I never knew what Arnie expected of me in those visits, if he expected anything at all. I couldn’t tell if he just liked me “as a friend”—lacerating words, though fine in Arnie’s case, since that’s how I liked him—or if he was simply too shy to “make the first move” (another term repeatedly used in frustrated or despairing conversations with close friends, as in “When is he going to make the first move?”). Sometimes I just thought he liked the quiet surroundings of my house, or our record player, or my parents’ jazz collection.
But whatever his motives, Arnie was reliable. He’d join our contingent at local anti-war rallies, hand out leaflets supporting our Student Union candidates for the Pioneer High School Student Council, and author well-researched articles about enfranchised minors or progressive education for our high school underground newspaper, The Foundation of Every State.
“No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors,” he earnestly wrote, quoting Paolo Freire in one of our last issues before graduating. “The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.”20
We’d had a showdown with Mr. Eastman, the Assistant Principal, over that issue. The first page featured a photograph of a bare-bottomed woman at the top of a stairway, bent over and peering between her legs. Her ample derriere filled most of the frame, and I was inordinately proud of the headline that I’d written to accompany the image: “Looking Back on a High School Education.”
“If it goes out, so do you,” the normally, if falsely, jovial Mr. Eastman declared. My fellow editors and I, all a semester away from college, having variously been suspended for smoking or walking out in protest of the war, or, in the case of my friend Carol and me, for wearing pants to school in defiance of a dress code, were unwilling to face another suspension.
“So much for being our own example in the struggle,” Arnie muttered as we skulked out of Mr. Eastman’s office. That was as close to being visibly angry as I’d ever seen him. But despite his lack of flash, Arnie seethed inside.
I never knew how much until a slate-skied evening at the end of that year, when he invited me to look at something in the immaculate white Plymouth Valiant parked outside my house. The air was damp, and the creak of the hinge was the only sound as he opened his trunk and pointed. Nestled inside were a gas-fueled power saw, an axe, and a sliver of a Stuckey’s billboard.
In a stand-up routine from the 1980s, comedian Joan Rivers wondered why aliens always chose to reveal themselves only to drunken hunters and farmers. Unlike today, rural people didn’t yet signify the Heartland and all that was right and pure with America. The fashion until the Reagan administration was to typecast them as ignorant crackers, a stereotype shockingly apparent in the derisive tone of the 1966 Life magazine article about Frank Mannors, the Dexter man who had set off the first in the series of UFO sightings that year.
“Frank should have been born in the days of Dan’l Boone,” it begins. “Since he wasn’t, he’s on the unemployment. Still, he’s a happy man.” The article goes on to itemize the Mannors’ home—an ancient refrigerator with an external cooling coil on top, an outside water pump and privy, and four junked cars on cinderblocks out front. It paints Mannors as a bad-tempered Gomer Pyle, with none of the homespun wisdom.
“That wasn’t no foxfire or hullabillusion,” Mannors insisted two weeks after his UFO sighting. “It was an object. Maybe it’ll come back if all these people would stay away and we could get a picture and have verification of it. Anybody wants to give me a lie-detector test, I’ll take it.”
Nobody wanted to test Mannors’ veracity. But Sheriff Doug Harvey believed in it. Forty years later, he’d say, “Dr. Hynek was sent in from the U.S. government. He came into my office. We went out to the site where supposedly this object came down on the ground. Dr. Hynek in the car said, ‘There is something. We just can’t put our finger on it. We’ve been investigating this for quite a while.’ He was on the phone for quite a while, which I found very enlightening. He came out and I said, ‘Well, Dr. Hynek. What do you think?’ He said, ‘It’s swamp gas.’ He tells me one minute he has no idea what it is. And then he makes one phone call to Washington and comes out and gives a statement that it’s swamp gas. Very strange.”
