The Female Persuasion

  That was it: why did she have to go through life feeling half-full? She wondered if some people got to feel fully full, or whether it was everyone’s fate to feel as if the state of being human was one in which the self was like a bag of something wonderful that had already been half-eaten.

  But lying in the dark at night in the splendor of her house, the much-loved youngest child of two highly accomplished judges, she began her mission toward fullness. Which maybe was the same as realness. Again, there weren’t words for this, not yet. Words would come later, and lots of them. Words spoken to other women, in beds or leaning against a wall in an alley, in a new voice that shocked her—shocked her that the strong feelings she had always felt meant this. That those feelings = being gay. Who would have thought? Everyone but her, apparently.

  The mission started at thirteen, and was revisited at sixteen, when Franny managed to make her way into the city to the East Village, to a women’s bar called Ben-Her. Her parents thought she was with two friends from school that day seeing Wicked. Franny had worked out something convincing to say about the Broadway show. If anyone asked her about it, she would tell them, “I particularly loved the song ‘For Good.’ It’s really haunting.”

  But while her friends went in a cluster to the Gershwin Theatre, she headed down to the bar she had read about on Fem Fatale, in an article titled “Where the Girls Are: A Roundup of the U.S.’s Best Lesbian Watering Holes.” The words themselves were disorienting—“lesbian watering holes” suggestive of female anatomy—and as with the time that her friends had sung that song after her bat mitzvah, she felt herself called to attention and yearning, like an alien who has received a message from its home planet.

  So there she was at Ben-Her, underage and underprepared for what she would find. In the heat of a spring night, jammed into a narrow storefront that in its last incarnation had been a Polish pierogi joint, the women in their tank tops and other thin warm-weather clothes stood talking face-to-face, chest-to-chest, everyone as close and intimate as it got without kissing. Franny wore a pocket T and cutoffs and Doc Martens; she looked like a hot butch Girl Scout or hot femme Boy Scout, take your pick. Her blond hair was cut medium-short and blunt, in a fashion that to her was mild but distinctly sexual, subconsciously designed to draw in women who looked like this, as well as others who looked more feminine. She liked those women too, was excited by their femininity but also by what struck her as their more secret, encrypted desire for women. The bar smelled both woodsy and spiced. Zee took out a fake ID that belonged to a friend’s older sister, and showed it to a bartender in a retro bowling shirt, a small tattoo of Betty and Veronica stamped onto her neck. “What can I get you, cutie?” asked the bartender, and Franny shivered in happiness at being spoken to this way.

  “A beer,” she said, not knowing you were supposed to request a particular brand. But the bartender found her one, cementing Franny Eisenstat’s lifelong love of beers, in particular Heineken, which she would always picture being held in that curved hand. Franny perched on a wobbling stool in the corner and drank her beer while watching the anthropological scene all around her. The music was from her parents’ twenties, Eurythmics’ old classic “Sweet Dreams,” played loud in that shoe box of writhing women, and she leaned her head back against the wall and just watched. Soon she became aware that someone was observing her, and she flushed in self-consciousness, ducking away and then looking back. The self-consciousness shattered into confusion as the person was revealed to be her mother’s big blond law clerk, Linda Mariani, who kept staring and finally pushed toward her through a wall of women.

  “Franny?” she shouted. “Franny Eisenstat? You’re here?”

  Linda took Franny by the hand and led her outside to the stoop beside the bar. Both of them were sweating; Linda was soaked through her silk shirt, her face glazed with melting makeup. She was forty years old and a lesbian, and she asked Franny, “Have you ever been here before?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. I’ve never seen you here. Does your mother know?”

  “No.” Franny said this with emphasis. “You’ve been here before?”

  Linda laughed. “Oh sure. Listen,” she said, “you shouldn’t be at a bar. You’re too young.”

  “I can make my own decisions.” Even speaking with such a swagger, Franny felt ashamed. She was trying on a whole new self here, and the experience was getting strange.

