Stiff, trembling. Needing to run away.
“Well, I just wanted to—thank you …”
“We don’t have to talk about it. OK?”
“Well—OK.”
Stiffly walking away. Feeling your eyes on the back of my head, quizzical, grateful.
Next time I saw you, in a public place, you were flushed with triumph. You were looking gorgeous—not like a girl who has been sticking a finger down her throat. Your friends crowded around you, to congratulate you for having won the “hotly contested” election for vice president of our class by a narrow margin—something like fourteen votes.
(Yes, it was a rumor that you’d cheated somehow in the election. Supporters of yours had rigged ballots. For you aroused such adulation, such loyalty. I did not wish to compete with these friends of yours; I kept my distance, aloof and uninvolved.)
“Friend of My Heart.” The sentimental Irish song one of the girls in the residence played on the battered old piano in a corner of the living room. Unbidden, the melody comes back to me sometimes. Very ordinary, you’d have to say banal, yet the song had the power of burrowing into my brain. Friend of my heart, where have you gone. Friend of my heart, I am alone.
Driving my shuddering Honda Civic rarely less than one hundred miles a week when I was commuting to teach at two other colleges beside this college. And during these hours, it was “Friend of My Heart” that echoed in my brain.
To live as an adjunct instructor is to commute—if you are lucky enough to have more than one job. Because this college will not employ me as a full-time instructor, still less give me tenure, until my car broke down last year I was obliged to drive seventy miles to the state university at Troy, to teach a course that meets on Monday and Thursday evenings for ninety minutes; here, I teach on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Fortunately, I can bicycle to my classes here; I can take a train to Troy. An adjunct instructor lives by her schedule, and the “schedule” is whimsical and wind driven as fate.
You would not understand. You who earn in a single cobbled-together lecture an adjunct’s salary for an entire term.
Where have you gone. I am alone.
It was genuine, my indifference to you. At the start.
A giant icicle, a stalactite, strikingly disfigured, that begins to melt, and to drip, and by degrees loses even its disfigured shape. Melting, bleeding away.
For you were so very friendly to me. Waving to me, calling to me, inviting me to sit with you and your companions in the dining hall, and blinking in surprise when I declined. For truly, I had thoughts of my own to think, which I did not want scattered and broken.
Not thinking—No! I will not be seduced by you, and dropped. I am not that lonely, and I am not that stupid.
Yet, we became friends. Somehow that happened.
By degrees it happened, in the winter months of our freshman year. Hiking together in the pine woods above the college—just Erica and Adra. Brisk, exhilarating walks along snowy trails. You kept up a stream of excited chatter, your plans for a “fantastic future” to which I murmured assent, half humoring, half impressed. And so by spring a change had occurred between us. A quickening of my pulse when I saw you on campus, and an undertow of apprehension, dread.
“Adra! Hey. Wait. Walk with me.”
I was a tall girl. Invariably I’d been the tallest girl in my class even in high school. One of the tallest persons in the class.
Yet, beside you, at Champlain College, I was not taller: we were of a height. (Though you wore heels, often high-heeled boots on your large, broad feet to boost your height; you did not shrink to make yourself smaller.)
Wanting to trust you. Wanting to believe you when you told me how special I was, like no other person you’d ever met before.
And how grateful you were, when I took time to help you with your class work. So very—flattering …
“Ad! Thank you so much.”
And, “Addie! You’re my heart.”
In such ways, my indifference melted. My resistance. An icy little puddle at my feet.
In our Introduction to Psychology class of 130 students it was our destiny to be seated side by side—Kirkland, Leeuwen. And so naturally you might ask me to explain, for instance, the distinction between Pavlovian and Skinnerian conditioning (a distinction you never could recall); you might ask me to help you prepare for quizzes, midterm, and final, and your term paper on an overambitious subject (“Is there a ‘female speech’?”), which, with your numerous campus activities you didn’t have time to adequately research.
That first paper, for which you received a stellar grade—A+.
And how funny it seemed to us, that my grade for my paper, at least as solid as yours, received only an A.
Over a period of time it came to be that I “helped” you with virtually all of your academic work. Under the pretext of our studying together, working together, earnestly discussing issues together, your exploitation of me flourished. I am not claiming that it was systematic—it was spontaneous, opportunistic. For you were a very bright individual, for one who was so gregarious: quick-witted, agile, and resourceful as any predator. Ideas flashed from your brain, half cracked, half inspired—few of them original, or even plausible—but the many distractions in your life made it impossible for you to sit still long enough to actually—what is the plebeian word?—work.
To explore an idea, to research and present an idea, to do the drudgery of footnotes, a bibliography—to write, write, and rewrite—that is work.
As I am an adjunct instructor seemingly by fate, so, by fate, am I obliged to work. While you—your inane “research”—are supported by a ceaseless succession of grants and appointments. Are you not ashamed to be so blessed while others, your peers, your superiors, are accursed?
Of course, it was flattering to me as an undergraduate that you so appreciated my help. And truly you did not ask of me that I contribute so much to your undergraduate papers, as I did; you’d only asked me to “skim”—to “make suggestions.” But being generous as I was, that’s to say besotted and foolish, I could not resist pouring out my brain, that’s to say my heart.
