Mia, you are saying, get to the point. Relax, breathe deeply, and I will make my rhetorical turn shortly. This is a question of sameness and difference, of what Socrates in the Republic calls a “word controversy.” He tells his interlocutor, Glaucon, that they find themselves in “eristic wrangling” because they hadn’t bothered to inquire “what was the sense of ‘different nature’ and what was the sense of ‘same nature’ and what we were aiming at in our definition when we allotted to a different nature different practices and to the same nature the same.” The Great Father of Western Philosophy is working out the man/woman problem for his utopia and comes to rest (uneasily, I think, but he rests nevertheless) on this: “But if the only difference is that the female bears and the male begets, we shall not admit that it is a difference relevant for our purpose.” The purpose: whether women should be given the same education as men and then allowed to rule beside them in the Republic.
Mostly the same, but different in parts, mostly in those lower begetting and bearing parts Or different in kind? Thomas Laqueur, bless his heart, has written a whole book on the subject. Once the innie-outie theory collapsed, sometime in the eighteenth century, women were no longer inverted men; we were wholly OTHER: our bones, nerves, muscles, organs, tissues, all different, another machinery altogether, and this biological alien was ever so delicate. “While it is true that the mind is common to all human beings,” wrote Paul-Victor de Sèze in 1786, “the active employment thereof is not conducive to all. For women, in fact, this activity can be quite harmful. Because of their natural weakness, greater brain activity in women would exhaust all the other organs and thus disrupt their proper functioning. Above all, however, it would be the generative organs which would be the most fatigued and endangered through the over exertion of the female brain.” The thought-shrivels-your-ovaries theory had a long and robust life. Dr. George Beard, author of American Nervousness, argued that unlike the “squaw in her wigwam,” who focused on her nether regions and popped out one child after another, the modern woman was being deformed by thinking, and to prove it, he cited the work of a distinguished colleague who had measured highly educated uteruses and found them to be only half the size of those never exposed to learning. In 1873, Dr. Edward Clarke, following the noble Beard, published a book with a friendly title: Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls, in which he argued that menstruating girls should be banned from the classroom and cited hard evidence from clinical studies conducted at HARVARD on intellectual women which had determined that too much knowledge had made these poor creatures sterile, anemic, hysterical, and even mad. Maybe that was my problem. I read too much, and my brain exploded. In 1906, the anatomist Robert Bennett Bean claimed that the corpus callosum—the neural fibers that bind the two halves of the brain together—were bigger in men than in women and hypothesized that the “exceptional size of the corpus callosum may mean exceptional intellectual activity.” Big thoughts = Big CC.
But no one utters such nonsense now, you say. Science has changed. It is based on facts. And yet, colleagues of my wayward husband are hard at work measuring brain volume and thickness, scanning its oxygenated blood flow, injecting hormones into mice, rats, and monkeys, and knocking out genes left and right to prove beyond all doubt that the difference between the sexes is profound, predetermined by evolution, and more or less fixed. We have male and female brains, different not only for reproductive functions but in countless other essential ways. While it is true that the mind is common to all human beings, each sex has its own KIND of MIND. Dr. Renato Sabbatini, for example, distinguished neurophysiologist, who was a postdoc fellow at the MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE, enumerates a long list of differences between us and them and then announces: “This may account, scientists say, for the fact that there are many more [male] mathematicians, airplane pilots, bush guides, mechanical engineers, architects and race car drivers than female ones.” Study all you want, girls, you will never solve a Riccati equation. Why? The wigwam idea returns without bringing in Native Americans (it is no longer possible to demonize or idealize the wigwam; we must retreat to peoples who can no longer be insulted): “Cave men hunted. Cave women gathered food near the home and took care of the children.” But not to worry, our esteemed professor assures us (citing an even higher paternal AUTHORITY, that great “‘Father’ of sociobiology” at HARVARD, Edward O. Wilson), you might not have evolved to make it as a bush guide, but “human les tend to be higher than males in empathy, verbal skills, social skills and security seeking, among other things, while men tend to be higher in independence, dominance, spatial and mathematical skills, rank-related aggression, and other characteristics.” Our superior “verbal skills,” if we follow the professor’s own logic, explain why women have dominated the literary arts for so long, nary a man in sight. I am sure you have also noticed that when the titans of contemporary literature are referred to, both in academia and in the popular press, the numbers of women among them are, quite simply, overwhelming.
