“Why don’t we look at the primary documents?”
We stare blankly at Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
“See,” I say uncertainly. “Even if these slaves had to live in a bad part of the house, maybe a place that you or I would not want to call home”—I think confusedly of my own apartment, the chipped tile, dank shower, and two-burner stove—“it was still their home, they still took pride in it. They had domestic feelings.”
“No, they didn’t.” Now there is real bitterness in Isabel’s voice, as if I have deliberately led her into a tautology, as if I, and not her teacher—no doubt a freshly minted PhD who had dreamt of seminars at Wellesley, not first period at Trinity—had assigned her this impossible task. “How can they be domestic if they don’t even have a home?”
A light knock, followed by the soundless entrance of a Filipino woman in lavender sweats. “You can put it here,” Isabel says, pushing aside her laptop. Down glides a tuna steak on a scalloped white plate, some kind of green reduction drizzled over its charred flesh. Isabel says not a word. Specifically, she does not say the word thanks.
The woman steps back. Our eyes meet. I try to convey subtle irony, an intimation of here we both are, serving this thirteen-year-old. Absurdly, I hope I will be recognized by her as a comrade, conscripted into this lucrative, absurd work.
“You want something to drink?” she says. “A sandwich?”
Aghast, I shake my head. “Oh no, I’m fine, really. I’m great.” A big smile, but she has already turned away.
I did not do well on my SATs. I did fine—to be frank, I probably did better than you—but I did not rocket them out of the park. In my defense, I never got tutored, I didn’t buy a practice book, I took them only once. Any extra effort would have struck me as gauche. During my teenage years I conceived of my intelligence as a natural phenomenon, like the sea. The sea does not try to get better. The sea is. The extent of my preparation was to add a banana to my morning cereal. Then bubbles for three hours, then talking shit in the parking lot. “How easy was that math?” I boasted to my best friend, Lacie, and then we went to get high near the Stop & Shop where they carried the vegan moon pies we loved.
What I did, rather than ace my SATs—I will tell you this, because you probably want to know, because you probably will ask, as most of my clients eventually ask, especially after I assure them that it’s okay not to be good at standardized tests, that I, in fact, am not good at standardized tests, they say, “Not to be rude or anything, but how did you get into Harvard, then?”—is that I wrote a play, a play in which the biblical Eve kills the biblical Adam, then travels forward in time to counsel a young heroin addict named Jane. Never mind that I knew nothing of heroin or addiction; never mind that I had not, until that year, ever read the Bible. I had a vision. At the climax of the play, Eve lifts her shirt and presses Jane’s palm against her ribs. “You didn’t come from Adam,” she intones. “You came from me.”
Obviously, it was a smash success. An empowering tale that, to a certain kind of middle-aged, second-wave feminist—a woman possessed of a slow-simmering anger, say, a woman sure that something still wasn’t right, that something was in fact wrong with today’s females, the ones who said they weren’t feminists, who were applying to medical school in record numbers, putting off childbearing in record numbers, giving blow jobs and getting boob jobs and joining sororities in record numbers—to that kind of despairing older woman, to those English teachers and underemployed actors who had agreed to judge the Young Playwrights competition, my play was pure vindication, the raising of the banner they’d seen so dispiritingly flag. They gave it all to me; I won everything there was to win. Briefly, and too young, I felt invincible.
Not that I say all this to my clients. Instead, I murmur that I “liked to write” back in high school, that I “got some attention for it.”
The first time I told Isabel this, she said, “So you were angular.”
“What?” Even as I spoke it dawned on me: What other word would mean the opposite of well-rounded?
“A freak who is freakishly good at one random thing.” She sighed. “Admissions people love them.”
Angularity may have gotten me into Harvard, but it also had the unfortunate effect of turning me into a writer. My blood, infused once with praise, sang for more.
But how? Once you hit eighteen slinging two decent lines of dialogue together is little more than a party trick. In the years after graduation, as I wrote and failed to get money for my writing, I began to weigh my Ivy League degree, thinking of all the anxious elites who believed in its talismanic power enough to pay for it. So I pumped up my scores and queried a host of tutoring companies.
