Ideas you’d swiped from me, long ago when we were undergraduates. Papers I’d “vetted” for you for psychology, philosophy, linguistics, feminist studies.
A strange costume you are wearing for an academic setting: gold-spangled, quilted, a kimono with exaggerated shoulders, falling loosely over silky black trousers flared like pajamas. A crafty way of disguising your fifty-three-year-old body from the sharp eyes of the young.
(Fifty-three! Difficult to believe.)
(Fortunately, my lean, rangy, flat-chested, and flat-hipped body has aged very differently from yours; indeed, along with my mostly unlined face, it seems that I have scarcely aged at all and no one would guess me to be your almost exact age.)
On your feet (which had once embarrassed you, so big, broad, flat—size ten EEE) are square-toed black shoes graceless as cudgels, orthopedic shoes in disguise; seeping over the sides of the shoes are (puffy, swollen) ankles mostly hidden by the flaring pajama legs, which is a good thing.
And yet—amid thunderous applause you have heaved yourself to your feet. You walk with a slight limp, favoring your left side, but you maneuver your black-shellacked cane like a plaything.
“Thank you! I am very honored to be here …”
A sugary voice! A ghastly smile! Fat, wetted lips like a sexual organ, distasteful to see.
Unctuous words. Clichés like faux pearls on a string. And so many pearls, and such a long string. How skilled in hypocrisy you’ve become, like a lyre you’ve learned to stroke in your sleep, designed to draw predictable responses from your credulous audience.
What a fraud you are—but a very clever fraud. Making a career out of exploiting the anxieties of females in a world of patriarchal males. Pretending to believe that there is a radical female speech inaccessible to the enemy, i.e., the male, that might unite us.
And then, I see that, for just an instant, you have glanced down into the front row of the audience—at me.
Yes, I am sure—at me.
For alone of the crowd I have not been applauding. Just sitting here with arms tight-folded and my backpack on my knees. And my hiking-booted feet flat on the floor. And my baseball cap—rudely, you might think—pulled low on my forehead, so that I can peer out at others without their easily seeing me.
You are startled by the sight of me, for a moment thrown off stride. Can’t quite recall who I am—is that it? Or is it the intransigence of my being, my refusal to applaud you like the others?
And so, I allow myself a smile like a scissors flashing.
Yes. It is I, your closest friend you’d imagined you had outlived.
Kirkland, Erica A.
Leeuwen, Adra M.
Alphabetical destiny: abutting each other on lists in our freshman residence at Champlain College, Vermont. In a large psychology lecture in which seats in the steeply banked auditorium were assigned and attendance assiduously taken.
Not destined to be friends, obviously. For you were “popular”—drew friends like a magnet. When you walked into a room all eyes swerved onto you, conversations faded, as if you’d strode onto a lighted stage; within a few days of the first semester everyone knew your name. Erica! Erica Kirkland.
Of course, I took little notice of you. At first.
Vaguely aware of the tall, swaggering girl in our freshman residence with long, thick, streaked-blonde hair, shrill laughter, restless agate eyes and a face that “lit up” a room. Aggressively you recruited admirers, foolish girls trailed in your wake, for you did not like ever to be alone but rather surrounded by a circle of witnesses like handmaids holding mirrors to reflect your face.
Did I even know your name?—I’m sure that I did not. At first.
As a work-scholarship girl I had neither the time nor the inclination to linger in the dining hall after meals; I did not seek conversations, as I did not seek friends; I had a spare, single room on the top floor of the residence, which meant that I could work through the night if I wished, with no roommate to complain or distract me. I could not comprehend how others in the residence could so happily drift from room to room, smoking their perpetual cigarettes, laughing loudly, wasting hours of precious and irretrievable time in chatter. Fifteen hours a week I worked at the college library. My fitful, brief, self-punishing hikes in the pine woods above the college left me exhilarated and primed to return to my work. I cared only for my courses, my books, and my own writing efforts; the vicissitudes of my interior life—moods ever shifting like the sky above Lake Champlain.
Yet our names sounded alike.
“‘Adra’—‘Erica.’ Separated at birth.”
The first thing you said to me, with familiarity startling as a nudge in the ribs.
No one at the college had spoken to me with such intimacy, which suggested a kind of teasing; even my relatives didn’t speak to me in such a way, for I never encouraged them.
I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know if I was offended by you smiling into my face as you were, or whether your attention was flattering.
“It’s like we’re twins—you know—‘separated at birth.’”
You must have thought that I was slow-witted; you had to explain your remark.
You laughed, the twin notion was so extravagant. For obviously “Adra” and “Erica” hardly looked like twins: one so strapping blonde, gorgeous, and the other—well, not so.
I remember that we were in the residence hall, on the first floor by a stairway. I remember that you were standing discomfortingly close to me, and I stepped back. A hot blush had come into my face.
My eyes swerved aside, I would not look at you. Shrugged and murmured a vague Yes, maybe—as you’d murmur to humor someone who has tried to be clever but the effort has fallen flat.
Later, I would wonder if you’d meant to be cruel, ironic. And it was that intention that had fallen flat.
