I had more ethereal ways of coping. Casting about for strategies to be safe, I imagined protective clothing, and if you imagine clothing sufficient to stop harm, you imagine armor, and then, if you were me, you’d end up with the full medieval metalware pile. I became preoccupied with armor for a few years and visited it in museums and read up on it in books, imagined being inside it, aspired to try it on. Toward the end of this time a friend of mine became a studio assistant to a New York artist, Alison Knowles, whose husband, Dick Higgins, was from the wealthy family that had established the Higgins Armor Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. I wrote him a letter asking if he could arrange for me to try on armor, making the request cheerful, cerebral, an interesting experiment rather than a fantasy born out of agony.
I never got closer to the armor, and it was an imaginative and not a practical solution. What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you? But maybe being in that cage would have freed me in some way. Or maybe I was in it and both freed and stifled by it: when I think of who I was then and often am now, the hard reflective, defensive surface of armor seems like a good image for it. There’s a way you can throw all your consciousness into that surface, into being witty, vigilant, prepared for attack, or just so stressed out your muscles lock up and your mind locks down. You can forget your own tender depths and how much of life that matters takes place there beneath the surface and the surfaces. It’s still easy to be the armor. We die all the time to avoid being killed.
Images of levitation also arose unbidden as I revisited or imagined attacks; I dreamed often of flying, but I wasn’t asking for that full freedom, just imagining lifting out of reach, however many feet that might be above the head of a pursuer. If I could not have a body too solid to be harmed, an armored body, could I have one too ethereal to be part of the clashes on the surface of the earth?
I imagined that so earnestly that I can still feel and see myself rising up to the level of the street lamp outside my apartment, hovering there in the halo of light in the night, safe not just from predators but from the laws of physics and the rules governing human bodies and perhaps from the vulnerability of being a mortal who had a body and lived on earth and from the weight of all those fears and that hate.
Disappearing Acts
1
One night late in my teens, my friend who’d given me the desk and a friend of hers and I walked down Polk Street, the lower stretch of the street where the bright lights of the cheerful old buildings with late-night bars and stores gave way to taller, blanker facades that cast longer shadows and where the runaway children sold themselves to the men who purchase children. We were walking in the dark, and I was reciting the refrain to a song that had taken possession of me, that I couldn’t get out of my head, that had a power that seemed as though it could be my power, so perhaps I possessed it instead, like an amulet, a spell I could cast, a fuel that could surge through me and make me something unstoppable.
It was “Mercenaries (Ready for War)” by John Cale, the avant-garde musician and sometime rocker who cofounded the Velvet Underground. I must have heard it on the radio because I never owned the record. The lyrics, if you read them, are full of scorn for soldiers, but the rhythm and the voice said something else. Disapproval was the railroad tracks but power was the train rumbling over them; the song had it both ways. The force of the thundering drum and bass and the howling, raging man’s voice intoning “Ready for war” over and over was a soldier’s power, was itself a desire for war, a hypervigilance that was a high, a readiness for anything, an armor made out of attitude. I didn’t want a war, but since there was one, or many, I wanted to be ready for it. Or them. “Just another soldier boy” went another of its refrains.
I didn’t imagine myself as a man but in those moments when I felt swept up by power that surged like confidence and sureness, I didn’t imagine myself as a woman. I wanted to be rugged, invincible, unstoppable, and I didn’t have examples of women who were those things. But I lost myself in the moment and the music; to be myself was to be, it seemed then, outside that power or unable to access it, to be vulnerable not in the sense of openhearted, but prone to harm. I think that a lot of girls and young women have this yearning that is part desire to have a man and part desire to be him, to merge with this force, to be where power is, to be powerful, to cleave unto it in the self or by bringing your body to it as an offering and as a quest for transmission. To be the armor and not what’s vulnerable behind it.
At fifteen, I had fallen in love with punk rock when it was first appearing on the U.S. scene. It gave form and voice to my own fury and explosive energy, in lyrics about defiance and indignation, in music that thumped and galloped. It was at first, in the late 1970s, music for outsiders and the participants were mostly scrawny, idealistic, experimental. Early slam dancing was people harmlessly bouncing into and off each other. Then the nerds were shoved aside for the jocks as a bunch of burly Southern California men’s bands came to dominate what had morphed into hardcore or thrash, and the front of the concert halls and clubs became a gladiatorial arena dominated by strong young men and the occasional woman who would knock you down and trample you if you couldn’t hold your own. It came to seem like another place I didn’t really belong.
But for a while, it spoke for me and to me and through me, and one day late in my teens I walked down the street chanting that song from John Cale’s most punk-influenced album. It was as though I had a choice between being fearless and powerful or being myself and I had no map for where those two things might intersect. They seemed like parallel lines that would run alongside each other forever.
