My friend Elizabeth once told me that she sees her life as divided into discernible stages—places she lived while growing up (hers was a military family), her college years, her years teaching school, doing odd jobs, acting in improvisational theater, graduate school, living in New York City, her first college teaching job. Her sixty years blocked out in shifts—places, time, direction.
The philosopher Schopenhauer once said that we finally see our life’s big patterns when we’re close to death. Before that, our lives appear random, often senseless. Possibly true, I think, but aren’t we able to understand some of life’s logic, divisions, meaning?
I think these thoughts at my computer now, Thursday morning, working on my autobiographical book and borrowing from Elizabeth’s idea, now seeing my life in stages.
When I was young, around five, I would tell people, “I’m a girl now, but I was a boy before I was born.” I remember getting into the apartment building elevator with my mother and making this pronouncement to others as we rode from our fourth-floor apartment down to the lobby.
My mother would tug my hand as a rebuke. But she’d say nothing, and I’d add nothing by way of explanation. I’d spoken my piece. The moment etched in my mind: down we go, and I make my pronouncement. With utter certainty. Out loud and in public.
Perhaps it’s the same impulse here. It’s not so important to know why I need to say something, but very important to say it. Leave understanding to the psychologists and literary critics.
But sometimes I still feel boyish, as if my female body were imprinted on a male template. I don’t believe in past lives, and I’m certainly female and heterosexual, but yet, there’s something different about me, my gender identity, my sense of my gendered self.
Typing furiously, I’m now ten, in fifth grade, and I’ve been selected to serve as a safety monitor at Number Six school. It’s lunch time; I’m asked to monitor the side door so that when the kids pour out onto the playground, they don’t run or get hurt while exiting. I push open the heavy steel door. Outside, it’s spring, there’s a blue sky above, and the sweet smell of nearby honeysuckle growing by the chain link fence that borders a residential property. On the stone steps, I breathe deeply, stretch out my arms. My thin body is flat and strong. I’ve been modeling in the city for the past year; I’m a straight-A student. I have friends, and people tell me I’m pretty, though I don’t understand that. I run my hands up and down my torso. I am a girl, and I am a boy, I think. I have the strength of both genders pulsing within. It’s electric; I’m alive with it. This energy defines me. I never want to be only male or female. I was a boy before I was born, I tell myself again.
In five minutes, a horde of schoolchildren pour into the corridor, make their way out of the building from the side exit I’m tasked to watch. I have the door jamb in place and yell out, “Slow down. Safety monitor on duty. Slow down, please!” The rush of bodies and noise floods the hallway, the nearby staircase, cascading into the playground. I am losing myself and becoming them—the pulse, the beat, the energetic throb of noise and impulse. Again, I’m no longer me, myself, nor anyone.
The phone rings and startles me. I grab my cell phone from my bathrobe pocket and find that it’s the secretary from Arts and Humanities. She wants to know if I’ll be in today; I need to sign some paperwork connected to an invoice, an interdepartmental transfer of funds.
“Yes,” I say, immediately regretting the commitment. I’m feeling sad again and want to stay in my world of memory, continue to write. The more solitary I am, the more solitude I seem to need.
But when I look over what I’ve written only a few moments ago, I feel disconnected to it and to myself. Maybe being out in the world would be good—offer my attention, my focus to an external locus.
There’s a Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day,” that I like, in which the speaker connects with a grasshopper, very particularly, as she enjoys a summer day. But by the poem’s end, Oliver challenges the reader to judge her day not as a waste of time but as a perfect employment of her time; her attention to the grasshopper encourages readers by proxy to give their attention to the smallest matters, that in such attention lies the fullness of life.
Before I end my writing, I type out Oliver’s lines from memory:
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
I save my book—if I can call it that—or document—though the word “document” sounds like something that should be notarized—and turn off my machine. Writing for the day is done.
Summer school is in session, so there are plenty of students and faculty around. I meet Jill, a social work professor, whose office is a few doors down from mine.
