Today, I've been thinking about honesty, image, and (self)representation -- for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I'm going to have to wear glasses for the next several months. (There are other, less solipsistic, reasons, too.) Anyway, my train of thought led me back into the past, to something I wrote in a graduate writing course in 1998, which I've pasted below.
******
Virtus Veritas Visum
One day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow. -- Michel Foucault
There are two ways of looking at things: close up and far away. I’ve been nearsighted since I was six. Actually, I don’t know when my vision started deteriorating, because at my first eye exam, I lied to the optometrist. I exaggerated a little, here and there: well, that kind of looks like a t or maybe an x – I really can’t tell. But I was astonished at my cleverness when the eye doctor fell for it all and told my mother I needed glasses. Later I worried that lying had distorted my prescription, had perhaps even called into being a malady of perception that never would have existed had I not twisted the truth. The world as seen through my first pair of glasses was dizzying, like a distant mirage – except that instead of disappearing when I approached, objects had a disconcerting way of solidifying under my feet even before I thought I’d reached them.
By the time I was ten, I had developed a “lazy eye”. The optometrist suggested focusing on pencils, staring at the end of my nose, and wearing red and green glasses while watching TV. Of course, I never could be as enthusiastic about these tasks as the optometrist was. And so, when I was thirteen, whoever examined my eyes told my parents I’d better get contacts or my eyes would become totally worthless.
This pronouncement had the element of high drama to me: contacts as a last-ditch attempt to save me from going blind. Although I was supposed to quit reading in the dark, I was always staying up to read books about people who lost their eyesight as punishment for some terrible crime of the heart. The prosaic outcome of the optometrist’s ultimatum was that my parents were convinced, I got hard contacts, and my vision actually stopped deteriorating. But more important than seeing better was looking better. The unexpected reprieve from the gigantic lenses that had always reduced my eyes to mere suggestions had coincided with the onset, finally, of the aspects of puberty I’d been most excited about. Dangle earrings. Lipstick. Slightly high heels. Actual breasts.
I was still not a girl with the right look. I wasn’t savvy enough not to dress up for Halloween, but I had my reasons for enduring the headband with pointed ears sewn onto it, the eyeliner whiskers striping my cheeks, and the black triangle on the tip of my nose. As Cat Dracula, I could wear a leotard to school. It was a legitimate part of my costume. After all, what good are breasts if no one can see them? I admit that this question has informed my clothing choices many times since then.
ZCMI, a department store that is owned by the Mormon church, files the nipples off of their mannequins before they display them in clothes. Unfortunately, Brigham Young University can’t file off your nipples, so they make do with a dress code: The no-bra look is not acceptable. Shoulders must be covered. Legs above the knee must be covered. Men’s shirt collars and ears may not be covered by their hair. No beards. A well-groomed appearance should always be maintained.
At recruitment seminars, I had been given two oversized T-shirts. One was gray and had Brigham Young University’s coat of arms and motto silkscreened on the front in blue and black: Virtus. Veritas. Visum.
Here’s the vision part. In Provo, Utah, in the middle of the winter smog, you can’t see much. There are mountains around, but you only feel them as a weighty presence behind the clouds and haze. Parking lots. Snow. The implacable gray sky, light gray during the day and dark gray at night. The buildings all seem to have been built in the 1960’s and 70’s, very rectangular and very cinderblock. On the fringes of campus you may see an older building with columns or a peaked roof. Women at BYU wear nylons, heels, pearls, and huge bows in their hair. Every day. Those who don’t are meek girls with bad perms who wear jeans and sweatshirts. Walking to my classes I’d scan the crowds of students, picking out anyone who stood out for any reason: that’s an awfully short skirt. Wow, she has a butch haircut. He’s wearing a long tunic thing. They’re going to make that guy cut his hair for sure. I swear the girl in front of me isn’t wearing a bra.
