The Last of Her Kind, page 5
We were a small class, only eight students—eight girls and one girlish instructor not long out of Barnard herself. We met at a round table in a book-lined room for two hours one day a week. Students were required to write a new poem each week and to hand these poems in ahead of time so the teacher could have them copied and ready to be read and discussed when we met for class. We were instructed not to write our names on our poems. Only the teacher would know who each author was. In class, our poems would be discussed anonymously—“So that you can talk about them more honestly and without personalities getting in the way,” the teacher said. But she might as well have said, So that you can be as tactless and brutal as you wish.
From the first class, I found myself in the grip of a delusion, hard to explain but equally hard to shake, that all these girls and the teacher—everyone, that is, except me—had known one another before. I knew this was preposterous, and yet the feeling persisted, ever more unsettling. It arose from the fact that everyone else seemed to speak the same language and to talk about poetry in a way that I had never talked about it or could talk about it. The kinds of poems the other students wrote were written in this same elusive language. I didn’t understand them for the most part, either, and I didn’t know what to say about them. The only thing not obscure to me was that the problem was all mine. I was the only one in the class consistently at a loss, and I was overcome by the kind of shyness and fluster you feel when you are indeed among people whose language you speak poorly or not at all. A tourist, say, or (worse) an immigrant. A stranger. After a few humiliating attempts to express myself, I clammed up, afraid—ashamed—to open my mouth.
Each time we finished talking about a poem, the teacher would ask the same question: “Would the author of the poem like to identify herself?” Sometimes the author would, sometimes she wouldn’t. But there was one who always would. A sophomore with a wide masculine face and a bulging forehead who for some reason never removed her coat and sometimes sat all through class with a hat on as well. A tricorne hat à la Marianne Moore … She was the class star—even the teacher deferred to her—the one who always had the most to say, and of all the poetry we read in that class, hers, the best liked, the most highly praised, was to me the most impenetrable.
But if I did not understand the poems of my classmates, they had no such difficulty understanding mine, no difficulty finding them, every poem, every line, every word, wanting. Worse than wanting. Not that I was the only one whose work was criticized—far from it. The concealing of identities really did encourage everyone to be pitilessly frank. But as far as I could tell, no one else’s poems were so unequivocally and unanimously disliked. Week after week, poem after poem, everything I wrote was put down. Each time the teacher asked her question—“Would the author like to identify herself?”—I froze, meanwhile writhing within, certain that everyone had to know, from my downcast eyes and crimson face, that the despised author was me.
“Those idiots. Those fucking bitches. Well, what do you expect? Here you are writing about reality, but of course they’re all too spoiled and stupid to see it. They wouldn’t know reality if it came up and bit them in the face” (Ann).
One day, after the class had left yet another bloodied poem of mine for dead and we were about to move on, the star of our class flipped a hand in the air and said, “May I add just one more comment about this poem?” And I braced myself. I was well aware of how my poems got under this particular reader’s skin, and she had a look of grave displeasure on her big face.
“I just want to say, this is the kind of poem that I have.” She exhaled fiercely on the last word—a real dragon hiss of contempt—and because I happened to be sitting directly across from her that day, her breath blew right in my face and a fleck of saliva landed on my cheek. I jerked my head as if scalded, and then, in a little fit of compounded shock, confusion, and hurt, I half rose out of my seat. Aware of heads turning, of eyes widening all around the table, I sat back down again. I barely heard the teacher above the roar of blood in my ears. “All the more reason for us to move on, then. But first, would the person who wrote the poem like to identify herself?”
Today I ask myself the obvious question: Could those poems of mine really have been so bad? And I answer: Yes. They must have been exceedingly bad. I have no real doubts about this, though in what particular ways the poems were bad I cannot say, since I kept no copies and I have no memory of them, as I have no memory of anything written by anyone else in that class. In fact, try as I might, I cannot remember the name of a single one of those students now, or even the name of the teacher. And this is significant, because in general I have a good memory for names.
You’d think I would remember everything about an experience that changed my life. Poetry was something to be put away now, with other childish things. This was what the class had taught me. I never took another poetry class, and in all the years that followed, I never wrote another poem again or even tried to write one. And though it would be another year before I actually dropped out, that class helped set things in motion, coloring my attitude toward all my other classes, toward being in college in general, intensifying my fear of not belonging, of not speaking the same language as everyone else—a language I might be capable of learning enough to get by, but in which I would never be fluent.
What had happened to the honor student, to the “set of brains” even my mother had to admire—what had happened to my calling? Had it all been a mistake, a big lie?
These questions were a torment to me above all because I had no answers for them, and in my heart I was often hard on Crug, whom I cursed and blamed.
And if I was not going to be a poet after all, what kind of life was in store for me?
In those days, everyone was reading a certain book. I myself had not read the book. I did not even know for sure what it was about, but the title spoke to me, describing how I often felt: I was a Stranger in a Strange Land.
