her dad invented Mr. Coffee, is the most popular girl in the class; behold her in homeroom, with blunt-nosed scissors, snipping stickers and showering them like rose petals upon her handmaidens. Lisa M. sits next to her and glowers, like an ill-natured troll. The third Lisa, Lisa Rosen, is heavy but no snout. She’s new this year and shy, and has no bosom buddies; she’s constantly reading a book in her lap. (I had to “take her to task” for this.) Lisa M. and Lisa R. are the only heavy girls, which I imagine makes them self-conscious; it’s my job to affirm their inner beauty. Lisa M. called Lisa R. a pig the other day, for which I took her to task. Afterward, she sauntered back to her cronies on the windowsill at the back of the classroom and announced, “That new teacher is a major hard-ass.”
Predictably, I am a freak at the Flowers School. I feel like a Rita Mae Brown character plunked in the middle of a Jane Austen novel. The school library doesn’t even have a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves! The first two days I optimistically wore my labrys, but only the headmistress remarked on it: “We ask teachers to keep jewelry to a minimum, Miss Nunn.” This was when I was asking her about the possibility of veggie alternatives at lunch. You’d have thought I was asking for a raw-human-flesh alternative. How did I expect the girls to get adequate protein? Was my understanding of the Flowers School’s mission to educate its pupils in socially aberrant behaviors? Maybe I’m paranoid, but right then I decided not to wear my labrys anymore. I’m so lonely for the Co-op, you can’t imagine. I was normal there, wasn’t I?
That is all, my flower. I must prepare tomorrow’s lesson plan.
I love you,
Andrea
October 16
I don’t know, Gretchen, is it OK that you slept with Amy? I don’t see why it should affect our relationship.
However, that shamefaced little confession I found at the bottom of your care package — I practically needed a microscope to read it — makes me think that you think it should. WHY DON’T YOU ANSWER YOUR PHONE?
Honestly, I don’t know how to feel. How many times have we said we wouldn’t get ourselves caught up in the Fascism of Straight Culture monogamy-possession trip? Dealing with this is only challenging because it’s the first time I’ve had to wed theory to practice. It is the first time, isn’t it?
At any rate, the pumpkin-zucchini bars are scrumptious and the tape is absolutely divine. Kate Bush is quite a name. I am convinced this woman is the goddess incarnate. You say she was on Saturday Night Live — and I missed it?! I can picture you salivating all over the common-room TV. And what was I doing that night? Grading midterms. I’m becoming pitifully unhip here in OH. You should have called to make sure I was watching!
Things are bad here — trouble with me, trouble with the girls. First, my trouble:
Ever since school started, I’ve had this sense I’m being spied on. Mere paranoia? But there have been incidents: One day at lunch, the school dietitian sidled up behind me and whispered, “Eggplant parmigiana!” Another time, also at lunch, the headmistress asked me how I liked the salad (I admired its brown color). But I don’t wear my labrys to school anymore, or my red bracelet when I’m menstruating, nor have I uttered the words “Fascism of Straight Culture” within a two-mile radius of the Flowers School. So why did the headmistress want to see me?
She is a rotund little person in Chanel suits and lavender hair. Around her neck she wears a clinking loop of gold coins. It will strangle her one day. “My dear,” she said, “the school nurse complains that you’ve been traumatizing the seventh grade at a very sensitive juncture in their, ah . . . development, by informing them their uteruses are —” she consulted a page of notes through her lorgnette — “reversed.” I thought, Is this woman from space? Then I remembered one time when one of the girls was complaining of back cramps, and I suggested that her uterus might be a little retroverted. Well-Woman Gynecology 101, right? I explained this. The headmistress said, “Ah,” and consulted her notes again. “The Flowers School is an ecumenical institution,” she went on. “Some of our families, however, might object to someone who is standing in loco parentis to their daughters promoting occultism.” No doubt the school nurse saw me conducting a Black Mass on the field-hockey pitch? No, evidently the teacher at the lunch table next to mine is offended when we say grace after meals and I thank the earth for my food instead of the Father God.
“My dear Miss Nunn —” the headmistress tapped my knee with her lorgnette — “I know you’ll keep these controversial behaviors to a minimum in the future.”