2
Where do you stand? Where do you belong? Those are often questions about political stances or values, but sometimes the question is personal: Do you feel like you have ground to stand on? Is your existence justified in your own eyes, enough that you don’t have to retreat or attack? Do you have a right to be there, to participate, to take up space in the world, the room, the conversation, the historical record, the decision-making bodies, to have needs, wants, rights? Do you feel obliged to justify or apologize or excuse yourself to others? Do you fear the ground being pulled out from under you, the door slammed in your face? Do you not stake a claim to begin with, because you’ve already been defeated or expect to be if you show up? Can you state what you want or need without its being regarded, by yourself or those you address, as aggression or imposition?
What does it mean neither to advance, like a soldier waging a war, nor to retreat? What would it be like to feel that you have that right to be there, when there is nothing more or less than the space you inhabit? What does it mean to own some space and feel that it’s yours all the way down to your deepest reflexes and emotions? What does it mean to not live in wartime, to not have to be ready for war?
Some of it comes from your position in society, and all the usual factors of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and more that come into play, some from a quality for which confidence is too glib a word. Perhaps conviction or faith is better. Faith in yourself and your rights. Faith in your own versions and truth and in your own responses and needs. Faith that where you stand is your place. Faith that you matter. Those people who have it in full seem rare to me, and clear in a way the rest of us aren’t; they know who and where they are, how and when to respond, what they do and don’t owe others. Neither retreating nor attacking, they reside in a place that doesn’t exist for the rest of us, and it’s not where the overconfident who take up too much space and take space away from others reside.
Perhaps I will always live in questions more than answers. What’s yours? Where are you welcome, allowed? How much room is there for you; where do you get cut off, on the street or in the profession or the conversation? All our struggles can be imagined as turf battles, to defend or annex territory, and we can understand the differences between us as being, among other things, about how much space we are allowed or denied, to speak, to participate, to
roam, to create, to define, to win.
One of the struggles I was engaged in when I was young was about whether the territory of my own body was under my jurisdiction or somebody else’s, anybody else’s, everybody else’s, whether I controlled its borders, whether it would be subject to hostile invasions, whether I was in charge of myself. What is rape but an insistence that the spatial rights of a man, and by implication men, extend to the interior of a woman’s body, and that her rights and jurisdiction do not cover even that territory that is herself? Those altercations on the street were about men asserting their sovereignty over me, asserting I was a subject nation. I tried to survive all that by being an unnoticeable nation, a shrinking nation, a stealth nation.
At the same time, I was toiling to appear by becoming a writer, to lay claim to having something to say, to deserve participation in the conversation that was culture, to have a voice, and that meant other contests in other territories. Those came a little after the years when menace on the street wracked me with fear and tension. And I was trying to have a life, including a love life, which meant appearing, attracting, being attracted, and sometimes I enjoyed men, enjoyed my body, my appearance, my time in public. But the war made it all more complicated.
Conversations are another territory where questions arise about who may take up space, who is interrupted or harassed into silence, that condition of occupying no verbal space. At its best, a conversation is a joy and a collaborative construction, building an idea, an insight, sharing experiences; at its worst it’s a battle for territory, and most women have experiences of being pushed out one way or another, or not let in in the first place, or being assumed not to be qualified to participate. Eventually that would become one of my subjects.
3
Sometimes having a body seemed to be the problem, having a body that exposed me to danger and potential harm and also to shame and shortcomings and the problems of how to connect and how to fit in, whatever that meant, whatever feeling I imagined people who were confident about their bodies and their movements and their memberships felt. Having a body of my gender was a vulnerability and shame so vast that I still find myself casting about for defenses, for versions of that armor I dreamed of in my twenties.
I was convinced that my body was a failure. It was a tall, thin, white body, which is supposed to be the best thing to be in terms of how the culture as a whole values and rates female bodies. But I saw my own version of this as a catalogue of wrongnesses and failures and confirmed and potential shame. The rules about women’s bodies were exacting, and you could always measure your distance from the ideal, even if it was not a great distance. And even if you got over your imperfections of form, the realities of biology, of bodily functions and fluids, were always at odds with the feminine ideal, and a host of products and jokes and sneers reminded you of that. Perhaps it’s that a woman exists in a perpetual state of wrongness, and the only way to triumph is to refuse the terms by which this is so.
No one is ever beautiful enough, and everyone is free to judge you. In her memoir Under My Skin, Doris Lessing describes how, when she was a young woman at a dance, a middle-aged stranger told her that she had an almost perfect body but one breast was a third of an inch too high or too low—I can’t remember which, just that a stranger thought her body was under his jurisdiction and announced what must have been a wholly imaginary fault to demonstrate his right and capacity to render judgment and her subjection to it.
