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

by Lena Dunham

  I froze. Nathan approached slowly and asked me to open my backpack. I unzipped it, terrified of what might fall out. There were piles of unfinished worksheets, half-finished papers, all of which he had just stopped asking me for. He said he’d rather read my stories.

  “You better have all this done by tomorrow,” he told me.

  I had picked up a dollar bill that had fallen out of my bag, and I was feeling it, turning it over in my sweaty hand. He snatched it.

  “You can get this after class.”

  Once the classroom emptied out, I approached him. “Hi. Can I have my dollar?”

  He smiled and stuck it down his shirt.

  “Okay, now I don’t want it.” I giggled, hoping it would calm us both down.

  He chucked it at me. “Jesus, Lena. You’re all talk, but when it comes to action …”

  It would be years before I knew what he meant, but I knew I didn’t like the sound of it, and I told my mother, who looked like she had seen a parade of ghosts. “That fucking pervert,” she said, furiously dialing my father. “Come home from the studio now.”

  The next morning, she marched into school with me rather than dropping me on the steps. I waited outside the principal’s office, catching snippets of my mom’s muddled but distinctly angry voice. I stared at the linoleum floor, wondering whether I was in trouble. After a while, she stormed out, grabbing my hand. “We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

  Fifteen years later, I met a man whose daughter was in Nathan’s class, at a different school in a different borough.

  “Oh, you should watch it,” I told him matter-of-factly, trying to sound more relaxed than I felt. “He was inappropriate with me.”

  His face turned stormy. “That’s a pretty big accusation.”

  “I know,” I said, rushing to the bathroom before he could see me cry. I was reminded again that there are so many things we need that can also hurt us: cars, knives, grown-ups. I was reminded how no one really listens to kids.

  I switched schools in seventh grade, to an institution whose values aligned with my own, and for six years school was as okay as it would ever be. I wrote poems, sprawling epics with curse words and casual mentions of suicide that didn’t get me sent to the school psychologist. (I’m not sure there was a school psychologist.) We put on plays, some of them about lesbians or cat breeders or both. Our teachers engaged us in lively debate and were willing to say “I don’t know” when they didn’t know. I was allowed to circulate literature about veganism in the stairwell. A teacher and I had a misunderstanding and we “talked it out.” It didn’t feel inappropriate. It felt real.

  I was not a perfect student—far from it. I was overmedicated and exhausted, wearing pajamas and a vintage hat with a veil. I struggled to stay awake in art history class. I had an authority problem. But I was living in a world where we were understood and honored for what we had to offer. I was allowed to take my puppy to gym class. My best friend played a didgeridoo he bought off the Internet. It was a best-case scenario for a worst-case problem: the fact that the government says we have to go to school. And when it was finally time to leave, I wasn’t ready.

  I bounded into Oberlin, thrilled to have been accepted and ready to learn with a capital L. I was keen on becoming a creative writing all-star and had prepared a “portfolio” of my poems and short stories for the head of the department. Dressed in bookish cords, I waited outside her door during office hours to discuss it with her.

  “Well,” she said. “You clearly write a lot.”

  “Oh, thank you! I do,” I told her. “Every day!” Chipper, as if she’d given me a massive compliment and not just stated a fact.

  “There are some interesting moments, but you don’t have a particular facility for any genre. The poems feel like stories. The stories feel like plays.”

  I nodded, like, great point. “Yes! I also write plays.”

  “And the story,” she said, “about the fake Underground Railroad. That just feels like satire, like something from The Onion. It’s a bit broad, obvious.”

  All I could muster was a tiny “But it really happened to me.”

  She nodded, clearly unimpressed.

  She let me in, but with reservations, and my rage from this tiny encounter fueled me and I became the most combative girl in every writer’s workshop. The one who crossed out sentences dramatically in front of the writer of the piece. The one who posited the ever-so-helpful “What if ALL of this is bullshit?” I had begged my way in, and now I wanted out. But first I wanted everyone to realize what they were doing to us, these teachers. Draining us of our perspective, teaching us to write like the poets they admired—or, even worse, like them. There were only three teachers I liked. One because he seemed to have other interests, another because he smoked and cursed, and a third because his ex-wife wrote a memoir about him cheating on her with a French teacher that sold fairly well. He was now with another, different French teacher and wore a diamond earring, appearing unfazed.

  My parents have authority problems. In second grade, my mother was sent home from school for trying to organize a protest in which every girl defied the dress code and wore pants. She found her teachers not only boring but repulsive, especially the ones who were trying to embrace the counterculture. They couldn’t trick her with their long center-parted hair, their amber beads, their use of the word “vibe.” Even now, a part-time teacher herself, she is horrified by the idea of anyone telling her what to think or do. She is also opposed to socializing with her students, mortified that anyone would think she was pulling the “cool teacher” move. “There is nothing more disgusting than being the oldest lady at the party,” she likes to say.

