a hard discipline, a practice of spartan ethics too often mistaken
for self-righteousness. If put ing my body there when it ought
to be here was required but to do so was to lie, I wasn’t going
to do it. I’d write and I wouldn’t lie. So when self-help writers
tel one to find the child within, I assume they don’t mean me.
Plato
A girl is faced with hard decisions. What is writ en inside
those decisions is inscrutable to her; by necessity - her age,
time, place, sex discrimination in general - she sees or knows
only the surfaces. So in junior high school I was thrilled when
I was allowed to wear lipstick for the first time, a rite of passage that has nothing to do with sexuality but everything to do with maturity, becoming an adult fast and easy. My first
lipstick was cal ed Tangerine, and like other girls I spent hours
thinking about what it went with, what it meant, and how my
life was final y beginning to cohere. It was also the first recognition from my mother - al -important, the whole deal has little to do with men or boys at al - that I was nearly adult
but certainly no child.
I'd wear Tangerine, along with a favorite dress that let me
see my own breasts, a deep V-neck, a cut I stil like, and I’d
be making my way through Plato’s
communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of
women that a female’s nose must never shine. In war, in
famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick
without the requisite face powder. On my own I added my
own favorite, Erase, which went over the powder (or was it
under? ) and got the lines under your eyes to disappear. In this
way I could hide my late-night reading from my parents -
circles under the eyes were a dead giveaway. I would pretend
to go to sleep; I'd wait for them to go to sleep; I'd turn on my
reading light, read, and simultaneously listen for any movement at their end of the house, at which point I'd get rid of any light in my room, hide the book, and wait until I heard
my mother or father return to their bed.
I was taunted by this problem: how could someone write
something like the
not shine at the same time? It didn’t mat er to me that I was
reading a translation. I'd read Plato’s brilliant, dense prose and
not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose
shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either
one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi
Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose.
It didn’t hurt, it didn’t make noise, it didn’t incapacitate in any
way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough
time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one.
Plato was my idea of a paperback writer: the Beatles were not