I did not fail out that first year, partly because the college did not want me—or any student for that matter—to fail out, and partly because I managed to pass all my finals, a feat that could not have been accomplished without the help of speed. But I was always ready to take speed, whether I had a good reason or not. By now, drugs of every kind were easy to come by, and we had the milkmaid, Outraged Father’s daughter, going up and down the halls with her pails full of uppers and downers. Now was the time to put in your order for black beauties, which not only would enable you to stay up all night cramming but would also sharpen your powers of reasoning and argumentation, rhetoric and expression. (Is this really so different from an athlete using performance-enhancing drugs? Think about it.)
May. The campus magnolias in bloom. Long days in the library, long nights at my desk, typing furiously, poor Ann trying to sleep with her pillow over her head. Smoking furiously, chewing gum furiously, no appetite, but unquenchable thirst. First light and birdsong. (And somebody’s eyes must meet the dawn.) Forty-eight hours, no food, no sleep, something like the beginning of bedsores from so much sitting. Hundreds of cigarettes. Gallons of coffee. Shakes, sweats, nausea, palpitations. Panic attack. (“This shit is strong. If you can’t come down, let me know, and I’ll give you a hit of Thorazine.”) Crashing, sleeping fifteen, twenty hours straight, unrousable (“You were starting to scare us”). Waking at last with a splitting head, hacking cough, bleeding gums, many pounds lighter, and hungry enough to eat cockroaches.
After school closed that year, I went home only briefly (I had decided I would not spend another vacation with my family unless we all agreed to meet in Paris). Then I returned to the city, where I had rented a room in one of the dorms that the university kept open for summer housing. (“Dear Ann, You won’t believe how hot it is here! I’m working at Bonwit Teller.”) The collection department, sole duty typing addresses on form letters, nine to five, seventy-five dollars a week.
Clack clack clack ding!
When you pushed through the store’s revolving door, you got a whiff of perfume, and printed on a small card posted on the wall was the name of the perfume.
An hour for lunch. Strolling along Fifth Avenue and in Central Park, visiting the bears in the zoo, discovering the Museum of Modern Art and the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street. My introduction at last to the city’s heart. Midtown: beautiful, romantic, grown-up world. Inspiring me to make a dozen promises to myself, many of which I would keep. A stupid, boring, humiliatingly lowpaying job. Yet I had never felt so free. My letters to Ann, who spent a month home in Connecticut before heading west, were full of hope.
The perfume in the air today is My Sin.
Dear George, I think it’s positively wonderful we are both doing what we want to be doing this summer and not what our parents or anyone else wanted us to do. I believe that we must live our lives to the fullest while we’re still young. We don’t want to be full of regrets later on, about all the things we never got to do, the way so many old people are. “To be nostalgic for what was is painful enough; to be nostalgic for what never was is torture.” I don’t remember who said this, but I know it must be true. Oh George, I miss you so much! We’ll have so many things to talk about when we see each other in September!
Later these memories would make me bleed. What if I had been home that summer? Could I have stopped Solange from running away?
Dearest Ann, If you can be nostalgic for things that never were, can you also be homesick for a home you never had?
Home? What home? is how I kept hearing Solange answer the question I imagined everyone she met must be asking.
“It sounds paradoxical,” one of the police investigators said, “but a lot of these runaways are actually trying to find a home.”
It sounded right on to me.
According to the police, there had been a great rise in the number of runaways—more American teenagers had run away from home that year than ever before. Fifteen was about the average age (Solange was fourteen and a half), and most runaways—almost three-quarters, I was surprised to hear—were girls. It seemed like a boy thing, didn’t it: walking out of the house with just a few bucks and not even a change of clothes and hopping the next bus. Today it is still true that the majority of runaways are girls, and it still surprises me.
So many things we learned from the half dozen investigators, some local, some federal, who came to be involved. Most runaways didn’t stay on the run very long. They were back with their families within weeks or even days. Tired, hungry, filthy, scared, they tended to be tight-lipped about where they’d been and what they’d done. Unfortunately, many of these returnees would try to run away again. One of the investigators spoke—inevitably—of “a vicious cycle.” On subsequent tries, the runaway could be expected to go missing for longer and longer periods of time. But only a tiny number of runaways disappeared without a trace. Even a runaway who never actually came home again was more than likely to let someone, if not her parents, know at least that she was alive. The question was when. In some cases, it could be years. If Solange telephoned, we should try to find out where she was calling from (“carefully, now”) and waste no time getting that information to the police. We were told that runaways often got in touch on their birthdays or around holidays. Instead of calling, she might write, and in that case we’d have a postmark—countless kids had been tracked down through postmarks. It helped that many of these kids were in fact hoping to be tracked down.
“Try not to worry too much, Mrs. George,” said one of the men, kindly patting my mother’s arm. “We know how much you love your daughter, and we believe she knows it, too. All of a sudden, out there in the cold, cruel world, it’s going to hit her that home isn’t such a bad place after all.”