“How’s it going?” Jill asks. She’s petite and has become very thin since her husband left her for another woman last fall. If I remember correctly, he teaches in the math department at a community college in Raleigh. They have two young kids, and Jill is the custodial parent.
“Okay,” I answer. But I know Jill really wants to talk about herself. So I ask, “How about you? Teaching this summer?”
Jill sighs, sweeping her blonde hair away from her face. “Yeah, I’ve picked up an Intro to Social Work course, but after that I’m taking the kids to my folks’ farm in Iowa. Horses. Goats. Chickens. Good for them. You know?” Jill has been looking down at her armload of papers, but now she’s turned her gaze on me. There are tears in her eyes.
“You okay?” I ask.
Jill looks at her papers again, embarrassed perhaps by her strong emotion. “Got to go,” she says. “Catch you later,” and walks away.
“If I don’t see you, have a good time in Iowa,” I call to her, regretting my tone. I watch as she shuffles down the hallway. “Eat some corn or something.” Not the smartest thing to say, but the words are already out.
“Yeah,” Jill calls back, as I see her turn the corner. I stand there for a moment, realizing that I’ve failed her.
Before heading to our secretary, Laura, I stop at the faculty lounge to check my mailbox. Nothing. That’s good. And when I bump over to her office, Laura’s on her cell phone, tapping at her computer, a procurement form on her screen.
“Okay. Tomorrow, I’ve got another one.” Laura lifts her head, nods in my direction, pulling out a piece of paper from a stack and handing me a pen.
I read the paper; there’s been a $10.24 charge for supplies that should have come out of the English Department’s budget, not the Writing Center’s. It’s not a lot of money, but I’ve spent almost my entire Writing Center budget, and I’m not sure that I can afford it—not before July 1, the beginning of the new fiscal year. That said, even if the Writing Center gets charged, the bill will be paid. It’s for English department supplies I’ve purchased at the university store, so the money transfer won’t involve the exchange of any currency. Funny money. I sign the form.
“Thanks, Laura,” I say. She barely looks up at me. She’s got bleached blond shoulder-length hair, and she’s wearing a low-cut tight-fitting polyester print dress, with a thick belt around her waist. She’s about thirty-five, married to a truck driver, ex-military, and they have four kids.
“No problem,” Laura says. But then she does look up, directly at me. “You okay?” And when she says this, I think, I’m not.
“Absolutely,” I say. “Why?”
“You know me. Psychic. You sure?” But now her office phone is ringing, so she tells her cell caller, “Hang on,” puts the phone on her desk, and wheels around to answer the school landline. “Hello, this is Laura DeAngelo, secretary for Arts and Humanities. How may I help you?”
I’m already out the door.
In my office, tears come again. I’ve shut the door and opened the windows, deciding against the air conditioning. I look out into the courtyard and notice that the grass is overgrown and weed-filled. There are a few picnic tables off to the side, and I see that one of the Writing Center consultants is meeting with a student. The Writing Center, soon to be relocated in our library, is now located in what used to be the print shop, on the first floor of this, one of the university’s original buildings.
I’m thinking about my brother. Thinking that I don’t know if I love him. I’m back in 1969 and then, further, back in 1959. My brain isn’t honoring boundaries.
Students pour out of morning classes and explode into the hall outside my office. No one will need me or know that I’m here, so I fight the impulse to pull myself together. Instead, I sit, let the tears come, and decide to be with everything—even sorrow. My mind bleeds memories.
“Let go,” I say aloud. Then again, louder, “Let go.” And there’s a perverse strength in relinquishing control. I breathe and turn the air conditioning off. The air quickly becomes hot and real.
I open my laptop but don’t check email. Instead, I write. The heat takes me back to my last summer of camp—again 1969. I signed on that year as a CIT—counselor in training—and my job was to teach horseback riding. It was a dude ranch camp designed for city kids, and I’d been a camper there the previous two summers.
