It would have ended there, except that, for whatever peculiar reason, Franklin liked me. Later he would say, “I fell in love with you from the moment I saw you.” At first, I thought it was only his romanticism talking, a confusion between lust and love. But later, I came to believe him.
(I am sentimental about only two things in this world: Franklin and Lorrie Ann.)
He began to hang around outside my office, to pop his head in and ask me questions, to stay late working, knowing I stayed late working. This kind of puppyish interest, if anything, made him less attractive to me. Indeed, I had to be wary because most men who were interested in me were masochists who wanted me to flagellate them in ways both
physical and spiritual, which was, perhaps surprisingly, not in my line at all. If anything, I sought the reverse: men who would overpower me, who could make me feel small and frail and helpless, and for whose love I had to clamor and beg, whine and snivel. They were usually dangerously self-involved, the men I made lovers, one a Russian novelist with a recurrent alcohol problem and delusions of grandeur but with a remarkable and encyclopedic knowledge of Husserl, another a tortured African American painter (quite talented) who found his very interest and indeed love for me, a white girl, to be yet another form of his debasement and mental colonization by the white man. In short, Franklin was just not my type.
And then one day, Franklin asked me out.
“Remember the day I asked you out?” he often asks me, even now, years later.
“Yes,” I say.
“I was so nervous.”
“You didn’t show it,” I say.
And he didn’t. He came into my office, casually leaning against the door frame. It was about eight at night, and he had been monitoring me, I suppose, and must have known that I had taken no dinner break.
“You are going to have dinner with me,” he announced.
“I am?”
“I really hope so,” he said, his brow lifted, his smile wide.
And so he, feigning nonchalance, as though none of this were planned, escorted me out of the building and around the corner to a not-inexpensive Italian place that had candles on the tables and where I ordered the farfalle and asparagus with gorgonzola cream sauce, and where he ordered a steak, and where we drank a bottle of wine.
Our rapport was not immediate. In fact, there were several points during dinner when I zoned out completely and returned to the conversation with no idea of what he was saying. He was speaking, of course,
about cuneiform, which should have been interesting to me, but Franklin was so good, so orderly, and so polite that it was difficult to tell at first that he was brilliant. But he was.
After dinner, we returned to campus. “I’ve got to stop by my office,” Franklin said, and, unthinkingly, I waited with him while he unlocked his door. Inside, all was lit by candles. There was a bundle of lilies on the desk.
“For you,” he said, handing them to me without any kind of fanfare.
“For me?”
He nodded eagerly. On the floor there was a blanket spread out, another bottle of wine, a plate set with cheeses and crackers, a box of chocolates. Some kind of chamber music was playing softly, what I later identified as a concerto by Fauré. I was so surprised by all this that I didn’t know what to do but laugh, not derisively, but nervously, girlishly, hiding my face in the lilies. I had never had anyone make such a gesture before. Not in my whole life. Not even when I went to prom.
“Will you … stay and chat?” he asked.
And so I began to take Franklin seriously as a suitor. And as time went on, I would take him more and more seriously, as a suitor, as a scholar, as a man.
When we began working together on the Inanna project, I worried we would wreck things by spending too much time together, but we seemed unable to disappoint each other. How often had I sat across a table from some man or other and realized, in the elision of the moment, that they were about to disappoint me terribly?
I remember once finding several Polaroids of a naked woman in my mother’s nightstand. I had no idea who the woman was; she was a stranger, someone I had never seen before, yet she was clearly posed on my mother’s bed—I recognized the tiny rosebuds of the bedspread. The first two were of the woman alone, and then there was another one of she and my mother, both naked, and artfully kissing each other, in the
watched, passionless way familiar to firmly heterosexual women participating in polite threesomes. The photographer, I guessed, had been my stepfather, Paddy. I must have been around eleven when I found these photos, and I remember, not feelings of shock or scandal, but a sickening recognition of something I had known all along, this awareness of my parents’ base dirtiness. I slid the photos quietly back in the drawer, imagining my mother and Paddy pathetically showing these three washed-out Polaroids to one another after the “kids” were put to bed: my two wild little brothers and me, sleeping in a heap on our air mattress. This feeling of resigned disappointment, a kind of contained disgust, was present throughout the rest of my life in almost all of my human relationships. Always, people were turning out to be a bit less than they could have been, a bit more what you had uncharitably suspected. Even I was less than I had hoped I would be, and it was Lorrie Ann, in large part, who made me aware of this, not through her own perfection, but because she was the only witness to the thing I regret most in my life.