I was such a cocky bitch: I thanked the headmistress with massive insincerity, then dashed home to laugh my head off about her on the phone with you — forgetting, for the moment, that you haven’t answered your phone since the autumn equinox. You still didn’t. I started heating some half-and-half on the stove to make yogurt. Then I got mad. An all-girls school and they’re squeamish about uteruses? Talk about the Fascism of Straight Culture! I whanged open the refrigerator door and grabbed my jar of starter yogurt off the shelf; the door whanged right back and hit me in the ear, I dropped the jar, and it shattered all over the floor.
My historic Co-op yogurt! Great-great-great-granddaughter to the yogurt you and I were in the very act of making on May 19, 1977, when I came out to you in the Co-op kitchen! There was no way I could salvage it; it was full of glass shards. I could almost hear it weeping. No, that was me weeping. My yogurt! It lay there, splat, at my feet.
And then I got this image of myself: lone freak in random kitchen, about to be fired from the low-status, slave-wage job, which is all I’ll ever be fit for in this hostile culture, for perpetrating gratuitous acts of freakishness. Because really I was just showing off, telling that girl her uterus was retroverted. And I didn’t have to be so in-everyone’s-face about the grace-after-meals thing. What happens if I lose my job? Gretchen, I don’t like the real world! And it doesn’t like me! I’m a disgusting coward and, you’re going to hate me for this, but, as long as I’m at the Flowers School, I’m in the closet.
Then there’s the girls’ trouble: someone has started writing I HATE LISA GOODFELLOW and I HATE LISA MCLAUGHLIN in public places with a red magic marker. Lisa Goodfellow’s desk was targeted first. The Mad Scribbler uses indelible marker, so poor Lisa G. had to sit at her desk of hate until I managed to wangle a clean desk from the custodian. Then the Scribbler began her attack on Lisa M., vandalizing the soles of her shoes while she was at gym, then her rain slicker. They complained, of course, so I arranged to interview the girls in their section (to start with — so far we believe the culprit is in Section B) the other day after school.
I sat on a bench in the atrium that connects the mausoleum to the shopping mall. One by one, the girls of Section B approached from the corridor. I asked them, “Do you hate Lisa Goodfellow? Do you hate Lisa McLaughlin? Do you own a red marker? Did you write these messages?” Ever the democrat, I interviewed Lisa G. and Lisa M. along with everyone else. Lisa G. said, “I don’t believe this!”; Lisa M. bit her nails. Everyone professed to adore the victims, except Lisa Rosen. “I hate them both,” she declared. She was sitting cross-legged on the bench. I could see her underpants. They had blue chickens on them. “Did you write these messages?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“I’ll ask you again. Did you write these messages?”
Her eyes teared over and she wiped the tears with her wrist. She wore a dogged expression. “Everybody thinks I did it because Lisa and Lisa are always so mean to me, but I didn’t. I’m glad someone’s doing it, though.” She pushed her glasses up into her hair and put her face in her hands. “I take it back!” she sobbed. “It’s mean, and nobody should be so mean to anybody!” The flesh of her upper arms jiggled. The blue chickens did a kind of dance. I couldn’t stand it. I reached out to comfort her; her head shot up and she fixed me with a look. I put my hand in my lap.
“Do you think I did it?” she said in a gasping, choking kind of voice.
I was a jerk and didn’t answer. Lisa R. stumbled to her feet and banged her way back to homeroom, whooping in pain as if I had killed her. She was my last interview; I just sat there, feeling too guilty to move.
So there I was, stupidly unraveling my braid, muttering, “You jerk,” to myself, when the Lisas M. and G. came skipping through the atrium, and Lisa M. stopped, gave me a thumbs-up, and said, “Good work.”
I regarded her stonily. “I beg your pardon?”
“Didn’t Lisa Rosen do it? She sure was crying,” Lisa G. said, while Lisa M. indulged in a private snicker behind her hand.
I said, “Lisa Rosen says she didn’t do it. Unless I find some evidence to the contrary, I must presume she was telling the truth.” I was proud of myself for saying that; I wished Lisa Rosen had been there to hear it.
“Huh,” said Lisa M., wiping her snout on her sleeve. “Well, I think she did it.”
“Well, you just keep your suspicions to yourself, young lady,” I snapped.
“But, Miss Nunn,” they said, “who else could it be?”
