By morning my poodle period was over. Later, when I saw pretty girls sitting in waiting cars, I was amazed that I could ever have been so passive and beholden. I added the patronage of rich men to the list of ways I could not live, which already included government hand-outs and menial employment in fast-food restaurants. I awoke to find I was energetic, brilliant, in possession of sound judgement and full of confidence.
IT'S BEEN NINE YEARS. SUPPOSEDLY HER THIRTIES AREthe sexiest years in a woman’s life, and I’ve missed mine. I never took a girlfriend in Cookham Wood, my taste preferring books, though my roommate, Bintu, came to be like a sister. Benji is still the last one.
Ron, I know, is interested, but I pretend not to understand. At the video store in Brattleboro last week, he edged me near the “adult” section, saying, “We could always get one of these.”
“These?”
“I was joking. They’re adult films. Erotic films.”
“Well, I don’t think that would be appropriate!” I feigned shock.
In fact part of me would like to be shocked. Vermont life is proving low in shocks. But Ron with his circumspection is not the man to tempt me, though I fear that sooner or later he will make a determined grab.
The only visitor to my bed who has not come from my imagination is Julia. And then only once and quite innocently. Even so, I’m inclined to think it’s had its consequences. She’s my teaching assistant for cross- cultural studies this semester and returned from break a day early, before the dorm opened. “I’ll stay overnight in Brattleboro,” she said when she called me. To which I replied, “Don’t be silly! It’ll be expensive. You can stay here.”
In my mind I was back in Hereford Road or Zanzibar: open doors, room for visitors, the Third World hospitality reflex.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” said Julia. “I have my sleeping bag.”
“I’m sure we can do better than that,” I replied without thought.
In fact I could not do better than that. In six months Julia was my first visitor and I only now discovered that there was not enough spare bedding to make up a bed on the couch.
I looked around at the house that was now revealed to be an inhospitable home. It reeked of someone who did not get out enough. There were the remains of the snacks that I make at all hours according to no particular pattern. Every surface was covered with books and papers. There were open notebooks on my desk, the kitchen table and the table next to my bed, in case I wanted to jot down some thought about class plans, my paper on migration, or my life. There used to be a notebook for each of these, but now the jottings had become intermingled: cross- cultural studies, migration, me. When did I become selfobsessed and slovenly?
“My bed is huge,” I told Julia. “We can both sleep there.” I was back to Zanzibar and the companionable way visiting friends and cousins shared beds out of simple practicality, the unselfconscious touch of Africa.
Julia gave me one of her keen looks. “OK,” she said. “Is this part of multi-cultural studies?”
“Cross-cultural. I’ve changed the course name from multi-cultural to cross-cultural. They said I could teach what I wanted.”
She stopped moving to think. “But it’s the opposite isn’t it? One’s about mixing up and the other’s about separating out.”
“You are smarter than the dean, Julia. He couldn’t see the difference. I decided there’s only mixing up.”
I did not sleep well. My ancient bed sags in the middle and I was used to sleeping on my back, centred in its valley. Gravity took me back there up against Julia’s tee- shirted body, she smelling as sweetly unperfumed as a child. She snuggled against me and I heard her sigh in sleep. I lay awake, stealing her warmth.
The next morning Julia was in high spirits when we began our work. “This is a great idea,” she told me, of my proposal for course projects, and she took it up as if it were her own. The night had made her bold with me and I watched her, pleased to see a clever, awkward girl find her confidence.
My good idea is to have the students prove to themselves that they come from everywhere. Instead of building their identities, I want to subvert them. I’ve told them to take something very American, anything: a man’s tie, apple pie, a dinner fork, flags, the briefcase, pants, the custom of shaving, the wedding ceremony, the single finger of abuse, the handshake, the display of the female’s leg in fashion, money, make-up, mathematics. I want them to take something that they believe is theirs and trace it back to its earliest origins. I know where this will take them. To Europe, which they will expect, but also to Arabia and China, Persia, India and Africa, which they will not expect and which the lazy ones will not reach.
I want to take everything familiar away from them, the sense that they own it, that their parents made it, or if not them, then even older white people back in Europe. They’ll see that when you go back far enough all you have is movement, people wandering and mixing things, that the idea of being German-Irish is no more precise a definition than being American. Just as being a Goan Indian Portuguese Arab African is too simple, all the parts as mixed and provisional as the whole. You come from everywhere, it will all imply, and you belong nowhere.
Julia added more items to the list, flew with ideas of her own, engaged by the notion of not belonging