“They did see something,” Harvey told an interviewer. “I’ll believe this to the day I die. Somebody has kept something quiet, and nothing more ever materialized. So we don’t know if it was the government experimenting, or was it really a UFO. I don’t know.”21
Jailer Doug Harvey, overseer of Harvey’s Pigpen, short-hair enforcer, head-busting keeper of the peace, is no longer emboldened by certainty. Forty-six years later, he now believes in government cover-ups. He and the Billboard Bandit turn out to have something in common. Arnie is now one of the country’s foremost authorities on the Freedom of Information act. The Sherriff who was an arm of the State has become a Libertarian, alienated from the authorities he once served; the boy I knew who thrived on subversion has become an authority himself, albeit one who champions transparency and Americans’ inalienable rights.
And what of Vicky Lou and Vicky Lynn? Did they marry at eighteen, surrender to the powerful pull of the familiar, and disappear into silent woods? I don’t know. But as I’ve become ever more rooted with age, I like to think that their mothers’ unruly curiosity took seed in them, blowing them to new, alien landscapes.
Social Studies (1971-2015)
“Call me Sheila,” Mrs. Faigenbaum cheerily demanded one Saturday morning in August of 1971. I was living in her house for a few weeks before starting college, there to babysit her sons Aaron and Elliott. “You’re a young lady now and I’m not your teacher anymore.”
Only half of that sentence was true. I was not a “lady,” not prim and coy and helpless. I was seventeen years old, recently returned from backpacking around Europe, and convinced of my own worldliness. I was a woman. Just not a woman comfortable calling my former Social Studies teacher “Sheila.”
Her cursive script on the blackboard on the first day of eighth grade had been firm and unbroken, the loops in the l’s and the c’s uniform and tight—Balance of Power, underlined three times. Turning to face us, hands on hips, she’d asked, “Okay, class, does anyone know what this means?”
Bill Case, who would grow up to kill himself at eighteen but was then just a nice and probably gay boy whose voice was lower and upper lip fuzzier than the other boys in class, raised his hand. “Something about equality?” he ventured.
Mrs. Faigenbaum nodded approvingly. “Something like that.” She turned back to the board, and scrawled:
Liberty vs. Security
Stability vs. Revolt
“Do you detect a theme?” she asked us.
Bill once again raised his hand.
“Does anyone besides Bill detect a theme?”
“I don’t know…contradiction?” my best friend, Pam, suggested. The “I don’t know” was for show; if Pam lacked anything, it was uncertainty.
Mrs. Faigenbaum craned her neck, her eyebrows expectantly raised. “Yes, contradiction and…”
We stared at her. I wondered how long she could hold that inquiring face.
“How do you resolve contradictions?” she asked, allowing just a hint of exasperation into her voice.
Betsy raised her hand. “You go to your room?” Friendly and dim, she smiled in confused gratitude when several of us burst out laughing.
“Revolution,” Kenny declared. Long in hair, short in stature, that was his answer to most questions.
“Sometimes,” Mrs. Faigenbaum acknowledged.
“Compromise,” Pam announced, not bothering to stick her hand in the air. “You resolve contradictions through compromise.”
Mrs. Faigenbaum beamed. “Exactly.” She set down the chalk, folded her ar
ms, and leaned against the desk. “Contradictions are inevitable, so to solve them, you make trade-offs. You say, ‘I’ll do the dishes, if you take out the garbage.’ The Supreme Court says, ‘The states have sovereignty over a, b, and d, and the federal government is in charge of c, e, and f. Society says, ‘We don’t want segregation, but we recognize that integration will happen gradually.’ So much of American history is just a repeating process of conflict and compromise, of choices and trade-offs. And that’s what we’re going to study this year.”
She nodded, this time to herself, satisfied with her own synopsis. It was the first time I’d seen a teacher as engaged with the material as she wanted us to be.
Now she stood in her kitchen, which was immense and gleaming. Though she’d always seemed so solid and immovable in front of our eighth grade class, so tirelessly in charge, here, in her own home, four years later, she looked lost. The tall, chrome doors of the new refrigerator dwarfed her big-bosomed frame. And it wasn’t just the fridge that dwarfed Mrs. Faigenbaum. Her husband, Marty, seemed to diminish her as well. Hirsute and muscular, he bristled with sarcasm behind his Nixonian five-o’clock shadow. Whether loosening jar lids, tightening the knot in the tie he donned every morning before heading off to his job as a Xerox machine sales manager, or hoisting his son onto his shoulders, he seemed coiled and ready to spring. I didn’t understand what Mrs. Faigenbaum saw in him.