I slumped against the glass. “I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s your job to find out,” Lisa G. scolded me. “And if you don’t, my dad is going to hire a detective.” They left. I hope her dad does hire a detective.
Later, as I was choking over my baba ghanouj at the health-food place, I began to think Lisa Rosen probably is the Mad Scribbler. They’re absolutely right: Who else could it be? Unless it’s someone from another section? Help!
I just tried you again, and you’re still not there. Is she holding you hostage?
We’re still on for Thanksgiving? Remember our last year’s road trip to Bloomfield Hills, and how we couldn’t stop laughing during the oyster course? “It’s nothing, Mom,” you said. “We just tasted them already in the car.”
I can’t wait, I can’t wait to see you again, my oyster. Please call soon.
Missing you,
Andrea
November 18
Gretchen:
It’s 4:47 A.M. I’ve graded forty-nine essays on “My Favorite Character in Fiction,” finished The Women’s Room, read my Tarot cards three times, and bugged the all-night Harvard operator to check just once more whether Gretchen Frazer has changed her phone number. He insists you have not.
Why won’t you call me? What have I done? I can’t sleep, Gretchen, and I have to be at school in three hours! God damn you.
Andrea
November 19
For all I know you don’t read your mail any more than you answer your phone, but I have to talk to someone. Do you know I haven’t made a single friend the whole time I’ve been here? And that almost every night I dream I’m back at the Co-op? When I sleep, that is. I can hardly differentiate my dream Co-op from the real Co-op anymore. Or perhaps there never was a real Co-op? I guess I’ll find out next week, when you pick me up for Thanksgiving. You are picking me up, right? I mean, just because we haven’t talked in over a month doesn’t mean you’re not coming, does it? You’re not planning to bring Amy, are you?
Well, my career is over: I’ve been outed. Remember the Mad Scribbler? So far, this is what she’s scribbled (I kept a record): I HATE LISA GOODFELLOW. I HATE LISA MCLAUGHLIN. I HATE LISA GOODFELLOW & LISA MCLAUGHLIN. I HATE UGLY PIG LISA M. LISA MCL WETS HER BED. LISA GOODFELLOW FRENCH KISSED HER DOG. LISA GOODFELLOW HAS DIFFERENT SIZE BOOBS. LISA GOODF SNOB BITCH. LISA MCLAUGHLIN IS SICK IN THE HEAD. Then yesterday in homeroom there was a humongous Mad Scribbler message scrawled across the lockers: LISA MCLAUGHLIN EATS LISA GOODFELLow’s SNOT. It was the message that broke the camel’s back. Lisa Goodfellow stood up in front of the class, pointed her finger at Lisa Rosen, and said, “J’accuse!’’ And just for good measure, Lisa McLaughlin announced, “You’re always taking that girl’s side against us, Miss Nunn; I think you must be a lesbian and you’re in love with her, because everyone knows Lisa Rosen is the Mad Scribbler!”
How did she know? I’ve been so careful! Do I just exude it? I went into shock. I hadn’t slept the night before; my brain was mush. The whole class was screaming accusations at Lisa Rosen, and I just stood there. This mob scene continued until the bell rang for first period, at which point I had to scrape little pieces of Lisa R. off the walls and send her to the nurse in a bucket. Then I clocked out, drove to the drugstore for some Sominex, went home, and slept for eighteen hours.
I came to school today expecting to find the contents of my desk in a heap outside my classroom and the doorway barricaded by that yellow “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape, but everything appeared normal. There was no order to report to the headmistress’s office for summary dismissal. I noticed several teachers staring at me as I passed their classrooms, but that was most likely because I was making a racket on the floor with those black hiking boots with the steel toes we used to call my “dyking boots” (remember?). I was taking the class on a nature hike, and they were all I had! One other suspicious encounter occurred at lunch, when the teacher at the next table — the one who complained I was promoting occultism — wished us a “gay old time” at Shaker Lakes Park. OK, she’s about a hundred years old, but still.
Shaker Lakes is a kind of pseudo-wilderness in the middle of posh, manicured Shaker Heights, complete with nature trails, rock formations, lake (of course), and arboretum. They have a special program for schools: twice-daily tours led by the park rangers or naturalists or whatever they are. Our ranger was named Jane. She looked very ranger-like — dressed in khaki, crew-cut, wielding a massive alpenstock.
