The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  When nighttime fell, though, the college came into its own. Their destination tonight was a large, corroding frat house thundering with sound. Greek life, the college catalogues had called this. Greer imagined IMing Cory later, writing, “greek life: wtf? where is aristotle? where is baklava?” But suddenly their usual kind of shared, arch commentary that kept them both entertained was irrelevant, for he wasn’t here, not even close, and now she was inside a wide doorway with these two randomly chosen girls, heading toward the noxious smells and the inviting ones, and, indirectly and eventually, toward Faith Frank.

  The house drink that night was called the Ryland Fling, and it was the pastel pink of bug juice but immediately had a muscular, slugging effect on Greer, who weighed 110 pounds and had eaten only a few small, sad anthills of food from the salad bar at dinner. Usually she liked the pleasing snap of clarity, but now she knew clarity would just lead her back to unhappiness, so she drained her first hyper-sweet Ryland Fling from a plastic cup with a sharp nub on the bottom, then stood waiting in line for a second one. The drinks, plus what she’d already drunk at Spanish House, were effective.

  Soon she and the two other girls were dancing in a circle, as if for the pleasure of a sheikh. Zee was an excellent dancer, her hips sliding and her shoulders working, yet the rest of her moving with studied minimalism. Chloe, beside her, drew shapes with her hands, her many bracelets chiming. Greer was free-form and unusually unguarded. When they were all exhausted, they plopped onto a bulbous black leather couch that smelled vaguely of fried flounder. Greer closed her eyes while an annoying hip-hop song by Pugnayshus began to swell:

  “Tell me why you wanna rag on me

  When I’m in a state of perpetual agony . . .”

  “I love this song,” Chloe said, just as Greer started to say, “I hate this song.” She stopped herself, not wanting to impugn Chloe’s taste. Then Chloe began to sing along: “. . . perpetual a-go-ny . . . ,” she enunciated, as sweet and reassuring as someone in a cherub choir.

  Above them, Darren Tinzler strode down the wide, majestic stairway. He hadn’t been identified as Darren Tinzler yet, hadn’t been given significance, but was still just another frat brother standing in front of the amethyst stained glass on the landing, thick-chested and with an overhang of hair and wide-set eyes beneath a backward baseball cap. He surveyed the room, then after consideration he headed for the three of them and their concentration of femaleness. Chloe tried to rise to the occasion like a little mermaid lifting toward the ocean surface, but she couldn’t entirely sit up. Zee, when he dubiously turned his attention to her next, closed her eyes and held up a hand, as if quietly shutting a door in his face.

  Which left Greer, who of course wasn’t available either. She and Cory were sealed together, and even if they hadn’t been, she knew she was too mild and focused for someone like this bro, though she still looked appealing in a very specific way, small and compact and determined, like a flying squirrel. She had straight, shining dark hair; the shot of color had been added at home with a drugstore kit in eleventh grade. She’d stood over the sink in the upstairs bathroom, getting blue all over the basin and the rug and the shower curtain, until in the end the room looked like the set of a slasher film on another planet.

  She had imagined that the streak in her hair would be a temporary novelty. But when she and Cory suddenly became involved senior year, he’d liked touching that unexpected swatch of color, so she’d kept it. In the beginning with him, when he sat looking at her for an extended moment, she often instinctively dipped her head down and glanced off to the side. Finally he would say, “Don’t look away. Come back to me. Come back.”

  Now Darren Tinzler turned his cap around and tipped it to her as if it were a top hat. And because of those powerful Ryland Flings, which had seriously loosened Greer, she stood and reached her hands out on either side of her waist, as if lifting a skirt in an air-curtsy, and bobbed her head. “Such a fancy occasion,” she murmured to herself.

  “What’s that?” Darren said. “Blue Streak, you are shit-faced.”

  “Actually, not true. I am only pee-faced.”

