by Deborah Emin
When I returned, I found Charles waiting outside the dormitory for me.
It was cold outside and I was so tired. He wanted me to come back with him to the apartment but I told him no. I needed to stay on campus and get up early to work and to run.
He put his arms around me. Talking for him sometimes is hard. It is as if someone had told him never to say a word. But then it all spilled out of him. I felt like he removed the cork just for me.
It was like he had been running and felt the release from himself that running can give.
He apologized and apologized. He told me how horrible he felt and how empty the place felt without me in it. He did go on and on and for some reason I do believe him and I do love him and I think he just did what he said he did—gave into the temptation because it was sitting right there on the table and he always saw me writing in it and . . .
He had a present for me. He knew how much I loved his bomber jacket and would wear it when he didn’t. He and I have almost the same birthday. His is April 24 and mine is April 25. But he said my birthday was too far off.
He got out this huge box and inside it was a bomber jacket for me. I couldn’t believe it. I had to try it on right then. It fit perfectly and I started to cry.
It was my birthday, Christmas and Hanukkah all rolled into one. He didn’t mean it, I could see it. He didn’t mean to be mean.
My Handsome Harry. I love you so.
Date: Tuesday, 10/14/69
I have discovered a love for my pottery class. We’re all women in the class, and Prof. Calderon is an extremely cool person. So different from any teacher I’ve had.
I like the way she gets to the heart of things. Being solely in the company of women is great.
She is also very dramatic and attractive. Not like Eileen is dramatic because she is a performer. She is dramatic and powerful because of how she is so in tune with her subject matter and how it affects her life.
She’s not like Virginia Woolf either. Prof. Calderon comes across as being free, without cares about what anyone thinks. I believe it has to do with her own love of her sexuality. The more I study Virginia Woolf the more this weight attaches to her. Not the weight of boredom, but of oppression. She felt it so deeply.
Also, I don’t know, was Virginia Woolf ever lazy, did she ever feel like being nothing other than a slug for days on end? I need to read more of her work, but I sense that it was very hard to live up to the standards she set for herself.
But it isn’t just this classroom full of women that has me caught up. I guess it is that we discuss things I never would have been comfortable discussing before. Feminism wasn’t a greatly appreciated idea where I come from. It conjured women who burned their bras, didn’t shave their legs and might of all things be a lesbian. I realize that was a caricature but it was a strong enough one to make none of us talk about it, ever. It wasn’t worth being branded with that identity.
Here at the College, there are some really strident women who people in Skokie would prefer not to know about. They aren’t just loud and angry but talk about men and confront them with things that would drive the men I know at home crazy. And out of the room and down the road and as far away from them as possible.
Annette, who is in Prof. Calderon’s class is one of the more strident ones. She is always posting signs for rallies, coffee house meetings. Lectures. I don’t know how she has time to study but she does and does well.
She looks like a large magnet that attracts everything in her path. Whatever she has eaten, whatever she has read, wherever she has put herself, all of it clings to her.
However, when she talks, she is clear as a bell in what she believes. In Prof. Calderon’s class, it is her voice I listen for when the topic of feminism comes up, which it does often. Maybe because she is in the room.
I used to blush whenever she spoke. Some of her friends, like Julie, also chime in and they have what I call a united vision. They believe exactly the same things and talk about it in exactly the same language.
I’ve never run across this type of friendship between women before. In some ways when they speak it is like watching a play.
Prof. Calderon used the words truth and beauty the other day. I think it was in reference to the Keats poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
She was describing a technique, funny how I can’t recall the specifics of this, but as soon as the words left her mouth, first Annette and then Julie spoke about how traditional forms of female beauty have been sold to women in order to enslave them.
I probably am grossly misrepresenting their ideas here. I can’t yet describe how they enter into these talks, almost like bullies, except that they’re not. They say some of the most thought provoking things I have heard, and then make me uncomfortable with how angry they are at men.
Maybe reading Virginia Woolf in conjunction with these experiences has forced me to reconsider things in ways I hadn’t thought about and for reasons that I’m not sure I understand.
For example, and this bothers me more than Annette being angry at men. I see her point often. It’s that when I look to the past, I see how not that long ago, women’s lives were god awful compared to how we live today.
Woolf describes Jane Austen writing in her room and having to hide her writing so that no one sees it. Her writing was a secret and she would never travel beyond the world she saw outside her windows.
Here we are in our classes, planning to do things in the world, while Jane Austen wrote novels she never knew would alter so many women’s lives.
I read this back to myself and I know I’m not clear at all.
I know I lived in that kind of fog in high school. I also knew my life would change. Jane Austen didn’t think hers would change and it didn’t. Maybe I don’t really deserve all that I have been given.