First we had a buddy check to make sure everyone was there. (My buddy was Lisa Rosen.) Then we hiked.
It was lovely. There were streaky clouds and migrating birds in the sky, and occasional glimpses of sun. The weather was humid, around forty degrees. The leaves were in all stages of decay — blazing on the bough, fluttering to earth, clinging skeletal to knee socks. Ranger Jane showed us spider-egg sacs nestled in the folds of a tree fungus, pulled down branches so we could pick ripe walnuts and buckeyes, and shushed us while she enticed a palpitating chipmunk to sit in the palm of her hand. For a few minutes I forgot all about you and Amy, the Mad Scribbler, my imminent canning, and all the rest of my freakish, lonely misery.
On the upper bank of the lake, three things happened. First, Lisa Rosen went, “Oh, my God,” and sat on the ground. Second, we did a buddy check, and someone was missing. Third, Ranger Jane came pounding up the bank dragging Lisa McLaughlin behind her, bellowing, “Vandalism! Park property!” We all turned and stared. Lisa M. was holding a magic marker, uncapped; against the screen of white birch, its red point looked like the tip of a tongue.
Lisa G. backed into a tree and swooned.
What had happened was this: During our buddy check, Ranger Jane had noticed suspicious movement in the bushes. She crept down the bank, and there she saw Lisa McLaughlin, marker in hand, hunched over the white wooden fence that prevents you from falling into the lake — madly scribbling! I HATE LISA MC was as far as she’d gotten. Was she trying to frame Lisa Rosen somehow? Could she simply not help herself? How twisted, I kept thinking; how malformed she is!
The class, of course, went wild. Imprecations flew. Spearmint and Black Raspberry Lip Smackers were held under the nose of the insensible Lisa G. Lisa McLaughlin looked at me glassy-eyed and said, “You wouldn’t understand.” Wildly improvising, I suggested that Ranger Jane take Lisa M. back to the Nature Center, where she could wait for us under the head ranger’s surveillance. Ranger Jane was only too happy to oblige, as it gave her further opportunities for cruel and unusual arm-gripping. We would wait for her on the bank. The girls stood about in subdued knots. I took a deep breath.
And then I noticed Lisa Rosen still sitting on the ground. “What’s up?” I asked, squatting beside her.
She just gulped.
“Everyone knows you’re innocent now,” I said. “That ought to make you feel good.”
She bit a fingernail.
I quit beating about the bush. “What’s the matter, Lisa?” I said.
“I think I wet my pants,” she whispered, then clutched her head and lurched in what could only be described as a paroxysm of shame.
“Did you, Lisa, or do you only think so?” I said.
“You’re wearing a long jacket. Let’s go down to the lake and see, OK?”
She shrank from me in horror.
“OK,” I suggested, “you go down and see by yourself.”
She nodded. Pulling her jacket close about her, she slunk off down the bank. About three seconds later, I heard her yell, “Miss Nunn, come quick! Miss Nunn!”
Down on the bank, Lisa was hopping about in a frenzy. “I got my period, Miss Nunn! Oh, my God, I got my period!”
“OK.”
“What do I do? What do I do?”
A light dawned. “Wait, you mean you just got it? Right now, for the first time?’’
She nodded, still hopping.
At that moment, up the bank, the girls started yoo-hooing. Ranger Jane was back. I could only wring my hands at her. “The last part of the hike is a loop,” she said. “We’ll swing by here on our way back to the Nature Center and pick you up. Twenty minutes sound good to you?” Beautiful, I told her. They trooped off.
Lisa’s skirt was clean; only her underwear (no chickens this time) was stained. I hadn’t brought a tampon or a pad or even any kleenex with me, so we gathered some soft, not-too-crumbly leaves, and Lisa lurked behind a tree and put them on. Then we sat together on a broad, flat rock and looked at the lake.
“What do I do?” she whimpered.
I assured her she’d done all she could for the time being.
“But what do I do?” she whimpered again.
She was so young, so utterly ignorant, so existentially freaked out; my heart felt like it would burst. How could I answer her? This is the school, remember, where the nurse complains if you mention the word “uterus.” I knew what I was supposed to do: insist she get herself excused from gym, then inform her the subject was closed. And if there’d been any possibility of my keeping my job, I would have done just that. Instead, I said, ” You live with it. You love it. You make babies with it.”
