the habit of being

( Where is my corset, I have decided for the moment to live as a wasp in an adult-rated movie, with long frizzy red hair and yellow teeth and a whip. )

- - -

As I was looking through my bookshelf yesterday, for something to read (I’ve stopped reading altogether, so help me), I found a paper journal I’d started years ago, maybe seven pages of text at most, I don’t continue with things. I take this passage, modified somewhat, from that journal, a burgundy book with a ribbon bookmark and gold-lined pages, because I never wrote this anywhere else, not really, so I will write it here, because I no longer fear my sixteen year old self or her perceptions.

- - -

I fear I should have written the entire episode down before, before it began to fade, but in all fairness to myself, one does not think of writing at such times. One thinks only of living and of great change, of movement in a forwardly way, onwardness. I like to think, honestly, that kissing her has altered me somehow, and that I am no longer simply Katharine, but Katharine Who Has Kissed a Beautiful Girl, even Katharine Who Is Loved, or maybe even Katharine the Seductress. And yes, it is that ridiculous, as ridiculous as beauty can be, and how this one act seems to weigh heavily on all others, and how I do not even understand. Three nights, consecutive, straining toward dawn, and then it all stopped flatly, and I can’t say I understand that either. Still, just clinging to her seemed quite enough after we left the blue room that was once my mother’s for the room that is hers and the room that is mine.

How was it, exactly, that I couldn’t seem to keep my hands off her, from the first night onward. Somehow, it didn’t seem entirely surreal that first night, as I found myself in the dark of her huge closet, my feet on the wall, my back to the floor, my hand on her thigh, drawing a roundabout path with my fingernails. How funny, like a naughty child afraid of getting caught, I saw this shadow of my entirety personified in that single hand (synecdoche?) cautiously retreating to the more open areas, her knee, her leg, ankle, foot, ever so often, so as to avoid being too obvious in my greed. But soon enough this feeling was overcome, and with triumph I felt I had claimed the thigh as my own, and no longer did I sketch lightly on it with my nail, but erased all that had been carelessly drawn with my palm. As I tried to delete so much of what had been done before, I listened steadily for changes in her breathing, and every slight alteration seemed to make me gasp as well, full of curiosity.

She did touch me as well, but I was so intent on what I was doing that barely made an impression. As my legs were stretched out with my feet on the wall close by her head, she could never reach farther than my knee. Her own legs were bent at the knee, however, giving me free reign of their entire length, which was significant. Quite significant was that night to me, the first night, I repeated in my head as we fell asleep side by side.

It was on the fourth night that I first kissed her. This moment came as the climax of a very slow crescendo, there were so many endless minutes leading up to it, as we lay there in the dark of that blue room, our hands on each other, somewhere, somewhere. So slow were our movements, to mask their obvious awkwardness, as more and more figure-eights were drawn across more and more skin, and we were covered by a tension thick as rain. How long did this calligraphic struggle to find ourselves in the correct position last? Minutes, hours, months, until the crescendo was matched by her breathing patterns, and my fingers found her lips, and her own fingers pulled me closer, to the very first taste, and I never wanted to let go.

I am allowed to sound like the author of terrible romance novels, I have that right, to play it out without the proper metaphors and without the due creativity, for isn’t such a moment needless of originality, isn’t it without era, without time?

There were drinks of water afterwards, and sleep eventually, thought by that time it must have been nearing five AM. The most odd thing was that the next day, when it was no longer dark and we were no longer huddled together, it was almost as if it had never happened. Except that it happened again. And again, the night after that, very much the same way. The fifth night, I recall, was the loveliest in the trilogy, for it was the longest and most intense. I discovered then her neck and her shoulders, arms, and legs all over again. How we sat face to face in the dark. How we giggled at ourselves. How perfect it all seemed, to me, though I have no idea of her own perception, and I fear it is quite the opposite of my own.

- - -

From the next day’s entry:

“I am tired of being such a bald-faced liar, but I do not have the means to tell the truth. In my freewriting I use only images which have no meaning. This, I hope, will cause the reader enough confusion that he will never notice how unbelievably fake I am. I think I grasp the concept of a “real phony,” but, still, I am inferior to that typecast. I am too in love with Franny to waste my time aspiring to be anything less than Vienna. I am too in love with Vienna to aspire to be anything less than Franny.”

Sixteen. I had recently turned sixteen.

Even now, sometimes, despite being an intelligent person, I still believe my life would be substantially better if my hair curled just perfectly, in a way that made me look like a girl who deserves to wear pearls everyday, and if my body were so thin and graceful that people wondered how I could even be alive, if my eyes were like Anais Nin’s, if my voice would only produce poetic sounds. Sometimes, despite being a vain person, I can smile sincerely.