“D’you smoke, Adra? No?”
“No.”
Hard to believe, this was an era in which everyone smoked. In our residence hall, in classrooms. Seminars in which our professors smoked, dropping ashes into Styrofoam coffee cups.
Your brand was Tareytons.
“You should try, Ad. It’s like caffeine—it gives you a charge.”
With time, you began to call me “Ad”—familiar.
With time, shyly, I began to speak your name—“Erica.” The sound—the three quite sharp, distinctive syllables—felt strange on my lips.
Yes, I did begin to smoke. But only in your presence, at first, with cigarettes you gave me—“Here, Ad. You look like you could use a cigarette.” Casually you’d hold out your pack of Tareytons to me, giving it a little shake.
It makes me faint to recall that gesture. I think that I don’t want to recall that gesture, which was often made in the presence of other girls, as if to signal a special connection that excluded them.
(Eventually, I began to smoke alone. In time, by the end of college, and through the protracted misery of my twenties, I was smoking two to three packs of cigarettes a day, which I could not afford; each time I lit a cigarette I felt a wave of faintness, recalling you. Cursing you.)
(But I am over that now. It has been decades since I’ve thought that inhaling toxic fumes into my lungs was “romantic”—that anything passed from you to me might have been “romantic.”)
“‘Shy.’ You wear shyness like armor, Ad.”
Your strategy was to observe, to analyze. You were not being critical, you claimed. As a feminist, you were utilizing tools of deconstruction.
Where Adra was shy, Erica was bold.
Or rather, Adra was shy seeming.
Together we read the early feminists. Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf. Simone de Beauvoir, spoiled for us by our discovery that she was in thrall to her longtime lover Jean-Paul Sartre, a walleyed gnome/womanizer whose infidelities de Beauvoir too readily forgave.
“If I’d caught Sartre being unfaithful to me, with someone young enough to be his daughter, I’d have stab
bed the bastard. Right in the groin.”
Like a child you spoke savagely. Others who were listening were taken aback by your vehemence but I just laughed.
“Would you do the same, Adra?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t give a damn about men. Where men stick their penises is of no concern to me.”
You laughed, startled. You were impressed by such words. Though you were a brash, bold, outspoken young woman you were yourself in thrall to men, or rather to sex; to the allure of sex that was a part of the air we breathed. You wouldn’t have thought of dismissing, as I had, what seemed to mean so much to the human species.
For it was true, I didn’t give a damn about men. I was tall, lanky limbed, with a plain, fierce, white-skinned face and a prepubescent body (at age eighteen), uninterested in attracting the attention of others except by way of my writing, and then it was only the attention of my professors that meant anything to me. And then, only a very few of my professors, for the faculty at Champlain College was not much distinguished.
You said, staring at me, “Of course. You’re right, Adra. Only another female knows what a female wants, by instinct.”
You could not have spoken more jubilantly if you’d made this discovery entirely by yourself.
Still waters run deep. Still waters mined by explosives, deeper still.
It seemed natural to me, to prefer my own company to the company of others. In high school I had mastered the art of icy calm, detachment, indifference.
For I did not trust you. Any of you.
Though most of the girls in our college residence had been afflicted with homesickness virulent as flu for the first week or two of the first semester, soon a bizarre change came over them, a rabid need to be together much of the time, to walk in braying packs to the dining hall and to gather in one another’s rooms late into the night. Homesickness was forgotten in a compulsion to confide in one another, to talk wildly about things that should have been kept private, and to laugh at things that were not remotely funny, like getting drunk—“wasted”—and throwing up at a fraternity party—“making out” with some guy they scarcely knew—“flunking” an exam. And of course they talked about one another ceaselessly, with relish, with pity, with a pretense of outrage, with the most lurid and unapologetic curiosity—My God have you heard!
What they said of me, I could imagine. Or maybe it was mostly pity they felt for what they perceived as my aloneness.
… wouldn’t be bad looking if she wasn’t so sour.
… if she’d just smile.
(But why would I smile at them? It was enough that, by degrees, I was learning to smile at you.)
You liked to quote Sylvia Plath (whom, with your blonde hair and manic ambition, you resembled, to a degree)—“‘I eat men like air.’”
Dropping by my room on the fourth floor of our residence when I was working late on a weekend night, in the aftermath of a fraternity party or a “date.” Eyes dilated and mouth swollen, hair in a tangle, smelling of beer, male sweat, and (I imagined) semen—“Hi, Adra! Can I interrupt?”
You were very funny, very wicked, complaining of the guys you went out with. Wanting me to know both how popular you were, how every guy who saw you desired you, some of them even fought over you, and yet how bemused you were by them, their clumsiness and stupidity, how disdainful you were even of sex, unless it was the very best sex.
Did I want to hear this? No.
Did I want to hear—some of this? No.
And so one night when you came to my door to rap lightly with your knuckles and push it open and ask, Can I interrupt, quickly I stammered that I was busy, I had no time. Not at the moment, I did not want to be interrupted. No.
Seeing in your face a look of faint incredulity. That anyone would rebuff you.
