ate.
I loved filling out the chart. I loved noticing what before had been invisible. I seemed to be extracting myself out of oblivion. And I loved best of all when, at the start of each meeting on Monday, I stood in my stocking feet on the scale and the lecturer nudged the wedge of iron along the bar to establish my new weight. 104. 103 and a half. I was presented a black round pin holding a diamond sliver that glinted like a drop of Curie’s radium. I grew so thin that a new hole needed to be gouged in my belt, and then another new hole. I was happier than I’d ever believed I could be. I’d found a power. I’d discovered I could influence my life.
Still, I didn’t confuse the high grades I got at school with actual thought. It was merely performing a good trick, like playing three-dimensional tic-tac-toe. Still, my grades got me accepted into a liberal arts college that had a library reference room lined with faded tapestries. Every night from six p.m. until midnight I sat in one of the creaky, black-painted Windsor chairs and read the assigned books, underlining, copying out, savoring the monastic existence, which felt like virtue incarnate. I sipped scalding coffee with chalky whitener dispensed from a machine in the basement, and, on study breaks ate so many carrots my skin tinged orange.
Then, junior year of college I fell in love with a droll senior, and the anorexia ended. I gave up the charts on which I wrote down everything that I ate. Happiness itself was a bleary drug. For lunch I bought kaiser rolls and fresh sliced provolone cheese at a corner deli and picnicked with my boyfriend on his bed. When I was awarded Phi Beta Kappa I learned the fraternity handshake but didn’t invite my parents to the initiation. I believed that secretly I was still that girl unable properly to add things up because I hadn’t yet kicked shut that door inside me. It was still hanging wide. I was awaiting the signal that I had taken in sufficient information to be allowed to come to my own conclusions, to be a separate person.
In the meantime I remained merged somehow with those around me, agreeable, compliant. I understood that my perspective was often distorted, and that such a person should not draw conclusions. It was as if I had one giant eye and one tiny one, one eye the size of a jar lid and the other the size of a sewing needle’s. I responded with too much enthusiastic intensity to some situations, and at other times missed the crucial ramification and responded with a mechanical, irresponsible nonchalance. At some point in the future when my eyes were the same size, which would happen because I’d taken in sufficient information and had acquired some kind of balance, then I would trust myself to form judgments. I was waiting to have sufficient information to warrant being allowed to come to conclusions. When was enough information enough?
“There’s a garbage-y smell in here,” announced a friend in graduate school, stepping into my apartment for a party.
Only in retrospect did that rankle. Why not take me aside to tell me that, I wondered the next morning. At the time I merely blushed hard, and ran out of my party with the trash.
I was, in my life, in a kind of coma. I believed, as many girls do, that the signals that came from inside were frivolous, half mad, silly, arbitrary, a blinding, burning fountain signifying nothing. I was estranged from myself, a kind of split-off Nostradamus head lurching my way forward in life without benefit of internal, and often bodily, signals. And then I was asked to teach. I was a second-year student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and assigned a literature class. It was late August, sweltering.
I stood before my first-ever session in the turquoise scratchy polyester frilled dress in which I’d attended my sister’s wedding. A pockmarked, smirking boy in the furthest row tilted back on the hind legs of his chair and clicked his pen. A girl in the first row with blonde, shellacked orange-juice-can curls peered at me, a blank notebook open on her desk. I was teaching Macbeth. I’d reread Macbeth.
“Macbeth is a man at war with his own conscience,” I suddenly announced to my students, and to myself. “There’s no feeling safe, for him!” Not knowing how to teach, I had anxiously abandoned my notes and begun to lecture, to conjure. Knives floating in the air, bloody hands that choke the throat of their own mistress, a ghost sitting silently at a party, a voice announcing, “Macbeth hath murdered sleep!”—“Why, this was just the Bronx!” I exclaimed, glimpsing it now for the first time. It was where I’d grown up. It was people disclaiming the meaning of their actions, constantly. It was the language of your inner reality divorced from what you were willing to acknowledge.
I recalled my sister pinching my cheeks so hard between pincerlike fingers that my skin throbbed for half an hour afterwards, even as she smiled the whole time in my face and I convinced myself this was love. And my mother fretting over Anita’s fleshiness with a fascinated concern that seemed to have a knife blade hidden inside it.
Shakespeare’s play was all about the disparity between the felt truth and the one publicly enacted, I heard my own voice say. It was the refused truth of things exploded outward. It was self-estrangement enacted on the world. It was another way of being a doofus. Of course the witches offered temptations! The world will do that. It will offer lots of glimmering rewards if only you will ignore what you know is true.
The boy clicked his pen, but less. The girl had taken a note or two, nodding slowly.
Walking uphill on Jefferson Street after class, I thought: So, in teaching literature, how you register the emotional valences matters. You can’t afford to be comatose. The institution—the university—values the felt sense of things! Has to! There’s no teaching English without it. “You’re beating a dead horse!” complained some students next class, those who could see nothing in rereading. You think this horse is dead? It’s panting! It’s sweating! It’s laid out before you but its heart is pounding! You think I’m beating it? Stories, I realized, were like McDonald’s wrappers to many of these students—to be emptied and tossed. And I could show them otherwise. I could show them lines to read between, with incandescent meanings clustered there, and sunken compartments in which spirits lay. For the first time in my entire life, I knew I knew something.
After that, I couldn’t help but become more attuned to my own internal signs. Was this the beginning of adulthood?—the signals finally making sense? Because the pangs of hope, the jolts of envy, the stinging rasp when mocked—now instead of seeming the nonsensical knocks and pings of life’s engine, they rapped out a pattern of obvious significance.
In November my students read the Metamorphoses, and walking along the deep green corridor after my class, it occurred to me that Nostradamus was an incarnation of the sacred poet Orpheus. My class had just read that the poet’s chopped-off head, floating down the river after he is slain, retains its mystic power: “his tongue, / Lifeless, still murmured sorrow, and the banks / Gave sorrowing reply.” Just like the physician/astrologer who continued to prophesy! So, a song is lodged in the body itself! I’d acted as if my own body were in fact a McDonald’s wrapper, useful just to keep me intact.
I’d always assumed that the Creature Feature prophet was a warning image of the hyperdeveloped mind—as if to be an intellectual, and especially a female intellectual, meant having to foreswear the other ordinary fulfillments: children, sensuality, a normal home life. I thought women had to choose. Now I saw the prophet as someone who traveled between the physical and the metaphysical, which were not unrelated, as I’d assumed. They might even be in communion, might even sometimes be the same. The body—might the body itself actually be a divining rod, of sorts, helping you to find where treasure was buried, help you to understand what things meant?
Still, despite these glimmers of awareness, it was a hard time, that first year I taught. My internal signals kept bringing me into conflict with those I loved. No wonder I hadn’t wanted to read them! Now I had to confront the friends who intimidated me, or at least my attraction to them. And I had to confront as well my tendency to put myself second, my assumption I didn’t need to be seen—I’d been wrong about that. Another mistake. I