Today, I went out and about with my mother, wearing a cheap home-made red dress from Goodwill, Birkenstocks, and no bra. Half my hair was in a ponytail, and the other half was just there. My face was still broken out and grimacing from cramps. Mom called me a “menstrual disaster,” and what can I say, things just aren’t as pretty any more, not all the time.

But things are always dramatic. And I do hope you forgive me this, in its shallow incompleteness.

Unlined paper.

Still, I have too many black hats and too many pink scarves, though I do not wear them like I should, and at this stage I believe I should have been three years ago. I remember having these thoughts then too, only much more abstract.

I had two dreams.

In the first, we are in a restaurant with green wallpaper, on the first floor of a nice hotel, near the lobby. The restaurant, untitled, serves only breakfast, three times a a day, three different levels, corresponding with regularly scheduled meals. We lay in a very long booth, I on my back, and we are fucking, yet I don’t remember our being nude, or how this came to be. I don’t see my lover looking down at me, not that intense questioning stare, but rather the look of another, a man in a suit at the other end of the booth. This outsider is looking straight at me, and he seems to know something, something more than I do. It seems I’d met him somehow earlier in the dream, before being joined by my lover on the booth. Maybe I’d even thought about sleeping with him. Now he is half-forgotten and perhaps jealous, though I never knew his name, and did not care one way or another whether he chose to remain in his seat or go. Still, oddly, he has power, for it is he who looks at me, unmoved, while I struggle to keep my eyes open in my own little sphere of pleasure.

The other dream, quite different, is laid out distinctly in a black and white which falls far from greyscale, high contrast as my favorite photographs, sharp enough never to be cast aside. It seems a bit like a silent film from the 1920’s, minus only the silence. We are in my room, on my vampire bed at first, then the floor, all a joyous carnival ride, high energy and acrobatic in our movements, the pornographic cirque du soleil. We throw one another around and scream with all our strength, yet are so excited and happy, at times we cannot avoid grinning from ear to ear. The scene becomes such a paradox, violent aspects undermined by expression.

The scene, yes, is interrupted by my mother, who seems to want to prove that I am underestimating my lover’s intelligence, or somehow trying to speak for him. But there were, before and after, many positions, freeze-frames, all fluid and dreamlike and perhaps impossible for those not trained in contortion from early days. (”I was just thinking,” he said, “about sex, and all the positions people get themselves into.”) Most clearly, from all this, an epic, spanning an entire night, I see most clearly him, lying down on his back in the middle of my bed, and myself on top, sitting up, laughing and screaming almost hysterically in my head, so madly blissful and unaware that it would have broken any man’s pelvis, my movement and weight. Here, in the dream, I see myself in the mirror, nude and sweating and blurred from it all, and so strikingly, utterly far from submissive. In the mirror I cannot even see my partner, it is too high, only myself, and I cannot grasp that this image is truly my own. My body seems somehow too powerful, too large, too alive.

All of this is singular in my mind, as I do not typically have fantasies of this sort, and it shakes me, the life I can live in my sleep, when from so early it was always that I wanted to be held down, constrained, objectified, fucked. But this image of myself I saw in the mirror was the antithesis, and it made me smile when I woke up the next morning.

And when I told him about my dream, he asked if I was aware that the Kama Sutra contained a section detailing how one should properly beat one’s wife.

This girl in blue has pantyhose in both bare and buff, and what could be called a talent, a collection of transparent ribbons from gift boxes, tags, old letters, sentiments. Today she wants to be a man, to have a straight line for a rhythm, be up, up, up. What would that do for concentration? And why, if science is portrayed as a beautiful woman men lust after until death, are there so many more male scientists in the world than females? If science is that which can be refuted, as well as the taunting vixen, is there a conflict of interests here? Given that understanding is the main goal of any scientific work, one must quickly admit that while a beautiful woman can be appreciated and even worshipped by a man, she can only be understood by another woman. And who better to refute everything on sight than a bitch with PMS. Therefore, there should be more woman scientists, I rest my case. And this girl in blue applauds with a run in her hose and Midol in her bag.