  He regarded her curiously, then led her into a corner, where they rested their drinks on top of a careless pile of warped and long-ignored board games—Battleship, Risk, Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, Full House Trivial Pursuit. “Were these rescued from the Great Frat House Flood of 1987?” she asked.

  He looked at her. “What?” he finally said, as if he was annoyed.

  “Nothing.”

  She told him she lived in Woolley, and he said, “You have my sympathy. It’s so depressing there.”

  “It really is,” she said. “And the walls are the color of hearing aids, am I right?” Cory, she remembered, had laughed when she’d said that, and told her, “I love you.” But Darren just looked at her again in that irritated way. She thought that she even saw disgust in his expression. But then he was smiling again, so maybe she had seen nothing. The human face had too many possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.

  “It’s been kind of not so great,” she confided. “I wasn’t supposed to be here at Ryland, actually. It was all a big mistake, but it happened, and it isn’t fixable.”

  “Is that right?” he asked. “You were supposed to be at another college?”

  “Yes. Somewhere much better.”

  “Oh yeah? Where is that?”

  “Yale.”

  He laughed. “That’s a good one.”

  “I was,” she said. Then, more indignantly, “I got in.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “I did. But it didn’t work out, and it’s too complicated to go into. So here I be.”

  “Here you be,” Darren Tinzler said. He reached out in a proprietary way and rubbed the collar of her shirt between his fingers, and she was startled and didn’t know what to do, because this wasn’t right. His other hand ran experimentally up her shirt, and Greer stood in shocked suspension for a moment as he found the convexity of her breast and encircled it, all the while looking her in the eye, not blinking, just looking.

  She jerked back from him and said, “What are you doing?”

  But he held on, giving her breast a hard and painful squeeze, twisting the flesh. When she pulled away for real he took her wrist and yanked her close, saying, “What do you mean, what am I doing? You’re standing here coming on to me with your bullshit about getting into Yale.”

  “Let go,” she said, but he didn’t.

  “No one else here is going to fuck you, Blue Streak,” he continued. “It would have to be a mercy fuck. You should be grateful that I was into you for two seconds. Get over yourself. You’re not that hot.”

  Then he let go of her wrist and pushed her away as if she had been the one who had been aggressive. Throughout all of this Greer’s face had turned warm and her mouth had gone as dry as a little piece of fabric. She felt herself swallowed up once again inside the usual feeling of being unable to say what she felt. The room was eating her up—the room and the party and the college and the night.

  No one appeared to have noticed what had happened, or at least no one was surprised by it. This tableau had taken place in plain sight: a guy putting a hand up a girl’s shirt and grabbing her hard and then pushing her away. She was as inconspicuous as Icarus drowning in the corner of the Bruegel painting they’d studied on the very first day of class. This was college, and this was a college party. Pin the Tail on the Donkey was being played, while several people chanted, “Go Kyla, go Kyla,” in monotone to a blindfolded girl who held a paper tail and took lurching baby steps forward. Elsewhere, a boy was softly puking into a porkpie hat. Greer thought about running to Health Services, where she could lie on a cot beside another cot that perhaps now held the girl from Woolley with diarrhea, the two of them having started college so inauspiciously.

  But Greer didn’t need
to go there; she just needed to leave this building. She heard Darren’s mild laughter pattering behind her as she moved quickly through the crowd, then out onto the porch with the groaning swing in which two people lay clasped, and then down onto the college green, which, she could feel through the heels of her boots, was still spongy from summer but already starting to turn brittle at the edges.

  She had never been touched like this before, she thought as she began a shaky speed-walk back across campus. In the hard, dark night, alone with herself in this new place, she tried to figure out what had happened. Of course boys and men had often made rude or lurid comments to her, the way they did to everyone, everywhere. At age eleven Greer had been muttered at by the bikers who hung around the KwikStop in Macopee. One day in summer, when she’d gone there to buy her favorite ice cream bar, a Klondike Choco Taco, a man with a ZZ Top beard had come close to her, looked her up and down in her shorts and little sleeveless shirt, and made his assessment: “Sweetie, you’re boobless.”