That was how I found myself, at seven thirty at night, gliding upward in a mirrored box steered by a solemn youth with acne and a garnet bow tie. That first time, Isabel had answered the door herself, a tiny girl in tiny green shorts, dwarfed by a darkly glowing hall of gold and onyx. “Let’s go up to my office,” she said, which surprised me. Usually, apartments do not have ups; usually, teenage girls do not have offices.
I asked, “Should I take off my shoes?” and she said, “Sure.” But I had only asked to be polite. I hate taking off my shoes in my students’ houses, especially if I’m not wearing socks. It makes my feet feel dirty, polluted from the world of subways and streets. Here the doorknobs shone, the walls were shadowed by delicate spindly sculptures, and the carpet was so soft that my toes—my profane toes—curled with delight. As we drew back into the house the texture kept changing underfoot, raised nubs, soft pile, ridged geometric designs, all of it clean and fluffy and fresh. Up and up we went, two flights of stairs, down a long hall filled with glossy black-and-white photos of her family, portraits so artful they seemed like magazine spreads, as if the Shear family were a celebrity family, as if we were passing their Annie Leibovitz shots from Vogue.
Finally we reached the modest white cubby where Isabel did her work, a small room tricked out with a laser printer, a MacBook Pro, a stray iPad, and a curated row of tiny international souvenirs, which—more than the Frank Stella hanging in the bathroom, more than the drawer of chilled Pellegrino or the courtside tickets to the US Open—would come to represent to me all the mysteries of the way the very rich raise their children.
There was a tiny koala bear, a geisha in red and gold, a snowball with the Leaning Tower of Pisa inside. There was a Big Ben, a noseless Sphinx, a penguin with its flippers out. They were not what a child would have picked—they were kitsch, but carefully curated kitsch, ironic nods to the idea of souvenir, a symbol not so much of these places—Australia, Japan, Italy, Egypt—as of the idea of travel as consumption. A joke, in other words, much too elaborate for Isabel to understand.
I was distracted by her lips. Were they artificially plumped? Hard to believe. Maybe she was just suffering a mild allergic reaction to, say, gluten, which she definitely and in defiance of her mother ate (Isabel ate a bagel and went into a GLUTEN FOG right before her PSATs, Rachel Shear had written in her first and only email to me). I had seen Isabel with packages of peanut butter crackers—she was, after all, thirteen and hungry and not yet completely brainwashed by fad diets. Regardless. Though she was in every other sense a child, though she had tiny child limbs that squirmed as she sat at her desk and a washboard for a chest and a delicate stem of a neck, her lips were somehow adult, big and fat and swollen, Botox lips, Angelina Jolie lips, definitively sexy lips.
She had a habit, when I talked, of leaning back in her chair with her legs up, her head tilted and her mouth slightly agape, her eyes dreamy and soft. She looked like a soft-porn star when she did this. But her complete lack of awareness as she assumed a posture of sexual abandonment only revealed how completely, how utterly, she was still a child. Right?
On the corkboard over her desk she—or a decorator—had tacked photos of her from all the bar and bat mitzvahs she had attended over the past year, a kaleidoscope of Isabels dressed and coiffed like a Barbie doll,
gleaming in dozens of configurations. There she was, with her friends, always posing, fixing the photographer with an empty-eyed pout.
There was another photo of her, black and white, a professional headshot—she was trying to become an actress—and again her hair hung in soft coils, her makeup was flawless, her eyes dark and inky as she gave that dead, sexed-out stare, and she looked nineteen, I mean she looked legal, up there on the corkboard, but when she was before me, copying out her medieval history textbook word for word, wearing mesh shorts and an old T-shirt, she looked like she might still enjoy Truth or Dare, might still enjoy a bedtime story.
I don’t mean to sound shocked. All thirteen-year-old girls want to be seventeen, unless they want to be ten again. No thirteen-year-old wants to be thirteen—they are always straining forward or back. But I was one of the ones who wanted to go back, to be ten; in fact, sometimes I think I could have been ten forever, that I would be happy, still, playing touch football with the boys, riding my bike, inventing elaborate dares with Lacie, keeping scientific records of rocks, having sleepovers, reading chapter books in bed until lights out at nine thirty, and then bounding forth each morning, sweet-smelling and hungry and happy and confident of the day.
