The Female Persuasion

  Greer had been spending a lot of time lately with Zee and Chloe, and also with Kelvin Yang, a Korean-American drummer who lived upstairs, and his roommate Dog—named affectionately by his family because dog was the first word he’d spoken. Dog was a big, handsome, and effusive person in a parka who often said, “I love you guys so much,” and embraced his female friends with a sudden seizing-up of emotion. They all went to parties together, though never again at any of the frats. They traveled in one group, like children inside a camel costume. They went on snowy hikes, and took a Chinatown bus down to a climate change rally in DC, and they sent one another links to articles about the environment, or US involvement in endless wars, or violence against women, or the whittling away of reproductive rights.

  That semester, Greer and Zee had been volunteering at the Talk 2 Us women’s hotline in downtown Ryland. They spent long evenings in the storefront sitting around playing Boggle as they waited for the phone to ring. When it did ring every once in a while, they would listen to stories of nebulous sadness and self-hatred, or sometimes more focused despair. They would speak soothingly, as they had been trained, and stay on the line as long as necessary, finally connecting the caller with the appropriate social-service agency. Once, Zee had to dial 911 because of a girl on the phone who said she had swallowed an entire bottle of generic Tylenol after a breakup with her boyfriend.

  Greer became a vegetarian like Zee. This was easy to do in college, where tofu and tempeh grew on trees. She and Zee sat in the dining hall with their plates of beige protein. Late at night they sat together in one of their dorm rooms, having long, searching conversations, which in the moments they took place seemed notable for their candor and feeling, though much later on would seem notable for how young and untried and guileless they had been.

  “Tell me what it is that interests you about men sexually,” Zee had said once after midnight in her room. Her roommate was off elsewhere with her hockey player boyfriend, and they had the place to themselves. The roommate’s side of the room was covered with posters of the men of hockey, fierce and strong, mouths stuffed with rubber. Zee’s side was an ode to equality and justice and in particular anything having to do with animals or women.

  The words men and women, deposited into conversation casually, were recent additions to their vocabulary. After a few usages, they became less strange, though throughout their lives girl would always be in play, a useful, durable word, signaling a confident state that you would never entirely want to leave.

  “Because I don’t understand why people are so different from one another,” Zee went on. “Why they want entirely different things.”

  “Well, that’s genetics, right?”

  “I don’t mean why am I gay. I mean on a feeling level. Is it just visual, what we like or don’t like about other people?”

  “No, not just visual. There’s the emotional part too. There’s that line that Faulkner said, about how you don’t love because. You love despite.”

  “Yeah, I love that line. Just kidding! I never heard that line, obviously. I’ve never read Faulkner and probably never will. But the feeling, what makes it sexual?” asked Zee. “I mean, do you actually like the penis, objectively? ‘The penis.’ That sounds so official. And like it’s the one penis in the world. Am I allowed to ask you that, or is it too private and I’m freaking you out right now?”

  “I like Cory,” Greer replied, and the answer seemed a little too easy and prissy and terse. How could you possibly explain to someone else why you liked what you liked? It was all so strange. Sexual taste. Even regular taste—loving caramel, hating mint. To be a heterosexual woman did not mean that you would be attracted to, let alone in love with, Cory Pinto, but Greer was. So maybe it was a good enough answer. Everyone on campus kept hooking up every weekend; it was a relentless activity, like IMing, but she didn’t know what it would feel like to sleep with someone she barely knew, someone she hadn’t grown up with.

  Here she was with him now, in his college bed, which looked exactly like hers. Both beds had extra-long sheets, a weird detail of college life. After college, sheets would immediately shorten to their normal length.

