The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky

by Jana Casale

  CHAPTER 14

  Success

  The next six months and two weeks of Leda’s life were unrecognizably calm. She found a certain focus within herself that would only be revisited the summer after her granddaughter was born. Her class schedule was fairly light, and on weekends she spent more time with her family. Her mom would tell her that she “looked healthy,” and that she “seemed happy,” and although Leda wouldn’t take much notice of her mother saying these things, they were true. She read a lot of Flannery O’Connor and on Wednesdays got soup at an organic soup place. She went to three shows with Anne at a little music club downtown. At one of the shows she got hit on by a cute boy named Caleb. He was tall and baby faced, and he told her that his band played at the club Monday nights.

  “I have a band and we play Monday nights,” he said.

  “Do you?” she said.

  She didn’t believe him about the band, but it felt good to flirt. And when she left that night, she could feel herself float. Anne said: “Why didn’t you get his number? Why didn’t you want him to buy you a drink?” And Leda said: “After what happened with Alex I do not want to go out with anybody right now.” And Anne said: “What about marriage?” And Leda said: “I don’t know.” And she really didn’t know.

  Most of her focus was on her writing, and she wrote some of her favorite pieces during this time. It was then that she first considered writing a novel. It was then that she saw herself as put-together and capable. When she blinked visions of how she considered herself, it was herself in a Chanel suit and heels clicking down the sidewalk. It was her linear by the way she stood, linear by posture.

  On the last day of this six-month-and-two-week stretch of clarity, she opened a window in her apartment that she had formerly believed to be warped shut. The landlord had pointed it out when she moved in.

  “That window won’t open, but all the others do,” he said. “It’s warped.”

  She was lying around in pajamas and watching bad TV all day. It had been very cold, and so she’d decided to spend her Sunday inside. She’d made pasta and called her mom and wrote a poem about pumpkin carving. On an impulse she tried to open the window. She had never tried to do it before. The window stuck a bit, but as she bore her weight pushing up against the pane, it loosed and drew open with a long, heavy slide. The cold air hit her in a crisp, nice way. Outside was her city block and the darkness. She could hear distant traffic, but she didn’t really listen for it. The stars were fairly visible despite the brightness of the streetlamps. And when she breathed she could feel a coldness in her lungs that felt as young and fresh as she did then. Clicking heels in her mind, linear as an impulse.

  When she went to bed, she shut the window but left it open a crack. She always slept better in the cold. And when she woke up she didn’t remember any of her dreams from the night, but it was morning so she felt the strange kind of promise of a new day.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 15

  Meeting

  She met him in an art appreciation class. She’d switched to it only moments before registration closed because she had a strange feeling that she should. Originally, she’d signed up for an art history class, but on a brisk and pulsing whim she switched. How fateful that decision would be. How blissfully ignorant she was, believing herself the arbiter of her own life. No more predictable than the cinnamon she’d sprinkle on the foam of her latte, each flaking granule falling as evenly and imprecisely as she met John.

  He was tall and blond, and when he spoke he seemed quiet, something she immediately liked. She first noticed him about a month into class. That morning she twisted her ankle so she took a cab to school. It was colder than it had been, and she treated herself to a hot chocolate. She held it in her hands; the heat through her gloves was mesmerizingly warm against the winter morning, so much so that she mistakenly thought the person in front of her was holding the door open for her. She walked right into the closing door, spilling the hot chocolate all over her gloves. Her hands went from hot and burning to unbearably freezing as the liquid quickly cooled the drenched wool. She pulled her gloves off and didn’t know what to do with them. They were cheap and soaked, so she threw them in a trashcan on the street corner. It was really the only practical thing she could do. When she finally made it to class, she could feel her ankle sore from the stairs (the elevators were broken), and her hands were still cold. This day is already hell, she thought.

  The art appreciation class had been a disappointment. The professor was in her mid-thirties. She was a mousy woman with a bad pixie haircut who wanted so desperately to be hipper than she was. She’d name-drop indie bands that she assumed the students were listening to, and most days she’d blast Pandora through her iPhone as they shuffled into the room. Occasionally she’d mouth along to lyrics of songs by The Cure and Leda would think, Why are you trying to be so hip? Don’t you realize you aren’t hip? You are just as not-hip as the rest of us, only you are older, and it is time to let it go. Her name was Cheryll with two l’s, a fact she explained the first day of class.

  “My mom named me Chantel, which I hated, so I changed it to Cheryll. Why the extra l? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you,” she said. Leda believed that Cheryll didn’t know why she spelled her name like that. She believed that there were probably many things that she did and didn’t know why. Cheryll taught the class by showing slides of different art pieces and asking whether the students liked them or not. Whatever the students said or thought, Cheryll would listen and nod and always agree.

  It was slow and grating and Leda found herself for the most part chronically disengaged. Occasionally Cheryll would say something interesting about a piece or an artist, but generally it was just some student rattling off their issues with Ellsworth Kelly.

  “Now, I’m very curious as to what you all think of this piece,” Cheryll said as she clicked to a slide of Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window.