When I was twelve, Lorrie Ann and I were pretending to be best friends with this other girl, Meghan Farmer. With a callousness that is common in twelve-year-old girls, but would be shocking in adult women, we verbally agreed that our friendship with her was “just pretend.” Truthfully, the idea had been mine and Lorrie Ann had fought me, stubborn as a donkey, every step of the way, but together we lured Meghan into the friendship, pooling our money to buy a Best Friends Forever necklace with three interlocking charms from Claire’s at the mall in order that she be part of a dance routine we were doing for a talent show. The three of us choreographed a horribly sexual bump-and-grind routine to TLC’s “Waterfalls,” which miraculously won first place.
Also, we admired Meghan’s breasts, which were already huge. Unfortunately, the more we got to know Meghan, the more we didn’t like her. She wasn’t very good about brushing her teeth. I had also noticed that she seemed to wear the same pair of underwear for multiple days in a
row. She loved to make the “Whoot-whoot!” sound for no reason. At first this had seemed festive and exciting, a kind of wonderful conversational punctuation mark, but after a while, it was just loud.
In any event, Lorrie Ann and I had agreed to meet Meghan at Auntie Anne’s Pretzels at the mall, and so, since Lorrie Ann and I lived just a few blocks apart from each other, she was supposed to come by my house around two so that we could walk the mile and a half to the mall together.
It was fall, which, frankly, is almost meaningless in Southern California. But I remember that it was fall because I remember that my little brother Alex, the youngest one, had just had his second birthday the weekend before. I also remember that it was a Sunday because the reason that we couldn’t all meet in the morning was because Lorrie Ann was at church.
Normally my mother didn’t work Sundays, and so I had counted on her being home to watch the boys. We had a sort of informal understanding: my mother absolutely took advantage of me as free help with the boys, abandoning them to my care six days out of seven, and in exchange I was entitled to be as rude and demanding as I wanted. It was also understood that she would keep me in makeup and nice clothes, or the nicest we could afford. Since my mother was slender, we often shared clothes anyway, and it was from her that I developed a taste for fine fabrics. In any event, when my mother had unexpectedly announced that morning that she and Paddy were taking the day to go to the beach and “rekindle their romance,” I was infuriated.
“Why are you going to the beach?” I asked. “It’s fucking cold! It’s almost winter!”
“We’re going to the Fun Zone. We’re going to ride the Ferris wheel and play skee ball. We hardly even see each other anymore, Mia.”
“I don’t care!” I said. “I don’t care if you two never fuck again!”
My mother was calmly putting on makeup in the bathroom, and I watched her in the mirror from the doorway. She finished with her eyebrows, then turned and sat on the pot to pee.
“You can go with your friends to the mall another day.”
I felt Paddy move behind me in the hall, walking swiftly, just the current of air as he passed. He and I hardly ever spoke. I watched my mother pee, thinking that every year she began to look more and more porcine, her fake-blond curls more and more reminiscent of Miss Piggy.
“You know who you really never see? Your sons. Why did you even have them? You obviously don’t care about them.”
I heard Paddy crack a beer in the kitchen. Alex and Max were watching
Barney
in the living room. They watched a lot of TV in those days, and the glowing screen kept them in an almost perpetual coma.
“You think you’re all grown up,” my mother said, wiping herself. “But you’re not. You’re just not, Mia. You don’t understand the adult world.”
I laughed, a big fake laugh then, a stage laugh. “God,” I said, “you really think you’re an adult, don’t you?”
“I do,” my mother said, yanking up her jeans. “Because I am.”
I leaned farther into the bathroom, getting my head close to hers, so that she jerked back. I breathed in her face. “Poor thing,” I said. “You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re just like a teenager playing pretend at being a grown-up.”
Her mouth opened, but she said nothing.