She stared at me as if I had blasphemed.
“That’s what it’s for, Lisa,“ I said gently. “You can do that now. You probably won’t want to for a while yet; you maybe won’t ever want to. But you can.”
Very slowly, she nodded. We looked at the lake some more.
There were so many things I wanted to say to her then. I wanted to tell her about the cycles of the moon, about Orthodox Jewish ladies purifying themselves in rainwater baths, about the yoni yantra. I wanted to tell her that she was a part of the goddess, that the goddess is inside her, and not just because she was menstruating, but because she is. I wanted to give her my red bracelet. I wanted to sing Kate Bush songs to her. And I wanted every shameless word of it to get back to the headmistress. Ha! I saw myself marching proudly out of the headmistress’s office — “You can’t fire me; I quit!” — and forming my own Midwestern guerrilla cadre of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. But I didn’t know how to begin, somehow, and Lisa Rosen probably wouldn’t have understood anyway, so I didn’t say anything at all.
Instead, we looked at the lake. It was a nice lake, with grass growing out of it, and trees bending over it, and full like a bowl of streaky, bright-edged clouds. Way, way down at the bottom of the bowl, we could see a big black vee composed of many little black vees, moving across it. Then the big black vee wheeled and seemed to be rising to the surface. All at once it fell apart, and all the little black vees became much, much bigger, shimmering and climbing, till they broke through the surface of the lake, honking and flapping their wings. It was a flock of long-necked Canada geese. They sat on the lake for a minute or two, calling to each other. Then they shook themselves and rose in formation, up in the air until I swear they were nosing the clouds, and went to Acapulco or Palm Beach or wherever it is they go, where the sun is.
Ranger Jane and the girls returned, and we hiked back to the Nature Center. On the way, Ranger Jane admired my dyking boots and asked for my phone number. We picked up Lisa McLaughlin at the Nature Center, did a final buddy check, and walked back to school. Some girls approached Lisa Rosen, in a shamefaced and cowardly fashion, to apologize, and though she did not respond graciously, she at least responded. I had to walk with Lisa McLaughlin on the way back, as Lisa Goodfellow no longer wanted to be her buddy.
— My goodness, could that be you calling, Gretchen, my darling?
November 21
P.S. But wait, there’s more! Seeing as you’ve been ravenously devouring each thrill-packed installment of Andrea’s Adventures in the Real World:
Naturally, it wasn’t you who called. It was Ranger Jane. A folk-singer friend of hers was playing a gig at a women’s coffeehouse, did I want to come? The thought of disrupting my evening routine of grading papers, preparing lessons, and fruitlessly dialing your number did cause a fleeting pang, but I resolutely ignored it. “Are you, like, asking me out on a date?” I said.
“Like, yeah,” she said.
I hadn’t realized how awful I’d been feeling about myself until I burst into tears right there on the phone. “Thanks!” I sobbed.
The coffeehouse occupies what used to be the conservatory in a mansion formerly occupied by the inventor of the arc lamp; the whole house has been converted into a funky mall. The coffeehouse was entirely candlelit. Jane’s friend sat on a stool, finger-picking a Joan Armatrading tune.
I thought of you, of course — I always do. That blizzard during Reading Period, remember? When we didn’t leave the Co-op for three days? Lying on your futon, reading Feminist Politics aloud, drinking espresso, and that song we kept playing? “You’ve got somebody who loves you. . . .”
Jane and I sat in a corner. In the candlelight, my cranberry juice glowed, and Jane looked like a photographic negative — her face in deep shadow, her short blond hair back lit. If I unfocused my eyes and didn’t listen to her, I could pretend Jane was the photographic negative of you.
Jane said, “Earth to Andrea. What’s wrong, you don’t like my taste in coffeehouses?”
“Oh no, I love it,” I said with feeling. It wasn’t just Jane’s hair or that Joan Armatrading song — it was being surrounded by long-haired young women in peasant skirts and clogs; it was the Tarot cards being shuffled at the next table, the smell of rosehip tea and clove cigarettes, the taste of cranberry juice in my mouth, and hearing myself called “Andrea.” The past two months went poof! and I was my old self again. I had an absurd urge to move my chair closer and drape my legs over Jane’s, to lick her cold earlobe and pass cranberry juice from mouth to mouth.