  Greer had had no way to defend herself against ZZ Top, no way to say anything spiky or do anything to stop him or even just call him out. She’d been silent before him, sassless and undefended. She wasn’t one of those girls who seemed to be everywhere, hands on hips, those girls who were described in certain books and movies as being “spitfires,” or, later on, “kickass.” Even now, at college, there were girls like this, fuck-you confident and assured of their place in the world. Whenever they came upon resistance in the form of outright sexism or even more generic grossness, they either vanquished it or essentially rolled their eyes and acted as if it was just too stupid for them to acknowledge. They wasted no thought on people like Darren Tinzler.

  On the college green now, people walked together in the resuscitative air, having left parties that were winding down, or heading toward other, smaller ones that were just starting up. It was the middle of the night; the temperature had dropped, and without a sweater Greer was cold. When she got back to Woolley the girl with the popcorn was asleep in the lounge, cradling her big plastic tub, which now contained just a cluster of unpopped corn kernels at the bottom like a congregation of ladybugs.

  “Someone did something to me,” Greer whispered to the unconscious girl.

  Over the next few days she would repeat a version of this to several conscious people, at first because it was still so upsetting, but then because it was so insulting. “It was like he felt he was entitled to do whatever he wanted,” Greer said on the phone to Cory with a kind of incensed wonder. “He didn’t care how I felt. He just thought he had the right.”

  “I wish I could be there with you now,” Cory said.

  Zee told her she should report him. “The administration should know about this. It’s assault, you know.”

  “I was drinking,” Greer said. “There’s that.”

  “So? All the more reason that he shouldn’t be messing with you.” When Greer didn’t respond, Zee said, “Hello, Greer, this is not tolerable. It’s actually pretty outrageous.”

  “Maybe it’s a Ryland thing. This wouldn’t happen at Princeton, I don’t think.”

  “Jesus, are you kidding me? Of course that isn’t true.”

  Zee was innately, bracingly political. She had started with animal rights when she was young; soon after, she became a vegetarian, and over time her depth of feeling for animals extended toward people too, and she added women’s rights, LGBT rights, war and its inevitable flood of refugees, and then climate change, which made you imagine future animals, future people, all of them imperiled and gasping, having run out of possibilities.

  But Greer hadn’t yet developed much of a political inner life; she only felt sickened and reluctant as she imagined filing a report and having to sit alone in Dean Harkavy’s office in Masterson Hall with a clipboard on her lap, writing out a statement about Darren Tinzler in her overly neat, good-girl handwriting. Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously?

  Greer thought about how victims’ names were kept out of sexual assault reports. The idea that something had been done to you seemed to implicate you, even though no one said it did, making your body—which usually lived in darkness beneath your clothing—suddenly live in light. Forever, if someone found out, you would be a person with a body that had been violated, breached. Also, forever you would be a person with a body that was vivid and imaginable. Compared with something like that, what had happened here was small potatoes. And then, once again, Greer thought of her own breasts, which could also be described that way. Small potatoes. That was the sum of what she was.

  “I don’t know,” Greer said to Zee, aware of a kind of familiar vagueness sweeping around her. She sometimes said, “I don’t know,” even when she did know. What she meant was that it was more comfortable to stay in vagueness than to leave it.

  As the moment with Darren Tinzler receded, it became less real, and finally it simply turned into an anecdote that Greer deconstructed more than once with a few girls in her dorm, all of them standing around the common bathroom carrying the plastic shower pails that their mothers had bought them to take to college, so that they resembled a coalition of children meeting at a sandbox. Everyone knew by now to keep their distance from the odious Darren Tinzler, and finally the topic exhausted itself, and exhausted the people thinking about it. It wasn’t rape, Greer had pointed out; not even close. Already it felt much less important than what was apparently going on right now at other colleges: the rugby-playing roofie-givers, the police reports, the outrage.

