The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

by Kate Hattemer

  Pleasure was a feminist choice too.

  “Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ll play. Also, I had an idea for prom.”

  “I brainstormed a few themes in history,” said Gennifer. She flipped around her notebook to show us. Hawaiian Hoopla. Ivy League Gala.

  “No, no,” I said. “We don’t need a theme. We need to change the dance’s very structure. We’ll call it the Last Chance Dance.”

  “Well, we’re seniors, so by default—” began Gennifer.

  “Listen. You make a secret list. Of anyone you’ve got a crush on. Anyone you’ve ever crushed on. And then you get matched.”

  “Just the guys, right?”

  “What?”

  “Like, the guys write down who they like. The girls see who put them and choose their favorite.”

  “No, no. Everyone submits a list. And if any of the choices overlap, you both get notified.”

  Andy grinned and put his hands behind his head again. “Nice. So say I put Gennifer, because she’s hot, and then it turns out she’s always dreamed of me, turns out she thinks I’m Lust Incarnate, God of Sex, which, of course, I am—”

  “Shut up,” said Gennifer, giggling.

  “—and she’s only dating my brother because, genetically speaking, that’s as close as she can get—”

  She gave him a naughty little smile. “I bet you two have a lot in common.”

  Barf. “Anyway,” I said loudly, “in your hypothetical situation, Andy, yes, you and Gennifer would be informed you were matches. But say you’d put me as well. Obviously I’m not going to put you, given that I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole—”

  “What if I said I could touch you with a ten-foot pole—”

  Gennifer slapped his arm. “Bad boy.”

  “Nobody would ever know you’d put me,” I continued. “And your embarrassing crush on someone totally out of your league would remain cloaked in secrecy.”

  “As if,” said Gennifer.

  “What if someone doesn’t get any matches?” said Andy. “That’ll happen, right?”

  “Well, then, they can just find a date the usual way. But we’ll encourage people to go broad. Put anyone they’d even consider. We’ll give everyone, like, a hundred slots.”

  “Honestly,” said Andy, shrugging, “I think it’s a great idea. Change it up around here.”

  I was quiet. Now that I’d made my point, I needed to lie low. If Gennifer didn’t take some ownership of the idea, she’d never agree to it. She looked between us, her eyes narrowed to slits. She pursed her glossy lips. I found myself staring. How did she get the lip gloss to stay on? I always end up eating mine. Especially if it’s fruit-flavored.

  “Do you have an ulterior motive?” she asked me.

  Yes. Giving girls control over their own lives. Balancing the power structure of dance invitations. Smashing the patriarchy. The usual. “Not at all,” I told Gennifer. “I just think it’d be a fun twist. It could jump-start some relationships.”

  “True,” she said.

  “I think the class’ll be into it,” said Andy. “As long as they’re assured it’ll be anonymous. We can’t be the ones sifting through the lists, making the matches.”

  “But that’d be the best part!” said Gennifer.

  “We’ll do it online,” I said. I’d thought about this. “We’ll have a program that encodes each name as the lists come in, and it’ll pair the codes and only decode the ones that match.”

  “You can write this program?” said Andy.

  “I’ll ask Paul Cunningham. He’s a junior. You know him?”

  “I still think we should do it ourselves,” said Gennifer. Ha. She was in. Now that she was worrying about the details, I knew she’d bought the big picture. “Don’t you think there’s room for discretion? Like, if two people match who’d be gross together—”

  “Let’s talk decorations,” said Andy quickly. “What’s Last Chance decor?”

  “Ooh,” said Gennifer, diverted. Andy quirked a smile at me, and I smiled back without even meaning to. That was the effect he had on me. And on every other girl at Chawton, I hasten to add.

  “How can we visually evoke the idea of chances?” said Gennifer.

  “Garlands of lottery tickets,” I suggested.

  “They’d look like trash hanging from the ceiling.”

  “I mean, most dance decorations do.”

  “We could use actual trash,” said Andy. “To conjure the theme of desperation.”