Yes, I would go back to ten, in a heartbeat I would, but I also mistrust this nostalgia of mine, for I belong to the generation who hit puberty just as Reviving Ophelia hit the bookshelves. At once, female adolescence went from a time of transition to a time of doom, an apocalyptic meltdown of personality. Mary Pipher, PhD, described the brilliant, vivacious girls she had known, how in the teenage years they stopped speaking in class and started cutting themselves, little red slices on the skin. Across the nation, in suburbs everywhere, mothers read this book, and their daughters read it, too. Maybe this is why I want to go back, because I snuck Reviving Ophelia from my mother’s nightstand and learned how I was going to lose myself, that my childhood was Eden but I had to leave, that in this poisonous late-twentieth-century misogynist culture, anorexia and suicide and rape and self-hate were the inevitable wages of womanhood.
And now here I was, fifteen years later, locked in a little white room with a little white girl who was rushing, as fast as she could, toward the time when she would have to be a woman every day. Fine. Fair enough. But usually, when little girls try to be women, their inept experiments with eye shadow and cheap dresses from H&M mark them as babies, only playing pretend. Isabel had an army of hairstylists and makeup artists—the very best in New York, no doubt—to turn her into a starlet, an ingénue, a little Lolita. I couldn’t stand it.
I remember the woman who played the heroin addict in my play. She was a skinny white woman with a long orange ponytail named Catherine, and the woman who played Eve was an older black woman with a round moon face named Melanie. One day, as we were all sitting around the table, I gave a little speech about the play. I meant it to be a feminist speech, a rousing speech, a we-are-all-oppressed-as-hell speech, but Melanie, when I finished, said, “I don’t know. I’ve always really liked being a woman. It doesn’t seem so bad to me.”
I still remember the shame I felt. She was right: my life wasn’t so bad. It was hard to say—or it seemed to me at the time hard to say—exactly why being female was so awful, exactly how I had been oppressed—I mean, I still talked a ton in class, I hadn’t tried to kill myself, not even once—and also, even though I knew nothing about her life, nothing except that she was an actor, a middle-aged black woman who did regional theater in Philadelphia, I thought or sensed or assumed that her life had been harder than mine, that if she liked being female then what reason could I possibly have to complain?
But, as I said, I knew nothing about her, and because I was sixteen, a sixteen-year-old girl who had not properly washed her hair in a month, who wore baggy men’s corduroys from Goodwill and giant hoodies in colors like dune and umber; because I undoubtedly spent a lot of that rehearsal, when I was not talking about oppression, wondering whether Jonah, my high school boyfriend, was not asking me to have sex because he was a good kid or because he just didn’t want to have sex; because when you are sixteen it is actually medically impossible to think of anyone except yourself for longer than thirty seconds—because of all these things, I probably did not think too much about her, about Melanie, I mean. I wanted to have sex, I felt I was ready, we were ready, we were sixteen, we were in love, we had been dating for a year, but I needed him to ask. I needed him to want it, want it so badly that he would do the thing you were never supposed to do, the thing that we had been warned about, again and again, in health class: put pressure on me. Pressure. Boys must not pressure girls, girls should not pressure girls. No one must pressure anyone to do anything, ever. But I wanted him to pressure me; I wanted to have sex without choosing, fully, to have sex; I wanted to avoid responsibility, just a little bit, for my wanting.
The day that Isabel turns in her paper about the slaves, we do not celebrate or linger. It is on to the Sermon on the Mount. Christianity sneaks up on us, as it snuck up on the Romans.
We read each line, then discuss. I gloss over the bad news about rich people, because I am sensitive, and whisk her ahead to the part about the light, about not keeping your light hid. She considers, says: “So, Jesus is just like, worship me, worship me.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Oh my God. He’s like Beyoncé or something. He’s bigger than Beyoncé.”