  They came in close for a long kiss, and as he began to lift her shirt and touch her they could hear a key crunching in the lock, and they sprang apart. Steers, his roommate, came in, the earbuds in his ears emitting a thin and distant stream of rhythmic rage. He nodded to Greer without removing them, then sat down at his desk under a spill of light from his perpetually lit gooseneck lamp (“He never shuts it off,” Cory had said. “I think he’s KGB and he’s trying to break me”) and proceeded to master a chapter of his engineering textbook. In response, Greer and Cory took out their own books from their backpacks, and soon the room was like a study hall. Cory was reading a bulky book for his econometrics class; Greer was reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and underlining so often that some pages were entirely marked up.

  “What are you marking up?” he asked, curious.

  “Things that stir me,” she said without self-consciousness.

  Later, when Steers left the room again, she knew they would return to the bookmarked kiss, and to another kind of being stirred, or maybe a related kind. Love ran through everything Greer read—love of language, love of character, love of the act of reading—just as it ran through everything that had to do with Cory. Books had saved Greer as a child, and then Cory had saved her again later on. Of course books and Cory had something to do with each other.

  With Steers gone, Greer’s Abercrombie jeans would be unsnapped and unpopped and her shirt and bra removed, all by Cory, who never got tired of stripping her. He would work everything off and would then sigh and lean back on his elbows on the narrow bed and have a good look at her, and she would love this moment so much that she couldn’t speak.

  She hadn’t been able to explain any of it to Zee. All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies. Cory’s penis sometimes angled to the left. “If this was an object you’d bought in a store,” he’d said to her once, “you’d probably return it. You’d tell them, ‘It’s crooked. It looks like . . . a shepherd’s crook. I want a better one.’” “I would not,” Greer had said. She would not have returned it, because it was his. Because it was him. She was touched that they were discussing something that no doubt he would rather die than discuss with another person. Which meant that she wasn’t another person, really; that they were tangled together and indivisible.

  Before they had become that way during their last year of high school, Greer had prowled the days in what had felt like isolation. Throughout her childhood she’d carried a soft aqua vinyl pencil case with a picture of a Smurf on it, as if to prove that she was like everyone else at school, though if anyone had asked her to name a single fact about the Smurfs, she would have had to admit she knew nothing. Smurfs weren’t interesting to her in any way, except as social currency, which was something she understood she partly lacked.

  Her parents had never cared much about fitting into the community in their small western Massachusetts town. They sold ComSell Nutricle protein bars, setting up a display of their thin collection of wares in people’s living rooms. Greer’s father, Rob, also painted houses around the Pioneer Valley, but he was sloppy, sometimes leaving cans of paint on people’s porches; months later, a crusted roller might be found in the azaleas. Greer’s mother, Laurel, worked as a so-called library clown, performing in the children’s rooms of public libraries all around the valley, though she had never invited Greer to come watch her show, and Greer had never pushed. It was just as well that she didn’t see the act, she’d thought as she got older, for it would have been painful to witness her mother trying too hard, in clown makeup and a red wig.

  Her parents had met back in the early 1980s when they’d both joined a community of people living on a refitted school bus in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone on that bus wanted to live differently from h
ow they had always thought they would have to live. None of them could bear to go off separately and lead conventional, regimented lives. Rob Kadetsky had “climbed aboard,” as they all called it, after graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology with an engineering degree, and then having no luck with a few solar-related inventions that had initially seemed so promising. Laurel Blanken had climbed aboard after dropping out of Barnard and being afraid to tell her parents, to whom she dutifully sent bogus postcards each week, hoping they wouldn’t notice the postmarks:

  Dear Mother and Father,

  My classes are amazing. My roommate got a gecko!

  Luv,

  Laurel

  Rob and Laurel quickly fell in love on the moving bus. They stayed on board as long as they could, taking brief, seasonal jobs, showering at local YMCAs, and sometimes eating cold food out of cans. At first their life felt unconstrained, but after a while they couldn’t ignore the limitations of a bus existence, and they came to hate waking up in the morning with a corrugated cheek from sleeping against the emergency lever on a window, or a rash on a leg from a night’s adhesion to a vinyl seat. They wanted to have privacy, and love and sex, and a bathroom.