Men were always telling me what to do and be; once in my emaciated youth I was walking through North Beach eating a pastry from one of the Italian bakeries when a portly middle-aged man chastised me for eating it because I should be watching my weight. Men told me to smile, to suck their dicks, and when I owned an old car with loose battery cables, men would wander by to tell me what needed fixing when I threw up the hood to wiggle the battery cables, and the ones who spoke were always wrong and never seemed to notice I already knew what I was doing.
The problem isn’t really with bodies, but with the relentless scrutiny to which they’re subjected. The problem is being a woman. Or being a woman subject to men. My once-Catholic mother’s deep shame about the female body’s functions and form had been passed on with vigor, and my father’s tendency to criticize her anatomy and then mine and sometimes those of women passing by in the most clinical terms didn’t help, nor did it that these were not unusual but ordinary parts of a culture that obsessed over bodies and in those days quantified female beauty according to precise measurements and sizes, and told us that the rewards were boundless for meeting them, the punishments for failing endless, and punished all of us anyway, because these were ultimately standards everyone would fail to meet.
And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to hover between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not.
We were trained to please men, and that made it hard to please ourselves. We were trained to make ourselves desirable in ways that made us reject ourselves and our desires. So I fled. My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence. It’s no wonder I was thin, no wonder women were so praised for being thin, for taking up as little room as possible, for hovering on the brink of vanishing, no wonder some of us vanished through undereating like a country ceding territory, an army retreating, until it ceased to exist.
I had a body. I had been a small, wiry child, withdrawn but active in my own pursuits, roaming the hills and climbing trees, and then at thirteen I suddenly grew several inches, and it took many years for my flesh to catch up with my bones. I was five feet seven and less than a hundred pounds when I left home, and then weight came gradually, slowly, enough to push me over to a hundred that first year I was away from home and by my thirties I was more or less average. But for a long time I was unusually thin, not lean like young women who have little fat over their muscle, because I had so little muscle either.
My skeleton was not far from the surface. My iliac crests jutted out so that people sometimes thought I was carrying something in the front pockets of my jeans. I thought of them as pearl-handled revolvers. When I let the bathwater drain out while I lay in the tub a pool formed on my hollow belly. My ribs showed. I had a waist so small a gay man once quipped that I did not have a torso but, like a wasp or a bee, an abdomen and a thorax. It was my friend David Dashiell, and he used the word thorax, and we were friends partly because we could banter like that.
There is a picture taken by the man who was walking with us while I sang “Ready for War” shortly after I moved into the apartment. It’s of me in a gray 1940s suit I wore constantly as my dress-up outfit, or rather of me wearing the suit’s pencil skirt and a man’s vest turned backward and belted into a sort of backless top, without the jacket. I have my back to the camera, I’m pressed up against the wall with its rectangles of molding, head turned to the right, a little hat with a veil over a face that still looks childish, a back that looks vulnerable, unformed, and elbow-length black gloves on. I’m trying to take shelter in my shadow.
The clothing speaks of an attempt to be elegant, sophisticated, to be an adult, to be ready for the world and find a world ready for me, a portrait of all those aspirations of youth. The posture speaks of an attempt to elude and melt away. I’m trying to appear and to disappear at once. The waist of that skirt I measured before I gave it away when I was pretty sure it would never fit again unless I became deathly ill; it was twenty inches.
Being so thin made m
e frail, tired, limited in my energies, easily chilled; maybe it made me more of a target: I was the opposite of robust, and all that punk rock was partly an attempt to imbibe a spirit that would counter the frailty, or perhaps it was that my flesh was frail but my spirit was savage. I sometimes think I fled to the city in my youth because to run in the other direction, to the country or the wilderness, would have required a physical vigor that I didn’t have then. I could walk great distances, I could dance for hours, but I had waves of fatigue that were probably blood-sugar drops when I could hardly stay awake, and I had dizzy spells when I stood up suddenly, and I was often tired.
Being thin is seen as a virtue, as a consequence of discipline, and self-restraint, and so it’s often admired as though it is a sign of character. But it’s often just a sign of the genetic lottery or that phase of youth before the flesh catches up with the bones. Some people insisted that I was so thin because of anorexia or bulimia, eager to make what they envied pathological, undesirable (and there were years of jokes about concentration camp victims and comparisons of me to famine victims, as though my body was itself a disaster zone).
There’s an austerity to thinness, to having a hard body, to being closer to the solidity of bone than the softness of flesh. It’s as though you’re removed from the messy, squishy, leaky business of life, as though you’re looking on from outside, from someplace less mortal, less malleable. As though you disdain mortality and the pleasures of the flesh. It’s an irreproachably stern way to show up. Which is to say that thinness is a literal armor against being reproached for being soft, a word that means both yielding, cushiony flesh and the moral weakness that comes from being undisciplined. And from consuming food and taking up space.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 6