But I knew that down deep, under her shock, under her fear, my mother was as angry at Solange as she had ever been in her life, and I knew that Solange knew it, too, and however bad things might be out in the cold, cruel world—however much she might be secretly hoping to be tracked down—there was this to give her pause. One of my last memories of Solange was of her trying to cover her bruises, smoothing pancake makeup all over as if it were body lotion. When she was in a rage, my mother would often threaten to kill us, and we believed her. Enraged, she seemed crazed enough to kill anyone. According to Zelma, the week before Solange ran away, things had reached such a pitch that Zelma herself feared Mama would go too far. Worse than threatening to kill her, my mother had threatened to shave Solange’s head, inciting Solange to make some serious threats of her own. “If Mama really did what she said, Solange said she was going to burn the house down, Georgie!” Poor Zelma had turned to Father DuMaurier. She began by talking about Solange and Mama but ended by talking about herself. “I cannot live in a house of hate.” Young as she was, Zelma was already meditating her own escape, not only from that house of hate but from the wider, hate-filled world.
Of course it was not little Zelma but Guy who had always been the family peacemaker—and Guy had moved in with Ina. It occurred to me that the move might even have played a part in Solange’s disappearance. Like me, Solange had idolized Guy (I have often wondered whether our rivalry for our big brother’s affection kept us from being as close sisters as we might have been, growing up). First, I go away to school. Then Guy moves in with his fiancée. It made sense that Solange was feeling abandoned.
Guy was taking his favorite sister’s disappearance hard. I thought it was partly a question of masculine pride. He had not been there—and was not there now—to protect her. Also, Guy was possessive, and it upset him that Solange could have taken such an extraordinary step without so much as a hint to him. But to me, this said that Solange had probably acted impetuously.
None of this was shared with the police, who, to my surprise, never asked to speak with any of us alone, out of our mother’s presence. They did, however, speak with Solange’s friends. Talk about tight-lipped. My mother wanted to know why, being the FBI, they didn’t tap Solange’s friends’ phones. If they did, she was certain they would learn something. The men explained that they could not do such a thing, because it was illegal. My involuntary sneer (these were Hoover’s men, after all) caught one’s eye.
“So you’re the college girl.” None too friendly, and no surprise. Clashes between cops and college students were routine by now, a part of the national crisis, and in spite of the reason why these particular cops were in our living room, it was a given we were still going to see each other as being on opposite sides. I was wearing purple jeans and a tie-dyed shirt. I was sitting on the couch next to Guy, whose hair was as long as mine. He’d gotten a lot of tattoos in the army, and the most visible one right now was the peace symbol below the knuckle of the third finger of his right hand. His eyes were bloodshot. Under the circumstances, this could have been taken as a sign of emotion or a bad night’s sleep, but I knew better, and I worried that a cop might know better, too.
“Which college?”
“Barnard.”
“And where is that?”
“Um, Columbia University?” As if I were guessing.
“Right.” As if he’d only been testing me.
His partner interrupted. “Let me ask you something. Is your sister a hippie, too?” Guy and I exchanged a look. Was this about drugs? No. “Is she into free love and all that?”
It was not just a prurient question. As it turned out, Solange’s sex life was more than relevant. Most runaways were girls, and “it’s not the good little virgins who hop on the Greyhounds.” It was the sexually active, sexually precocious ones. If we didn’t know that, alas, far too many others did, and they were out there, “a vast network of predators,” stalking bus and train stations and certain streets and parks and shelters in towns and cities all over the land. They lay in wait, ready to “befriend” these lost girls and lure them into prostitution. And in fact, some staggering number of runaways ended up turning tricks even before pimps got to them. And if a girl had already got herself into the life, especially if she’d become the property of some adult male, “well, let’s just say this could complicate things.” Who wouldn’t hesitate to call her mother if … “It’s a hard life to live, and an even harder life to leave.”
Once the talk took this turn, my mother had to leave the room, and I began to sniffle, and I thought it was good that Guy was mellow.
One thing I did not understand: if this vast network of predators knew exactly where to go to find these runaway girls, why didn’t the police know, too? In fact, they had to know—so why didn’t they cover those places and get to the runaways before the bad guys did? I mean, even if they couldn’t save them all, they should have been able to save most of them. Or lots of them. Or at least some. Or one. Oh, please, dear God, just one, just one. What was it with the cops, anyway? Why weren’t they all out there rescuing poor girls from pimps instead of coming after us for demonstrating against war and racism and smoking a little harmless marijuana? Oh, this society.
But even the ones who ended up working as prostitutes, we were told, even the majority of those girls could be expected sometime to resurface and be reunited with their families.
Ruled out: that Solange had gone in search of our father. She had by this time joined the rest of us in believing that he was as good as dead and she was better off without him.
