The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  It was eight years before she would return to the Pintos’, and then, when she did, there was no aletria; she no longer desired it, or even consciously longed to be “parented,” as people said these days. Because finally she was a full-strength teenager, and feeling separate from one’s parents was, as she would say to Cory, part of the job description. It didn’t often matter to her that she had been ignored and left to come of age mostly alone in the house. She had long since gotten used to it and had come to accept it as her life. But now at the Pinto house there was Cory himself—different Cory, teenage, emotionally and sexually attractive Cory, who was not only as bright as she was, but was interesting as well, with a serious face and long hands and a hair-free chest, and a way of being with her that soon seemed unrelated to the way anyone else was with her.

  By then, at age seventeen, both of them were deeply involved in the furthering of their own individual brands. He was a basketball player, having been drafted onto the Macopee Magpies, where the coach didn’t pressure him to be particularly good, just tall. When he wasn’t on the basketball court or laboring over the grindstone of his studies, Greer had seen him standing over the ancient Ms. Pac-Man machine at Pie Land Pizza. Quarter after quarter was slipped into the slot, and as the grimy, curving display fluttered to life, Cory became the master of this world too, his name appearing at the top of the players list that the management of Pie Land had posted on the wall. People wrote in their own scores, and at the end of the week a champion was declared. PINTO had been written in green Sharpie.

  It seemed unfair that he should dominate in this realm too, Ms. Pac-Man being, after all, female. Though really, Ms. Pac-Man with her sunlike orb of a head, and legs in red bootlets, lacked the parts that would separate her from her male counterpart. She was breastless, and there was no lower body to hold the sexual mysteries that would excite Pac-Man himself, he who required no “Mr.” before his name.

  In high school Greer had sometimes sat at Pie Land on weekends with two or three friends, all of them on the obedient, good-girl track but with a slight offbeat aesthetic, as if to compensate. The blue streak that Greer put in her hair was like a neon sign lighting up the set of delicate facial features below. Maybe Cory Pinto noticed her; maybe he didn’t. But Greer and the others noticed him, and more than that they watched him from the side or back as he played the game. His wing bones shifted, his jaw went tight; he was in a state of absolute concentration.

  “What’s so fascinating to him about that game?” Marisa Claypool asked.

  “Maybe it helps him focus,” said Greer, though the question really should have been: what’s so fascinating about Cory Pinto?

  She watched intently as the globular Ms. Pac-Man kept eating everything in sight. Did it matter that that character was female? Greer tried not to pay too much attention to her own femaleness; the world would do that for her. But her breasts did exist now—she was no longer boobless, as she’d been called outside the KwikStop—along with a tapering waist, and a vagina that menstruated in its secret, brilliant way each month, observed only by her. No one else knew what went on inside you; no one else cared.

  One day, early in the winter of their senior year of high school, Greer Kadetsky and Cory Pinto and Kristin Vells thudded off the bus onto Woburn Road, one after the other as usual, but this time after Kristin walked away Cory hitched up his huge backpack and turned around to look Greer in the face, saying, “You think that test in Vandenburg’s class was fair?” Up close, she saw the pastel mustache making a soft inroad over his lip, and the small, crescent-shaped remnant of an injury scabbing on his cheekbone. She recalled his having had a small Band-Aid stuck there not too long ago, from some kind of boys-horsing-around accident.

  “Fair how?” she asked, confused that he was talking to her suddenly, and with such force.

  “All that material about electric potential, et cetera. None of it turned out to be on the test.”

  “So you learned extra,” she said.

  “I don’t want extra,” Cory said, and she realized that the unnecessary information weighed him down. It was like the way swimmers shaved their bodies, wanting nothing to get in the way of their proximity to the water.

  Without any negotiation, he followed her up the path to her house. “You want to come in,” she said flatly, not a question, even though she didn’t know exactly why she was inviting him, or what they would find inside now. But as soon as she opened the door she could smell a far-off scent rising up from the basement to meet them.