  No one raised their hand, a common reaction from the bemused class.

  “Come on, guys, one of you must think something about this gnarly painting.” Still no one responded.

  “Well, how about we hear from someone we haven’t yet,” Cheryll said, reaching for something, anything at all.

  “Laura, what do you think of the piece?”

  Laura was a girl Leda’d had several classes with in the past. She rarely spoke and had a nervous laugh. The one meaningful encounter Leda had with her was being paired up with her in her modernist literature class. The two of them were meant to give a presentation on a section of “The Waste Land.” Before they began Laura said, “I’m not really good with poetry.” And that was about all Laura said. Leda was left to navigate through the presentation alone. At the end of it Laura turned to her and said, “Thanks. I’m sorry.” After that Leda made a point of never sitting next to her for fear of ever having to work with her again.

  Laura looked up at the painting. She’d been drawing or writing on her notebook. Her skin was olive and shined in the overhead projector light. She looked terrified.

  “I think it’s ummmmmmm. I like it?”

  “Why do you like it?” Cheryll asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, there’s no wrong answers. What is it you like about the painting?”

  “I think ummmm. It’s ummm. I don’t really know, actually. I guess I just like it. I’m not really sure why or anything.”

  “You don’t know at all?”

  “No, not really, ummmm sorry.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “Umm, ummm.”

  Cheryll, who usually by this point would concede and move on to harassing a better-prepared student, stood stock-still; her body posture was stiff and her expression resolved. Her usual demeanor was small and yearning, peppy and desperate, but it was as if a calm had come over her. As if she’d all at once been made aware of what a fool she
was for wanting to be hip so badly in a group of college students who were supposed to respect her. It was as if she’d suddenly realized her life was as futile as her haircut.

  “Well, you must have some idea why you like it. I mean, you’re saying that you like it. What do you like about it? I don’t think it’s a really hard question to answer.”

  “Hahahahaha,” Laura nervously laughed much too loudly. “I don’t know.”

  “The colors? The light? The subject matter? What? I mean, this is Vermeer. I wouldn’t call his work exactly inaccessible. I could easily tell you a thousand things I like about this painting and you can’t tell me one?”

  A palpable tension fell over the class. Leda looked around quickly. Everyone seemed to be as terrified of the ensuing awkwardness as she was. She looked at Laura, who had turned purple in the impressionist glow.

  “I, I, I’m, well, I’m, I, I’m—the colors?”

  “What is it that you like about the colors?” Cheryll snapped back.

  “They are ummm. Well, I don’t know exactly—”

  “You don’t know what it is you like about the colors? You like the painting because of the ‘colors’ ”—Cheryll air-quoted “colors”—“but you don’t know what it is you like about the ‘colors’?” She air-quoted again.

  “No, I—I like the way that they’re vibrant, I think.”

  Good girl, Leda thought. Don’t let her rip you to shreds.

  “What do you mean exactly?”

  “I, I don’t know—”

  “Again you ‘don’t know’? I’m not asking you to split the atom here. I’m expecting you to know why you like something. I mean, for god’s sake, if you don’t know why you like anything how can you live your life? How can you wake up and pick out what clothes you’ll wear? Or what cereal you want to eat for breakfast? Or who you want to fuck?”

  The word fuck hung in the air. Leda had heard plenty of professors use the word, and Cheryll of course used it every chance she got. But this was the only time in her life she would hear it used in this way. It was penetrative and violating, stripping and vulgar. She could imagine Laura then as a child sitting at a large table dwarfed by everything around her or naked under the weight of some hideous man. Her fat rolls exposed and jiggling as the man ferociously fucked her.

  And then John raised his hand. He did it in such a way that even if she wanted to, Cheryll couldn’t have ignored it, the bend in his elbow or his expression, strong and still. Leda would remember how blue his eyes seemed, how even as he was sitting she could notice his height.

  “John,” Cheryll said.

  “Could you tell me about that Tom Hunter painting that was inspired by this? I saw it in an exhibit once, and it was really incredible,” he said.

  “That is one of my absolute favorite paintings of all time.” Cheryll’s face softened. The tension in the room instantly defused and Laura was spared. Cheryll continued on about the painting; she smiled and gestured as she spoke, enlivened by the question. Leda watched John nod in response, his face kind.

  He seems like someone who would be a good boyfriend, she thought.

  That night she texted Anne: “I think I have a crush on someone in class.”

  She’d save that text, and years later she’d reread it to remember a feeling that was as fleeting as that girl with her letter by the window and the all-surrounding fuck.

  CHAPTER 16

  The First Date

  John and she had been hanging out after every class since two weeks after “the Laura incident,” as they had started to refer to it. He would walk her to her next class, and they’d talk and flirt right up until she had to go in. She liked the way he never rushed her. The patient way he seemed as happy as she was just to be there. Until then she had firmly believed that most guys would spend only as little time as was needed to get a girl to stay around. “You always want to be there more than they do,” Anne would say. And it was true. Leda’s ex-boyfriend was a myriad of attention deficit–like behavior. Sometimes she’d see him, sometimes she wouldn’t. Sometimes he’d call, sometimes he wouldn’t. She would, though; she would always want to be there or want to talk. Before meeting John, she assumed that it was just the difference between men and women, that women were somehow kinder and more patient. With John she became reassured in the possibility that humanity wasn’t singularly female.