But you went away. You did not insist. You laughed, you went away, gracious if a little drunk, a good sport. Never one to push yourself on another but rather one who calculates a new point of entry, a new strategy of triumph and revenge at another time.
(It was true, I worked late into the night, in a kind of fever. I believed that I did my most inspired work after midnight and I did not want to waste my waning energy listening to your droll tales told to impress me, to make me envious and jealous and yearning to be like you. No.)
How did I come to know your secret. One of your secrets.
I did not ever actually know, I think. But by accident hearing you in one of the bathrooms and knowing it had to be you, exiting at once when I heard what it seemed I was hearing and not wanting to know anything further … Quickly disappearing into my room, and the door shut.
But soon, others knew. Began to know something. How you starved yourself, bloated your stomach with Tabs. And then, how you ate—ravenous as an animal. At the worst of times you hid away to eat. Campaigning for vice president of our class. Posters with your face everywhere on campus. (And some of us, overzealous on your behalf, having put up your posters, returned after dark to deface or tear down the less attractive posters of your rivals.) It began to be whispered how you crept away to vomit—to force yourself to vomit. Sticking a finger down your throat, quickly the reaction came, a nervous reflex, deftly executed. Just this one time. I haven’t done it in—months … Just the pressure right now. Stuffed myself like a disgusting pig. You could make a joke of it, almost.
Why are you telling me. Why, I don’t want to know.
Embarrassed and ashamed for you. Stricken with concern for you.
Though we did not—yet—know the clinical term bulimia. Though we had heard—some of us—of anorexia.
(Anorexia: aversion to food. Fear of food, fear of “getting fat”—developing hips, breasts. Aversion to menstruating. How well I understood!)
But I don’t want to share these secrets with you. Not with anyone. Even you.
Also: I have work to do. Always, I have work to do. Like saying a rosary, work to do.
Please don’t knock at my door. Please don’t interrupt.
Please don’t make me feel sorry for you, fear for you, it is a way of seduction, I am not strong enough to resist.
And so: a girl in the residence was speaking of you, meanly, maliciously, and I overheard and came up to her and told her to shut her mouth—“It’s none of your business, what any of us do.” The girl—her name was Beverly Whitty—one of those who’d adored you and followed you around and was rebuffed by you—was shocked, and the expression on her face so inane, fatuous in alarm, I shoved her back against the wall as I’d never done before in my life to anyone—as I’d never imagined doing. And yet it was easy!
All who witnessed this were shocked. But no one dared protest as I strode away, tingling with righteousness, my blood beating in my veins as rapidly, happily, I ascended the stairs to my room on the fourth floor.
How easy, to shove another. What a surge of pleasure, one could become addicted.
It was at this time that fear of Adra Leeuwen began in the residence where before there’d been only a kind of wary disdain. I did not trouble to discourage it.
Our residence adviser, Miss Tull (as we called her), summoned me to speak with her. She was a nervous woman with a tenuous air of authority and a permanently strained smile (she knew how flighty, fickle, febrile girls our age were, how swiftly they could turn upon even someone they claimed to adore). Of course, the silly, frightened girls had reported me, but it was not clear that they’d reported the reason for my having behaved as I had, my defense of you.
In Miss Tull’s sitting room I was stony faced, unyielding. By the age of nineteen I had attained my full height of five feet ten but I was still lean, flat hipped as a boy, with close-cropped hair like a boy’s, and a pale, somewhat sallow skin that was the very expression of adolescent sulk. My reputation in the residence was of a high intelligence linked to a sharp, sarcastic tongue. (But why was this? I rarely exchanged remarks with anyone in the residence except you, and I was never sarcastic
with you.) I have no doubt I intimidated poor Miss Tull, who clasped her hands tightly together to disguise their shaking. This was not yet an era in which psychological counseling was recommended for students displaying the slightest “aberrant” behavior, so Miss Tull simply spoke to me, with a pretense of calm, drawing upon tactics very likely provided for resident advisers by their supervisors—“You are a very intelligent young woman, Adra. It is just surprising—it is unexpected—that you would behave as you did …” Frowning and silent and staring at the carpet, I let Miss Tull speak for some minutes before I said, “What I did to—her—was morally justified. I would not have acted as I did to halt a malicious slander if it had not been justified.”
“But we are hoping it won’t happen again, Adra …”
I had to smile. With Adra Leeuwen there is no we.
However, I didn’t contradict Miss Tull. As a young child I’d learned the strategy of allowing my elders to think what they wanted to think while I did what I wanted to do as soon as their backs were turned.
When you found out, you squeezed my hand, and said, with rapidly blinking eyes, not quite looking at me, laughing—“Look, I don’t know what the hell it was, what it’s about, all I heard was—you stuck up for me. Thank you, Adra! Anybody else, they’d have said nothing. They’d just—wouldn’t—have stuck up for me.” Your words were halting, uncertain. Still you could not look at me. A hot blush came onto your face and seemed to spread to mine, to my chill, sallow cheeks.
All that I could think to say was: “Well, I’m not ‘anybody else.’”
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