“Oh, you know,” she answered vaguely when, one morning at breakfast, I asked her how they’d met. “Friend of friends. We’d see each other at parties, or out for pizza and beer. When you’re twenty-one and still living with your parents, even ordinary guys look pretty enticing.” Hearing herself, “Not that Marty’s ordinary or anything. I just mean that when you’re ready for a relationship, you’re ready.” She took a studious swallow of coffee, then met my eyes again. “How about you,” she asked brightly. “Are you ready?”
What did she mean? Pam and I had talked endlessly about if and when we’d be ready to sleep with a boy. When Pam did in our Junior year—Pam, who I thought would be last—I was ready too, and did, the first chance I got. But she couldn’t possibly be asking me about that, could she?
“Well, there’s a guy, a sort of summer romance thing,” I answered. “But actually, I think it’s just as important to maintain my friendships with my women friends.”
She contained a smile and raised her coffee cup in a toast. “Here’s to women friends.”
I assumed Mrs. Faigenbaum had them. I’d hear her talking to people on the phone—including my ninth grade French teacher, Mrs. Harrat, or Marie, as she’d call herself to my great unease. But there was no sign of them in this oversized, splendid new house in the outskirts of Ann Arbor, not even on the weekend, which stretched out long and quiet as an abandoned playground.
Weekday mornings, though, were hectic. By the time I rose from the guest room in the basement at the ungodly hour of seven a.m., Mrs. Faigenbaum was dressed in some floral below-the-knees dress, her lips reddened, her eyes bright behind her tortoise-shell glasses, her son dressed for nursery school, and her husband reading the paper over his morning coffee. Marty left the house first, giving Aaron a quick peck on the forehead, and denying Mrs. Faigenbaum even that. She left soon after, scooping up Aaron in one arm, her purse and briefcase in the other, and staggering out the door in her cream-colored patent leather flats.
In the half-hour or so that I typically had before the baby woke up, I’d try out different items for breakfast—Laughing Cow cheese on rye crisps with real English blackcurrant preserves on top; cottage cheese with pineapple and chocolate sprinkles on top; cocktail pumpernickel squares with corned beef rolls and pimento-stuffed olives on top. The capacious kitchen, its exotically stocked fridge, the Mr. Coffee carafe—a breakthrough alternative to the bubble-topped electric percolator—felt luxurious.
As I ate, I read Mrs. Faigenbaum’s dog-eared paperback of Couples, the John Updike book that had been published three years earlier. Set in a toney New England town occupied by brokers, lawyers, and polo people, it told the story of four married couples and their intermingled, prolific, and kinky sex lives. It catalogued acts, such as oral sex, that I’d yet to experience and struck me as gross. But it went well beyond the standard repertoire of intimate practices, into territory that I didn’t recognize and couldn’t fathom—“golden showers” and, as I recall, sado-masochism (which I’d probably heard about, but only as such a costumed, bizarre, and accessorized activity that I lumped it in with The Adams Family).
By the time I sat in Mrs. Faigenbaum’s kitchen, I’d slept with one boy a couple of times, and messed around with many. But Couples absolutely floored me. It seemed to epitomize the creepy lasciviousness of the mainstream, adult manifestation of “sexual liberation,” as suburban couples donned Nehru jackets and mini-skirts, and, according to Time magazine and other disapproving chroniclers of cultural trends, engaged in “swinging” or “wife swapping.” (A few months later, I’d hear someone comment on the fact that it was always the wives being swapped. Like putters, I thought, or lawnmowers.) In an interview, John Updike had said, “The book is, of course, not about sex as such. It’s about sex as the emergent religion, as the only thing left.”
I didn’t (and still don’t) understand the grandiosity or the desperation behind that equation. There was nothing I recognized in Couples. Still, more than titillated, I felt sad reading this book that my no-nonsense teacher abandoned on the big, oval, faux oak table each morning. It seemed to speak to some longing in her that I pitied.