  “You two are hopeless.” Gennifer slammed shut her notebook. “I’ll discuss it with Social Committee. Meeting adjourned.”

  * * *

  —

  Wednesday Quiz Team practice was my favorite time of the week. I got to hang out with my friends and show off. The two spices of life, as far as I’m concerned.

  Mr. Peabody was our coach. He had me, Paul, Jiyoon, and Jonah playing Ashby, Zachary, Greg, and Cilla. We were neck and neck right till the end, when Paul got some computer-science toss-up that the rest of us had no clue on. That reminded me. I needed to ask him to code the Last Chance Dance site. Preferably in private, since Triumvirate had decided it would be best if nobody knew who’d done the programming. It’d be a tiny bit of extra security for all that sensitive data.

  “I have a favor to ask you, Paul,” I said as we walked out. Jiyoon was with us, but she was extremely trustworthy. “On behalf of Senior Triumvirate.”

  “Does this have something to do with Powderpuff? Because I hate that shit.”

  I was surprised. Paul wasn’t the most dynamic person. He was laconic, understated, dry. Him saying I hate that shit carried way more clout than someone saying it who was bombastic and bilious and prone to hyperbole—e.g., me.

  “Why?” asked Jiyoon.

  “I hate school spirit. For the same reason I hate professional sports. They’re ways for people to hide.”

  “Did you have a traumatic experience with pro sports?” I said. “Puking at a football game or something?”

  “Never mind, if you’re only going to mock it.”

  “You mean,” said Jiyoon, “if you bury your identity in an institution, you don’t have to worry about what your identity actually is.”

  “Exactly!” said Paul.

  They kept talking. I was annoyed. It was like I’d lost my chance to participate because I’d made that one dumb joke, and now I had to trudge along and watch them bond via a cool intellectual discussion about identity and groupthink and nationalism and subsuming the one to the many. I would have been all about that discussion.

  When we reached the junior parking lot, Jiyoon was flushed, neat circles high on her cheeks. “So,” said Paul, turning to me, “to what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “Huh?”

  “The favor? With Powderpuff or whatever?”

  “Not Powderpuff. Even better. Prom.” I explained the Last Chance Dance.

  “Ah,” he said. “And you want me to build the website.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s a terrible idea.”

  “Do you even get it? Traditional dances force girls into passive roles, and—”

  “The idea’s cool. But only a moron would put information like that into a website.”

  “It’ll be a secure website.”

  “Anything can be hacked. Anything can be leaked.”

  “Nobody at Chawton knows how to hack.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Come on. Can you do it?”

  “I can, sure.”

  “Will you?”

  He hesitated. “Maybe he needs a minute to think about it,” said Jiyoon. Reasonably enough, I guess. “How old’s your car?” It was the jankiest one in the lot, a maroon Honda Civic that would have been put down long ago if it had been a d
og.

  “Prudence?” said Paul. “She’s nineteen.”

  “She’s been on the planet longer than we have,” said Jiyoon.

  “I think about that a lot, actually. The impermanence of humans. Compared to things.”

  “We think we’re so much more sophisticated than machines, but which lasts longer?”

  They were at it again. God. I checked my phone just to have something to do. Under normal circumstances, I loved this kind of talk. Shooting the philosophical shit. “You’re that teenager,” Crispin had told me once—the week I was into Nietzsche, I think. But now it annoyed me, the way Paul and Jiyoon were so into it, so into each other. They were having an Intellectual Discussion Party and I was definitely not invited.

  “Ideas, thoughts,” Paul was saying. “They last longer than anything. Us or cars. But they’re also the most insubstantial.” He did this quick, jerky shoulder thing. The two of them beamed at each other. When Paul smiles, he gets a whole mess of lines spooning his mouth. Maybe because he’s so superlatively skinny. Possibly malnourished. He has all these food allergies, so usually for lunch he has something weird from the salad bar, like an entire compostable plate of artichokes.

  But Paul is cute. You look at him and think he’s a spindly nerd, and then you look again and see his gray-blue eyes, which always match the sky, and his foot-long eyelashes, and that liny smile. I watched him flash it at Jiyoon, and I watched her dimpled one shoot back to him, and I thought, They’re cute together.