  But over the next couple of weeks, half a dozen other female Ryland students had their own Darren Tinzler encounters. They didn’t even necessarily know his name at first; he was just described as a male wearing a baseball cap and having “eyes like a carp,” as someone said. One night in the dining hall Darren sat with his friends and watched a sophomore for a long, unhurried amount of time; he gazed across the crowded space at her while she raised a spoon of fat-free something or other to her mouth. Another night he was in the reading room of the library, slouched at one of the butterscotch tables staring at a student as she forged her way through Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics.

  And then, when she stood up to talk to a friend or to bus her plate or to get some supposedly UTI-curative cranberry juice from the spigots with their miraculous free-flow that defined college life, or simply to stretch a little, joints going pop-pop-pop, he stood up, too, and strode toward her with resolve, making sure that they had cruised into a side-by-side position.

  When they were together in an alcove or hidden behind a wall or otherwise away from all onlookers, he started a conversation. And then he perceived her politeness or kindness or even her vague responsiveness as interest, and maybe sometimes it was. But then he always made it physical, a hand up a shirt, or on a crotch, or even, once, a finger swiped fast across a mouth. And when she recoiled he became angry and squeezed her hard so she cried out, and then reeled her in, saying some version of, “Oh, like you’re so shocked. Give me a fucking break. You’re such a little whore.”

  In every case she jolted back from him, saying, “Get away,” or simply storming off, saying, “You sick fuck,” or saying nothing and later telling her roommate what had happened, or maybe telling no one, or else worriedly polling all her friends that night, asking them, “I don’t look like a whore, do I?” and having them gather round her and say, “No, Emily, you look incredible. I love your look, it’s so free.”

  But then one night in Havermeyer, which was still known as the “new” dorm, though it had been built in 1980 and had a Soviet style amid all the eclectic architectural overreach that defined the Ryland campus, a sophomore named Ariel Diski returned very late to her room to find a boy waiting in the fourth-floor hallway’s defunct phone booth. There was no longer a phone in the booth, just a series of chewing-
gum-plugged holes where the pay phone had been ripped out, and a wooden seat to sit on in this useless little chamber. He opened the squeaking glass accordion door and stepped toward her, detaining her, talking to her, and even saying something that amused her. But soon he had touched her rudely and was edging her into her room; she pulled away from him, at which point he got mad and reined her in by her belt loops.

  But Ariel Diski had studied Krav Maga in high school with the Israeli gym teacher, and she got Darren in the center of his chest with a perfectly executed elbow strike. He brayed in pain, doors opened up and down the hall, people appeared in various states of undress and standing-up hair, and finally Security lumbered into the building with their sizzling, muttering walkie-talkies. And though Darren Tinzler was gone by that time, he was easily identified and apprehended back in Theta Gamma Psi, where he was pretending to be deep in a one-person round of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit.

  Soon the other girls rallied and came forward, and while the college initially tried to avoid any kind of public airing, under pressure officials agreed to hold a disciplinary hearing. It took place in a biology lab in the pale, leaking light of a Friday afternoon, when everyone was already thinking about the weekend ahead. Greer, when it was her turn to speak, stood in front of a glossy black table lined with Bunsen burners, and half-whispered what Darren Tinzler had said and done to her that night at the party. She was sure she had a fever from testifying, a wild and inflamed fever. Scarlet fever, maybe.

  Darren was without his usual baseball cap; his flat, fair hair looked like a circle of lawn that had been trapped and left to die under a kiddie pool. Finally he read a prepared statement: “I’d just like to say that I, Darren Scott Tinzler, class of 2007, a communications major from Kissimmee, Florida, am apparently kind of bad at reading signals from the opposite sex. I’m very ashamed right now, and I apologize for my own repeated misunderstanding of social cues.”