But I wasn’t attracted to them. Not in that way. I was a perfectly conventional woman with perfectly conventional thoughts and values. I’d had the usual boyfriends growing up, the usual overprotective father, the usual concerned mother. This was in the ’70s and ’80s, decades for which I’ve never felt the slightest nostalgia despite the drumbeat of movies and TV shows that have focused on that time ever since. Dad owned a little café, Mom was a housewife; we lived in a perfectly respectable row house in Northwest D.C., the Adams Morgan neighborhood. It was a good place to grow up, I guess, as safe and secure as life in any city could be in the years before the crack cocaine epidemic turned Washington into a shooting gallery. Until the catastrophe, at least, we lived average sorts of lives (except, of course, that by definition my brother and I could never be “average”). But even afterwards I was an excellent student, a responsible person, a good girl.
I loved reading, especially gloomy romances—Jane Eyre and Rebecca and the like. I loved old movies, especially murder stories with Bogart or Cagney or Robinson and anything with a good femme fatale like Barbara Stanwyck or Lana Turner. And Hitchcock, of course—always and forever Hitchcock and his icy blondes, Grace Kelly or Kim Novak, the kind of simmering woman I dreamed of being. I liked new movies, too, of course—I saw Star Wars five times when I was a girl—but for me there was something special in the older productions, watching people who in many cases had been dead for decades magically alive again, their flickering shadowy selves plotting evil deeds, shooting guns, punching each other, tossing wisecracks. It was a strange, appealing sort of immortality.
From grade school I knew that boys liked me well enough, that I passed whatever internal tests they had amongst themselves to judge females. I wasn’t brilliantly popular by any means, but neither was I an outcast. Other girls liked me. Boys talked to me. I had my first date at fourteen, when I was a freshman in high schooclass="underline" another freshman, a tall skinny boy named Stan Stevens, got up the nerve to ask me to a school dance. We went. It was neither magical nor disastrous; Stan was nice, we danced, he shook my hand at the end of the evening and thanked me. We went out once or twice more, casual things, then drifted apart.
Both Mom and Dad drank too much, but whose parents didn’t in those freewheeling days? Whenever I saw adults getting together there always seemed to be beer, whiskey, those bottled wine coolers that were so popular then—our own refrigerator was perpetually stuffed with them. Occasionally I’d steal one to share with one of my friends and the sky didn’t fall. They seemed sweet and harmless. I was used to my parents’ voices slurring in the evening, used to the softening of their glances and the fuzziness of their expressions. Neither was mean or abusive. They just seemed to fade in the evenings, softly, like twilight turning to night. I never felt traumatized by their behavior. I never felt anything about them, really. They were stick-figures in my life, useful for an allowance or permission to go on a date but otherwise not terribly relevant. I didn’t think of them as alcoholics, though my mother drank wine coolers from early in the morning the way I used to drink Mountain Dews. I didn’t consider their drinking in any serious way. I didn’t think they might have been assuaging their pain. I had no idea they had any pain they needed to assuage. I thought that all the pain of the family was within me, myself (my half-self), that I carried it for them, silently, heroically. I carried it but I kept it sealed off, like nuclear waste buried deep within countless layers of lead or whatever they use for such a task. I didn’t let it hurt me.
They died in an alcohol-fueled car accident shortly after the end of my high school career. I hardly noticed.
4
I met Bill Lindner in college. I was an English major, having been practical and deciding I needed a subject I could teach to young people—literature was much more marketable than movies, which were in some ways my bigger passion. My inheritance, not large, paid my way. Bill taught Political Science, a subject in which I had no interest, but I needed the course to help fulfill my general education requirements. This was at a little school in upstate New York run by aging hippies, who by then—the early ’80s, Lennon’s murder, Reagan’s rise—were sour, disillusioned people with a kind of siege mentality, as if they thought themselves the last bastion of peace and freedom and liberality left in the land. Teachers tended to sit cross-legged on the floor with their students in a circle around them. In good weather classes happened outside in the woods. Everyone was on a first-name basis; teachers socialized with students, students attended parties at teachers’ homes where they drank and smoked pot. Love affairs, though officially frowned upon between the learned and the learning, were frequent and generally the most open of secrets. I was two decades younger than Bill, a quiet kid who rarely made eye contact with anyone but a couple of trusted friends. I wore the kind of flipped-up hairstyle popularized by Mary Tyler Moore ten years earlier, badly outdated then. Plain sweaters, blue jeans. I was nothing that stood out in any way, but Bill took notice of me.
I found him frightening at first—he was a fierce, articulate lecturer, slim and good-looking in an intense sort of way, though by then his encroaching male pattern baldness made his long hippie hair look a bit as if it were sliding backwards off his head. His beard, long and unkempt, was beginning to go gray. He wore beads around his neck, tie-dyed T-shirts, jeans, Birkenstocks. He was glamorous, a kind of campus-level celebrity: a political radical in the ’60s, he’d met Martin Luther King during the March on Washington, interviewed Malcolm X for his college newspaper (“What can white people do to help the black revolution?” my future husband asked him, to which the revolutionary replied, “Nothing”). He’d done sit-ins, passive protests, been clubbed by riot police at an anti-Vietnam rally outside the White House in ’71. I was just a shy, mousy sophomore—and still a technical virgin, modestly experienced with boys and their various erotic predilections but never having gone quite all the way. Bill, on the other hand, had had all the experiences one would expect of someone like him, including numerous affairs with students. He’d even been married briefly. Yet, as different as we were, something clicked between us.
I didn’t know what to make of sex at first. I knew vaguely about female orgasms (learned quite young not through personal experience but by glancing hastily through a friend’s older sister’s copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask) yet for a long time the idea was only theoretical. I enjoyed the closeness with Bill, the caressing, the feeling of deep and profound togetherness, but the actual physical sensation was fairly limited. I wondered what it was that he felt, what made him sigh and moan and thrust faster and faster until he finished, sometimes quite violently, inside me. My discovery of my own physical resources wouldn’t come for years.
I liked men. As a breed, as a type. I liked their physicality, their strength, their aggressiveness. Bill had those qualities in spades; I felt protected when I was with him. I could stay quiet and unnoticed, the only not-quite-adult in the room, when we were with his friends— other teachers mostly—and they were arguing about Reagan’s policies and whether he was deliberately setting out to destroy the poor or if they were just collateral damage in his insane, unprecedented military build-up. No doubt those people thought of me as just another of Bill’s groupies, but in my senior year he married me.