Twice, I saw something I wasn’t expecting. Once when I was walking back from the fieldhouse with wet hair that was slowly freezing into long icicles, I noticed that someone had dressed one of the resident statues. The woman in the “Happy Family” trio had a kerchief over her metal bouffant and a raincoat covering her stiff dress. Another time someone had drawn the outline of a horse on the sidewalk, like the outlines detectives make around cadavers before they remove them. The horse must have been long, with short nubby legs. A Dachshund horse. I often looked at the sidewalk after that.
The other things I saw weren’t real. Every week I went to International Cinema because it was artistic and less heavily censored than the mainstream Hollywood offerings. My roommate B sometimes came with me – mostly, I think, to see the guys who checked our passes before we walked into the theater. We had pet names for them: Howie and Neuf. B had christened Howie, and he was hers. He had a very good build, wore hip 60’s style glasses and tight t-shirts. Neuf, by default, was “mine.” I called him Neuf because he was very good looking but a little too stuck on himself to handle a name like Dix. He had longer hair than any of the other male students I’d seen; he wore it tucked behind his ears so that it looked short enough. Sometimes, though, a strand would escape, a long curve of hair almost reaching his jawbone, and every time I went to the cinema, I hoped to see his hair fall forward when he checked my pass.
My favorites were the Tarkovsky films. The plot lines were disjointed, the imagery cryptic, and the action moved along at a ponderous pace. Plenty of time in each frame to look at everything, to see it all in detail as the camera imperceptibly panned out. Dripping water. The black outline of a tree. The pulsing vein in a bald man’s head. A house on fire. The rush of birds from an old ruin. A jar of milk falling, falling from the shelf and now, just now, breaking into sharp shards, flinging milky drops arcing slowly through the air…
One day I came home from a less memorable film and B asked after the two men. “They made Neuf get a haircut,” I said despondently.
My life became a series of movies and dreams. Sometimes I dreamt about movies. Once, I was sitting in the theater looking at a giant screen, which was completely filled with a close-up shot of my boyfriend’s face. I was so glad someone had cast him in a movie, because he was in California now and I’d been forgetting what he looked like. After that one close-up, I didn’t see his face in another dream. I began arriving too late to places he’d recently left.
After that, my dreams were mostly about not seeing anything. I’d stumble around in some unfamiliar room and realize that I was wearing both contacts in one eye. Or I’d dream that I couldn’t see something that was right in front of me, and I’d tilt my head every which way, but something black and rectangular would always block my sight. One morning I woke up with these words in my head: the storm’s line of vision was blocked until now.
*******
Five of my housemates were gathered in my room one day during the first week of fall quarter. Four of us were freshmen, which meant we were woefully unequipped to handle running a household, even if you added up all our various kitchen utensils. I’d just spent the previous hour fixing chicken piccata, and I’d resorted, in the end, to using one of my new penny loafers to flatten the chicken breasts. “Don’t worry,” I was assuring the other girls, “I wrapped the chicken in a plastic bag first. Besides, I haven’t even worn those shoes yet.”
The next person who had anything to say was B: “So, we’re all virgins, right?”
I might have expected a tense moment, where we all looked at each other, trying to divine everyone’s reaction, and, based on that quick estimation, figure out what to say. I certainly hadn’t decided beforehand whether or not I’d best be served by lying, telling the truth, deflecting the question, or remaining silent, because it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would ask. To my relief, though, B plowed right on with the rest of her speech. She had been reading a romance novel, she said, which of course wasn’t hers, it was someone else’s who went to her same highschool, and it wasn’t like she’d read very much or anything, but it was open to this one page, and she was just scanning, you know, and there was this part…there was this part about a man kissing a woman’s breasts, and, uh, you know, sucking on them, and what she wanted to know was…um, is this normal??
I got my tense moment. Mainly I was trying to check my impulse to laugh, but I had to simultaneously notice the other girls’ reactions to this. After bouncing over a baffled expression and an expectant one, I realized that M was looking at me with the right lift to her eyebrows, like, “Are you going to tell them or am I?” and I risked a quick smile. Resuming my careful face, I ventured, “Well, actually, from what I hear, I guess it’s pretty normal.” I was off the hook.