- - -

92 test tubes, 45 forceps, 10 scalpels, 27 250mL beakers, 1 2000 mL Erlenmeyer flask, 1 flower press, 32 microscopes, 3 alcohol lamps, 29 goggles, 2 ancient centrifuges, 1 climatarium… inventory for Anne’s lab, pages and pages, counting and looking up prices. 2 10cc glass syringes that are no longer carried by ANY science supply house, not Ward’s, not Fisher, not Carolina Biological, not anywhere. I sat in D’s classroom looking these things up as he helped a girl with a test. We’d worked on the inventory for days; I stayed after school the week of final exams, when school ended at noon. Everything had to be taken out of the huge supply cabinets and placed on the lab benches. Consumables were not to be inventoried, so they were separated out. All the items listed on last year’s inventory were checked off, some numbers were changed, some things were scratched off. Those things were moved to the tables at the back of the room. The items left at the front had to be added to inventory. I’d do these things, according to the system, and everything had to be counted and recounted before it was put back in the appropriate cabinet. When we finally finished it, three days later, he told me we had done a damn good job, and that no one would ever notice or appreciate it, but that he would know.

He isn’t my teacher anymore, and no one’s calling me an “AP Biology maggot” now, though I still have the perspicacity award he gave me, and the silver star I got for knowing about Fibonacci sequences, and I still have the text from the course (I wouldn’t turn it back in, so I paid for it), and I still have my big grey notebook with black and white photographs on the cover, and my Science Olympiad pin, and a conviction that I will major in biology and not be swayed by humanities whores.

Davis Ranch is this big beautiful place with so much space and air. Marlon and I drove out there one day to make sure he was okay; we’d heard he got into a car accident that morning. He was fine, though his red Miata looked like a dead cartoon, one eye open and one eye closed. There was a telescope on his porch, and his brother was there, and his motorcycle was out in the yard, and his dog was covered with gnats. He was a person, short and fat and bald as ever, with a little white house on his parents’ farm.

He’s leaving this year, going to teach stuck up snobs in Atlanta. He said he told the principal at his new school that he would call his students maggots and that they would love it. It’s true. He’ll give them insane amounts of work and they will love it. He’ll pick on them relentlessly and make them feel like absolute idiots and they will love it. He’ll have so much fun teaching his class that you’d think teaching high school was the kind of job people actually want. And all his students will make 5’s on the AP exam, and some of them will want to major in biology.

I gave him a new Scrabble dictionary for his birthday.

He called me Kate.

I’m saying it because it’s May and someday I will want to remember this month, the month I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. I threw my cap in the air and the tears started going everywhere, almost like all these people I was methodically hugging (tightly, and really meaning it too), mattered in my life, that my never seeing them again would make some sort of difference. James says it’s good to cry at graduations. Marlon said I looked pretty when I cried. I’m not sure which comment has the most substance, and I don’t care.

A scene:

In a house I’d never been to, full of drunk college students playing video games, beer bottles covering tables, Oriental things, paintings and books written in Chinese, I lay exhausted on a foreign sofa in crumpled clothes and wild hair and pimples on my chin.

I’d been swimming before, in a freezing cold pool surrounded by ghosts of people who were once my classmates. Some were smoking and some were drinking, most were talking, and I was the only one still in the pool, floating on my back in the middle while some guy sat on the edge watching me. I thought about how James told me he could still remember how I looked floating in the Atlantic Ocean last June, in my leopard-print bra. This guy is not James, and he will probably not remember me floating, or anything else from that night. I get out of the pool, dry off on Marlon’s already-damp towel, and put my clothes back on. They were crumpled, because they’d just been sitting on the ground all that time, and my hair got in such a mad state from getting wet in the pool and getting brutally harassed by Marlon for a good fifteen minutes afterwards. He scratched my head as if I were some favorite dog, as I sat huddled in an uncomfortable chair, but what did I care, with people constantly asking if I were okay, just because I was tired and didn’t feel like grinning. It was midnight after all. And then the cops showed up and we left.

So I’m lying on this guy’s couch, tired, and Marlon and Ellen are there with me. Ellen’s wearing a pink fairy dress, and she’s sitting in the hole left my wrinkly partial fetal position, between my head and my knees. She’s warm and I want to sleep. She’s warm and she strokes my hair, like she doesn’t have enough problems of her own to take a second to make me feel safe in a strange Oriental drunken house where I shouldn’t be, and Marlon is unhappy and uncomfortable and I don’t even care because Ellen’s close to me and playing with my hair and I’m almost asleep. The boy who belongs to the house, Ellen’s friend, also tipsy and Chinese, sits on the other couch and he’s mumbling about how he should take pictures of us and sell them on the internet, it’s so erotic our being close like that. And Ellen says “Katharine has a boyfriend.”

(And that’s how I spent graduation night, just in case I ever need to remember.)