Violation

by Sallie Tisdale

  They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know—already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot.

  Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a million air.” A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.”

  Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children, and giving up—giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.

  One girl writes of her future—and I feel this way, too—“Long awaited depression will fall on me, and I will be ready for it.”

  FOR THE SECOND week, while I repeatedly remind them of the chapter they must write and then read out loud, we do exercises. More free writing, more lists. We make a list of childhood play-ground games, a rousing twenty-minute shoutfest, and write scenes about them. We break into small groups. I bring my big box of crayons and a pad of art paper and have them draw maps of a familiar childhood place and try to remember everything that happened there. “More crayons!” they all shout the next day, and so we draw personal symbols of the future when our social security number will be replaced by logos.

  I get to know a few students in the changing crowds. Anna turns in every assignment, speaks up in every discussion. Joseph, with his peroxide blond fade and unreadable neon-orange pen, Joseph who never listens and never shuts up and drives me crazy, seems to genuinely care what I think about his work. Skinny little Hunter, with an opinion on everything, who loves to take the least popular position and start arguments, tells me his parents would be angry if they knew he did something as wasteful as “writing stories.” He sits next to Rebecca, pretty, plump, smart, and they fight constantly. Karen, quiet and self-contained with a perfect silver hoop piercing her left eyebrow, is a strong-minded and clear thinker.

  On a quiet Wednesday in the second week, discouraged by the girls’ outlines, I talk to the sophomores about self-censorship. I should have done this earlier, I see now; I thought perhaps they wouldn’t need it yet, the way adults usually do. I thought maybe they wouldn’t understand it—but I was wrong about both things. I make lists on the board about what we’re afraid to write about and who we want to please and suddenly everyone is talking at once, Josie and Hunter and Rebecca and even a few of the Megans, tentatively raising their hands, arguing about censorship and offensiveness and politically correct speech, what is obscene, who decides.

  But the next day, the real agenda returns. It is almost time to read the stories. The other writers, they tell me, didn’t make them read. I’m not making them, I reply, only giving higher grades for it. The other writers read their work for them—I won’t. One of the other writers read their work anonymously—I steadfastly refuse.

  Instead I buy potato chips and pretzels, jelly beans and red licorice whips and M&M’s and come to class on the first read-out-loud day with overflowing grocery bags. The first reader chooses the first treat, I say, and Isaac surprises me by going first. Isaac is smart, shy, with one crossed eye, and Isaac knocks everyone out with his account of how he fell from grace as world chess champion, became a bum, and finally rose to new fame as a Central Park hustler.

  After class, four girls stop me and say all at once, “We can’t read!” They can’t read, they say, because Isaac’s story is so good and theirs are so boring and his is full of adventure and theirs is not. They are afraid to read out loud, fearful of being thought stupid or foolish or—what? I ask them. Girlish? Boring, says one Megan. (Which Megan? I can’t remember.) This is a terrible fear, I know—this fear of not being interesting—of being trivial, not special. It is almost as great, I think, as their fear of standing out and being special. I give them a little pep talk, but they aren’t consoled.

  After a few days of the bravest students coming to stand in front of the class, showing everyone their personal symbol, reading their stories, and then staying put to hear comments, one girl begs me to let her read while sitting at her desk. I list again the reasons why I want her in front: you’ll read better standing up; you need to claim your work; you’ll be more confident in the end. “Please,” she begs, but I’m tough and say no. Read in front or not at all.

  “Slowly, clearly, please,” I say, and one by one they hunch over their papers and read: nervous, sometimes joking, sometimes stiff, smiles plastered on their faces, a few with ripe pimples and big feet, a few blossoming in perfect spring bloom.

  And I am surprised again, to tears. There are bad stories, dull stories—and beautiful stories, better than the stories some of my adult students write. I close my eyes and listen to the voices, deep and high, fast and murmured, and sometimes stumbling and thick, and images appear, people in a London flat, a busy airport, autumn leaves skittering across a wet sidewalk, a bitter whispered fight, a sour resignation to mediocrity. The technique seems to leap beyond all they’ve shown me, the maturity beyond their years.

  (Later, line-editing the stories, I see the misspellings and incomplete sentences and misshapen construction I fail to hear in my delight at their voices. The freshmen spelling! “This Japanise undeground fighting areana is one of the dingist raggity places I have ever fought in.” And the fatal danger of the sophomores’ dependence on spellcheckers: “I gazed upon a pear of muscular biceps.” “She turned summer salts.” And my favorite: “I raped the package carefully.”)

