yet on the horizon, and anyway I’m sure that John would have
agreed with me. There was nothing I wanted so much in life
as to write the way Plato wrote: words inside ideas inside words,
the calzone approach at enuated with Bach. I'd look at my
cheap Modigliani reproductions or the reproduced females by
Rodin or Manet, and I didn’t see the shine, except for that of
the paper itself; but more to the point, in no book about the
artists themselves that I could find was the problem of the
shine addressed. These were the kind of girl-things that preoccupied me.
Or, for instance, when it came to lying: in elementary
school one would play checkers with the boys. My mother
had said don’t lie and had also told me that I had to lose at
games to the boys if I wanted them to like me. These were
irreconcilable opposites. It was, first of al , virtually impossible to lose to the boys in an honest game of checkers. Second, who wanted to? Third, how would I ever respect him or them
in the morning? It did strike me that the boys you had to lose
to weren’t worth having, but my argument made no impression on my mother nor on anyone else I was ever to meet until the women’s movement. And it was damned hard to lose
at checkers to the pimply or prepimply dolts. I now think of
the having-to-lose part as SWAT-team training in strategy,
how to lose being harder than how to win. It was hideous for
a girl to be brazenly out for the kil or to enjoy the status of
victor or to enjoy her own intelligence and its application in
real time.
I stil remember how in the eighth or ninth grade Miss Fox,
one of my nemeses among English teachers, made us skip the
first three pages of
the play, partnered with the captain of the footbal team as
Romeo. Stereotypes aside, his reading was not delightful. And
yet we al had to sit there and wait while he tried manfully, as
it were, to sound out words. Her pedagogy was to encourage
him while let ing the rest of us rot.
I, true to form, wanted to know what a maidenhead was,
and to say that I was relentless on the subject would be to understate. Miss Fox’s retaliation was authoritarian and extreme. I had been out of class sick and had to take a makeup vocabulary test, multiple choice. I failed. I did not just fail: I got a zero. I was pained but respectful on my first five or ten trips
up to her desk to ask her how it was possible to get a zero on
a multiple-choice test, even if one did not know the meaning
of one word on the test. Final y, exhausted, I just asked her to
regrade the test. Since she was sure of her rightness in al things
English, we struck a deal: she’d regrade the test and whatever
the outcome I’d shut up. She glistened with superiority, Eve
the second after biting into the apple; I was tense now that the
