The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “I’m going to fuck this one’s brains out,” Cousin Sab cheerfully said, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the bed with the magazine between them like a little warming campfire. “I’m going to seriously come all over her face. She’s going to want it from me again and again. She’s going to need it from me.”

  “You’re thirteen,” Cory felt he had to point out.

  The boys looked at Sab’s rotating carousel of porn whenever Cory’s family came for a visit, and over time the images became less new and less shocking. They stared at the photos, studying them hard for their future application in their own lives. One month there was a pictorial called “She’s Hot 4 U—Sizzle!” in which a girl dripped candle wax all over a guy’s naked torso. Other times, Cory and Sab sat together actually reading the text in Beaverama that was thinly scattered among the pictures. Beaverama’s advice columnist, Hard Harry, wrote:

  Learn how to find her clit quickly. Ask her to show you where it is—she’ll like that! Guys, if you can make her come she will be sooooo grateful, she will do anything to you. And I mean anything. Seriously not exaggerating!!

  “What do you think ‘anything’ means?” Cory asked Sab. His cousin shrugged. Neither of them had enough imagination yet to even think of what else a girl could do to you, what powers she possessed, which you would want her to unleash upon your naked form. But eventually, going online to meet their daily porn requirements, they learned. The men in these scenes shouted out things to women, and the women shouted back. “I’m going to make you come!” the men cried. “Yes, yes!” the women cried back. “Do it now!”

  The girls Cory knew at school had none of these skills. They could, though, walk the balance beam, and they could tap out IMs to one another at the speed of light. Over time he went out with a couple of them and furiously kissed them and touched them, and then later on he went further with two different girls, trying out the language that had come from all the long hours spent in the company of porn.

  By senior year of high school, many of the boys in his grade played a game called Rate ’Em. Cory, fully handsome at this point and finally inhabiting his body as if he actually owned it and didn’t lease it from a disreputable place, was walking down the hall when Justin Kotlin grabbed his arm and said, “Pinto, you in? Rate ’Em time.”

  Cory turned to see a row of boys leaning against the wall. Every time a girl approached, the boys huddled together and each of them gave her a number rating, and then Brandon Monahan added the numbers up on his Texas Instruments calculator and came up with the average, which was hastily recorded on a piece of paper and then held up for everyone to see. Kristin Vells got an 8 (she lost points for being a skank), and Jessica Robbins, who was super-religious and wore plain jumpers and black shoes with buckles on them like a Pilgrim, got a 2.

  “Sure, whatever,” he said. Distantly then, he saw that Greer Kadetsky was wandering their way. Though they were still in all the same accelerated-track classes, he hadn’t really spoken to her in years. He had seen her over time; she had an after-school job a few days a week in the mall at Skatefest, where the employees wore horrible outfits and matching hats, but he had never really looked at her critically before. Now he did. She had an appealing but imperfect face, a spot of electric blue in her brown hair, and black jeans and an Aéropostale T-shirt that stretched across her smallish breasts. But he could see for himself now, for the first time over all these years, that quiet, fiercely hardworking Greer was also crisp and ready and serious and special, and maybe, actually, even a little bit beautiful. This realization, coming after all this time, was almost startling.

  Beside him, all the boys huddled over a calculator like employees at H&R Block during tax season, and finally a number appeared, which was then scrawled with a flourish on a piece of paper.

  6

  Greer Kadetsky was a 6. No, no, that was all wrong, Cory thought; she wasn’t a 6, that was way too low, and even if she was, that number would make her feel bad. He didn’t even think before taking the piece of paper from Nick Fuchs, who was routinely called Nick Fucks, when he wasn’t being called Nick Pukes.

  “What are you doing, Pinto?” Fuchs said as Cory turned the notebook upside down, transforming the 6 into a 9.

  Cory had rescued Greer from a moment of public humiliation, but she wasn’t even looking. Turn around, Greer Kadetsky, he wanted to say. Turn around and see what I have done for you.