  Life on the bus became unbearable, but regular life still seemed unbearable, too. Caught between a conventional life and an alternative one, Rob and Laurel came east and split the difference. The house in working-class Macopee, Massachusetts, bought with a little family money on Laurel’s side, became not dissimilar to a school bus. It remained underdecorated and slightly uncomfortable, and it seemed almost in motion, never fully grounded. There were bathrooms, though, and running water, and no parking tickets clustered on the window.

  Rob unsuccessfully tried to get companies interested in his inventions again, and he did his painting jobs, and he and Laurel sold protein bars, and they had Greer, and eventually Laurel became an occasional library clown. Over the years, they struggled financially and in other ways, never getting a grip on the world, smoking much too much pot and letting the smell of the smoke wind through the house, though Greer kept her knowledge of all this a hazy, inchoate thing, the way children both perceive and don’t perceive their parents’ sex lives.

  But it was more than that. She had the sense, itself as strong as a trail of smoke, that the life she had with her parents wasn’t normal, wasn’t right. But if she told anyone about it, if anyone really knew, that would have been worse. It wasn’t that she would be taken away by Child Protective Services; it wasn’t like that. But families were supposed to eat together, weren’t they? Parents were supposed to dole out food and ask questions like “How was your day?”

  The Kadetskys had a kitchen table, though it was often spread with cases of protein bars and stacks of order sheets. Her parents weren’t “social,” they said, when she asked why they didn’t eat meals as a family very often. “Plus, you like to read while you eat,” her mother had said. Greer definitely remembered her saying it, but she wasn’t sure which had come first: that comment or the actual fact. In any case, from then on she did think she liked to read while she ate. The two acts became inextricable. Greer usually made dinner for everyone: nothing elaborate, usually chili or soup or chicken parts breaded with cornflakes. Her parents would wander in at some point, grab plates of food, and take them upstairs. Sometimes she could hear giggling. Primly she stood at the oven, her face heated from the blast. Finally she made a plate for herself and sat alone at the table, or cross-legged in her bed upstairs, a book propped up behind her plate.

  All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the uninterested parents.

  At night she stayed up in bed reading by a flashlight, its beam quickly dwindling. But even as the light bailed, Greer read until the very last minute, consuming a yellowing circle of stories and concepts that comforted and compelled her in her aloneness, which went on year after year.

  It was the middle of fourth grade when the new boy showed up in school. She realized that she had seen him on her block over the weekend. Cory Pinto, a tall, skinny, lightly olive-skinned kid, had moved into the house diagonally across the street. Within a few days after he appeared in school, Greer understood that he was as intelligent as she was, though unlike her not at all afraid to speak up. The two of them outpaced all the other students in their class, who often seemed as though they had been blindfolded and spun around each day and then told to make their way through the curriculum.

  In the past, whenever the class had been broken up into reading groups, Miss Berger could do little for Greer besides let her go off by herself into the top group, the Pumas. Or, more exactly, the Puma. But suddenly Cory was with her in the corner, and there were two Pumas now, a pair of them. A few yards away, they could hear Kristin Vells, a member of the lowly Koalas—an odd-looking animal weighed down by its thick pelt and chunky legs—sounding out a line in her red reader, Paths of Wonder. “Billy wan-ted to go to the ro . . . to the ro . . . ,” she tried.

  “To the rodeo,” Nick Fuchs finally cut in with impatience. “Jeez, can’t you go any faster?”

  There in the corner where Greer sat with the intense, too-tall new boy, they both had goldenrod-colored readers called Paths of Imagination open on their laps. “Book 5,” it read at the top in discreet Garamond font. The plots of the stories in Paths of Imagination were extraordinarily dull, and in this dullness Greer trained herself the way a soldier preps through deprivation, knowing that one day it might all be useful. Apparently Cory Pinto felt the same way, for he too tolerated and absorbed the true story of Taryn the Recycling Girl from Toledo, who by third grade had collected more bottles than any child ever had, getting into The Guinness Book of World Records and potentially saving the world.