Can anyone help me with this problem? In the Keats poem, there’s the image of those frozen people on that vase, dancing but caught dancing in that one pose never to move again. I believe they felt the joy of it, as if there were no tomorrow. So was Keats correct when he wrote: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty and that is all ye need to know?”
Because I don’t know.
In high school, the focus was on what things meant. We never learned how anything was made. The message, the message, that was what we had to be able to understand. Our classes became battlegrounds over meaning without us ever knowing for certain if our arguments meant anything. We enjoyed the battle.
Here, arguments turn into something far more serious. Those engaged in them seem to care personally about whether you agree with them.
Even when the things they argue about are as silly as the kind of person they believe a certain professor to be. They ridicule Prof. Loomis, our Philosophy teacher for example. They make fun of his two suits and three sweaters and one tie. They make jokes about how much underwear he owns. About how he combs his hair to hide the baldness, his one form of vanity. To them, he represents a certain type of authority figure who disdains luxury for the pure pursuit of knowledge. They find this old fashioned and paternalistic.
His clothing and austerity don’t bother me. I appreciate him for being a repository of thought and study. That inside that clothing, his being has stored up many, many years of study and organized it so he could teach it to us.
His class, however, never makes me think the way Prof. Calderon’s class does. In his class, I am the student. In hers I feel more like, what? Not really a student in the traditional sense.
In her extravagant clothing, the many-colored scarves, the light colored and then dark colored layers of fabric that cover her, in the perfumes she wears and the multiple pieces of jewelry she created for herself, I see, I guess, a messenger of some kind.
A form who comes to us to bring news of something else than what we hear from the rest of the world. I know that sounds very radical coming from me. Maybe it�
�s not true and utterly worthless as an idea. It’s only my way of saying that her class has taken over a part of my thought process that is escorting me to places I don’t know anything about, yet.
Date: Wednesday, 10/15/69
Charles, Tony and I were hanging out at the apartment tonight. I don’t usually pay attention to the things they talk about—sports, bands, drugs, sports, politics, sports. Charles and I have a completely different repertoire of topics.
Tony, to me, is a mental midget. I never talk to him about anything except to ask him to pass the salt or help me carry the groceries up the stairs.
He and Charles worked on their stage set assignment tonight on the big table in the living room. I was doing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen after our dinner.
Tony asked Charles why he didn’t act anymore. I forgot that Charles had dropped out of the theater program and became a political science major when he returned to the College. He kept his hand in the game, as he put it, by taking scene building classes. He enjoys helping with the production of the plays but not the acting.
Charles took a long time to answer Tony. I thought he might never have an answer to the question. I sure was eager to hear the answer though. It surprised me.
“I had a hard enough time knowing who I was or am most days so that going on the stage to be someone else and then to have to find me for the rest of the day became too upsetting. It began to undermine my whole personality. You know?”
He turned those spotlight blue eyes onto Tony. Tony shook his head in total understanding of what Charles said. That surprised me too.
Maybe Tony wasn’t the mental midget I thought he was. Turns out, he’s Tony, buddy for life. I witnessed a moment between the two of them that I rarely get to see. I understood from that exchange why Tony was always around. For me, too, their exchange gave me more insight into who Charles is.
After Tony left, we went to bed. Now I am up because of what happened in the bedroom. Not the sex part, but the questions Charles asked me.
He had two requests as he held me in his arms after we made love. The first one was if I would go with him to Washington, DC for an anti-war march in the middle of November. The second question was would I please come with him to his parents’ house for Thanksgiving.
The last request made more sense to me than the first one. But both requests made me roll over and away from him. Not because I was angry as he thought at first but because I fell into a hole at that moment that I hadn’t known I wanted to fall into.
When I listened to him talking with Tony, part of me wondered where I fit into his life. I didn’t yet have the courage to ask that question. Now there was an answer to the question I couldn’t ask.
Mr. Charles Foster Payne became a much larger presence to me as we talked in bed. His size didn’t increase so much as his importance in my life now emerged to be greater than I had known. I felt tricked into loving him and told him so.
I screamed at him, “You’ve tricked me into loving you! You’ve made me need to be here with you. I know you CFP. You are a magician, aren’t you? It doesn’t matter what effect you have on my equilibrium, does it?”
He thought I was joking, play acting to show him how pleased I was. I let him think that.
I don’t know why I should go with him to the march. Why would his family be interested in meeting me?
I write to my parents every week, but I never mention Charles. How could his parents know about me?
How can we stay with his parents, at their house? Then they’ll know that we sleep together, won’t they?
I can’t believe this is happening. It’s too fast.
I told him finally that I needed time to decide if I could go to DC or New York City. I’ve never been to either place before.
I don’t know what to do. Why is this so difficult? It is keeping me up most of the night while he sleeps without a care in the world.
Date: Thursday, 10/16/69
Today I skipped classes for the first time in my entire life. I can’t believe all the things that happened during this one day.