  But she had her narrow back to the row of boys, and the bell rang and everyone started to scatter. Cory crushed up the piece of paper in his hand and walked away, and as he did that Nick casually stuck out a leg and tripped him. “You piece of shit,” Nick whispered as Cory went down, his cheek scraping the sharp edge of a locker where the metal had peeled back. A little flap of skin had opened on his face, and he knew he would need to go see the nurse, and that there would be Neosporin in his immediate future. But the pain wasn’t too bad, and all he could really keep thinking about was that he had rescued and praised Greer, and had now taken an injury for her, and yet she knew none of it. That same afternoon, on the bus, he sat directly behind her, with the bandaged cut on his cheekbone lightly throbbing while he studied the back of her head. It was a very well-shaped head, he noticed. It was definitely not the head of a 6.

  Greer had nothing in common with the women of Beaverama and all those websites, except that beneath her standard-issue high school clothes she possessed a good body, apparently full of holes the way all girls’ bodies were. It could make you slightly psychotic if you really focused on the idea that girls had holes under their clothes. Holes that suggested, in the absence they pointed out, that they could be filled, and that you could do the filling. He had turned a 6 into a 9; together the numbers made 69, which embarrassed him even to think about, but right away he saw two heads bobbing up and down in a bed like separate buoys in the ocean.

  His deliberate, crafted sexualization of Greer Kadetsky increased day by day. It was only three weeks after Greer Kadetsky had been rated and Cory had been deliberately tripped and sliced his cheek on the locker edge that he decided it was time to establish contact with this girl he now contemplated deeply and continually. He turned to her one afternoon as they got off the bus and said something inane about Vandenburg’s physics test being “unfair.” Then he lightly followed Greer up the path to the Kadetsky house, and from there it began.

  His cousin Sab almost immediately sensed the change in him, for each time the Pintos went to Fall River lately, Cory turned down Sab’s invitation to look at porn. “Oh come on, don’t be a pussy. Instead, come look at pussy,” Sab said. But Cory didn’t want this anymore, and Sab called him a faggot. Sab had been changing too, becoming mean and angry, and doing who knew what with his friends. Hard drugs. Dark things. When they saw each other, there were long, cold silences. But Cory was far away from Sab now; he was leaving him, and leaving his whole family.

  “When you’re both in college I’m going to visit you,” Alby, now four, said one afternoon when Greer was over at the Pinto house and they were sitting in the living room. “I’ll bring my superhero sleeping bag and unroll it on the floor of your room.”

  “Wait, which of us are you going to visit, Alby?” Cory asked, his hand in Greer’s hair, lazily rubbing her head. “That is, if Greer and I aren’t at the same college, which we really hope to be. Preferably at one of the Ivies,” he added with casual arrogance.

  “First I’ll visit Greer, then you,” said Alby. “And one day you can visit me at my college.”

  “And I can sleep in my superhero sleeping bag when I do,” Cory said.

  “No,” said Alby seriously. “That makes no sense. When I go to college you’ll be . . . thirty-two. You won’t want a sleeping bag. You and your wife will want a bed.”

  “Yes, Cory,” said Greer. “You and your wife will want a bed.”

  “Greer could be your wife,” Alby said. “But she has to convert to Cat
holic like us.”

  “How do you know about converting?” asked Cory.

  “I read about it.”

  “Where, in The Little Golden Book of Converting? You scare me, Alby. Slow down, brother. You don’t have to know everything already.”

  “Yes I do. Ask me a question, and I’ll tell you the answer.”

  “Okay,” said Cory. “When did the dinosaurs go extinct?”

  Alby slapped his forehead. “That’s too easy,” he said. “Sixty-five million years ago.”

  “He’ll be good when he gets to Paths of Imagination,” Greer said. “He’ll whip right through it.”

  “Yeah, he’ll kick Taryn the Recycling Girl’s butt.”

