WHEN I WAS seven, my parents and I had gone to visit Bob at the University of Kansas. His room was in Ellsworth Hall, a teeming high-rise with harsh lighting and a pervasive locker-room smell. Following my parents into Bob’s room, I saw the centerfold on his wall just as my mother cried out, in anger and disgust, “Bob! Bob! Oh! Ugh! I can’t believe you put that on your wall!” Even apart from my mother’s judgment, which I’d learned to fear greatly, the bloody reds of the pinup girl’s mouth and areolas would have struck me as violent. It was as if the girl had been photographed emerging, skinny and raw and vicious, from a terrible accident that her own derangement had caused. I was scared and offended by what she was inflicting on me and what Bob was inflicting on our parents. “Jon can’t be in this room,” my mother declared, turning me toward the door. Outside, she told me that she didn’t understand Bob at all.
He became more discreet after that. When we returned for his graduation, three years later, he taped a construction-paper bikini onto his current pinup girl, who in any case looked to me warm and gentle and hippieish — I liked her. Bob went on to bask in my mother’s approval of his decision to come home to St. Louis and go to medical school. If there were girlfriends, I never had the pleasure of meeting them. He did, though, once, bring a med-school acquaintance home for Sunday dinner, and the friend told a story in which he mentioned lying in bed with his girlfriend. I barely even clocked this detail, but as soon as Bob was gone my mother gave me her opinion of it. “I don’t know if he was trying to show off, or shock us, or act sophisticated,” she said, “but if what he said about cohabiting with his girlfriend is true, then I want you to know that I think he’s an immoral person and that I’m very disappointed that Bob is friends with him, because I categorically disapprove of that kind of lifestyle.”
That kind of lifestyle was my brother Tom’s. After the big fight with my father, he’d gone on to graduate from Rice in film studies and live in Houston slum houses with his artist friends. I was in tenth grade when he brought home one of these friends, a slender, dark-haired woman named Lulu, for Christmas. I couldn’t look at Lulu without feeling as if my breath had been knocked out of me, she was so close to the ideal of casual mid-seventies sexiness. I agonized over what book to buy her for a Christmas present, to make her feel more welcome in the family. My mother, meanwhile, was practically psychotic with hatred. “‘Lulu’? ‘Lulu’? What kind of person has a name like Lulu?” She gave a creaky little laugh. “When I was a girl, a lulu was a crazy person! Did you know that? A lulu was what we called a kooky crazy person!”
A year later, when both Bob and Tom were living in Chicago and I went to see them for a weekend, my mother forbade me to stay in Tom’s apartment, where Lulu also dwelt. Tom was studying film at the Art Institute, making austere non-narrative shorts with titles like “Chicago River Landscape,” and my mother sensed, accurately, that he had an unhealthy degree of influence over me. When Tom made fun of Cat Stevens, I removed Cat Stevens from my life. When Tom gave me his Grateful Dead LPs, the Dead became my favorite band, and when he cut his hair and moved on to Roxy Music and Talking Heads and DEVO, I cut my hair and followed. Seeing that he bought his clothes at Amvets, I started shopping at thrift stores. Because he lived in a city, I wanted to live in a city; because he made his own yogurt with reconstituted milk, I wanted to make my own yogurt with reconstituted milk; because he took notes in a six-by-nine-inch ring binder, I bought a six-by-nine-inch ring binder and started a journal in it; because he made movies of industrial ruins, I bought a camera and took pictures of industrial ruins; because he lived hand to mouth and did carpentry and rehabbed apartments with scavenged materials, hand to mouth was the way I wanted to live, too. The hopelessly unattainable goddesses of my late adolescence were the art-school girls who orbited Tom in their thrift-store clothes and spiky haircuts.
THERE WAS NOTHING cool about high-school German. It was the language that none of my friends were taking, and the sun-faded tourist posters in the room of the German teacher, Mrs. Fares, were not a persuasive argument for visiting Germany or falling for its culture. (This much was true of the French and Spanish rooms as well. It was as if the modern languages were so afraid of adolescent scorn that even the classrooms were forced to dress predictably — to wear posters of the bullfight, the Eiffel Tower, the castle Neuschwanstein.) Many of my classmates had German parents or grandparents, whose habits (“He likes his beer warm”) and traditions (“We have Lebkuchen at Christmas”) were of similarly negligible interest to me. The language itself, though, was a snap. It was all about memorizing four-by-four matrixes of adjective endings, and following rules. It was about grammar, which was the thing I was best at. Only the business of German gender, the seeming arbitrariness of the spoon and the fork and the knife,[3] gave me fits.
EVEN AS THE bearded Mutton and his male disciples were recapitulating old patriarchies, Fellowship was teaching us to question our assumptions about gender roles. Boys were praised and rewarded for shedding tears, girls for getting mad and swearing. The weekly Fellowship “women’s group” became so popular that it had to be split in two. One female advisor invited girls to her apartment and gave vivid tutorials in how to have sex and not get pregnant. Another advisor challenged the patriarchy so needlingly that once, when she asked Chip Jahn to talk about his feelings, he replied that he felt like dragging her out to the parking lot and beating the shit out of her. For parity, two male advisors tried to start a men’s group, but the only boys who joined it were the already-sensitized ones who wished they could belong to the women’s group.
Being a woman seemed to me the happening thing, compared to being a man. From the popularity of the weekly support groups, I gathered that women truly had been oppressed and that we men therefore ought to defer to them, and be nurturing and supportive, and cater to their wishes. It was especially important, if you were a man, to look deep into your heart and make sure you weren’t objectifying a woman you loved. If even a tiny part of you was exploiting her for sex, or putting her on a pedestal and worshipping her, this was very bad.
In my senior-year journal, while I waited for Siebert to return from her first year of college, I constantly policed my feelings about her. I wrote “Don’t CANONIZE her” and “Don’t be in love or anything idiotically destructive like that” and “Jealousy is characteristic of a possessive relationship” and “We are not sacred.” When I caught myself writing her name in block letters, I went back and annotated: “Why the hell capitalize it?” I ridiculed and reviled my mother for her dirty-mindedness in thinking I cared about sex. I did, while Siebert was away, date a racy Catholic girl, O., who taught me to enjoy the raw-cauliflower aftertaste of cigarettes in a girl’s mouth, and I did casually assume that Siebert and I would be losing our virginity before I had to leave for college. But I imagined this loss as a grown-up and serious and friendship-affirming thing, not as intercourse of the kind I’d read about in Rogue. I’d finished with sex like that in junior high.