They had hardwood stools in the studios, and stacking file boxes no one had opened in years. I wore a cloth cap when I took them, and my no-nonsense expression. I was so calm that one of the professors helped me clear paper off the third one. He was distracted, discussing Jackson Pollock with a very pale woman whose hands were marked with tusche. “Glad they finally decided to get these out of here” was all he said to me, never once looking up into my face. My anger came up from my stomach with an acid taste. I went back for his clipboard and papers, but his desk was locked and my file broke on the rim. In compensation I took the silk lining out of the pockets of the corduroy coat he’d left thrown over a stool. The silk made a lemongrass sachet I gave my mother for her birthday, and every time I saw him in that jacket I smiled.
My sociology professor had red hair, forty shelves of books, four children, and an entirely cordial relationship with her ex-husband. When she invited me to dinner, I did not understand what she wanted with me. I watched her closely and kept my hands in my pockets. She talked about her divorce and the politics in the department, how she had worked for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and demonstrated for civil rights in Little Rock in ’65. There were lots of books she could lend me, she insisted, but didn’t say exactly which ones. She poured me Harveys Bristol Cream, trailing her fingers across my wrist when I took the glass. Then she shook her head nervously and tried to persuade me to talk about myself, interrupting only to get me to switch topics as she moved restlessly from her rocking chair to a bolster to the couch beside me. She did not want to hear about my summers working in the mop factory, but she loved my lies about hitchhiking cross-country.
“Meet me for lunch on Monday,” she insisted, while her eyes behind her glasses kept glancing at me, turning away and turning back. My palms were sweaty, but I nodded yes. At the door she stopped me, and put her hand out to touch my face.
“Your family is very poor, aren’t they?”
My face froze and burned at the same time. “Not really,” I told her, “not anymore.” She nodded and smiled, and the heat in my face went down my body in waves.
I didn’t want to go on Monday but made myself. Her secretary was confused when I asked about lunch. “I don’t have anything written down about it,” she said, without looking up from her calendar.
After class that afternoon the sociology professor explained her absence with a story about one of her children who had been bitten by a dog, “but not seriously. Come on Thursday,” she insisted, but on Thursday neither she nor her secretary were there. I stood in the doorway to her office and tilted my head back to take in her shelves of books. I wanted to pocket them all, but at the same time I didn’t want anything of hers. Trembling, I reached and pulled out the fattest book on the closest shelf. It was a hardbound edition of
Sadism in the Movies,
with a third of the pages underlined in red. It fit easily in my backpack, and I stopped in the Student Union bookstore on the way back to the dorm to buy a Hershey bar and steal a bright blue pen.
On the next Monday, she apologized again, and again invited me to go to lunch the next day. I skipped lunch but slipped in that afternoon to return her book, now full of my bright blue comments. In its spot on the shelf there was now a collection of the essays of Georges Bataille, still unmarked. By the time I returned it on Friday, heavy blue ink stains showed on the binding itself.
Eventually we did have lunch. She talked to me about how hard it was to be a woman alone in a college town, about how all the male professors treated her like a fool, and yet how hard she worked. I nodded.
“You read so much,” I whispered.
“I keep up,” she agreed with me.
“So do I,” I smiled.
She looked nervous and changed the subject but let me walk her back to her office. On her desk, there was a new edition of Malinowski’s
The Sexual Life of Savages
. I laid my notebook down on top of it, and took them both when I left. Malinowski was a fast read. I had that one back a day later. She was going through her date book looking for a free evening we could have dinner. But exams were coming up so soon. I smiled and nodded and backed out the door. The secretary, used to seeing me come and go, didn’t even look up.
I took no other meals with professors; didn’t trust myself in their houses. But I studied their words, gestures, jokes, and quarrels to see just how they were different from me. I limited my outrage to their office shelves, working my way through their books one at a time, carefully underlining my favorite passages in dark blue ink—occasionally covering over their own faded marks. I continued to take the sociology professor’s classes but refused to stay after to talk, and when she called my name in the halls, I would just smile and keep walking. Once she sat beside me in a seminar and put her hand on the back of my neck where I was leaning back in my chair. I turned and saw she was biting her lips. I remembered her saying, “Your family is very poor, aren’t they?” I kept my face expressionless and looked forward again. That was the afternoon I made myself a pair of harem pants out of the gauze curtains from the infirmary.