  “By the time he’s in school,” said Greer, “Taryn the Recycling Girl will be sitting on her porch thinking about the highlight of her life, the time when she was a child and got into The Guinness Book of World Records.”

  “Actually, she’ll probably be dead,” said Cory. “The toxic chemicals in all the bottles she collected will have given her cancer and killed her.”

  “Who’s going to be dead? Give me another one,” said Alby, full of lofty excitement.

  Cory thought about this. “Okay,” he said, and he smiled at Greer. “Try this one. Define love.”

  Alby stood up on the plastic surface of the couch, which crunched beneath his feet. He wore a thin old red Power Rangers sweatshirt, handed down from Cory and already too small, the image and the lettering half rubbed off and cryptic. “Love is when you feel, like, oh, oh, my heart hurts,” Alby said. “Or like when you see a dog and you feel like you have to touch its head.” He looked at Greer. “Like the way Cory is touching your head now.” Cory stopped the movement of his hand, just froze there in her hair.

  “Whoa,” said Cory softly, taking his hand away. “You’re like the Dalai Lama, man. I’m afraid to let you go walking around outside. Some people might come and bring you back to their country and make you live in a gated palace.”

  “That would be good,” said Alby. “They can do that if they want.”

  Greer suddenly reached over and touched Alby’s small, sleek head. Cory watched his girlfriend pet the head of his brother, as if Alby were a cocker spaniel, smooth-furred and enormous of eye.

  Cory and Greer would try to be together for college; that was what they agreed, and they were optimistic it would happen. On the spring day when most of their college decisions would be revealed online after five p.m., they rode home from school barely talking. The hydraulic doors of the district school bus unshuttered and released them with a vacuum pop onto the mouth of Woburn Road. Behind them, distantly, was Kristin Vells. Kristin was not on an academic track, and so they had never even had a conversation with her over all these years; they thought she was dumb, and she thought they were dumb, each in a different way. Kristin went home to her house, probably to smoke and nap, and Cory and Greer ran pounding down Woburn toward the Kadetskys’. It was only three thirty. They lingered for a while in Greer’s bedroom, undisturbed.

  “Whatever happens today, we’re solid, right?” he asked her. “And we’ll be solid next year too.”

  “Of course.” She paused. “Why, what are you expecting to happen?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just that they don’t know us, these admissions committees. They don’t know what we’re really like. Or that we do best when we’re with each other.”

  They had decided that they would find out their college decisions together, first at her house, and then at his. At five p.m. Greer went first, sitting at the kitchen table and logging in to the relevant websites one after another, alphabetically. Her hand shook a little as she entered her password and waited. “We received a record number of applicants . . . ,” came the tumble of words. The shock of rejection was strong: Harvard, no. Princeton, no.

  “Oh shit, oh shit,” said Greer, and Cory gripped her hand.

  “It’s insanely competitive,” he murmured. “But really, screw them, Greer. They’re just wrong.”

  “This is what you meant when you said we’re solid, isn’t it?” Greer said, her voice rising. “You thought I wasn’t going to get in, and you were trying to prepare me.”

  “No, of course not.”

  The Yale decision still hung there at the end of the alphabet, but by now Cory felt sorry for her and worried for himself, and didn’t hold out too much hope for her for Yale, if she hadn’t gotten into those others. Greer clicked indifferently on the Yale link and entered her password, and when the music flooded out all at once, the Yale fight song—“Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow wow wow!”—they both started to shout, and then Greer cried and he put his arms around her, so relieved, and said, “Nice work, Space Kadetsky.”

  Her parents wandered in then, her father looking for something to eat and her mother cradling her flip phone and talking into it about a new shipment of ComSell Nutricle bars, “which,” she was saying, “we now have in Banana Blast.”

  “What’s going on?” Rob asked, and then Greer told them, and he said, “Oh shit, it’s already five? We lost track.”

  Cory wanted to say to Greer’s parents: You lost track? Are you shitting me? Don’t you know what you have here with this girl? Don’t you know how hard she works, and how much she loves it? Why can’t you be more proud of her? Why can’t you appreciate her? It’s so easy to do.