  It had never occurred to me.

  “I have a great idea,” said Jiyoon. “You should teach Jemima to drive.”

  “What?” Paul and I said at the same time.

  “It’d be perfect,” said Jiyoon. “You need to learn and Paul has a car.”

  “How about he teaches you to drive?” I said.

  “It’d be pointless,” said Jiyoon. “I wouldn’t have a car even if I learned. You, though. If you knew how to drive, we’d be free. We could go anywhere. We could go to California.”

  “Or the soft-serve place,” I said.

  “Or there.”

  It was indeed a great idea. How could we convince Paul? What was in it for him? Men love explaining to women how much they know about engines, right? “You’d get to mold me from raw clay,” I told him. “You’d be the first person in the world to see me control a motor vehicle.”

  “You’ve never driven a golf cart?” he said.

  “Never.”

  “A lawn mower?”

  “Nope.”

  “A bumper car?”

  “Yeah, but I kept crashing.”

  “Nobody knows what’ll happen if she touches a steering wheel,” said Jiyoon.

  “It’ll turn into a toad, probably,” said Paul.

  “That’s if she kisses a steering wheel,” said Jiyoon.

  “We’ll have to find out,” said Paul, and they both turned bright red.

  There is something supremely awkward about watching your best friend flirt. Maybe even more so when it’s mutual. It’s like when your parents kiss. You want it to happen; you just don’t want to be there when it does. “Well, well!” I said, feeling like Old Great-Aunt Dorcas, taken aback by the coquettish habits of the younger generation. “Think about it, Paul. You’ve got a willing student if you want one. And meanwhile…” I hated to bring it up again, but Gennifer would eviscerate me if I didn’t get confirmation. “The website?”

  “Fine,” he said, ripping his eyes from Jiyoon. “I’ll do it.” You could tell he still thought it was a terrible idea. “But I don’t want anyone knowing I’m doing it. I’m just a contractor. This is your thing.”

  Once a week, though not on set days because Chawton goes by an insanely complicated rotating block schedule, the explanation of which I will kindly spare you, we had a Town Meeting for grades nine through twelve. Sometimes Triumvirate ran it and sometimes Mr. Duffey did, but we always sat on the stage.

  The faculty chose the Mildred. That was the only position that was, in theory and practice, filled by both boys and girls. Social Committee elected their own president, who was and ever would be a girl because boys never joined Social Comm. And the Chawton School chairman, elected by the whole school, was always, always—as the name implies—male.

  Always. Ever since, according to the aforementioned obelisk/penis, 18-freaking-92. Of course, no girls had attended Chawton till the merge with Ansel in 1978, but even in the past four decades there hadn’t been a female chairman. A few years back this super-cool senior named Maria Lovelace had started a petition to change the name to chair, but it was quashed. Rumor had it a few influential (read: deep-pocketed) alumni played the tradition card. “It’s like mailman, or man-made,” they said. “Everyone knows what it means.”

  And honestly…

  Here goes Jemima Kincaid baring her soul…

  I couldn’t imagine a girl chairman.

  Let me explain.

  The senior class wanted a good leader: intelligent, likable. And it was hard for a girl to seem both. For a brief time in maybe fifth or sixth grade, before anyone had figured out the code, there were smart girls who were popular and popular girls who were smart. But then you had to choose your dominant wing. Fast. You chose your friends; you chose who you dated, and whether you dated. You chose your clothing. Did you raise your hand in class? Did you volunteer to do the torque problem on the whiteboard? When you got specially recommended for the Model UN conference, did you go? Did you join Social Comm or Quiz Team?

  I’m not saying the popular girls weren’t smart—look at Gennifer—but they weren’t known for it. If you were a girl, you couldn’t have two reputations at once.

  The chairman needed both. There was a spark you got when you were both beloved and respected, when you were popular and you deserved it, intelligent and you knew it, clap your hands. Call it whatever you want—mojo, moxie, charisma, that je ne sais quoi—the chairman had to have that spark.