  My father, meanwhile, began his academic career as the shining star of the Southbury, Connecticut, public school system. Class president, book-club leader, smiling bucktoothed in a necktie on the Student of the Month placard. But like all the men in his family, he was eventually shipped off to boarding school, and by the time he got to Andover he was fifteen, shaggy haired, and angry, refusing to attend chapel or even class. When I read Catcher in the Rye it was instantly familiar, like an extension of the stories my father would tell on a long car ride. My father’s journey from emblem of academic excellence to deadbeat burnout was a classic narrative but a potent one. I felt pride imagining the moment he realized it was all bullshit, man, and at his bravery for refusing to be carried along with the current. One time he cut class and walked into the woods and out onto the surface of an icy pond, only to fall through into the freezing water. After a terrifying struggle, he caught hold of the ice and pulled himself out and ran, soaking, back to the safety of his dormitory. But his life had flashed before his eyes. He could have died. After all, nobody knew where he was.

  I went through brief phases of being a good student. Showing up early to my seminar with a mug of tea, taking cogent notes with a mechanical pencil, carrying my books close to my chest like a girl in a movie about Radcliffe. I loved doing it right—the ease of it, the tidiness of my objectives, which were simply to understand and express that understanding.

  But inevitably it faded. A month into the semester, I would start showing up twenty minutes late to class again, with a bag of Cheez Doodles and a cup of cold grits, having left my notebook at home. The rewards weren’t enough to keep me on task, and life got in the way. My mind wandered to the future, postcollege, when I’d create my own schedule that served my need to eat a rich snack every five to fifteen minutes. As for the disappointment written across the teacher’s face? I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, care.

  I was fifteen minutes late to graduation. My mother forgot the peach silk dress I planned to wear, and so I bought a vintage sari and piled my hair atop my head and trooped out to the arch in the middle of Tappan Square and waited for the music to start. My boyfriend, already graduated, lay out on the lawn. My father wondered why he had worn a suit. We were given two options: walk around the Tappan Square arch if you don’t support the imperialist missionar
ies who installed it or walk through it if you don’t know, don’t care. I can’t remember which option I chose, only that I couldn’t believe I had never noticed the pregnant oboist in line in front of me. As we strode onto the lawn, I nodded at the teachers, dressed to the nines in their Hogwarts garb for the tenth, thirtieth, fiftieth year in a row. Later, motherfuckers.

  I go back to Oberlin in the dead of winter to give a “convocation speech” in Finney Chapel, the largest and most historic of campus structures. In a subconscious nod to my college experience I forget to pack both tights and underwear and have to spend the weekend going commando in a wool skirt and kneesocks. I am toured around the school like I’m a stranger by a girl who didn’t even go here. We stop at a glossy new café for tea and scones. She asks if I want a tour of the dormitories—no, I just want to wander around alone and maybe cry.

  That it’s been six years since I graduated from college seems impossible. Older folks laugh at my naïveté, saying that six years is nothing in the scheme of life. But now I’ve been gone longer than I was there. Soon, my life as a student will be as far behind me as summer camp.

  I head down to the basement of Burton Hall where they’ve assembled a question-and-answer session, with student journalists sitting in a messy half circle around me. I make sure to keep my legs crossed, so as to avoid the headline: “Returning Alumna Flashes Vagina.” Most of them ask sweet, neutral questions: “What do you think is the most beautiful spot in Oberlin?” “If you could take one class again, which would it be?” Others have a sharper edge and seem to be looking for the big scoop: “How does it feel to be a line item in so many people’s narratives of privilege and oppression?”

  I don’t have a good answer. I look around for a sympathetic face before muttering, “There are some worse guys than me.”

  One student warns me that there is a protest planned outside my lecture tonight, though she can’t seem to explain exactly what it’s about. It reminds me of the time I joined a student walkout, got up and left history class, hoping all the way that someone would tell me where we were going and why.

  That night, on the stage of Finney Chapel, I feel adrenalized and inchoate, like I have something to prove and no drive to do it. I’ve braided my hair and I can feel it sliding, slowly but surely, down my neck in wet clumps. A favorite professor asks me thoughtful questions, and I answer as best I can, with sound bites that have worked in the past.

  “I feel like I have to bring up some of the controversy surrounding your work,” he says.

  “Okay, bring it up!” I’m trying to speak from a place of calm and strength, but it comes out more like a shriek. “Bring it up, and tell those protesters to come in, and we will talk like adults, not just freaks with signs! We will talk to each other and just WORK IT OUT! Because at the end of the day, we’re all pissed about the same thing, you know? Having to be in school.”

  He looks at me blankly. The audience shifts, with discomfort or confusion or both. In an instant it becomes clear to me that there are no protesters, probably never were. If they planned something, they all bailed. There’s just me, them. Us.

  The next morning I leave at 8:00 A.M. Driving through town in the snow, I see my memories plainly. There I am in my long sleeping-bag coat, shuffling to class twenty minutes late on a Tuesday morning. There I am in what used to be the video store, piling my arms high with VHSs. There I am in the diner, ordering not one but two egg sandwiches. There I am in the gym, riding an Exercycle from the early ’80s and reading a book called Bosnian Rape.