Instead, I told her about you. (Goddess forbid she should assume I was available.) I told her about your thesis on the economics of prostitution. I told her how, during that first week after I came out and was having anxiety attacks every afternoon, you stayed home from class and rubbed my back and promised me it would be OK, and it was. I boasted about how we’d had sex in the Widener stacks, aboard the Boston-to-Provincetown ferry, at that truck stop outside Detroit on the way to your parents’ house for Thanksgiving last year. I rhapsodized about the carrot-mushroom loaf I planned to bring this year, and how I positively relished being kept in suspense as to whether you’d actually show up for Thanksgiving or not. What a roller coaster of a relationship, I gushed — but that’s inevitable when you reject Straight Culture and its values. In fact, I said, my relationship with you is so free that — last I heard, anyway — you’re sleeping with someone else!
“Aren’t you jealous?” Jane asked.
“Jealous?” I laughed long and heartily.
Jane said, “I hate to be so blunt and all, Andrea, but it sounds to me like this Gretchen chick is giving you the bum’s rush.”
“Oh, no, Jane,” I patiently explained, “Gretchen does her thing and I do mine; and when we come together, well, it’s beautiful.”
Jane said, “Oh, please.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Butterflies are free,” she mocked me.
The bitch was this close to getting a face full of cranberry juice. I jumped up, ran upstairs, and locked myself in the bathroom — which, by the way, was vintage, with a clawfoot tub, a doorbell thing in the wall for calling the maid, and an overhead tank with a chain hanging down to flush the toilet. I flushed it over and over (I tell you, the water came hurtling down; it was like Niagara Falls) until I’d cooled off enough to stalk back downstairs and demand to be taken home, where I spent the remainder of the evening grading papers, preparing lessons, and fruitlessly dialing your number.
When I got to school this morning, I found the note I’d been expecting on my desk, from the headmistress. I slogged across the muddy field-hockey pitch in the rain to the headmistress’s house. Just to be defiant, I’d worn my dyking boots again. As I followed the housekeeper to the headmistress’s study, I surreptitiously wiped the mud off them onto the headmistress’s Persian rugs. The housekeeper knocked on the study door; the headmistress bade me enter.
She sat enthroned upon an oaken chair.
“Miss Nunn,” she said, extending her hand to me, “please accept my congratulations for having solved the mystery of the Crazed Scribbler. I can imagine how relieved you must feel.” She pressed my hand formally.
I gaped. “But how did you know about the . . . the Crazed Scribbler?”
She smiled. “It’s a headmistress’s business to know these things. Now, how do you intend to follow through on this episode?”
“I . . . I don’t know what to do about it,” I confessed.
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “I’ve been an educator for forty years, and coming up with an appropriate strategy in this case was challenging to me.” She picked up a page of notes. “I notice that all three of the relevant Lisas are in the same section. You can start by separating them. Beyond that,” she moved her finger down the list to the next item, “you’ll ask Lisa McLaughlin to write formal letters of apology to Lisa Goodfellow and Lisa Rosen. Furthermore, Lisa McLaughlin will remain after school to assist the custodian in erasing any remaining hate messages.” I had a vision of Lisa M. in a coverall and goggles, operating a sandblaster. “Finally —” this one killed me — “Lisa McLaughlin just might benefit from a chat with the school psychologist.”
“You mean you’re going to let Lisa McLaughlin stay at the Flowers School?”
The headmistress raised her eyebrows. “My dear, Lisa McLaughlin has two grandmothers on our board of trustees.”
“I see.”
“By the way,” the headmistress went on, smiling, “it’s been brought to my attention that Lisa McLaughlin had the excessive impertinence to assert publicly her opinion of your, ah . . . sexual preference the other day.”
Suddenly I got cold all over. Now was I going to be fired? I nodded hesitantly.
She kept right on smiling. “This sort of incident is almost guaranteed to provoke a tempest in a teapot. I would be very much indebted to you, Miss Nunn, if you would write an account of the incident so that if a hysterical parent calls about it, I can soothe her with cold facts. Could you get that to me before chapel, please?”
“I . . . sure,” I stuttered.
The five-minute-warning bell sounded faintly from across the field-hockey pitch. The headmistress tore off her lorgnette. “Oh, dear,” she fretted. “Off you go, Miss Nunn, you’ll be late, and I execrate tardiness.”
