Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned

by Lena Dunham

  And I completely lost it: “No, she’s not! Just because you’re gay for a second doesn’t mean everyone else is too, okay!? And not that I’d care if she was, but if she was, I would know. I’m her sister, okay? I’d know. I know everything.”

  Grace came out to me when she was seventeen. We were sitting at the dining room table eating pad thai, our parents out of town, as they often were now that we were old enough to fend for ourselves. Twenty-three and sponging mightily, I forked some noodles into my mouth as Grace described a terrible date with a “dorky” boy from an uptown school.

  “He’s too tall,” she moaned. “And nice. And he was trying too hard to be witty. He put a napkin on his hand and said, ‘Look, I have a hand cape.’ ” She paused. “And he draws cartoons. And he has diabetes.”

  “He sounds awesome!” I said. And then, before I considered it: “What are you, gay?”

  “Actually, yes,” she said, with a laugh, maintaining the composure that has been her trademark since birth.

  I began to sob. Not because I didn’t want her to be gay—in truth, it worked perfectly with my embarrassing image of myself as the quirkiest girl on the block, hence my recurring suggestion that my parents foster a child from a third world background. No, I was crying because I was suddenly flooded with an understanding of how little I really knew: about her pains, her secrets, the fantasies that played in her head when she lay in bed at night. Her inner life.

  She had always felt opaque to me, a beautiful unibrowed mystery just beyond our family’s grasp. I had been telling my parents, sister, grandma—anyone who would listen, really—about my desires from an early age. I live in a world that is almost compulsively free of secrets.

  When Grace was three, she came home from preschool and announced she was in love with a girl. “Her name is Madison Lane,” she said. “And we’re going to get married.”

  “You can’t,” I said. “Because she’s a girl.”

  Grace shrugged. “Well, we are.”

  Later, this became a favorite family story: the year Grace was gay, the Madison Lane incident. She laughed, as if we were telling any silly baby story. We laughed like it was a joke.

  But it wasn’t a joke. And Grace’s admission felt not like a revelation but a confirmation of something we all understood but refused to say. Throughout high school Grace remained above the fray. She was president of speech and debate, attending a rhetoric match, then running off to tennis lessons in a crisp white skirt, skeptical of the hormonal hysteria that had overtaken her girlfriends. She’s too mature, we thought, too unusual to get caught up in crushes. We said, “College will be her time. For satisfaction, for relaxation, for boys.”

  Grace was polite, firm, and unemotional as she answered my questions, continuing to eat her pad thai steadily and check her phone every few minutes. The basics: When did you know? Are you scared? Do you like someone? Then the ones I couldn’t ask: What have I ever said that let you down, that failed you or made you feel alone? Who did you tell before you told me? Is this my fault because of the dialysis mask?

  She said she’d already had a romance, a girl named June who was her roommate on a summer program in Florence. They kissed most nights and, she said, they “never really talked about it.” I tried to imagine June, but all I could picture was a snowy-white mannequin in a wig.

  My discomfort with secrets made waiting for Grace to come out to my parents torturous. I begged her to tell them, saying it was for her sake but knowing it was for my own. Sitting with the knowledge, the divide it created in our home, was too much for me. I had never been comfortable with what was not said, and there was nothing I would not say. But Grace wasn’t ready, despite my cajoling and kicking her under the dinner table. I held my tongue, despite my fear that I would have a Tourette’s moment and shout, Grace is gay!

  One morning, my mother emerged from her bedroom, eyes sunken, hair askew, bathrobe still on. “I didn’t sleep at all,” she said wearily. “Grace has a secret, I know it.”

  I gulped. “What do you think it is?”

  “She stays late after school, she ignores me when I ask her questions about her day. She seems distracted. I think”—she took a pained sip of her coffee—“I think she’s having an affair with her Latin teacher.”

  “Mom, no,” I said.

  “Well, how else do you explain it?”