“Have you figured out yet that Paddy doesn’t really love you?”
“That’s enough, Mia,” my mother said.
“Oh, how cute,” I said, pulling back so I was no longer quite so close to her face, but instead leaning in the doorway. “You still think he does.”
“I’m leaving,” she announced, pursing her lips so that faint frown lines appeared in her artificially preserved skin.
“Of course you are,” I said, swinging away from the doorway and stalking along the wooden floor of the hallway, smacking the floorboards with my bare feet, before collapsing on the black leather couch with my brothers.
As my mother passed me on her way to the front door, she called out for Paddy. “Are you ready?”
I was grateful when they’d gone.
Except, a few hours later, when the boys got hungry for lunch, I realized that there wasn’t really any food in the house. The only money I had was the ten dollars of my allowance. The supermarket really wasn’t far, perhaps a mile at the most. But we didn’t have a double stroller, and taking Max and Alex anywhere was a huge ordeal. In particular, Alex, excited but also confused by his birthday the previous weekend, had decided he wanted nothing but cake.
“Cake!” he screamed.
“We can’t have cake,” I said.
“CAKE!!!!”
“We can’t have cake because your mother is a vicious, selfish alcoholic,” I told him. “What about a pickle?”
“No,” Alex wailed. “No!”
I looked in the fridge some more. “What about a slice of bread with yummy ketchup on it?”
“NO!!!!! CAKE!!!!!!!”
“No more screaming,” I said. “What about …” I trailed off. I remember I was looking in the freezer and seeing that we had frozen peaches. I was wondering if maybe I could make something out of the frozen peaches and Bisquick and water that might be cake-ish, or at least cake-ish enough to fool a two-year-old. But just then Alex bit me, hard, on the thigh just below the hem of my jean shorts, breaking the skin. I screamed and started hitting him on the top of the head to try to make him let go. When he finally drew back, his mouth was smeared with my blood.
“Cake!” he screamed.
“NO!” I yelled, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him into our room. Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t dislocate his shoulder. I didn’t know what I was doing; I had no plan. I remember he was wearing nothing but a diaper, and I wanted to spank him, but everything was happening too fast for me to take off the diaper. I threw Alex facedown on our air mattress, and I grabbed a wire hanger from the floor, and I
began beating him with it, whipping him across the back as he screamed. Max watched from the doorway, sucking his thumb.
It was this scene that Lorrie Ann walked in on, when she thought she was coming to meet me to walk to the mall. When I saw her I froze, the hanger still upraised in the air.
And so Lorrie Ann knew exactly how much less I was than what I could have been, how far I had fallen from the mark. Lorrie Ann knew and, somehow, went on loving me.
We never spoke of what had happened. Mutely, she helped me apply Neosporin to Alex’s back and to my thigh, and without discussion we pooled our money and took Max and Alex both out for pizza at Gina’s over on Iris. They loved pizza. They still do. We didn’t notify Meghan Farmer of the change in plans, and that day when we stood her up at the mall was the marker of the beginning of the end of our threesome, which was later punctuated by Meghan hurling her portion of the friendship necklace at me on the playground as I shouted, “At least I wash
my
vagina!”
And yet, no matter how many times I steeled myself, pitted my gut, prepared for Franklin to suddenly reveal himself as selfish, as small hearted, as foolish or puerile, he always failed to say what I expected him to say, or do what I expected him to do. I never stopped being surprised by his goodness, just as I could not stop myself from being surprised by Lorrie Ann’s goodness. I held both of them in a fierce and irrational esteem that owed more to the veneration of the collector than the easy gratitude of a friend. They were my trophies, my prizes, my miniature gods. I did not pursue my relationship with either for personal reasons, but because I sincerely believed they were the two best specimens of humanity I had yet to run across on the planet.
I knew too that I was not worthy of them, but then, I had not been worthy of Yale either, worthy of any of my accomplishments. I knew full well that I had stolen them, stolen all the beauty of my life, stolen
scholarship itself, and I had resolved simply to be very careful that no one find out. Even in my most genuine moments there was a whiff of artificiality, a tremor that belied the force with which I was pretending to be myself.