I am happy to say that my own (or used-to-be own) Boris would not agree with Dr. Sabbatini. Up to his ears in rats as my old man is and attached to evolution and genes as he also is, he knows that genes are expressed through the environment, that the brain is plastic and dynamic; it develops and changes over time in relation to what’s out there. He also knows, despite our commonalities, that people are not rats and that the higher executive functions in human beings can be decisive in determining what we become, and he knows that good science one day can become bad science the next, as was true of the sensational discovery in 1982 that the corpus callosum, the selfsame fibrous brain-hemisphere connector of Dr. Bean, especially one part of it known as the splenium, is actually LARGER in women than in men. This study, soon to be trumpeted to the masses by Newsweek magazine, claimed not that women were intellectually superior (an idea never advanced in the annals of human history) but, rather, that we of the large CCs have greater communication between the hemispheres of our brains, which in Newsweek was conveniently translated as “women’s intuition.” But then a study of Korean men and women found that the pesky thing was bigger in men. Koreans must be special. Then another study found no difference. Other studies followed: a little bigger, a little smaller, about the same, no difference. In 1997, Bishop and Walsten, the authors of a review of forty-nine studies on the corpus callosum, concluded: “The widespread belief that women have a larger splenium than men and consequently think differently is untenable.” Whoops. But the myth is still circulating. One simpleton, eagerly spewing his own brand of pseudoscience, has dubbed the CC the “caring membrane of the brain.”
It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it. Every era has had its science of difference and sameness, its biology, its ideology, and its ideological biology, which brings us, at last, back to the naughty girls, their escapades, and the instruments of darkness.
We have several contemporary instruments of darkness to choose from, all reductive, all easy. Shall we explain it through the very special, although dubious otherness of the female brain or through genes evolved from those “cave women gathering food near the home” thousands of years ago or through the dangerous hormonal surges of puberty or through nefarious social learning that channels aggressive, angry impulses in girls underground? Surely our Ashley, contrary to the good doctor’s analysis, is deeply interested in “social dominance” and “rank-related aggression,” despite her XX status, just as my old friend Julia was, when I was a sixth grader in an earlier era and I opened a piece of paper that had been left on my desk and read the words, formed by letters cut out of a magazine, “Everybody hat”0em” wiu because you are a big fake.” And I recall wondering, Am I a fake? Hadn’t I checked out from the library books with tiny print that were too hard for me? Did that prove they were right? The note stirred the psychic muck within me—guilt and weakness and a worry that as much as I wanted to be admired and loved, I wasn’t worthy—an
d I, wimp and crybaby, allowed them to taint me. Fake! I wasn’t fake enough. Glory to artifice, to the clown mask, to the Dracula face to hide the softness. Put on your armor and pick up your lance. Hail a bit of falseness if it protects you from the vipers.
Truisms are often untrue, but that cruelty is a fact of human life is not one of them. We must go closer, so close that we smell the blood from their cuts and the frisson of secrecy and theatrical danger the girls found in the Coven. We must be so close that we feel the pleasure they took in hurting Alice and so close to Alice that we can see how in her vulnerability and her need to be so very, very good, she defanged herself, just as I had before her.
But, I told myself, you are no longer twelve. Your fangs may not be the sharpest, but they have grown back and now you can act. I made seven phone calls and explained to seven mothers that I wanted to take a week off, but that during that week each of the girls had to write her story of what happened in either poetry or prose. Two pages minimum. The rest of the class would be spent dealing with that material in one way or another. I was forceful. Although I heard some murmurs of concern about “going over all that again,” no one opposed me in the end, not even Mrs. Lorquat, who seemed genuinely shaken by the whole ungodly mess.
* * *
Dear Mom,
Dad has moved into a hotel. I’m not sure what’s going on exactly, but we’re going to have dinner on Thursday, and he has promised to talk to me, to be totally honest. I told him that he really should write to you, and he said he would, but I have to tell you he sounds awfully sad on the telephone, all slowed down. He’s no open book, Mom, but I will keep you posted. A week and a half and I’ll be in Bonden, my little Mammy dear, and will pop through your door and fling my arms around you!
Love from your own Daisy girl
* * *
A. Boris dumped the Pause.
B. The Pause dumped Boris.
C. The affair was still on, but the duo had decided the pausal quarters were too small, hence hotel.
D. The two parted by mutual agreement.
E. None of the above.
* * *
A was preferable to B, B to C. D was preferable to B. E was an unknown quantity, or X. Much inward churning and burning over A, B, C, D, and X. Considerable spinning of satisfying fantasies of prodigal spouse prostrate or kneeling in state of keen remorse. Other, less satisfying fantasies of spousal heart broken by Frenchwoman. Some introspective activity on the conflicted state of own worn and tattered heart. No crying.