My parents came for graduation, Mama taking the day off from the diner, my father walking slow in his back brace. They both were bored at the lunch, uncomfortable and impatient to have the ceremony be over so we could pack my boxes in the car and leave. Mama kept pulling at the collar of my robe while waiting for the call for me to join my class. She was so nervous she kept rocking back on her heels and poked my statistics professor with her elbow as he tried to pass.
“Quite something, your daughter,” he grinned as he shook my mama’s hand. Mama and I could both tell he was uncomfortable, so she just nodded, not knowing what to say. “We’re expecting great things of her,” he added, and quickly joined the other professors on the platform, their eyes roaming over the parents headed for the elevated rows at the sides and back of the hall. I saw my sociology professor sharing a quick sip from the dean’s pocket flask. She caught me watching, and her face flushed a dull reddish gray. I smiled as widely as ever I had, and held that smile through the long slow ceremony that followed, the walk up to get my diploma, and the confused milling around that followed the moment when we were all supposed to throw our tassels over to the other side. Some of the students threw their mortarboards drunkenly into the air, but I tucked mine under my arm and found my parents before they had finished shaking the cramps out of their legs.
“Sure went on forever,” Mama whispered, as we walked toward the exit.
The statistics professor was standing near the door telling a tall black woman, “Quite something, your son. We’re expecting great things of him.”
I laughed and tucked my diploma in Mama’s bag for the walk back to the dormitory. People were packing station wagons, U-haul trailers, and bulging little sedans. Our Pontiac was almost full and my face was starting to ache from smiling, but I made a quick trip down into the dormitory basement anyway. There was a vacuum cleaner and two wooden picture frames I’d stashed behind the laundry-room doors that I knew would fit perfectly in the Pontiac’s trunk. Mama watched me carry them up but said nothing. Daddy only laughed and revved the engine while we swung past the auditorium. At the entrance to the campus I got them to pull over and look back at the scattered buildings. It was a rare moment, and for a change my hunger wasn’t bothering me at all. But while my parents waited, I climbed out and pulled the commemorative roses off the welcome sign. I got back in the car and piled them into my mama’s lap.
“Quite something, my daughter,” she laughed, and hugged the flowers to her breast. She rocked in her seat as my stepfather gunned the engine and spun the tires pulling out. I grinned while she laughed.
“Quite something.”
It was the best moment I’d had in four years.
Monkeybites
I
n college I contemplated a career in biology for one long year, and rats—fat gray ones with minuscule wires in their skulls or slender white ones trailing colored threads to mark the buried electrodes. The animal labs were in a cinder-block building set away from the campus. I went there like a pilgrim to stare into the cages and finger the plush on a monkey’s neck, the monkey bent to a frame that kept his razor teeth from my flesh. After a while the teeth were gone with the larynx, and he only spat when I came to see him.
It hurt me that he could not bite; the rats at least kept their teeth. I told myself that the security of a career in science demanded sacrifice. I would have to get used to rats with wires and monkeys without teeth. But it was hard, hard. I hated the whitewashed walls and the raw, shrinking creatures under my hands as much as the implacable mechanical motions of the professors in rubber gloves. After I got the job of cleaning up the lab, my dreams were full of monkeys’ teeth and the sibilant scratches of rats’ nails on Formica counters. On those rare nights when Toni and I could sleep over at a friend’s house in the city, I would wake shuddering, feeling her arms around me like the wires that trussed the monkeys.