  But the differences remain, more obvious than ever. The boys write about war and fame and money and alien contact. Damon writes about setting a world record in the 100 meters. It’s not a great story, or even a good story. But it has a beginning, middle and end, and he stands in front of the class and reads without laughing. Lots of the boys write about marriage and love and hard choices, too, layered through their scenes of movement and action. The girls write about marriage and love and hard choices and no more. Sandra gives me a technically proficient and strangely passive story about a friend’s pregnancy, and refuses to read. Jocelyn—loud, obnoxious, obscene Jocelyn—writes about her prayer to God to help her get a job. Anna, purple lips and raccoon eyes in place, reads an intensely detailed story about giving birth.

  The exceptions occur even inside the rule. Nancy describes murdering her husband’s lover in a gothic tale of madness and imprisonment. Desiree imagines becoming a pro basketball player, and in the end, quits to be with her children so her husband can continue to work for the team. Rebecca is the only girl who writes a story primarily about her own professional accomplishment. She describes running for president, and the entire story revolves around the stress of her campaign being focused on makeup, hair, and clothing.

  I don’t know what to expect from Cindy. She’s beautiful, delicately featured, slender, with a soft voice. She’s beautiful in the way that makes adults coo and behave weasely. I suspect she’s been stared at and coveted by strangers since her birth. She
reads an explicit story about a businesswoman caught in the equation between power, money, and sex, leaving the room dead silent. It is too knowing for comfort.

  And the best story to come out of all the classes—110 students—is written by quiet Rose, who is fat and plain and a stutteringly bad reader. It is mature, complex, layered, subtle; there is almost nothing I can write in the margins to make it better, this tale of a compromised marriage to an unfaithful layabout.

  Toward the end of the three weeks, I have lunch with a representative from the foundation. She wants to know what could be done to make the girls more “confident.” I rattle on, about girl-only classrooms, giving them room away from the boys, time to talk, permission to question and complain without being afraid of being seen as whiners, complainers, bad girls, tough girls. But I know that all of them, boys and girls both, are still only partly formed, soft as Play-Doh. They are like golems—their bodies in full flower and everything else a work-in-progress. I don’t dare say there are essential gender differences here, though I wonder more and more.

  “But girls have so many more role models now,” the foundation representative says. She is a petite, elegant, beautiful woman in a black suit, perfectly coifed.

  More role models. Which ones, I wonder. An increasingly impossible physical ideal? A clear-cut choice between career and family? They’ve seen their mothers suffer from trying to do both. They know all about the “second shift” of endless work. When I was fifteen, my role models were burning bras, marching in the street, starting clinics, passing laws, and getting arrested. Role models now are selling diet books and making music videos.

  The simple fact is, I don’t know. I don’t know how to help them. I know that I have to keep checking my watch during lunch and rush off to make the final bell for sixth period, and that all of these children who are almost grown have spent their entire lives ruled by a clock and the demands of strangers. They have grown up in a fragmented and chaotic place over which they have no control. I know they’ve rarely thought about the possibility of getting out; they don’t see any place to get out to, anywhere to go not ruled by bureaucratic entanglements and someone else’s schedule and somebody else’s plans. If girls are somehow wired toward pliancy, then the helpless role of student in the shadow of the institution is the worst place they can be. If we want to teach them independence, the first thing to do would be to give it to them.

  I’m sitting in the hallway at the end of third period, with three girls named Megan and one silent morose boy named Dave, trying to have individual conferences, which is of course impossible. There is simply no time, and no place to go but the hallway floor.

  The Megans are all getting A’s, good, competent I-turned-everything-in-on-time A’s. Dave is flunking without apparent remorse, having done nothing, said nothing, for weeks. I tell the stocky, brunet Megan that I want her to read out loud and she says, “It’s so hard to read. I hate to read my stuff. It seems so boring.” And what I can’t tell her is that it is, a little, sincere and earnest and predictable and boring. So I give them another little pep talk about the way women writers have been demeaned for writing about the domestic and how it’s a great subject and great domestic stories have been written by men and women both, but especially by women, and how they’re going to have to cope sooner or later, whether they write or not, with this dismissal of the female realm. And they nod, good students, good girls, silently acquiescing to authority.

  Dave sits cross-legged, staring at the floor, in dour sleepy silence. He will never write anything, but I will miss him anyway, this lumbering boy. I will miss them all; I miss them already.

  So I say it again: “I’ll be listening to you. I’ll listen.” And what I want to say, long to say, and don’t, is: Dream a little. Oh, my girls, dream.

  Then the bell rings again and the human ocean spills into the hallway like breakers in a storm. We scramble up off the floor before we’re trampled by the hurrying sea.

  Salon, July 1, 1997

  For several years, I taught for Writers in the Schools, a terrific program pairing writers with high school classes for several weeks of focused writing. At the time, my own children were teenagers. They had all had difficult years in school, one way or another, and teenaged energy had been a significant part of my home life for a long time. I taught at the neighborhood high school a few years after my middle son had dropped out for a brief career as a juvenile delinquent. I was startled to discover that trying to cajole noisy classes into writing a little bit turned into a heartbreaking study in how we turn girls into victims.