  Example:

  Town Meetings can be extremely boring, because when certain teachers get a captive audience, they take monotony to heights heretofore unreached by mankind. (Humankind. You know what I mean.) As Triumvirate, we did our best to combat the boredom. At homecoming, when the Spirit Week themes were announced, Andy disappeared while we were talking about Twin Day and Hat Day and Nineties Day, and right as Gennifer said, “Thursday will be Pajama Day,” he strolled back onstage. In a rainbow-unicorn onesie. The auditorium exploded. Everyone was screaming and laughing, and Andy started doing this floaty, New Agey dance—it was dreadful—and everyone got even more hype, and Gennifer and I just stood back and laughed and laughed. Finally Mr. Duffey walked over and said, “That’s enough.”

  Andy straightened. He said into the mike, “Yeah, so wear your favorite pj’s on Thursday! But just like mine…”

  Everyone was already smiling at the punch line.

  “They’ve got to be something you actually wear to bed.”

  He was Chawton’s darling.

  That never could have happened if he hadn’t been a guy.

  For one, girls aren’t allowed to wear onesies to school. They’re deemed immodest. Because, you know, distracting female bodies pose a huge educational barrier for the poor boys. And if a girl had done that zany dance, either it’d have been sexualized or it’d have been stupid, depending on the girl. “She’s hot,” people would say. Or “She’s weird.” That morning, leaving Town Meeting, everyone was jostling one another, still in high spirits. “Andy is so out there.” Voices dripping with admiration. “He’s such a…” They couldn’t even finish. No words. Shake head. Smile, smile, smile.

  What they meant, of course, was this:

  Andy Monroe is so, so freaking cool.

  Right after that dance—still in the onesie!—he tapped the mike and said, “Next announcement. The Service Club is hosti
ng a winter-coat drive on behalf of the Coalition for the Homeless.”

  A girl wouldn’t be allowed to bridge both worlds, the silly and the sober. To be taken seriously, she’d have to act serious, and her seriousness would make her unelectable—just as a lack of seriousness would. It was a quintessential catch-22, and we couldn’t even call it out, because it sounded like an excuse. Well, I could be that cool, if I were a guy….

  We couldn’t say it, but we felt it. We felt it as surely as we felt the weight of our bodies, because, like gravity, it was a truth about how it worked, this world we knew. Girls didn’t even consider running for Chawton School chairman because, as girls, we knew, we knew deep in our bones, that we would always lose.

  * * *

  —

  “Hey, guys,” said Andy. “I’ve got a few announcements about Jamboree.”

  There was a whoop. Mr. Duffey tensed his lips. Earlier he had told us that we needed to cut down on unnecessary audience interaction, since Town Meeting had been getting lengthier all year. Unsurprising, given that the longer it dragged out, the shorter third period was.

  “Juniors,” said Andy, “start thinking about next year’s Chawton School chairman position. Anyone can run, of course. Applications are in Ms. Edison’s room, and soon you’ll start campaigning, debating, bribing, all that good stuff. The election will be held at Jamboree.”

  Andy’s pants looked good. From, um, the rear.

  “An announcement for juniors and seniors only”—a boo from the freshmen and sophomores, who had recently figured out the cut-third-period-short thing and adopted it with the zeal of youth—“but with Jamboree comes prom. You probably think I’m about to tell you the theme’s something dumb like Hawaiian Hoopla or Ivy League Gala.” Everyone laughed but Gennifer. “Nope. This year it’ll be called the Last Chance Dance. Juniors, you’re invited, of course. But there’s something special for seniors.”

  He explained the rules: go to the website, enter names, get matched. Even from the stage, I could sense the excitement sweeping the auditorium. The whispers. The giggles. The knowing looks. Everyone was eyeing the crushes they’d had all along, while also trying not to be obvious about eyeing them, while also trying to see who they were getting eyed by. “Nobody’ll know if you don’t get matched,” said Andy, “because it’s all private. But to better your chances of a match, I’d suggest putting anyone you’d even consider getting with. Lower those standards.” Everyone laughed.