  “Don’t be cocky. You’ll get hurt.” Linda wiped at her own face with a tissue, and Franny saw that it came away smeared with flesh-colored makeup. Suddenly she had an uneasy image of Linda Mariani having sex, her makeup coming off on a pillow.

  On another night, a visit to Ben-Her led to Franny’s first sexual adventure, which was with a woman whose power was simply in the moment and not in the world. She had power because Franny was attracted to her. Alana was eighteen, with an overbite and the kind of hair that had submitted to one too many flat irons. She worked in retail, she said, and though she was an ordinary-looking person and not particularly articulate, when she took Franny back to her older sister’s studio apartment in a tenement building around the corner from the bar, simply that Alana was female and desired Franny was enough to make the encounter monumental. The sixth-floor walk-up apartment was decorated with knickknacks and bamboo furniture. The shelves held no books, only stuffed animals wearing tiny T-shirts with sayings on them. A raccoon wore one that said I’M WITH STUPID, and the tiny stuffed zebra beside it wore one that said STUPID. Franny, raised in a large, tasteful house filled with original art and books—and in fact personally named after someone in a book—could not help but feel snobbish.

  But when Alana said, “Lie down,” in a voice that Franny would later come to understand had been almost suffocated with sexual arousal, Franny obeyed. Above her, Alana crossed her arms and lifted off her own shirt, revealing small, slightly pessimistic breasts. Then she removed Franny’s shirt and skinny jeans, saying to her, not unkindly, “Is this your first time?”

  “Yep,” Franny said, trying to sound cheerful and game, but her voice came out surprisingly untried.

  “Okay. Well, then, let me just say this. The point is for it to feel good, right? There is no other point whatsoever. You don’t have to try and figure out what it means, or whether we’re going to be in a relationship, because I’ll tell you right now we’re not.”

  “Got it,” said Franny, and then before she knew what was happening, Alana dove down upon her, her mouth between her legs—yikes, a woman’s mouth between her legs, licking her there with knowledge and patience and need. The strong sensation was instantaneous, like the moment when a mask with anesthesia is put over your face, or in this case a mask with reverse anesthesia, in which you feel more and not less. She easily went under.

  Franny never saw Alana again, but she did go back to Ben-Her three more times before her parents discovered where she had been going during those trips into the city. One night senior year, she took Metro-North home from Manhattan as usual, and walked into the house on Heather Lane to find her mother waiting in the kitchen in a peach-colored bathrobe, though she might just as easily have been in her black judicial robe. Judge Wendy Eisenstat looked at her with serene confidence and said, “You haven’t been seeing Broadway shows. That was a lie about crying at the end of Phantom of the Opera. Let’s get that clear. I know you’ve been going to a women’s bar, using a fake ID, which is illegal.”

  “How?” Franny asked in a light wail.

  “Linda Mariani has been stealing office supplies from my chambers. Nothing big, mostly a lot of Hewlett-Packard inkjet cartridges, but we had to let her go because they add up. And as security escorted her out, she turned to me in front of everyone, mind you, in front of everyone, and said, ‘By the way, Judge, your daughter is gay. Ask her where she goes on all those trips into the city.’”

  So all was revealed, and Franny and the judge both became teary.
“I wish I hadn’t found out from my law clerk,” her mother said. Finally it was decided that Franny should see a therapist in order to “sort everything out.” After their conversation was over, Franny’s father, who had been hiding in the den, gently approached her. “Your mother’s manner is kind of absolute,” he said. “If it’s any consolation,” he added with a small laugh, “she’s that way on the bench, too. But just know we both believe in you and love you a lot. You’ll do fine.” He gave her a hug.

  A few days later, Franny agreed to see Dr. Marjorie Albrecht, who had a therapy practice in the basement of her nearby Larchmont home. Dr. Albrecht was a former member of the Tri-State Modern Dance Troupe who was now working as a psychotherapist. She was a willowy, sun-damaged woman who wore leotards at all times, and who, even when she was listening to you intently, might do a casual arm-stretch over her head. Most of her clients were teenage girls—girls with eating disorders; girls with anger issues; girls who cut themselves shallowly but meaningfully in order to feel better. Girls who hated their mothers or fathers; girls who were disappearing into a morass of self-hate and hair in the face; girls with bad-news boyfriends. Dr. Albrecht also had a good number of patients with sexual identity issues.