  “Whoa,” Cory said, then laughed.

  “What,” she said flatly.

  “Superweed, parental variety,” he said, and she just shrugged as if she didn’t care.

  Her parents’ cannabis was stronger than what the stoners at Macopee High smoked. Rob and Laurel Kadetsky procured their mellow marijuana from a farmer friend and his wife up in Vermont. Sometimes in Greer’s childhood she would accompany her parents on a road trip there. She’d once sat on the couch while Farmer John painstakingly plinked out “Stairway to Heaven” on the banjo, quietly singing along, “Ooh, it makes me wonder . . .” Beside him his wife, Claudette, showed Greer and her mother the patchwork baby dolls, made of pantyhose pulled over balled socks and bits of fabric and called Noobies, that she was trying to sell. The Noobies’ faces had the vague, mashed expressions of people stoned on Farmer John’s superior product.

  The day that Cory came to the house, marijuana was the opening theme. It had been a while since Greer had caught a tinge of it during the day, and it upset her that on the one afternoon of her life that she had brought her longtime secret nemesis Cory Pinto home with her, this was what she’d found.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just funny,” Cory said as he sniffed the air. “I’m going to get a contact high just being here. I’ll need Cheetos and M&M’s pretty soon, so get them ready.”

  “Shut up. And why is it funny?”

  “Oh, come on. Your parents are these stoners, and you’re this ambitious good girl. I think that’s funny.”

  “I’m honored by your description of me.”

  “I wasn’t trying to insult you. I see you all the time with college brochures. You’re trying for the Ivies too, right?” She nodded. “I think we’re the only ones in the grade,” he said. “I think it’s just us.”

  “Yeah,” she said, softening. “I think so too.” They shared a single-mindedness that you couldn’t teach someone; a person had to have it as part of their neurology. No one knew how this kind of focused ambition got into someone’s system; it was like a fly that’s slipped into a house, and there it is: your housefly.

  When Greer’s mother appeared, dressed in her clown collar but not the shoes or wig, she seemed self-conscious. “Oh,” Laurel said. “I didn’t know you were bringing someone home. Hi, Cory. Well, I’m off to do a show.” She opened the door. “Dad’s down at his workbench.” Rob Kadetsky sometimes puttered around in the basement, listening to cassettes of eighties bands on an old Walkman and working on something involving radio waves. Greer and Cory watched Laurel walk to her car in a modified version of the clown suit that she wore to her occasional gigs.

  “What exactly does your mom do again?” Cory asked.

  “Take three guesses.”

  “Accountant.”

  “Ha ha, you’re hilarious.”

  “I mean, I’ve seen her outfit,” he said. “Obviously I know the basic concept, but it’s not like she’s going under the big top, is she? Elephants and a ringmaster and a family trapeze act?”

  “Library clown,” said Greer.

  “Ah.” Cory paused. “I didn’t know library clown was a job.”

  “It isn’t, really, but she made it into one. It was her idea.”

  “Well, that’s resourceful. So what does a library clown do, exactly?”

  “She goes around to libraries dressed as a clown, and I guess she tells jokes
to the kids and reads to them or something.”

  “Is she funny?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “But she’s a clown,” Cory said thoughtfully. “I thought being funny would be a prerequisite.”

  The entire time Greer and Cory were together in the house that afternoon, her father never emerged from the basement. The two of them sat tensely in the den on the old plaid couch, and Cory played with a lighter that one of her parents had left there, flicking it with his thumb and touching it to the wick of one of the small white candles that sat in little glass cups on a windowsill, furred with dust. Then he upended the lit candle and waited until a clear teardrop of wax had dripped off and landed on the back of his hand, where it immediately turned opaque.

  “Amazing,” he said.

  “You sound stoned. What’s amazing?”

  “The way you can tolerate hot wax on your skin for a second. Why is it tolerable? If a car runs over your foot for a second, is that tolerable too?”