  “Just think,” I hissed. “Think.” I waited, though not long enough, for her to understand. “Grace is gay!”

  She cried harder than I had, like a surprised child. Or like a mother who had gotten something wrong.

  A few years after she came out, Grace admitted that the June encounters were a fiction. She had invented them as a means of proving to anyone who questioned her that she was really gay. I was relieved to learn she hadn’t fallen in love without telling me.

  Grace is graduating from college. The four years since she left home have lessened her mystery and deepened her sense of self. She’s emerged as a surprising, strange adult, still prone to bouts of moody distance but also possessed of a high cackle and a desire to have constant and aggressive fun. Sometimes she hugs and tickles me, and her long, cold fingers annoy me, a reversal of fortune I never imagined possible. When she writes, which isn’t often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known.

  She dresses like a Hawaiian criminal, loose, patterned shirts and oddly fitting suits, loafers without socks. Her attitude toward sex is more modern than mine and has a radical element I chased but never found. She wakes up with her hair knotted and leaves the house like that, often not returning home until late. She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions. She has a strong sense of social justice and an eye for anachronisms and contradictions. She is thin but physically lazy. Guys love her.

  1. Because everything is everyone’s business, but every story starts with “There I was, minding my own business …”

  2. Because the rules are really more like suggestions.

  3. Because it’s more than just Manhattan, or even Brooklyn. Places like Roosevelt Island and City Island and Rikers Island! Did you know that there is a commune on Staten Island that has a dwarf chef? Did you know that there is a Colonial mansion in Brooklyn where a Japanese surgeon lives with his blind wife, or so I was told? Did you know that you can buy a tiny turtle with highly contagious salmonella in Chinatown that is so adorable you will want to risk it?

  4. I have a passion for cabdrivers. I forever stand by the statement that there is no more brilliant, diverse, eccentric group of human beings on this planet than the men (and rare women) employed by the Taxi & Limousine Commission of New York. My father drove a cab for six months in the late seventies, and I told everyone in the second grade it was still his job.

  5. Because everyone hates a suit. Even the suits.

  6. Because if I see another film that’s a “love letter to New York” or in which “New York is really the third character in this romance,” I’m going to explode with rage, and yet I still recognize that nothing looks better on camera than a Midtown corner in winter or the Staten Island Ferry in high August.

  7. Because of the twenty-four-hour pharmacy on Forty-eighth and Eighth, where a 3:00 A.M. plea for a Klonopin refill is treated like buying milk at 5:00 P.M. in Bethesda.

  8. Because the people may not be polite, but when it counts they’re something better than polite: they’re kind. They’re always letting you take your tea when you’re short on change. Or letting you take the first cab if you’re crying. Or letting you pee when you didn’t even buy something. Or rushing to your side when you step in a pothole wearing platforms and eat it, hard. Helping you trap the lop-eared, terrified rabbit that has been living in a Dumbo parking lot for weeks. Giving you directions home.

  9. Because everyone gets catcalled. And I mean everyone. If you have a vagina, by birth or by choice, you will be called “mami” or “swee
tie” or “Britney Spears.” And the catcalls can be so creative! Once, my little sister was walking down the street in her thick black glasses, and a homeless man muttered, “Talk nerdy to me.”

  10. Because I was born here, and New York is no alien: she is in my gut like an old sickness. Sometimes I’ll be walking in Soho or Brooklyn Heights, and a smell, some brand of stale air, stops me dead in my tracks. Bound up in that smell: what it felt like to be dragged home from Balducci’s on a hot night with a blister from my jelly shoe, begging every step of the way for a cab, realizing with horror that I was so close to my house I could see it and still I was on foot. The shady view from the window of my dentist’s waiting room, before she stuffed her fat fingers in my mouth. The day we were so late to school and it was raining so hard that we caught a ride in the back of a soy-milk truck, which my mother denies to this day. Sitting in an alley with some guys from a different school, watching them smoke. Waiting for my parents to get home because I’d lost my keys and pissing in someone’s potted plant. Looking down and realizing I am inexplicably up to my knees in mud. The time I took a cab on my birthday and it hit an old woman, and she lay in the street, teeth knocked out, while the cabdriver held her bloody head in his arms, and I shrunk down low until finally a pedestrian tasked with moving the car out of the intersection noticed me cowering, and I gasped, “It’s my birthday.” The time I was in a sundress walking my dog and locked eyes with a guy on a bicycle, and he rode right into a parked car and I ran. Each corner is a memory. In that way, it’s just like every town.