  Franny was at first defiant at having to go see her, but soon she came to like the early-evening sessions. Her mother would drop her off at the curb and drive to Starbucks and read a brief while Franny went in and sat and talked with the therapist, who at some point would suggest that they could “make some movement” while they discussed whatever was on Franny’s mind.

  “I really loathe being called Franny,” she confided one day as they swept around the basement studio with its gleaming wooden floors and its mirror and barre. Somewhere overhead came the footfalls of the family Albrecht.

  “So change it,” said the therapist, leaping diagonally across the room and landing like a cat.

  “I can’t. I was named for Franny and Zooey, a book my parents love. It would hurt them too much.”

  “Oh, they’ll live.”

  “Maybe I could be Zooey,” she said shyly, and Dr. Albrecht grabbed her hand and they twirled. So Zooey it was, for a week. The name proved too . . . zooey, too animalistic, and ultimately too ugly. With Dr. Albrecht, she discovered that she didn’t dislike being female, she just disliked the metonymy of this lightweight female name standing in for all womankind. If you heard that someone was named Franny, she thought, you might assume some things about her—such as that she was totally feminine and perhaps prone to blushing—and you might be wrong. It was while dancing around that room the next time that she decided to collapse Zooey into Zee.

  It was amazing that her name had come from those sessions with Dr. Albrecht, but more amazing still that a betrayal would come from them too. This would take years to discover. Off at Ryland College, where Zee had gone after being such a middling student in high school, she was in the library getting a book for her psychology class, when she accidentally came upon a volume with its author’s name stamped in large gold letters on the spine. MARJORIE ALBRECHT, PHD, she read, shocked. “Whoa,” Zee said aloud in the stacks. The book had a long boring psychological title.

  She opened it and began to read. Each chapter was a different case study. Chapter 3 was called “A Girl Named Kew: Lesbianism as Mask and Mirror.”

  “Whoa,” she said again.

  “Kew” was raised by a workaholic mother who put her profession before parenting, and who likely struggled with her own gender issues, and a father who was removed and gentle and passive, hardly providing the template for a young girl’s future passions and fantasies, but instead staying obstinately weak and distant.

  Is it any wonder that this young girl came to my consulting room so confused about her sexuality, and so reluctant to accept her femaleness, that she actually announced she was going to change her name to one that, like the garb she chose to wear, sadly bore no traces of femininity?

  My heart ached for this very young patient who could not let herself enjoy the wonders of her own female self or embrace the love of men. It seemed to me that she had entered treatment too late, and that she would have no choice but to lead a “gay” lifestyle, unconsciously denying herself that which had been denied her and which she craved with a hunger she could never even feel.

  We did a great deal of movement together, “Kew” and I, and in the furious motions she made I could sometimes see the real heterosexual self that wanted to be seen but sadly did not know how.

  By the time Zee had finished reading, she was crying out quietly in injustice and insult. And when the light in the narrow aisle between metal bookshelves suddenly clicked off with a soft little catch like a release of breath, Zee was relieved. She thought she might pass out in the musty dark. Never had she felt as misrepresented, and yet she still couldn’t shake it off, and had to wonder if any or all of what Marjorie Albrecht had written was true. If Zee’s need to occupy the place she had essentially created—a zone where a person could have a name like “Zee” or “Kew” and wear a tuxedo shirt and yet not consider herself a cross-dresser or in any way be doing a weak imitation of men, but merely be finding for herself the most natural and graceful way to exist in the world—was in fact a result of something having gone psychologically wrong. She didn’t tell anyone about the book except for Greer, nor did she return it to the shelf. Instead she casually checked it out of the library and brought it to the dorm, and in front of Greer, despite fire regulations, she took a cigarette lighter and calmly set the book ablaze.

  “We used to dance together,” Zee said softly, remembering the lovely feeling of flying across that room. “That’s why I’m a good dancer. But I can’t believe she wrote this.”