  By the end of the semester a tension had emerged between them. Leda would stand in the hall with John, talking about cats and the potential of homemade mayonnaise, and all the while she’d be thinking: Ask me out. Ask me out. Ask me out. The waiting grew tiresome, and she started to worry that maybe she was misjudging the whole thing. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. I really hate my arms. I wish I had thinner arms. Anne would ask every day about the progress of the flirtation, and at a certain point Leda began responding with things like, “Yeah, I don’t know. I’m kind of over the whole thing.” Then one day she walked past the school’s café window and John tapped the glass to get her attention. He motioned for her to come in, and right then she knew that she was wrong about all of it, and that he hadn’t noticed her arms.

  She came in and sat beside him at the counter. They chatted about school and their upcoming finals. She could smell his coffee when he’d lift his cup, an aroma that with all its bitterness suddenly smelled sweet to her.

  “Are you free this Saturday?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  They talked awhile longer and exchanged phone numbers. Leda waved at him through the window as she left. She felt truly happy and light; the prospect of a date with John calmed the frantic energy of being single. In a few days she’d be on a date with someone. Life seemed in control. Life seemed brilliant. On the train ride home she watched a girl in a bad skirt silently sing along to music. She tried to guess what she was singing. She texted Anne in the places where she had service.

  “We’re going out!” she texted.

  “Ahh!! So exciting!! It sure took him long enough ”

  She didn’t respond to Anne’s text for a while. Whatever, Anne. Just be happy for me. The light from outside filled the train momentarily. Leda got a text from her mom.

  “Look at this picture I found. Three years old,” it said over a picture of herself in a hot pink bathing suit with a Ninja Turtle hat. There was a Band-Aid on each knee. You skin your knees like that so much when you’re little and you can never imagine a life with unskinned knees, but then suddenly you stop skinning your knees and everything is different.

  “I love it ♥,” she responded.

  She laid her head back against the window. She was tired, still elated though, still light, still in a glow. I’ll wear my red shirt that makes my boobs look huge, she thought. The window felt cool on her temple. She knew she’d wear her good underwear even though they wouldn’t have sex. Something to look forward to, she thought. And is there really anything better than something to look forward to? Am I doing anything but trying to feel good?

  The night before the date she could hardly sleep. She kept living hypothetical conversations over and over in her head as she lay there.

  I’ll say: You look handsome.

  And he’ll say: You look gorgeous.

  And I’ll say: Thanks.

  And then maybe I’ll wink or shrug my shoulders, kind of.

  And then at dinner he’ll say: What do you like to write?

  And I’ll say: I like writing about women. I write for women.

  And he’ll say: You only write for women?

  And I’ll say: Yes, I’m fine with that. Aren’t you?

  And he’ll say: Yes.

  And he’ll smile in the way he does. He’ll get what I mean. He’ll see me as I am.

  And then when he leaves he’ll try to kiss me, and I will kiss him back, but I won’t open my mouth really. I mean, I will but only like this and on
ly a little bit, like this. And she kissed her arm. I should really try and go to sleep.

  As she got ready for her date she let herself fully indulge in all of it. She played OutKast’s “So Fresh, So Clean” as she danced naked and got dressed. She looked at herself in the mirror. I am kind of linear, she thought, even though I ate a lot of chocolate through finals. I look like sex. She wore her darkest lipstick and her best push-up bra. When she left her apartment, she looked at her reflection in the mirror and winked at herself. It was the only winking she’d do on the date. She’d explain it all to John two summers later.

  “It’s like the date is with myself. Seeing you is always nice, but getting prettied up and feeling beautiful, that’s all it’s really about.”

  “So relationships are about you feeling pretty?” he asked.

  “Not totally, but basically,” she said. “But when you think about it, isn’t everything in life about feeling pretty?”

  They had planned to meet up in front of a coffee shop in Harvard Square. She looked for him outside, scouring over the little courtyard, anticipating his tallness. She checked her phone. No text. He was late. After a while, standing around outside made her feel self-conscious so she decided to wait for him inside. She sat in a chair by the window, a seat away from a gangly-looking boy with a laptop. The boy was young and attractive in a sort of brooding way. Leda noticed he was staring at her, and so she smiled at him. Maybe this brooding boy likes me. She tapped her phone against the bar and sighed. The boy continued to look up at her here and there, smiling, catching her gaze, and acting as if he were about to speak. He may have thought many things about what to say or what to do to attract her. He may have had her if he’d thought of something to say. She would think of it in her early forties, one afternoon as she cleaned out the attic. The dust settled around her as she pulled out a box of unused frames. She’d lift a flap of the box, the smell of cardboard, the light filtered in thin lines of the attic window; she would think: If that boy had talked to me who might I have become?