I hesitated by the study door. “I was sure you were going to fire me,” I blurted.
“Whatever for?” she said, and waved me out of the study.
The girls gave Lisa McLaughlin a polite but decided berth in homeroom. She usually sits on the windowsill with Lisa Goodfellow and that clique, but today she just sat glumly at her desk. Lisa Goodfellow seemed to have paled and wasted overnight, as befits a tragic heroine.
After announcements, I called Lisa Rosen to my desk so I could switch her into Section A. Once we’d completed the paperwork, she asked for the hall pass, then extracted an entire box of Kotex from her desk and ostentatiously went to change her pad.
After homeroom, I met with Lisa McLaughlin. I sat on the little wooden classroom chair next to hers. I was trying to think how best to open the interview when Lisa M. said, very fast and rehearsed-sounding, “I’m very sorry I called you a lesbian, Miss Nunn.”
I was taken aback. “Oh, I don’t care that you called me a lesbian,” I said. “That’s not insulting to me. But it was uncool, nevertheless, Lisa. You showed you didn’t respect me, which makes it hard for me to respect you.” She flinched ever so slightly.
I explained the headmistress’s conditions; she listened without reacting. I handed her the Section D schedule, which she held at arm’s length as if it were covered in slime. “Is there anything you’d like to say, Lisa?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, sitting forward suddenly, “I’m glad I don’t have to be in class with Lisa Rosen anymore. That fat, crazy pig: no wonder she has no friends.” And she drew a plump forearm across her nose.
She could have been describing herself — and of course, she was. And in a flash I saw it all, the whole sick mechanism at work in her, and I was shot through with a bolt of tenderness and shame. Why had it never occurred to me to imagine what it must be like for Lisa? To look in the mirror every morning and see a self she cannot bear to be? To engrave that self-hatred on every surface until she moves through a world that screams it back at her from all sides? My goodness, no wonder she’s miserable! It was pitifully easy, then, to pity her. It was even easy to forgive her. But I am not God, or Lisa McLaughlin, and I could not release her.
“Poor Lisa,” I said, and reached across the desk to her. She saw my hand coming, twitched, and looked away. “Poor Lisa,” I repeated idiotically, stroking her hand. “Don’t worry. It’ll be OK.” An empty promise; how could I possibly know? I just wanted — oh, Gretch, you know — to affirm her.
“No, it won’t,” she breathed, still looking away.
“Sure it will,” I said, in a loud, cheerful voice.
She opened her mouth to gainsay me, and I saw this tennis match continuing far into the night, perhaps forever, so I pointed at her and said firmly, “Don’t argue with me, young lady. Go to class.”
“OK, Miss Nunn,” she said humbly, and lurched out of the room.
I’m almost afraid to write this next part down.
Pause during which Andrea removes red bracelet from seashell where it lives when not in use, and ties it loosely around wrist.
OK, here goes. All day I was tortured by the highly embarrassing memory of my behavior last night at the coffeehouse; so, as soon as school was over, I drove to Shaker Lakes to find Jane and apologize. She had just finished showing some third-graders a filmstrip entitled Glaciers: America’s Natural Sculptor. Now the kids were filing out of the Nature Center and onto a waiting school bus.
I sidled between two rows of benches to where Jane was rewinding the filmstrip. She didn’t look up, just said, “I thought you’d still be mad at me.”
“I thought you’d be mad at me,” I said.
“I am. You were hypersensitive and irrational.”
“Well, you weren’t exactly tactful,” I retorted.
She shrugged and wheeled the projector into a closet.
“I came to apologize,” I said huffily.
“I was going to call you this evening,” she sniffed, deep in the closet.
I walked over to a glass case exhibiting genuine Shaker artifacts: a quilt, a millstone, a pair of hand-ground spectacles. I could hear Jane rattling around in the closet. I studied an 1845 Shaker map of the area, known at that time as the Valley of God’s Pleasure.
“Hey, Andrea, you want to come for a walk?” Jane called offhandedly. I shrugged. We straggled out of the building, not exactly together, but not separate either.
It had stopped raining and was now cold and sunny. I pulled my scarf out of my pocket and put it on. We tromped through the woods, stopping to look for cars whenever we had to cross one of the winding roads that intersect the park. We didn’t talk. Suddenly, we were assailed by a most vivid stench.