Our apartment had “get to know your new bishop” appointments that evening; we trooped down to the basement meeting room in fifteen minute intervals. I’ve never been a Catholic, but from what I understand, the main difference between our “appointments” and Catholic “confession” is that a Mormon bishop is armed with a list of specific questions to ask, should you be unforthcoming. This particular bishop had a strange way of doing his hair – was it Mickey Mouse or some kind of portly Dracula? – and his main concern seemed to be what he called “moral cleanliness.” He did most of the talking.
I hadn’t yet been to an appointment where I had anything to confess, so I hadn’t thought out my strategy very carefully. At the end of the interview, I’d said the right list of “yes” and “no” to be completely honest, but the bishop didn’t seem satisfied with the unadorned truth. What he really wanted were details. He gave me a little pep talk: “You’re an attractive girl,” he said, “don’t let guys talk you into things you don’t want to do.” I had no response to this, furious as I was. He was a liar, first of all, because here I was making a concerted effort to look as plain as possible, wearing an oversized green shirt, no makeup, and a headband. Did he think he’d get somewhere by using flattery? Even worse, he apparently saw me as a doll-baby idiot who could be convinced to do anything. “Just come talk to me anytime you feel you’re ready to tell me more about this,” he said. “I’m happy to listen to anything you have to say. I wouldn’t want you to carry around this burden all by yourself.” “Thanks,” I said, “but really, I feel fine.”
Upstairs in our apartment, all of us were gathered in the kitchen while C was rehashing her conversation with the bishop: “I hadn’t even heard of half the stuff he was asking about,” she said.
When I was nine years old, I told my friend Jennifer Pearl that the world was going to end. It would come, I contended, in two years, because I had seen a double rainbow. Plus, one year would be too soon. There were all the signs of the times that had to come to pass first. Jennifer Pearl asked how I knew these things; I said, “Haven’t you ever read the Bible?!” After that, she seemed resigned, even agreeing with me about the time left until the coming Armageddon: two years. There were two of us, and there were two years remaining – could this be mere coincidence?
All that spring we walked around the block together, talking, sticking to the sidewalk to avoid the spongy dead lawn and seeing in every doubling – look! Two red Volkswagons! – yet another confirmation of impending disaster. At nine, I figured I was too old to play with a friend, so Jennifer Pearl and I chatted. “Jennifer, you’re so nye-eeve,” I kept telling her. Even though she manifestly resented my brash superiority, we settled into this routine: she asked questions and I answered them.
We were twirling around in the swings one day, twisting up the chains and unwinding until we felt sick. Jennifer said, “Boy, I’m getting all hot and sweaty. Good thing I’m not a grown-up, or I’d have to wear those pads.” “Huh?” I said. She stared at me. “You mean you don’t know? That’s what those ‘New Freedom’ things are for. You know, the packages your mom keeps in the bathroom? My mom says that when ladies grow up, they sometimes sweat too much, you know, down there. Isn’t that gross?”
“Oh my God, Jennifer,” I said, taking the Lord’s name in vain because the situation obviously warranted it, “your mother is lying to you! Those pads are because of blood.” This pronouncement had exactly the effect I was hoping for: she looked aghast and intensely interested. I proceeded to explain the whole monthly cycle very carefully, ending the lecture with, “And that’s how come grown-ups can have babies and girls can’t.” She sat in her swing for a moment, silent, then leaned sideways toward me and half whispered, “Now that’s another thing my mom won’t tell me. How do people make babies?” There was a portentous pause while I looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Okay,” I said, “This is really weird, but you asked…”
Her response to my detailed lesson on human reproduction was less than gratifying. “That’s really sick,” she said. “How do you know, anyway?” “Because,” I retorted, “my mother told me all this stuff just a couple months ago. Do you think I’m lying?” Jennifer shrugged. “Okay then,” she said, “if you’re so smart, then how do girls get a chest?” “Whaddaya mean, how do they get a chest? Breasts just grow, that’s all. Don’t be stupid, Jennifer!” I said, still miffed that she didn’t believe me.