  “I don’t know, but please don’t try it at home.”

  “And if someone else drips wax on you, does it hurt? You know the way you can’t tickle yourself?” Cory said. “Is it like that?”

  “I have no idea,” said Greer. “I’ve never thought about any of this before.”

  In one move Cory yanked up his shirt so that his long torso was revealed. Cory and Greer were the two brains of the grade, but here he was being mostly a body, a torso—what a strange word. It was one of those words that if you said it aloud a few times, it disintegrated into nonsense: Torso torso torso.

  Cory lay down on his back along the wooden coffee table, which creaked with strain, his legs hanging over the edge. “Okay, do it,” he said. “The wax.”

  “You’re going to break my parents’ table.”

  “Come on, just do it,” he said.

  “You’re deranged. I’m not going to drip wax on your stomach, Cory. I’m not some dominatrix on a website.”

  “How do you know there are dominatrices on websites? You just gave yourself away.”

  “How’d you know the plural was dominatrices?”

  “Touché,” he said, smirking.

  “Shut up,” she said, the second time today that she’d said that to him. Shut up, girls said to boys, and the boys were thrilled.

  “Come on, I just want to see what it feels like,” said Cory. “You’re not going to kill me, Greer.”

  So she found herself tipping a lit candle onto Cory Pinto’s stomach, peering down as the flame softened the wax, which formed a transparent pearl of liquid, and then the liquid met skin with a soft little dollop sound. He drew back the muscles of his abdomen, and exposed his teeth and said, “Shit!”

  “Are you okay?” she asked. He nodded. The wax hardened into a white oval above the small depression of his navel. She thought that they were done, but he didn’t get up, and then he asked her to do it again. Now she wasn’t thinking about whether this would hurt him; obviously it would, but not too badly. She was thinking, instead, that the feeling of dominating Cory Pinto was new, the feeling of being in charge of him, going past him, and that it was sort of great.

  The following Saturday, her parents drove up to the farm in Vermont, and Cory came over in the afternoon without even the pretense of studying or talking about school. He brought no books or notebooks or graph paper or laptop. Later, she could barely remember how they moved from school talk to what happened next. But after sitting at the kitchen table for a while, she invited him upstairs to see her room. After about thirty seconds of looking around at all her things—the snow-globe collection, the trophy for winning the spelling prize, the many, many books, from Anne of Green Gables to Anne of Avonlea to Elie Wiesel’s Night—Cory said, “Greer,” and she said, “What,” and he said, “You know what.” He smiled at her in a new, sly way, which both shocked her and didn’t, and then he took her face between his hands, kissing her so swiftly that their teeth knocked. As soon as she felt his tongue tip she heard him groan, and the sound made her feel as if a spoon were stirring her organs around. Then Cory took her by the shoulders and maneuvered her back so she was lying down and he was lying on top of her, their hearts competing. Greer was so excited she didn’t know what to do with herself.

  “Is this okay?” he asked, and she couldn’t think how to answer. How could it be okay? That wasn’t the word for it. He touched her breasts beneath her bra, and both Greer and Cory were silent and shocked from the strength of the sensation. When he opened her bra and kissed her breasts she thought she might faint. Can you faint lying down? she wondered. In a little while, after much touching, he unsnapped her jeans with such a loud sound that it was like a log popping in a fireplace.

  Then his fingers hovered tantrically inside the nanospace between jeans and underpants, and he started to get inexplicably and weirdly chatty. “I’m going to make you come,” he said in a voice that was unfamiliar. “I’m going to make you want it,” he went on. Then he asked, a little unsurely, “Do you want it?”

  “Why are you talking like that?” she said, confused.

  “I was just saying what I felt,” he said, but now he looked as if he’d been caught in something.

  And though, once in a while in bed after that day, he would speak to her in a similar, strange way, she was usually able to bring him around quickly to being himself. Not that being themselves was any less disorienting. The freedom of that, the idea that you could have preferences, and that they were your own and it was up to you to know what they were—you and the other person—terrified her.