She contemplates this for a minute and then her face screws up. “Wait, can you imagine if you were Beyoncé?” She clamps her hand over her mouth, agog. “If you actually were her?”
Until this moment, it has never occurred to Isabel that Beyoncé is an actual person. Until this moment Beyoncé has been a behemoth, an empire, a brand. There is too much Beyoncé for Beyoncé to be contained in one person.
Of all the mementos from bar mitzvahs on Isabel’s desk, the one that fascinates me the most is a small yellow box of candy. Isabel’s face is on it. Smiling in a white satin gown, she gestures like Vanna White at the gumdrops, a perfect sugar princess.
This is what the rich do, after they have bought epic pieces of property and priceless art, after they have grown bored of travel and the ballet and a box at the baseball stadium. They buy their way closer to celebrity, and then they buy themselves a simulacrum of it. Yet they never quite believe their own pose. Nothing excites Isabel so much as Beyoncé, I think, because Beyoncé has something that Isabel cannot buy.
Later, when Jonah and I finally did have sex, when I said, “All my friends think it’s weird we haven’t had sex yet,” and he said, “Oh, do you want to have sex?” in a jovial, sporting tone, as if I had suggested we take up an obscure but hypothetically enjoyable hobby, and then when we had finally gotten naked in his basement bedroom, when he had torn the foil packet of the Trojan condom that I had made him buy, when we had actually started to do it, we could not stop laughing. The whole procedure seemed unwieldy and faintly absurd. We could not muster the requisite solemnity. “Ow, ow, you’re hurting me,” I gasped, but I was giggling. I guess I was nervous. I guess we both were.
It’s hard for me to imagine Isabel finding anything funny about sex. It’s too hooked in to glamour for her, too connected to looking a certain way.
When her teacher returns her paper in two days, it will be branded a B+; this will prompt her mother to decide that I don’t understand Isabel’s needs, that it is simply “not working out.” We don’t know it yet, Isabel and I, but we are on our last session together. After tonight we will never see each other again.
We move on to the adultery section of the Sermon on the Mount. Most people forget it’s there. “So,” I try to explain, “Jesus is saying that before you weren’t allowed to commit adultery, but now, you can’t even think about it. Thinking about it is as bad as doing it.”
Her mouth is open, her eyes are far away. We forge on.
“Wait, what does that mean?” she asks.
I scrutinize. I stall. Finally I say, “So, if you stop sle
eping with your wife, you can’t divorce her, and if another man wants to marry her, he can’t, because you will still be married to her, even if you’re not sleeping with her anymore.” For some reason I feel wildly unsure whether Isabel knows what sleeping with means, even as I know that she does, that she probably knows more words than I know, words for acts I cannot even imagine, acts that probably involve cell phones.
She is paying attention now. She says, “Are you a feminist?”
“Yes,” I say. “Are you?”
She hesitates. “Yes.” She looks both bashful and proud. “But I don’t do any feminist work.”
“Me neither,” I tell her, and we grin at each other, like two housewives who’ve just admitted that we don’t iron the sheets.
Later, though, I keep thinking about it: feminist work. What is feminist work? For some reason the only two answers that come to mind are escorting women past antiabortion activists and answering phones at a domestic violence shelter. But obviously that can’t be right. I feel like I do feminist work. I feel like feminism is more about being than doing, but maybe this is a cop-out. I think of the column my friend Maddy ran in our college newspaper called Ask a Feminist. Nobody had any questions, so she made them up: Dear Maddy, Is it feminist to carry a Nalgene bottle? Sincerely, Confused in the Co-op.
She replied, Dear Confused in the Co-op, A Nalgene bottle aids in hydration, and insofar as it is a feminist principle to stay hydrated and generally healthy, yes, it is feminist to carry a Nalgene bottle.
Back then I thought this hilarious, but now its faith touches me. From this perspective, my whole life is a feminist work. All those dark leafy greens in the crisper, the yoga class I went to last Tuesday, even the fact that I live alone, have lived alone for six years now, in a little household of one, washed the dishes and taken out the garbage and written my godforsaken manuscript all by myself, for six years, all alone, is a feminist work. Maybe I am a feminist work.