“You are one restless woman,” Toni would tell me in the morning, showing me the scratches I’d made on her arms and back. “Can’t lie still to save your life.” More out of guilt than desire, I’d kiss her shoulders and slide down between her legs to ease with my tongue what I could not cure with words. I felt about oral sex with Toni the way my roommate in the dorm felt about transcendental meditation. At the point at which my neck began to ache and my fingers spasm on her thighs, I would begin to feel righteous. The longer it took to get her off, and the greater the ache in my neck and back, the farther away I would go in my mind until finally it was as if I were not making love to Toni but to myself. I became a point of concentration, icy and hot at the same time. When she began to babble those love words that meant she was just about to come, my own thighs would shake sympathetically. I rarely came making love to Toni, but nothing made me feel so balanced as an hour or two pushing my tongue between her swollen labia. It was expiation and penance. It was redemption.
But for Toni, sex was a matter of commitment; making love was a bond itself. She had her own cage, her own need for expiation, and she hated the way I could go away into my own head, the distance between us that she could not cross. She wanted a bridge across my nerves, a connection I could not break at will. Hanging out in the lab with me, she’d tease and flirt, laughing at the other lab assistants and the carefully serious expressions with which they’d clean rat shit off their fingers. The truth was Toni loved the lab, the perfectly square cinder-block rooms, the walls of cages, and the irritable way I’d stalk around with my broom and dustpan. She loved to follow me over in the evening to watch me sweep up the little gray turds and chopped-up computer printouts that lined the bottoms of the cages. Sipping from her omnipresent thermos of vodka and orange juice, she’d throw cashews at the bald-headed monkeys and tease me about how my ass moved when I bent over with my pan.
Once I’d gotten so angry I’d grabbed her thermos and threatened to kick her out of “my” lab.
“Oh sweetheart, you don’t want me to go,” she’d told me, and tried to coax me up on one of the big empty lab tables beside her.
“Have a sip. Have a little smoke. Tell me how you always wanted to find somebody like me to tease you, and love you, and suck on your nipples till you’re howling at the moon.”
“Oh yeah. Uh huh. I just always knew some black-eyed woman was gonna come along dying to fuck me silly in front of a bunch of toothless monkeys.”
“Prescient. That’s what you were.”
“Desperate, maybe. That’s what I was when I let you talk me into bringing you over here.”
“Oh, girl.” She held a joint in her left hand and using her right hand only, she pulled out a match, struck it against the pack, lit the joint, took a puff, and then held it out to me.
“Have a smoke and lighten up. I’m the one on your side, you know.”
Her mouth was wide and soft, the right side turned up a little in that way made my hips feel loose. Above that mouth her black eyes were shining and bright. Sometimes when I wanted to make her feel good, I would make my own eyes widen, intensify my gaze, and give her the look of love she was giving me at that moment. For me it was lust; only in her eyes did it become love. But she was on my side, I knew that. Toni was old-school. For all that she was my age and just another scholarship student in a blue-jean jacket, she was and knew herself to be a bar dyke with a bar dyke’s studied moves, the low and sauntering strut of a great fighter and a better lover. She had, too, a bar dyke’s rough and ready talent for getting me angry and then charming me out of it. Every time she played that game and made those moves, all the anger went out of me.
“Yeah,” I told her, looking into her soft eyes. “You’re on my side.”
She drew the smoke deep into her lungs and smiled drunkenly. “Girl, girl. You act like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Keeping your eyes down and your voice so soft. Wearing those silly-assed sandals and damn fool embroidered denim blouses. Always telling those drawling lies about all your cousins, and grand-daddies, and uncles . . .”
“They an’t lies.”
“Then they should be.”
“And you.” She was making me angry again. “Who do you think you are?”
She pulled her legs up, ran one hand down her heavily muscled thigh, arched her back to stretch, and gave me another of her slow wandering looks, her eyes sliding up from my crotch to my face, heating my skin as she went.
“Me?” she drawled. “Me? Why, I’m just the daughter of the man with the smallest used car lot in Pinellas County and a mama who an’t been sober since the day I was conceived. They wanted me to go to college and make something of myself, so here I am. Trouble is they an’t got the first notion that all I really want is to be the sun and the moon and the stars to some butter-tongued girl in silly-assed sandals and an embroidered denim blouse.”