But the camp was strange, mostly because there weren’t many campers, and it was badly organized. In fact, we had fewer than fifty kids each summer, and the swimming pool was a round concrete hole in the ground filled with unchlorinated water from a nearby stream. The cabins were rundown, the food terrible, and there was little supervision. We had two or three poorly paid counselors, and there was a large lodge-like building that served as our main rec room upstairs and dining hall downstairs. We had no official camp song, not much of a daily schedule, and our horses—mostly quarter horses—were trucked in from the West. The owners—whomever they might have been, because no one ever met them—would hire cowboys from Wyoming and Montana mostly, and they’d caravan in horse trailers with about fifty horses, one for each camper, onto the property. Many of the horses were wild, and the cowboys stayed until they—and some of the campers—broke them. The cowboys were rough, the horses ornery, and nobody seemed concerned with personal liability. I can’t imagine the camp was accredited.
It was a late June morning when my parents drove me to meet the camp van in Valley Stream by Green Acres, the outdoor shopping mall. Dennis didn’t come with us, but he was going off to another camp the following week. Which camp, I can’t remember. But Dennis never liked country life or horses, so he was probably off to a baseball camp held right outside the city limits in Putnam County.
There were five other kids at the van. We stood in an asphalt parking lot, clutching our knapsacks and stuffed animals, said our goodbyes, gave and received hugs, tucked our luggage into the back of the van, and off we went. The driver, an old squat Jewish man, held a dead cigar stub between his teeth, and every time we began to sing, he’d shout, “Knock it off!” which would stop us for a moment, before we’d begin again. After a while, the driver ignored us.
I sat with the teenager who was to be my camp counselor. Her name was, like mine, Rachel, spelled like mine, and her last name, strangely, was Rosenfeld, my mother’s maiden name. Rachel had long kinky hair, and as soon as the van was out of parental sight, she lit an unfiltered Camel and offered one to me.
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“Good idea,” she said. “They’re supposed to be bad for you.” But she looked unconvinced, took a deep drag, then blew her smoke my way.
I told her that I was a CIT and my job was to provide riding lessons.
“Great,” Rachel said. “You can teach me.”
“Can’t you ride?” I shifted my position and opened the top two buttons of my plaid, Western-style shirt. The van, although air-conditioned, was pretty hot.
“Nope,” she replied and opened her own shirt, beneath which was a tight-fitting tee shirt that read, “Get Clean for Gene.” I had no idea the message referred to Eugene McCarthy, but it was tie-dyed and looked cool.
“So, why’d you come? Dude ranch and all?” I asked.
“To meet some cowboys.” Rachel looked at me and grinned with crooked teeth. I could see something wild in her, just beneath the surface.
“Yeah, but they’re not guys to date. I mean they…”
“Watch me. Gonna light their fire…” She laughed, took another drag on her cigarette. I leaned back against the vinyl seat.
k
A knock on my office door jars me. I say nothing but open it, and Laura is standing there with a small stack of boxes in her arms.
“These are for you,” she says. “I was just about to unlock your office and put them here. No room in my office. I knocked but didn’t think you were in.”
“Yeah, I’m just finishing up. Thought I’d get some work done.”
“Hot,” she says. Why don’t you turn on the a/c?”
“Guess I forgot, but I’ve got to leave anyway. I’ll take these,” I say, relieving Laura of the boxes. “Thanks for bringing them.”
“No problem,” she says. I can see that she really wants to know what’s inside them, but I’m not in the mood to indulge her. Two boxes, I already know, contain review copies of texts from publishers. Everyone in the English department receives these and usually sells them to book buyers who come by periodically. But two boxes are small and unmarked—perhaps supplies? Not in the mood to deal with them, I stack all the boxes by my bookcase on the floor.
“Have a good afternoon, Laura. Thanks again,” I say through the open doorway. Class in session, the hall is empty now, shadowy as I hear the tap-tap of Laura’s high heels grow fainter as she returns to her office.