were secular holidays was a big lie, not a small one. Whether
the issue was segregation or abortion, I, the sixth-grader, was
going to deal with it, and my vehicle was going to be truth:
not a global, self-deluded truth, not a truth that only I knew
and that I wanted other people to follow, but the truth that
came from not lying. Like “do no harm, ” not lying is a big one,
a hard discipline, a practice of spartan ethics too often mistaken
for self-righteousness. If put ing my body there when it ought
to be here was required but to do so was to lie, I wasn’t going
to do it. I’d write and I wouldn’t lie. So when self-help writers
tel one to find the child within, I assume they don’t mean me.
21
Plato
A girl is faced with hard decisions. What is writ en inside
those decisions is inscrutable to her; by necessity - her age,
time, place, sex discrimination in general - she sees or knows
only the surfaces. So in junior high school I was thrilled when
I was allowed to wear lipstick for the first time, a rite of passage that has nothing to do with sexuality but everything to do with maturity, becoming an adult fast and easy. My first
lipstick was cal ed Tangerine, and like other girls I spent hours
thinking about what it went with, what it meant, and how my
life was final y beginning to cohere. It was also the first recognition from my mother - al -important, the whole deal has little to do with men or boys at al - that I was nearly adult
but certainly no child.
I'd wear Tangerine, along with a favorite dress that let me
see my own breasts, a deep V-neck, a cut I stil like, and I’d
be making my way through Plato’s Symposium. It had been
communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of
women that a female’s nose must never shine. In war, in
famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick
without the requisite face powder. On my own I added my
22
Plato
own favorite, Erase, which went over the powder (or was it
under? ) and got the lines under your eyes to disappear. In this
way I could hide my late-night reading from my parents -
circles under the eyes were a dead giveaway. I would pretend
to go to sleep; I'd wait for them to go to sleep; I'd turn on my
reading light, read, and simultaneously listen for any movement at their end of the house, at which point I'd get rid of any light in my room, hide the book, and wait until I heard
my mother or father return to their bed.
I was taunted by this problem: how could someone write
something like the Symposium and make sure that her nose did
not shine at the same time? It didn’t mat er to me that I was
reading a translation. I'd read Plato’s brilliant, dense prose and
not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose
shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either
one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi
Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose.
It didn’t hurt, it didn’t make noise, it didn’t incapacitate in any
way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough
time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one.
Plato was my idea of a paperback writer: the Beatles were not
yet on the horizon, and anyway I’m sure that John would have
agreed with me. There was nothing I wanted so much in life
as to write the way Plato wrote: words inside ideas inside words,
the calzone approach at enuated with Bach. I'd look at my
cheap Modigliani reproductions or the reproduced females by
23
Heartbreak
Rodin or Manet, and I didn’t see the shine, except for that of
the paper itself; but more to the point, in no book about the
artists themselves that I could find was the problem of the
shine addressed. These were the kind of girl-things that preoccupied me.
Or, for instance, when it came to lying: in elementary
school one would play checkers with the boys. My mother
had said don’t lie and had also told me that I had to lose at
games to the boys if I wanted them to like me. These were
irreconcilable opposites. It was, first of al , virtually impossible to lose to the boys in an honest game of checkers. Second, who wanted to? Third, how would I ever respect him or them
in the morning? It did strike me that the boys you had to lose
to weren’t worth having, but my argument made no impression on my mother nor on anyone else I was ever to meet until the women’s movement. And it was damned hard to lose
at checkers to the pimply or prepimply dolts. I now think of
the having-to-lose part as SWAT-team training in strategy,
how to lose being harder than how to win. It was hideous for
a girl to be brazenly out for the kil or to enjoy the status of
victor or to enjoy her own intelligence and its application in
real time.
I stil remember how in the eighth or ninth grade Miss Fox,
one of my nemeses among English teachers, made us skip the
first three pages of Romeo and Juliet - the part about the maidenheads - only to read aloud Juliet herself throughout the rest of
24
Plato
the play, partnered with the captain of the footbal team as
Romeo. Stereotypes aside, his reading was not delightful. And
yet we al had to sit there and wait while he tried manfully, as
it were, to sound out words. Her pedagogy was to encourage
him while let ing the rest of us rot.
I, true to form, wanted to know what a maidenhead was,
and to say that I was relentless on the subject would be to understate. Miss Fox’s retaliation was authoritarian and extreme. I had been out of class sick and had to take a makeup vocabulary test, multiple choice. I failed. I did not just faiclass="underline" I got a zero. I was pained but respectful on my first five or ten trips
up to her desk to ask her how it was possible to get a zero on
a multiple-choice test, even if one did not know the meaning
of one word on the test. Final y, exhausted, I just asked her to
regrade the test. Since she was sure of her rightness in al things
English, we struck a deaclass="underline" she’d regrade the test and whatever
the outcome I’d shut up. She glistened with superiority, Eve
the second after biting into the apple; I was tense now that the
challenge had been taken up. It turned out that she had used
the wrong key in grading the test; the answers she wanted me to
give were for some other test. I was good but not that good.
I wanted out, Tangerine lipstick notwithstanding. I wanted
smart people whether or not their noses shined enough to
illuminate a room or a house or a city. I wanted someone who
cared about me in particular, as an individual, enough to
notice that I could not get a zero on a vocabulary test because
25
Heartbreak
I had too big a vocabulary. I was so worn out by Miss Fox that