  And there I am, drunk on a spring night, yanking my tampon out and hurling it into a bush outside the church. There I am falling in love by the bike rack. There I am slowly realizing my bike has gone missing from that same rack, stolen while I was sleeping. There I am calling my father from the steps of the art museum. There I am half listening to a professor when she tells me I need to start attending class more regularly. And I’m there, too, dragging a torn sofa into the black-box theater with my “set designer.”

  If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognized their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside my resentment, dropped my defenses. I might have a basic understanding of European history or economics. More abstractly, I might feel I had truly been somewhere, open and porous and hungry to learn. Because being a student was an enviable identity and one I can only reclaim by attending community college late in life for a bookmaking class or something.

  I’ve always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me: “You’re still awake! Hiiii.” And I’d think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that. Sixteen, lying on the dock at night with my camp boyfriend, taking tiny sips from a bottle of vodka. But school was so essentially repulsive to me, so characterized by a desire to be done. That’s part of why it hurts so bad to see it again.

  I didn’t drink in the essence of the classroom. I didn’t take legible notes or dance all night. I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we’d make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened. Then why am I so sad?

  I remember when my schedule was as flexible as she is.

  —DRAKE

  I WORKED AT THE BABY STORE for nine months.

  Just recently graduated, I had stormed out of my restaurant job on a whim, causing my father to yell, “You can’t just do that! What if you had children?”

  “Well, thank God I don’t!” I yelled right back.

  At this point, I was living in a glorified closet at the back of my parents’ loft, a room they had assigned me because they thought I would graduate and move out like a properly evolving person. The room had no windows, and so, in order to get a glimpse of daylight, I had to slide open the door to my sister’s bright, airy room. “Go away,” she would hiss.

  I was unemployed. And while I had a roof over my head (my parents’) and food to eat (also technically theirs), my days were shapeless, and the disappointment of the people who loved me (my parents) was palpable. I slept until noon, became defensive when asked about my plans for the future, and gained weight like it was a viable profession. I was becoming the kind of adult parents worry about producing.

  I had been ambitious once. In college, all I seemed to do was found literary magazines with inexplicable names and stage experimental black-box theater and join teams (rugby, if only for a day or so). I was eager and hungry: for new art, for new friendship, for sex. Despite my ambivalence about academia, college was a wonderful gig, thousands of hours to tend to yourself like a garden. But now I was back to zero. No grades. No semesters. No CliffsNotes in case of emergency. I was lost.

  It’s not that I didn’t have plans. Oh, I had plans. Just none that these small minds could understand. My first idea was to be the assistant to a private eye. I was always being accused of extreme nosiness, so why not turn this character flaw into cold hard cash? After hunting around on Craigslist, however, it soon became clear that most private eyes worked alone—or if they needed an assistant, they wanted someone with the kind of sensual looks to bait cheating husbands. The second idea was baker. After all, I love bread and all bread by-products. But no, that involved waking up at four every morning. And knowing how to bake. What about preschool art teacher? Turns out that involved more than just a passion for pasta necklaces. There would be no rom-com-ready job for me.

  The only silver lining in my situation was that it allowed me to reconnect with my oldest friends, Isabel and Joana. We were all back in Tribeca, the same neighborhood where we had met in preschool. Isabel was finishing her sculpture degree, living with an agin
g pug named Hamlet who had once had his head run over by a truck and survived. Joana had just completed art school and was sporting the festive remains of a bleached mullet. I had broken up with the hippie boyfriend I considered my bridge to health and wholeness and was editing a “feature film” on my laptop. Isabel was living in her father’s old studio, which she had decorated with found objects, standing racks of children’s Halloween costumes, and a TV from 1997. When the three of us met there to catch up, Joana’s nails painted like weed leaves and Monets, I felt at peace.

  Isabel was employed at Peach and the Babke, a high-end children’s clothing store in our neighborhood. Isabel is a true eccentric—not the self-conscious kind who collects feathers and snow globes but the kind whose passions and predilections are so genuinely out of sync with the world at large that she herself becomes an object of fascination. One day Isabel had strolled into the store on a dare to inquire about employment, essentially because it was the funniest thing she could imagine doing for a living. Wearing kneesocks and a man’s shirt as a dress, she had been somewhat dismayed when she was offered a job on the spot. Joana joined her there a few weeks later, when the madness of the yearly sample sale required extra hands.

  “It’s a ball,” said Isabel.

  “I mean, it’s awfully easy,” said Joana.

  Peach and the Babke sold baby clothes at such a high price point that customers would often laugh out loud upon glimpsing a tag. Cashmere cardigans, ratty tutus, and fine-wale cords, sized six months to eight years. This is where you came if you wanted your daughter to look like a Dorothea Lange photo or your son to resemble a jaunty old-time train conductor, all oversize overalls and perky wool caps. It will be a miracle if any of the boys who wore Peach and the Babke emerged from childhood able to maintain an erection.