“Pee-yew,” I said.
Jane walked around a bend in the road and called back, “Hoo-boy, what’s black and white and red all over?’’
“Do I want to see this?” I called.
“Don’t be a wuss!”
I minced around the bend.
“And no puking,” she added.
It wasn’t so bad, for road-kill. It was a skunk, of course, lying near the side of the road, half its body crushed and smeared on the asphalt. One foreleg had been sheared clean off; there it was, a few yards away.
“Oh, look,” Jane said, and squatted to scoop something out of the dead grass by the edge of the road.
“What is it?”
“It’s the baby,” Jane said in a whisper, holding her cupped hands against her chest. “Come and see.”
“Won’t it spray?”
“How should I know?”
I approached gingerly. Jane was stroking the baby skunk very lightly with her index finger. It was tiny, with a nubby head and fine, sparse fur through which I could see its pink flesh. It wouldn’t stop trembling. I passed my index finger across its tiny sharp toenails. It didn’t respond.
“I think it’s in shock,” Jane whispered. “See how it shivers? And even when I touch it in a real sensitive place, look —” she tickled the hollows of its ears — “nothing.”
“Why is it in shock?” I asked stupidly.
“Duh,” said Jane, “because its mother just got creamed by a huge, deafening monster. Wouldn’t you be in shock?”
Unexpectedly, I was swept by a wave of bitter and complete desolation, and it was then I knew beyond a doubt that I had lost you. I sat down hard on a rock and choked.
“Uh-oh,” Jane said. “I told you no puking. Take deep breaths.”
I waved at her to shut up. Gretchen! I was screaming in my head.
“Is something wrong?” Jane said, stepping closer.
I jumped up and started digging the rock I had been sitting on out of the ground. It was heavy, and deeply embedded in the cold mud; I scrabbled madly at it, scraping my hands, getting decayed yuck under my fingernails. When I’d finally hauled the rock out, I hoisted it into my arms and staggered about four feet down the trail. Then I went, “Ungh!” and dropped it into a puddle.
Jane jumped back, staring at me. The noise of the rock landing — thud-splash! — bounced flatly off the surrounding trees. Wrestling with the rock had emptied me; now I felt nothing. Jane seemed a mile away.
“Andrea?” she ventured.
“Last night, what you said,” I muttered, “you were right.”
“I told you,” Jane said, and lifted the baby skunk up to her neck, where she cradled it like a fragile, centuries-old violin. Then she said, “The answer to your question is no, it won’t spray. Otherwise, it for sure would have just now.” I just stood there. I felt as if I were standing in the middle of an ice field, with Jane’s voice coming to me via field telephone. “Should I, uh . . . go?” Jane suggested awkwardly. I shook my head slightly.
She stood where she was. I stood where I was.
“Hey, Andrea?” Jane said presently. “How attached are you to that scarf?” I didn’t feel attached to anything. “Can I wrap this little one in it? I’m going to take it back to the Nature Center.” Shrugging, I reached up, unwound the scarf from my neck, and held it out to her in a mushed-up ball. “Come on, girl, hold it open for me,” she scolded. I held the scarf taut so she could deposit the skunk on it.
She stepped closer. All of a sudden she burst out, “Andrea, I’m not trying to be a jerk. I know what you’re going through; I know how much it sucks. I feel super-guilty, too, because if I hadn’t said anything you might still be dreaming away in your happy little fantasy world.”
She looked down again; she was flushed. She was so close I could see the Chapstick on her lower lip, smell her shampoo. She placed the skunk in the palm of my hand. It was the approximate size and weight of a muffin. Unlike a muffin, however, it was warm and trembly, and the shock of its aliveness shot up my arm.
“I know you’re not trying to be a jerk,” I surprised myself by saying. Jane looked up then, and for a moment we just stood and looked at each other. Then I wrapped the skunk carefully in my scarf and handed it to her. She lowered it gently into one of the deep, roomy pockets of her coat.
P.P.S. I’ll be throwing that red bracelet you gave me into the Shaker Lakes, Gretchen, to decompose amid the fetid choke of plankton and old sneakers. You devil’s bitch, you heart-eater. Why do I still think you’re going to phone to say it was all just a terrible misunderstanding? I must be sick in the head.
This story originally appeared in Indiana Review.
— Ed.