Papers in feminist theory, literary theory, the philosophy of language, “gender studies” (new and revolutionary at the time, a bold anthropology of sexual identity)—how many times you squeezed my hand, or hugged me as no one had ever hugged me—You are just so, so brilliant, Ad! Oh, God, what would I do without you.
Strange that, beside yours, my own work seemed dull. Those papers that bore the name Erica Kirkland seemed (somehow) more exciting, more glamorous, than those bearing the name Adra Leeuwen.
In our classes, you spoke frequently. Bold, assertive, and seductive.
I was apt to brood in silence, bent over a notebook in which (it would appear) I was taking notes earnestly. My face was stiff, impassive. It was not clear (even to me) if I was stricken with shyness in class, or with stubbornness.
Gnawing at my lower lip until it bled.
There are no new ideas. Only new appropriations.
This has been the cornerstone of your career. How convenient for a plagiarist to proclaim! An ideal way of obscuring the fact that you’ve stolen your ideas from others.
J’accuse: The core of The Masks of Gender: Language, Sexual Deceit, and Subterfuge was stolen from one of my papers, itself a masterwork of undergraduate pretentiousness—an application of Hegelian principles to ideas of intentionality in consciousness originally developed by Edmund Husserl, and all of it imposed upon the female voice.
Have you forgotten, this idea was originally mine? And how lavishly you thanked me for it, and praised me for it … Yet in the acknowledgments to your “seminal” book there is no “Adra Leeuwen.”
In none of your books. In none of your footnotes. Nowhere!—in more than thirty years.
The heartbreak of looking for my name. The futility.
(At least I don’t buy your books. It is enough for me to stand in a bookstore and leaf through them checking
the index, checking footnotes for my name, and hoping no one will discover me at this humiliating task.)
I did not want to acknowledge how shallow you were, enrolling in courses that would assure you high grades; avoiding the most rigorous courses, which, with typical recklessness I never hesitated to take—symbolic logic, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, Saussurean linguistics, Husserl and Heidegger, Lacan and Foucault. Which was why, at the time I withdrew from college in the spring of our junior year, my grade-point average was almost exactly the same as yours.
To you, appearances were all. Impressions were all. Whatever you wrote, or handed in as your writing, was a stratagem to be admired and an appeal for a high grade. Anything less than an A was distressing to you, and required emergency conferences with professors; if a professor did not appear to be utterly charmed by you, you dropped the course. Look at me, admire me, are you impressed with me, love me. Surrender to me! Die for me.
Later, I would learn that I wasn’t the only person you flattered in this way. I wasn’t the only naive “friend” you exploited. But I was the one who did the most for you, over a period of more than three years. Stupidly, I was the friend of your heart.
“Adra? Can I say something—personal? You won’t be offended.”
Won’t be offended. Of course not.
It was a giddy prospect—not being offended. Dizzying, like standing at the edge of a deep ravine.
Out of your smiling mouth, these words: “What I really, really admire about you, Adra—I guess I’m envious!—is how you don’t give a damn how you appear to other people—what they think of you. Like, guys.”
A shrug of my shoulders. As if what you were going to tell me would not be wounding as it would be to another, ordinary girl.
“It’s so cool, Adra. You don’t even try. You let your hair go, sometimes you don’t wash it for days. Looks like you barely comb it. You never wear makeup—of course. (You don’t even own makeup, I’m sure.) Your face could be a boy’s face, almost. A handsome boy’s face.”
You dared to touch my face, with your fingertips. For a long moment I did not flinch away.
Nearing the end of sophomore year you said, as if casually: “We should room together, Ad. Next year? OK?”
Like a blade these words cut into me. Thrilling, with an undertone of dread.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“What d’you mean—no? Why not?”
“I don’t—want—to room with anyone.”
You stared at me, wounded. With anyone! But how was Erica Kirkland—anyone?
The prospect of sharing a room in a residence hall with you filled me with panic. Like being pushed close to a mirror, so close that I could not see the reflection in the mirror, in this way blinded, suffocated. No thank you. No.
You went away. Furious. You were not so forgiving now for you had offered yourself, with rare openness. And in my shyness, in my fear of our intimacy, I had rebuffed you. It is likely that you were thinking She will pay for this insult. Though I could not have guessed at the time.
And then, in our junior year, the scales tipped away from me, and I became morbidly attached to you.
Your invitations to sit with you in the dining hall, to accompany you to events on campus, to receptions and parties, began to diminish. You dropped by to visit my room less frequently. (At a little distance I would see you, swaying drunk, giddy, and your face lit with merriment that excluded me, which seemed to me vulgar and foolish, shameful. And I retreated from you, and shut my door and locked it.) Rarely you invited me to walk with you in the woods above the college.
Suddenly you had no time for me.
You won an award for “outstanding citizenship,” and others crowded around you to congratulate you. You published an essay in the school literary magazine, that I’d seen only in an early draft, which I had critiqued closely, but you had not returned it to me for a second reading.
Were others “vetting” your work now? I could only guess. Trying not to be sick with jealousy.
