Then Ray tried on my straw hat. Maybe he was trying to be playful. But it was almost one in the morning, and he was walking around in my straw hat and shoes. I couldn't laugh. I finally said, "Well, I'm tired and I have class in the morning."
At the door Ray kissed me good night and looked at me pleadingly. It was too late. I felt a rush of incipient hypertension, but I tried to calm myself. When Ray had finally gone, I examined the shoes. They weren't ruined after all, but I pushed them to the back of the closet.
I was the youngest in my family, but now I'm an only child. When I was eight, Ellen, my sister, then twelve, died of leukemia. When Ellen got sick she asked for a dog and got a Chihuahua named Midnight. It lived until four years ago. Now it's just my mother and I. I rarely think about Ellen. My mother doesn't like to talk about her, and for me she's become bleached to an image on a flickering movie screen. Photographs show me standing next to my sister: she had wispy blond hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a pointy chin. Once, during a squabble, I ran into the kitchen and came back at Ellen with a handful of pepper which I threw in her face. Just after that, she got leukemia. I also have three half-brothers, whom I've never met. After Ellen's death my father offered to pay for a ticket to New Zealand for me, but I didn't want to go —or perhaps my mother didn't want me to—and the offer was never repeated. The boys are now fifteen, thirteen, and six. In September my father sent me a miniature jade baseball bat, highly polished, and a note congratulating me on my acceptance to the Women's Studies Program at Yale. With the jade bat was a card saying this was a replica of a Maori war club. I brooded about what my father had meant by it, but I was too busy with my courses and schoolwork to think about it for long. At the beginning of the semester my courses seemed quite interesting; but a few days after Ray tried on my shoes I was sitting in class, taking notes as usual, when it became apparent that not one word that was being said made the slightest bit of sense. The teacher, Anna Castleton, a well-padded, grayish woman with clipped, poodle hair, was discussing a conference she had attended the week before—a Poetics of Gender colloquium—where she was severely attacked for her presentation. I carefully wrote down everything Anna said but when I got home that night I reread the notes and found they still sounded as if they had been written in a foreign language.
Status of empirical discourse.
Post-structuralist account of dissolving subject precludes formation of female identity.
The notion of the subject in progress.
It was assumed she was calling for a return to fixed identity.
Post-gendered subjectivities.
If gender is constructed — a gendered identity 99% of the time is built onto a person who has a sex.
Here I had made a little sketch in the margin: a picture of a beaver, paddling frantically, with a tree stump clutched in its large buck teeth.
The only text of rupture is right wing.
To speak of identity is to speak of racism.
Anyone who throws out the word "essentialist" believes
that there is such a thing as real women who are trans-historical. ANYONE WHO THROWS THIS OUT AS AN OPENING
REMARK IS PROVING THEIR MIDDLE-CLASS
PARANOIA. The most important thing about Marxism is positing a
historical subject. Now, you can say as a Marxist you
want to dissolve "woman." Without using the word "class," she argued for a more
complicated view of women as historical subject. Yet she was attacked for this — brutally attacked.
Then I had written down the words of one of the other students: "Angela Davis said that Elizabeth Cady Stanton's decision to separate a middle-class reformist movement in the name of feminism was implicitly racist—there is such a thing as nonessentialism."
To this the teacher responded, at least according to my notes:
It isn't complicated, it's simple: the unreworked biological category, where you locate yourself to take action. The language becomes the primary basis for working things out — in other words, can you top this? The privileging of the complicated.
I wondered whether the teacher had burst into tears following the attack on her. The two hours of class were devoted to a retelling of the attack, couched in this language which so gracefully circled a subject without ever landing to make a point.
At the end of the semester I gave an oral report for the Castleton class in which I discussed mysticism and Eastern philosophy and some of the similar themes that emerge in the writings of Virginia Woolf. I had hoped to please the teacher; throughout my lecture she wrote furiously in a notebook. When I finished, she looked up and said, "You're wrong." The other women in the class all turned to catch my reaction. I felt as if I had been electrocuted on a television game show. Anna went on to say that I had fallen prey to a traditional male put-down: placing women in the category of weak, dreamy mystics and thus denying them power. I knew that the most successful reports in class were those which merely repeated what the teacher herself had said; but how could I repeat what made no sense? I found myself arguing, trying to defend my position. I left the class feeling as if my leptons were no longer in orbit.
That evening I sat in my apartment, on one of Ray's chairs, trying to figure out what had happened. It was strange to find something that had once absorbed me so quickly transformed into musty, foul-smelling words. I thought of Dostoyevsky, chattering away in his icy locker room, seized with the flu or perhaps remembering his near-execution. Charlotte Brontë, trimming her cuticles by the open fire. Florence Nightingale, sanctimonious in her bandage-strapping. These people had lust, infectious greed to live, a passion in life. If smallpox and polio vaccines hadn't been developed, I figured I would have been one of the ones to keel over by now. Maybe I was just tired; it would be good to have a break at Christmas.
But I didn't feel any different during vacation; by New Year's Day I decided not to go back to Yale.
Half the reason I had decided to go to Yale was that I didn't get an apartment I fell in love with in New York. The summer before I had landed a job as editorial assistant on a magazine —I would be taking over for a woman who was going on maternity leave in September. I had a whole month to find a place to live, but after several weeks of looking I still couldn't find anything, not even a share. Nell, my mother, came into the city to help me look. She wore her tattered cardigan with holes in the sleeves and her Red Cross shoes, practical for walking. She said that the way to find an apartment was simply to wander up and down the streets until we saw a sign in a window saying apartment for rent.
"Ma," I said, "maybe that was how you could one time find an apartment, but not anymore." But she insisted, and on the afternoon of the second day we did see a sign on the first floor of an old brownstone on Third Avenue in the twenties. Nobody answered the bell, but we went next door to an antique store and the woman gave us the key to the place and said that she was handling the rental for the landlady.
The place was fantastic. It held the sediment of many lives: gilt ceilings, molding in a pattern of vines and leaves, covered with many layers of paint, an intricate puzzle-parquet floor, like a Parcheesi board, cracked and dented in places, the wood still beautiful. The apartment was two stories high, with a spiral staircase in the dining room that led upstairs to a small balcony with a sleeping area. There was a second bedroom in front, off the living room, which had an ornate marble fireplace. The bathroom was elaborate, with a claw-footed tub and a pedestal sink. The place came with its own backyard, fenced in, though bare of plant life. How calm and happy I felt here! It was a place to sit morosely by the open fire in a velvet dress, entertaining an assortment of people I would surely meet. I would plant a willow and peach tree in the backyard, get a cat. "I'd never be able to afford this," I said. "I bet it's twenty-five hundred a month."