I met someone new. I found out things about the Town that I never knew. We, at the College, live comfortably and lack for nothing, while just down the hill from the College, not that far away, live many, many people with much less. Thinking through all that I saw today, I want to become a part of the Town. I’ve been given so much. It hurts to see people who didn’t have this same chance and who live right here.
Charles didn’t wake me this morning. He left and when I heard the sound of his Jeep taking off without me, I decided to skip the day at school and find out where I live. I thought I would spend the entire time thinking about all that happened last night but instead I forgot all about it as I went about the Town investigating.
I stopped at a cafe on the main street and had coffee and lunch. I’d never been in the cafe before. It had high ceilings, it flooded with light, the tables were mostly filled with students drinking coffee and reading. I didn’t read the Woolf book I had with me. I stared around the room like a character in a play who has awakened in a new town. The walls looked covered with large scraps of paper until I realized this wasn’t some odd decorating idea but were notices, filling up much of the available space, even on the walls in the bathroom. I read some of them. The postings were by people looking for part-time work, who were baby sitters, cleaners, or they sold wood, could clean stoves, had hay for sale. None of this was part of my world in Skokie. I made note of it though and wanted to think about it later.
In my pocket, I had the $20 bill Goldie sends me each month. I felt like Virginia Woolf. In her book she describes what it felt like to be able to take herself to lunch after her morning’s work in the British Museum. How she didn’t have to scrimp on herself knowing that the money she had gotten from an aunt would allow her this kind of luxury for the rest of her life. I, too, had some of that richness in my life, not quite to the same extent. Goldie’s $20 bill came each month and that was helpful.
After paying for my lunch, the thought of going back to the College didn’t agree with me. I wanted to wander through the Town, to observe more of this place that exists at the bottom of the hill and that has been here much longer, so I learned, than the College. It isn’t very big, this Town, and as the old joke goes, if you blink, you will miss it.
I turned towards the big white church we always passed as we came into Town from the College. For some reason it always looks blindingly white to me as if they painted it every day in that boldly bright color. Next to the church is a cemetery. I am going to wander through it on a day that is less sunny and colored by the rich harvest of changing leaves.
I walked away from the church and towards the town square. Old people and pigeons sat on the benches. The quiet of the humans was punctuated by the cooing of the pigeons who encouraged the old ones to throw bread crumbs on the ground for their lunch. The cobblestones around the square were littered with pigeon droppings and the uneaten bread crumbs.
There are no traffic lights in the Town. Traffic is sparse. What I saw driving through were mostly pickup trucks, loaded down with supplies or wood or equipment, covered in mud, held together with chewing gum and paper clips as Pops would say.
Not much seemed to be happening. I walked from one end of the Town towards the other end.
As I strolled along the sidewalks got narrower and then disappeared. On each side of the road, small, wooden houses painted in many colors sat very close to the road, too close, in my opinion.
We haven’t had rain in a long time and the sidewalks were covered with dust. The Town had this quiet hush over it as if everyone was either taking a nap or had left Town for good. It was that kind of quiet.
At the furthest end, beyond the sidewalk, I heard much shouting. I picked up my pace and discovered a yard full of children playing, screaming.
The children were stream
ing out of a solidly built, small house. They came spilling out and spilling out, without end. They made me laugh. Two women, one young and one obviously much older, came towards me along with their charges when I approached the fence holding the children in.
I think the expression might be that they looked like they were trying to herd cats.
The younger woman came right up to the fence to greet me. She held out her hand and said, “I’m Lauren,” she said. “This is the Day Care Center. Would you like to come in?”
If they were casting a movie, Lauren would be the one they cast as “the Hippie.” She wore men’s coveralls. Her long blonde hair was tied into a braid that went all the way down her back right to the bottom of her spine. On her coveralls’ strap a big red button read, “My name is Lauren. What’s yours?” Her full mouth and heavy eyebrows made her look like she lived on a farm that grew children.
I hadn’t intended to go inside the center but it turns out, she mistook me for someone who had an appointment to apply for a job there. I didn’t care what the reasons were, I liked the energy of those kids.
Unlike how I generally feel when I am in a new situation, I didn’t feel self-conscious at all. I didn’t question either Lauren or Elise’s motives in asking me to come inside. I’ve never felt that free anywhere and I really liked it. Of course, I didn’t realize they had been expecting someone else and this was a case of mistaken identity.
While I thought of Lauren as a hippie, my classmates at the College wouldn’t have been so kind. To them, she would be a representative of the People. Meaning she is poor or at least much poorer than they are.
Lauren asked me my name. I said, “I’m called Scags.”
“Interesting name,” Lauren said and opened the gate to let me into the yard. She must have realized at that point that she had made a mistake. But she didn’t seem flustered by it at all.