  NOBODY BELIEVES THIS STORY.

  It was the spring of third grade; our class was taking an overnight trip to a camp called Nature’s Classroom, where we would spend three days learning about teamwork, ecology, and history in a remote corner of upstate New York. I had been sick about it since the moment I found out, two months before, and brought the permission slip home to my parents secretly hoping they would hand it back to me and say, No way! No daughter of ours is going to the woods for three days! FORGET ABOUT IT.

  I didn’t have friends. Whether this was by choice or not was a question I seemed unable to answer, for myself or for my parents, who were obviously concerned. I was anxious simply leaving my family for the day and made a collect call to my mother every lunch period, my stomach tightening when I couldn’t reach her. The best news I ever could have received would have been that my parents had decided to homeschool me, to remove all pretense of socialization and just let me spend my days with them in their studios, where I belonged.

  Really, I’d hated school since the day I got there. My father often repeats the story of my initial reaction to kindergarten: I came home from the first day and plopped down at my pint-sized desk.

  “So, how’d it go?” my father asked.

  “It was fun,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ll go back.”

  He gently explained that wasn’t an option, that school is to children as work is to grown-ups: it’s what you do. And so I would have to go every day, rain or shine, with only occasional exceptions for illness, until I turned eighteen. “Then,” he said, “you can decide what to do next.” That was thirteen years away. I couldn’t imagine thirteen more minutes of this, much less thirteen years.

  But there I was, having made it to third grade, headed upstate in a fifteen-passenger van while Amanda Dilauro showed me a sheaf of pictures of her cat Shadow. The first thing I did when we reached our bunk was drop my backpack on the vinyl mattress and vomit.

  Over the next few days, we were led from activity to activity. We played tambourines, weighed our leftovers before adding them to the compost pile, pretended eggs were our precious babies and carried them around our necks in padded cups dangling from twine. And then, on the final day, it was time for the faux Underground Railroad.

  This is the part that no one believes.

  “No adult would ever do that,” they say. “You can’t be remembering that right.”

  I am, in fact, remembering it perfectly. The counselors “shackled” us together with jump ropes so we were “like slave families” and then released us into the woods. We were given a map with a route to “freedom” in “the North,” which must have been only three or four hundred feet but felt like much more. Then a counselor on horseback followed ten minutes later, acting as a bounty hunter. Hearing hooves, I crouched behind a rock with Jason Baujelais and Sari Brooker, begging them to be quiet so we weren’t caught and “whipped.” I was too young, self-involved, and dissociated to wonder what kind of impact this had on my black classmates. All I knew was that I was miserable. We heard the sound of hooves growing closer and Max Kitnick’s light asthma wheezes from behind an oak tree. “Shut up,” Jason hissed, and I knew we were cooked. When the counselor appeared, Sari started to cry.

  Back at base camp, the counselor who became a bounty hunter became a counselor again and explained how many Americans traveled the Underground Railroad and how many didn’t survive it. As he spoke, he pulled out a cardboard timeline of the Civil War, and all I could think was: This is stupid. This is so so stupid.

  What were we going to learn from being lashed together with our classmates and chased by a pony? Would we suddenly empathize, be able to fully imagine the experience of the American slave?

  A month after Nature’s Classroom, my slave brother Jason Baujelais was suspended for casual use of the N-word. The exercise was a failure.