  “I can’t either. You don’t deserve this, Zee. No one does.”

  At one point, when the flame swelled the cover, it even made a tiny sound like a human voice crying out from somewhere far away, though soon it was drowned out by the sound of the fire alarm clanging through the halls of Woolley. Dr. Albrecht hadn’t been trying to be cruel; she believed what she had written. And maybe Zee, to her own horror, believed it a little bit too.

  She was used to thinking that you could be as queer as you wanted these days if you lived in the right geographical area. But though the book had burned and become unrecognizable, causing Zee to pay the Metzger Library a lost-book fine of sixty-five dollars, and though she had hooked up with a couple of gasping women in college, she felt part of a sometimes unworkable struggle. She had already been betrayed by two different older women in her life: Linda Mariani, that cunt; and of course Dr. Albrecht, who had seemed so warm and trustable as they danced around the room.

  Zee distracted herself from the incident with the book by joining the school’s terrible improv troupe, and sleeping with one of the other members, Heidi Klausen, who was fair-haired and European and refined. She had told Zee about the Swiss cookies called Schwabenbrötli that she used to bake when growing up in Zurich, and she said that she and Zee would bake them together sometime. So one day Zee came to her off-campus apartment and said, “Teach me to make those Schwaben-whatever cookies,” and Heidi had agreed. They’d fed each other warm cookies on Heidi’s futon. Zee didn’t understand what drove her, a few days later, to hook up with her former RA, the confident Shelly Bray. Of course Heidi found out about it, because Shelly Bray could not keep it to herself, and Heidi became furious, yelling at Zee in the middle of the quad, “Fock you, Eisenstat, I made myself vulnerable to you in all ways. I even showed you how to bake Schwabenbrötli!” In reply, Zee said, nastily, “Right, your Nazi cookies,” but Heidi was Swiss, not German, and anyway she had done nothing wrong.

  Zee went through women, or they went through her. “I’m a slut,” she once said easily to Greer as she headed across campus for a late-night meeting with a girl she’d met in an anthropology seminar. She had never been in love, but only temporarily infatuated. There had been bursts of phys
ical pleasure, ephemeral shooting stars.

  Her good friend Dog watched her longingly throughout college as she went about her all-female business. He watched all women longingly, she’d noticed, but he had a particular soft spot for Zee. He was always hanging around her room, flopped on the bed. He was extremely good-looking, objectively, though he had a beard that was just shy of Amish. Why didn’t anyone tell men that women didn’t like that look? They could leave them anonymous notes saying, “Friends don’t let friends wear beards without mustaches.”

  Dog was one of the kindest people Zee had ever met, and he listened to all her stories about her hookups, nodding and taking it in and being very understanding and contemplative—he himself had had many hookups with women since he’d been at Ryland, but he never liked to talk about himself, and instead always ceded the floor to Zee—but then at the end of her filibuster he said, “So will you give me a shot?”

  “A shot? No.”

  “Is it because I’m a ginger?” he asked with a puckish smile.

  “Dog, seriously? I’ve just been sitting here talking about being gay, and you want me to give you a shot?”

  “We could just do some things,” he said shyly, long-lashed, looking down.

  “No,” she said. “Sorry.”

  But then one Friday night, after the Heidi debacle had taken place and Zee was worn out, and Greer was off visiting Cory at Princeton, and Chloe was at a party, it got really late, and Dog was lying on top of the covers on her bed half-asleep, so Zee, feeling affectionate and bored, lay down beside him. He put an arm around her, delighted.

  “See, that’s not so bad,” he said.

  She thought that they would just sleep, maybe, if it was possible to fall asleep under these conditions, but he said to her, “Would you mind?” and took her hand and held it for a second in his own much larger one, and then, when she didn’t object, he took it and placed it on his chest, at the place where the bramble of hair crept over the top of his T-shirt. She felt his heart, and didn’t pull away. And then, finally, he put her hand on the hardest, hottest crotch in the world. A big, hot boulder. She practically leaped away.