  Cory Pinto was still a novelty, being new, but he was more than that. His voice was strong, though not obnoxious, making itself known among the other boys’ voices, some of which were both strong and obnoxious, prompting Miss Berger to stand up at the front of the classroom a number of times and stare down at all the boys, sternly reminding them, “Use your inside voices!”

  Greer only possessed an inside voice, no other. During breaks she sat on the floor under the whiteboard eating Pringles from a can with the other incredibly quiet girl in the class, Elise Bostwick, who had a dark, slightly troubling personality. “Do you ever think about poisoning our teacher?” Elise casually asked her one day.

  “No,” Greer said.

  “Yeah, neither do I,” said Elise.

  But Cory, as skinny as anything, spoke up easily, and was popular and confident. What made it worse was that he barely ever seemed to be paying attention, and instead had a dreamy carelessness about him. Greer could see it when he stood at the bus stop on Woburn Road each morning. At age nine he resembled a thin, easygoing, quietly handsome scarecrow. She could even see it when he used the water fountain, the way he closed his eyes and articulated his mouth to anticipate the shape of the flowing water before he pressed the metal button.

  Greer, in her little acrylic pressed shirts and with her Smurf pencil case, felt mowed down by him. He wasn’t only smart, he was also somehow joyous and independent. Again and again, because of their intelligence and their test scores, they were thrown together, but they never discussed anything at all unless they had to. She didn’t want to know him, and she didn’t want him to know her either. Or her family. Greer felt hotly ashamed of her parents, as well as their house. The Pinto house, however, was spare and clean, and their refrigerator door was a vertical leaf bed of Cory’s report cards and certificates and papers with gold stars, all of which Greer had seen because once, the month he’d moved in, she’d been assigned to work on an after-school project with him on Navajo customs.

  She had entered his house that first time and taken note of how neat it was, and, more unhappily, the refrigerator shrine to Cory. “
You’re like God around here,” she said to him.

  “Don’t say that. My mom will get mad. She’s very religious.”

  This was another way in which the families were different. The Kadetskys were atheists—“lowercase a,” her father always said, afraid that deification could slip into a nuance of typography.

  Cory’s very small, busy mother, Benedita, came into the kitchen, where they were working that day on their project, and she proceeded to serve them small blue bowls of aletria, a warm Portuguese dessert that weirdly had noodles in it. The image of a mother at the stove, fussing over food that she would make for her child and his classmate—staying there long enough to cook it, and even to watch them both eat it—was painful. Sometimes from across the street Greer had noticed the Pinto family getting ready for dinner. Then, when they sat at the table, she could see the tops of their heads going in and out of frame as they bent to eat, and it all upset her. The discrepancy. The difference. The normalcy of this family across the street, compared with the uneasy oddness of her own family. Beyond that, now, the taste of the aletria was shocking in its deliciousness, showing her that when a mother cooked, she could make magic. Mrs. Pinto approvingly watched them eat the dessert, proud of her own skill and enjoying the fact that they were enjoying it. Or at least that Cory was.

  It was easy to tell how much she loved her son. At nine, seeing a mother’s unhidden love, Greer was naked in her own lack of love. Naked and, she was sure, pathetic. Mrs. Pinto probably looked at her with sadness and sympathy: the carelessly raised little girl who lived across the street. Maybe that was why she was giving her this dish of ambrosia; it was the least she could do. As soon as Greer thought this, she pushed the dish away. There were still a few spoonfuls left, but she didn’t want to eat them. The Navajo project was quickly finished, and then Greer went home, pretending indifference to this boy and his family. But something new had happened. She had seen how loved he was; she had seen that being loved that way in real life, not just in a novel, was possible.