  The second time they were together in bed, he boldly whispered, “So where’s your clit?” The word was almost alarming when spoken by Cory and actually meant to refer to a part of Greer.

  “What?” she said, because it was all she could think to say. She was stalling.

  “Where is it exactly? Show me.” His voice, after this moment of bravado, faded out.

  “It’s over here,” she said, gesturing vaguely and miserably. In fact, she didn’t know. She was seventeen years old and she had been too embarrassed until now to comprehend her own anatomy. She’d had hundreds of orgasms alone in bed, but she could not draw a map to the place where they had originated.

  That night, after Cory had gone home to his house across the street, and Greer was left in the quiet wonder of what had happened between them, she went online and Googled the words clit and diagram, so that now she would know, and then next time he would know too. If you ever wanted to get an accurate picture of who you are, Greer thought years later, all you had to do was look at everything you’d Googled over the past twenty-four hours. Most people would be appalled to see themselves with this kind of clarity.

  Now she and Cory were constantly together. He told her about his parents, how he’d felt ashamed when he was younger that they had accents and menial jobs. She told him about being an only child, and having parents who were often indifferent to her. “I will never be indifferent to you,” he said, and she realized that he was on her side, and that she wasn’t alone. They were becoming seriously attached, and their sexual activity was a mix of gasping thrill and excruciating misfire. Sometimes he accidentally hurt her, and sometimes her own hands and mouth became misguided hummingbirds. They tried and tried. They had petty arguments about whether they were compatible.

  “Maybe you’re not the right person for me,” he said once, testing out the words.

  “Fine. Maybe you should go out with Kristin Vells,” she said. “You can help her with reading. I bet she’ll appreciate that.”

  “Believe me, we won’t be doing any reading.”

  Greer turned away, upset and hugging herself, and she realized that she had seen this kind of behavior in TV shows and movies: the emotionally fragile girl with her arms crossed protectively around herself, maybe even stretching out the arms of her sweater. She didn�
��t understand why she was so easily willing to take on this predetermined female role. But then she realized she actually sort of liked it, because it made her part of a long chain of women who had done exactly this.

  Sometimes all it took was a distraction to make them both return to themselves. They would play one of his three-and-a-half-year-old brother Alby’s video games for an hour or two, or send IMs filled with private jokes—it was amazing how quickly private jokes could develop—and then they would both remember they were compatible. “I don’t know that I love you yet,” Greer warned Cory one afternoon when they lay brazenly in her bed with her parents moving around downstairs. But she had said it only because she did know.

  “That’s all right,” was all Cory said. But they knew that this was love, and that this was also desire, the two forces forming a substantial and circular current.

  Then, a week later, Greer said, “Remember what I said about love? Is it too late to change it?”

  “It’s not an answer on a test.”

  “Well, okay. Then I love you,” she said quietly, trying it out. “I do.”

  “I love you too,” he said. “We’re even.”

  At her house the next afternoon, now certifiably in love and even, they had what was considered actual sex. It was a little embarrassing and certainly imperfect—Cory gnawed at the condom wrapper for a long, tense moment—though occasionally, over time, it would become perfect. Her house was used for exploration; in the Pinto house they weren’t even allowed into his bedroom, so instead they sat in the living room on the sofa with the plastic covers zipped onto it, and there was always fragrant food cooking, and sometimes an aunt wandered in or out.

  What she particularly liked about being at Cory’s house was that Alby was often with them, lolling all over them on the couch. Alby was a late addition to the Pinto family, having been born when Cory was fourteen. Alby’s dented, empty juice boxes dotted the back of the Pinto family car, along with his action figures lying facedown or faceup, bent-armed or straight-armed, frozen in mid-kick or mid–karate chop, waiting for him to return to the car and reanimate them. Alby resembled a small Cory, funny and antsy and precocious, very likely brilliant; and he loved his older brother and also seemed to love Greer.