  Fifth grade was when you made the switch to middle school, and with it came new privileges: elective classes and pizza Fridays and free periods in the library. My fourth-grade classroom was across the hall from fifth-grade history, and sometimes that teacher, Nathan, left his door open so we could hear him explaining Mesopotamia to a group of laughing eleven-year-olds. I’d seen Nathan around. He was the definition of gangly. His hair was thinning, and he cut the sartorial figure of Bob Saget, but he was youthful in the way he bounded around the classroom, using silly voices like Dana Carvey’s, my favorite, and holding contests to see who could say “like” the least. The fifth-graders all said he was the best.

  One day, our fourth-grade hamster, Nina, had babies. Six of them. They looked like chewed-up tomatoes, which is what I told our teacher when I summoned her to the cage. “I think she barfed fruit or something.”

  Kids crowded around the cage, but by the afternoon they had lost interest. I, meanwhile, became obsessed, particularly with the runt, which was black and white and about the size of a fava bean. I named it Pepper. As Pepper grew, it became clear there was an issue: its back legs were fused together by some kind of membrane that looked like pink bubble gum stretched thin. As a result of this deformity it had to drag itself around by its front legs, and it usually got left behind. Kathy, our teacher, was concerned: soon Pepper might get beaten to the food bowl, bullied, or worse. Nathan, she told me, was a hamster expert. He had fifteen of them at home. Perhaps I could take Pepper across the hall and see what he had to say.

  I approached cautiously at lunch, carrying Pepper in an open shoe box. I paused at the door, watched him for a moment at his desk hunched over a sandwich, a juice box, and a grown-up novel. “Hello?”

  Nathan looked up. “Hello.”

  I explained the situation in fits and starts, trying simultaneously to convey the gravity of Pepper’s case and take in the reality of a fifth-grade classroom. He motioned for me to hand him the box. He peered in, picking Pepper up in a confident motion, holding her under the tiny armpits while he examined the lower extremities. He removed a pair of nail scissors from his desk drawer, and I watched him cut Pepper’s legs apart. “It’s a she,” he said. She was mewing, kicking her newly freed feet. “She’ll be fine.”

  The next year, when I got to Nathan’s class, I felt like I already knew him. He acted like he knew me, too. And he noticed: that I loved to read and write and act and also that I had no friends. He invited me to stay with him for lunch, so I didn’t have to stand out in the courtyard with everyone I hated, huddling in the corner to stay w
arm while sportier types sweated and had to remove their overlayers. We would usually end up talking: about books, rodents, the things that scared me. He told me his wife had died right after his daughter was born and that he had gotten a new wife, but he didn’t like her as much. He said it was hard to find someone you wanted to spend that much time with. His energy shifted: some days he was calm and funny. Others he was antsy and tense, stopping every few minutes to shoot Nasonex up his left nostril. “Stupid allergies.”

  I’d never had a teacher talk to me this way. Like I was a person, whose ideas and feelings mattered. He wasn’t just nice. He saw me for who I felt I was: achingly brilliant, misunderstood, full of novellas and poems and well-timed jokes. He told me that popular kids never grow up to be interesting and that interesting kids are never popular. For the first time, I looked forward to school. To the moment I’d walk into the classroom and catch his eye and feel certain I was going to be heard that day.

  He called me “My Lena,” which became Malena. At a certain point he started rubbing my neck while he talked to the class. He put a heart on the board every time I said “like,” but just a check for the other students. I was terrified of what the other kids would think and thrilled to have been chosen. One day he brought his daughter to class, and she sat on his lap during lunch, drinking a juice box, her feet dangling, skimming the floor. She looked just like him in a wig. I wanted to kill her.

  That winter, Jason Baujelais (now seemingly forgiven for the N-word incident) announced he hadn’t done his homework. “Well, that’s a problem,” Nathan said, arms crossed.

  “You never make Lena do her homework,” Jason said.