  “Mom, Dad, I got into Yale,” Greer said. “You can read the letter. I left it up on the computer.”

  Next he and Greer ran across the road and up the incline, and right away Cory sensed something strange going on inside his own house. Both of his parents knew that today was when decisions would be handed down. They were so invested in this whole process, and yet where were they? They were behaving almost as cavalierly as the Kadetskys. They should have been waiting for him by the door, he thought. But then his mother was upon him out of nowhere, throwing her arms around him. “Around my legs,” he later insisted, hyperbolic. How such a small woman could have given birth to this tall, thin pole-child was bewildering, as even Cory’s father was only of medium height and build. Their first son had gone beyond them in all ways.

  “What’s going on?” Cory said, and deeper in the house other voices rose up. He heard his brother shouting, “He’s home!” followed by the thumping of Alby’s sneakers as he raced overhead and then leaped down the stairs with Slowy in hand, arriving at the same time that Aunt Maria pushed into the room from the kitchen, carrying a large aluminum pan containing a sheet cake. His father was right behind them, carrying a second cake. Cory was confused. The first cake was spread thickly with blue-and-white frosting, with a brush fire of candles on top. The air in the room was tinged with a distinctive birthday smell.

  “Look at the picture,” his aunt said, and at first neither Cory nor Greer understood why the cake had been decorated with an illustration of an animal.

  “A cow?” Cory asked. “But why?” It did look like a cartoon cow, though not quite, with a freckled face and an angry expression. No one answered, and Cory said, “Listen, you guys. You know the decisions are live online right this minute, right? These cakes are great, but I really have to go check.”

  “Cory,” Alby said, gesturing in the air with the hand that held his turtle, which waved in halfhearted protest. “Don’t you get it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a bulldog.”

  As soon as Cory hesitantly said, “Yale?” his father presented the second sheet cake to him. This one was frosted white and orange with a big rust-colored animal in the center. Though it too resembled a farmyard animal, Cory and Greer both understood now that it was supposed to be the Princeton tiger.

  “You got into both places. A full ride!” said Alby, as if he really understood the significance of this.

  Cory stared at his family. “But how do you know already? I haven’t even logged in.”

 
“Forgive me,” said Benedita. “I enter your log-in and then your password. I know them.”

  “Greer123,” said Alby, and over to the side Cory could see Greer’s pleased expression. He ought to have been furious with his mother for denying him his moment of reckoning, but he wasn’t. Also, she was so happy right now; both of his parents were. Tonight the news would be all over Fall River, and all over Portugal. “Harvard turned you down,” Alby continued breezily. “But who needs them, right?”

  The crimson cake, baked alongside the others, just in case, was still in the kitchen, and would later be tossed in the trash. Benedita had spent the day baking with Aunt Maria, whose own son, Sab, wouldn’t be going to college. Out of all the cousins, Cory and Alby had long ago been pegged as the most academic ones. Cory had already proven himself in this way, and Alby was certainly going to follow, and most likely exceed, his older brother. The day they had discovered Alby could read was when, still a toddler, he’d been gazing at a box of Fruity Pebbles at the breakfast table, and in the clatter of the morning kitchen had quietly begun to whisper to himself, “Red 40, Yellow 6, BHA to help protect flavor.”

  Now Cory would have to pick between Yale and Princeton. A bulldog or a tiger: what a decision. If he went to Yale, he and Greer would be together. So really, it wasn’t a decision at all. Yale was where he would go. Greer and Cory sat at the kitchen table eating slices of different-colored cake, both of which tasted identical on the tongue. No one in the world had ever eaten sheet cake for taste, only for celebration. “Greer got into Yale too,” Cory told his family, and they exclaimed politely over her success.

  “Full ride?” Alby asked.

  “I didn’t look yet. I was so excited.” Greer stood up from the table. “I have to go home and see.”

  “I’ll come,” Cory said.