  Temporary God

  FROM THE TINY BALCONY OF MY DREARY HOTEL IN MARINA Del Rey, California, I can see a sprawling shopping center, a busy freeway, and a small kidney pool glittering in the dirty light. A half-dozen people drowse or read in the plastic chaises by the water.

  I’m alone, out of town on business, and I have two hours free—two hours to pretend I’m alone in the world with no place to go and no one to please. I go out to the pool with a soda and a book and find an empty lounge, its vinyl strips still sagging in the shape of a departed bottom.

  Three chubby girls with identical black hair and ill-fitting swimsuits are playing Double Dare in the shallow end.

  “Dare, or Double Dare?” the biggest girl says to the smallest.

  The smaller girl flips her heavy, wet hair. “Double dare,” she says, without hesitation.

  “I dare you to stand on your head under water.”

  “Eeeaaasssy,” drawls the girl, jumping in and flipping over.

  A heavy, self-conscious woman bobs in the deep end, watching the dark-haired girls.

  Nearby, a pair of prepubescent sisters compete for the attention of an older boy. Their swimsuits bag on their attenuated bodies as they shriek and call; the boy, his bony chest puffed out like a mating frog’s, takes turns flinging them away from him so they can splash and scream.

  A slim Japanese woman in a black tank suit silently leads her timid little boy down the steps.

  And weaving through, as fluid and oblivious as the water, slide two teens.

  The girl is blooming, about fifteen years old, unblemished. Her shoulder-length brown hair is pulled back and clings to her small head like a cap. The boy is a bit older, perhaps, gawky and thin, and his shoulder-length brown hair is disheveled and loose around his long neck. In the tiny pool, in the noisy L.A. haze, they fold themselves together like gliding swans. He holds her for a moment like a man carrying a child, or a bride, then she turns slowly and wraps her arms around his neck. He comes in close to her ear and whispers, she turns her back to his chest and leans her glistening head on his shoulder. He pushes off the bottom and they float backward to the pool’s edge and pause against the deck, beside each other. He turns and she lays herself on his back and he slides forward; she ducks out of his reach for a second and he stretches after her, she laughs and rolls back to him, they bounce gently face to face, murmuring.

  This goes on for a long time.

  I read my book, drink my soda. And all the time, I watch. People slowly, sleepily come and go. The dark-haired girls are called away. The boy demonstrates his skateboard moves to the sisters. A young man arrives with fresh towels. Trucks rumble by. The boy and girl slither through the water together without a thought, seamlessly drifting between the changing swimmers. I watch from behind my sunglasses, and suddenly she catches me watching and returns my stare, stony, self-contained. The difference between us is simple. I am just another voyeur, dismayed by the distant object of desire. She is not dismayed. She is a universe of Two.

  I’ve left behind my thirteen-year-old daughter, my youngest child. She is young at thirteen, younger than her own body, interested in books and soccer and her pet turtle. She is still very interested in me, in my position of safety and control between her and the world. She likes to sit behind me when we watch television and mess up my hair and tell me stories that invariably begin, “Guess what?” and eat big, messy bowls of cereal right be
fore going to bed. She misses me terribly when I’m gone, and this time I wrote a note for the kitchen bulletin board to remind her when I’d be back: “Mom, Sunday, 12:30.” If she was here, she’d be winning Double Dare; she’d lie beside me drinking soda and dripping on her mystery novel in the sun.

  But that will end like everything else.

  I remember how it feels, their dizzy height of obsession, the centering of the universe around Two. I remember how all else fades like a weakening signal, to a blur, how when you are together, all the world is the world made by Two, and when you are apart, there is only waiting to be together. I remember when love and sex were one thing, as unbroken as this moist ease in the sunlit water. I remember how one falls in love and longs for the body of the other and, longing, believes in love.

  And I remember, oh I do remember, that the ghostly adults around you have no idea, because they have never felt like this, and so there is no reason to try to explain.

  Many years ago, when my daughter was still toddling around with a ragged bear in her arms, I tried to explain to an old friend how it felt to be her mother. She was my third child and I was still trying to find the words.

  My friend had no children, had no interest in children, tolerated mine with poorly disguised impatience. I wanted her to know why they mattered to me.

  I pointed to my daughter on the floor beside us, and said, “I’m the giver and taker of the world to her.” I was trying to explain this enormous responsibility, the weight that sometimes feels intolerably large. “I bring good and evil whether I mean to or not. I might as well be God.”

  My friend sneered at me. “Well,” she said, “aren’t you special?”