Covertly I watched you. I was edgy, anxious for your attention. Though I did not seek it. When you needed help with a paper on normative philosophy, the news came to me through another girl, a network of girls, each of them passing on the request—Erica is worried to death she is going to flunk this course. But she doesn’t want to ask you to help her, she feels that she has taken up too much of your time as it is.
“That’s silly. That’s just ridiculous. Tell her to bring it to me. Of course, I’ll be happy to help her.”
And this was so. I was very happy to help you.
That paper, we received an A. Both of us quite proud!
Weekends when I was not working at the library, I had time to myself. Too much time perhaps. I had time for my own work, for my “creative” writing, and I had time for your work, which had begun to be more daring now, more original and imaginative, in ways I could not have foreseen. As if she has swallowed me whole, and has grown around me. I did not mind providing footnotes, combing research materials in the library while you were at fraternity parties, attending a conference in New York City. I took pleasure in knowing how it would surprise you, that I’d expanded your sparsely argued fifteen-page paper into a thirty-page paper, richly footnoted, brilliantly argued. One of your “pioneering” papers.
I did not “stalk” you—the very notion would have been repugnant to me. But sometimes it happened (by chance) that we were walking in the same direction, onto the hilly campus, you in the lead and me trailing behind, like a dog that is dragging one of its feet, reluctant to be seen, and yet hopeful.
And you would see me, and wave to me. “Adra? C’mon, catch up and walk with me.”
You laughed at me. (Did you?)
You took pity on me. You were pitiless.
With the innocence of the most profound cruelty you inspired others to laugh at your lanky-limbed disheveled friend. Your friend who was indeed “special” yet deeply unhappy.
Of course, it was not stalking. “Stalking” had not been invented.
And one day on the steps of Lyman Hall you said, “Look. I’m tired of you following me, Adra. It’s boring. You’re boring.”
But it was a joke. (Was it?) I was shocked, but managed to laugh. Tears flooded my eyes, which often happens when I am taken by surprise, I cannot seem to see or even to hear, for my senses are blocked by the surprise.
“I’m not ‘following’ you. That’s—that’s ridiculous.”
“You’re acting like a damn girl.”
“You! You’re the damn girl.” Suddenly stammering, “You—you bleach your hair. You’re the girl.”
Hated you! Could have flung myself at you and scratched and gouged your eyes you’d outlined in dark brown eye pencil and darkened with mascara that gave your lashes a stiff look like the legs of long-legged spiders.
You laughed at me, seeing the fury and misery in my face, which you knew I dared not express. Turning away, with a negligent gesture of your hand as if you were waving away an annoying fly—“Oh, go away. I’ll see you later, Adra.”
There are the exploited, and there are those who exploit.
The predator, and the prey.
The parasite, and the host.
It was a time when I walked often—alone—in the woods above the college. I did not really hike any longer—I did not have the time.
I had a fear too of getting lost in the trails for I did not have a strong sense of direction. The area of the brain that monitors spatial relations had not developed in my brain as it develops in others.
Walking with you, for the last time, in the fresh pine-sharp air, all of my senses alert to the point almost of pain, and my heart running rapid as a mountain stream, and you are breathing deeply and humming under your breath, which (you know) is distracting and annoying to me and suddenly you say, quizzing me, “Which way is the college, Adra? Just checking.” And I am jolted from my thoughts and not immediately able to comprehend our location. For it is not a simple
fact, that the college must be behind us; the trail has been curving, twisting, turning back upon itself, indeed we have turned onto several trails, and a panic comes over me that we are lost …
“Don’t be silly, Adra. Nobody gets lost here.”
You’d hiked long miles, five or six hours, seven hours in the Adirondacks. You’d belonged to a hiking club. Your leg muscles were hard and thick, stronger than mine. It was natural for you to become impatient with me, who had so poor a sense of direction.
In hiking boots your feet were large as a man’s. The only feature of yours that truly embarrassed you, you’d said you hated.
But you liked it that my feet were the same size as yours, in length. In width, my feet were narrower than yours.
We sat on a fallen log. We noted how tiny ants swarmed beneath the bark, which we lazily picked off. Dreamily, you said, “Ants in a colony are like neurons in a great brain, but they are brainless.”
Some of this I knew also, from our psychology lecture. In fact, I had been reading on the subject, and must have told you, in my fascination with the mysteries of evolution, and now you were quoting me back to myself, in a way that was impressive to me as if what I was hearing was entirely new.
With a shudder, I said that it was terrible to think of ants—“What they represent.”
“What they ‘represent’? What’s that?”
“Ourselves. They are like ourselves.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. The ants are just ants.”
You laughed at me. At times you found my seriousness very charming but at other times you found my seriousness very boring.
Stubbornly I said, “Nothing is just what it is. It is also what it represents.”
“No! An ant is an ant, and five ants are a single ant. A trillion ants are just one ant.”
“That’s what I meant. They are terrifying.” I didn’t know what we were talking about but I was feeling disoriented.
“Oh, I think they’re wonderful. Just—ants.”
Grinding the heel of your boot into a small anthill, crushing as many scurrying ants as you could. The look on your face!—murderous, grinning.
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