* * *
And then, on Wednesday evening, around nine-thirty, while I was reading Thomas Traherne aloud to myself in a very low voice as I lay on the sofa, my face covered in a mud mask of a green hue, a concoction I had purchased because its makers promised it would soften and purify an older face like mine (they did not state this explicitly, but the euphemism “fine lines” on the label had made their intention clear), I heard him next door, the volatile Pete, howling two well-known expletives, an adjective for the sex act and a noun for female genitalia, over and over again, and with every verbal assault my body stiffened as if from a blow, and I walked to the glass doors that opened to the yard and stood looking out toward my neighbor’s low modest house, but the windows revealed no persons. It wasn’t entirely dark yet, and the sky’s deep blue was streaked with darker trails of graying clouds. I opened the doors and stepped onto the grass and into the hot summer air, and I heard Simon wail, then the front door slam. I saw a racing shadow that was Pete, heard the car door slam, the ignition, the revving motor, and the skid of tires as the Toyota Corolla vanished down the empty street and took a violent left, presumably into town. Then, framed in the window, I saw Lola walk into the living room with Simon, her head bent over him, bouncing the child in her arms as Flora trailed after them like a sleepwalker. They were all whole.
I didn’t move for a few minutes. I stood there with my bare feet in the warm grass and felt immeasurably sad. All at once, I felt sad for the whole lot of us human beings, as if I had suddenly been transported skyward and, like some omniscient narrator in a nineteenth-century novel, were looking down on the spectacle of flawed humanity and wishing things could be different, not wholly different, but different enough to spare some of us a little pain here and there. This was a modest wish, surely, not some utopian fantasy, but the wish of a sane narrator who shakes her red head with its slices of gray and mourns deeply, mourns because it is right to mourn the endless repetitions of meanness and violence and pettiness and hurt. And so I mourned until the door opened, and my three neighbors emerged from the house and came across the lawn, and I took them in.
There were four, really, because Flora had brought Moki. As she walked toward me over the grass dressed only in her Cinderella underpants, she spoke urgently to him, telling him it was okay, that he mustn’t worry, mustn’t cry, that it would be all right. The child patted the air beside her and kissed it once and when we were inside, she ran to the sofa, curled up in the fetal position, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. I noticed she was not wearing her wig. I sat down beside Flora, beconed to Lola by pointing at a chair, and watched her lower herself into it as if she were an old woman with sore joints, her face oddly expressionless. She did not appear to have shed any tears—her cheeks were dry and the whites of her eyes were untouched by redness—but her chest rose and fell as she breathed deeply, like a person who had been running. I placed my hand gently on Flora’s back. She opened her visible eye, took me in, and said, “You’re green.”
My hand flew to my face as I remembered the beauty product, rushed off to remove it, returned to the room, and noticed that more than anything Lola looked exhausted. She was wearing a thin paisley bathrobe of some synthetic material that had fallen open at the neck so that it exposed much of her right breast. Her blond hair hung in disordered clumps over her eyes, but she made no effort to adjust the robe or push away the hair. She was limp, beyond effort. Simon whimpered as he pressed the crown of his head against his mother’s arm, but she didn’t move. I took the baby from her and began to pace, jiggling him as I walked back and forth across the floor. Without turning to look at me, she said in a voice hard with determination, “I will not go back there tonight. I do not want to be there when he comes home. Not tonight.” I offered them my bed, to which she said, “We can sleep there, all four. It’s a king, right?”
We did sleep there, all four or five of us, depending on how you counted. After giving Lola a couple of shots of whiskey from the Burdas’ stash of hard liquor, I rocked Simon to sleep and laid him on the bed, a fat ball of babyhood in blue pajamas with feet, who breathed loudly from his chest, tiny lips pursing and unpursing automatically. I dug out a small blanket I had hidden away and wrapped him up in it to protect him from the air-conditioning and then carried in the unconscious Flora, who snorted once when I pulled the blanket over her, but she quickly rolled over and settled into deep sleep. After I returned, Lola and I sat together for a while. She did not want to talk about Pete. I asked her about the row, but she said that their fights were stupid, that they were always about nothing, nothing that was important, that she was tired, tired of Pete, tired of herself, sometimes even tired of the children. I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, without a transition of any kind, she began to tell me that for three years after she had started school as a child, she had not uttered a word. “I talked at home, to my parents, to my brothers, but I never said anything in school, not to anybody. I don’t remember much about preschool, but I remember a little about kindergarten. I remember Mrs. Frodermeyer leaning over me. Her face was really big and close. And she asked me why I didn’t answer her. She said it wasn’t polite. I knew that. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t understand. I just couldn’t.” Lola looked at her hands. “My mom says that sometime in the first grade I started whispering in school. She was overjoyed. Her kid had whispered. And then, little by little, I guess I jus
t got louder.”