A few months later, at the first Ann Arbor Women’s Liberation conference, I heard a name for Mrs. Faigenbaum’s condition. Several, actually. “Domestic slave” and “objectification of male fantasies” are the two I remember, but those two long days in Rackham Auditorium were electric with slogans, phrases, and disputes that have had even more staying power.
In 1968, I’d watched news broadcasters ridicule a group of women who had picketed the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, chanting “Up Against the Wall, Miss America” and “Miss America Is a Big Falsie.” I was delighted by the protest—after all, the baton-twirling Tricia Nixon wannabes were already laughably retrograde to those of us who had (temporarily) stopped shaving our legs and wearing our bras—and unsettled by the sneering condescension of those hosting and reporting on it. (“Pretty girls don’t have those problems,” host Bob Hope said of the demonstrators.) But not much had happened to advance the movement in the intervening three years, so when my mother suggested that we go to this conference together, I let my curiosity get the better of my embarrassment about going anywhere with her.
The auditorium was packed and hot and tumultuous. “Processing” sessions followed each major address, in which audience members would stand up and comment on what they’d just heard from the dais about “the road ahead” and “the correct line,” matriarchy vs. patriarchy, lesbianism vs. heterosexuality, about whether our mothers were our sisters or our oppressors.
(“Did you think it would be good for me?” I recently asked her. Now eighty-five, she paused before answering. “I thought it would be good for me. I was a generation older than all the women I worked with, and they treated me like the enemy. I was trying to figure out if I was.”)
“The solution to our oppression doesn’t lie in navel-gazing,” shouted one woman in an incongruously frilly-necked blouse, “and so-called ‘consciousness-raising’ is just that—self-indulgence.” With her wispy hair plastered to her sweaty forehead, she looked like some Pioneer woman in the throes of delirium.
“So you’re saying we shouldn’t consider our own feelings or learn from our own experience?” Someone right in front of me stepped out into the aisle to confront the person who had just spoken. She sounded like a woman, but with her short hair and button-down shirt and work boots, she looked like a man. I was intrigued; I’d never seen anyone who looked like her before.
“I�
��m saying that inserting a speculum and peering into a mirror to see our own cervixes isn’t going to change the material conditions that give rise to our oppression,” retorted Pioneer Gal.
“Our bodies are ourselves,” someone in front of her leaped up to say. A handful of people started to clap, but were quickly drowned out by the woman in front of me.
“Men’s hands on the speculum, men’s laws governing our bodies—those are the material conditions of our oppression!” She cupped her palms to her mouth and blew in them, as if to cool them.
The wispy-haired woman rolled her eyes. “Of course we should have female doctors. Of course we should have free access to birth control and abortion. Stop obfuscating!” Stop what? “I’m just saying that how we feel—about ourselves, about our bodies—is an individual issue,” she continued. “You want therapy? Fine. You want to talk to other women about it in a consciousness-raising group? Go ahead. But don’t mistake that for political struggle.”
Two women in front of her jumped to their feet and shouted, practically in unison, “The personal is political!”
Waves of applause began undulating through the auditorium, as the moderator on stage tapped the microphone with her finger over and over again, pleading “Can we please have order? Everyone deserves the right to be heard. Can we please have order?”
This was amazing. All this talk about menses and placentas and orgasms and vulvas! All this yelling about rape and pornography and clitorises! And all of it in front of my mother! Like listening to an argument in the next room, I understood the odd word or phrase, enough to get a sense of what the debate was about. Was our oppression self-imposed or a direct consequence of economic exploitation? Could women change themselves without changing society, or would one flow out of the other? Was heterosexuality just capitulation to male dominance, or were egalitarian sexual relationships possible in a patriarchy? But the questions I was posing to myself and would continue to wrestle with for my first few years in college were much more prosaic. Should I take women’s studies, anti-imperialist studies, or both? Could I start shaving my legs and armpits again? Should I spend Saturday night with my boyfriend or my women friends? Was it okay for anyone to be on top when having sex, or did we have to always try to do it sideways? And what about make-up? Was it ever okay to wear make-up?
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