I was walking back to the dorms with C, M, and B one freezing October night when I finally let them have it. I’d told them before, but no one had believed me and I’d known they wouldn’t. Funny how if you tell the truth with the right slant to your voice and in the right situation, people think you’re lying. B had a real fixation with sex: she was always throwing out variations on the “We’re all virgins” comment. The third or fourth time she said this, I responded archly with, “Well, you might be a virgin.” She took me up on this: “Oh, and you’re not!” “Alas,” I said, “my virtue has been trammeled so many times I’ve lost count.” B thought this was hilarious. But I hadn’t lost count. I'd had sex eleven times. Maybe she was right to understand my exaggeration as a lie.
So we were walking back home, four abreast, or almost abreast, and jostling for sidewalk space. B had been going through a couple of containers of sour cream every week, and she took up a lot of room. The street wasn’t well lighted and we saw each other only intermittently when cars went by. I have no idea how B found so many opportunities to use her virgins comment, but here, in one of the dark stretches before the lights changed, she squeezed it in again. This was a bad moment to say anything true, because we weren’t dressed for the cold and I was also having a hard time walking in the ridiculous white stilettos I’d bought when I, too, was a virgin. They had bows on the back. My right heel kept sinking into the muddy grass when I got pushed off the sidewalk. “Look,” I said anyway, “I’m just going to say this once. I’m not a virgin, okay?” I’m not sure they were breathing. Then B: “What was it like?”
Here’s what it was like: when I got off work at the Iceberg Drive-In, it was close to midnight. There were sticky droplets of dried ice cream in the strands of hair around my face, and the shirt I wore, an old white oxford of my father’s, had splotches all up the arms from operating the shake machine. I stepped into the yellow light of the back parking lot and realized that my car was gone. But there was my father in his Volvo sedan. For a second I thought, I’ll just ignore him, go back inside, sleep curled up under the toppings counter. Then I thought, I’m screwed.
I got in the car. My dad said very quietly, “[Helen] let the cat out of the bag.” “Oh,” I said, just as quietly, thinking I was going to kill her. “So then it’s true?” he shouted, slamming his hand down on the steering wheel and beginning to sob in the loud wrenching jerks of someone unaccustomed to crying. “I wish I could have died for you,” he said, “you’re one of the reasons I lived.” He said, “I thought you said you wouldn’t have sex until you were married.” I said, “I changed my mind.” “You changed your mind? What did he say to convince you? I’ll bet it was real persuasive,” he sneered. And then, when I didn’t say anything, he said, “So tell me. Was it the greatest experience of your life?” “No,” I said, truthfully.
My boyfriend’s mother had not told my father anything. That was just my father’s idea of a good opening line. What he’d done was read my journal. I’d typed up a very careful two pages on my new word-processor and taped them in. He explained himself by saying that the entry called attention to itself – it was on tan colored typing paper, seductive, like it was asking to be read.
*******
It took five years at Brigham Young for B to get married. Three months after the climactic event, we met for lunch at a restaurant that was essentially in the middle of a mall parking lot. She ordered a chef’s salad with extra dressing. “You know,” she said, “the weird thing about sex is that it’s so normal. How come they made us think it was such a big deal?”
When B and I were eighteen and living in the dorms together, we rented Cinema Paradiso and rewound the kissing scene eighteen times. Once at BYU I dyed my hair fuschia with grape and cherry Kool-aid, and when I next washed my hair the coloring ran down my back, shoulders, and chest in faintly staining rivulets. Only once during the eight months I lived in Provo did I make myself look good: I unbraided my hair, wore a white body suit, and went dancing. The man who took me home did not rape me, but my lips were bleeding when he walked me to my door. He seemed sad and embarrassed when I said I wouldn’t see him again.
I had not wanted to go to BYU. I wanted to go with my boyfriend to Louisiana and work on a shrimp boat, or maybe to Seattle, where we’d wear galoshes every day. In the summer of 1992, I took all the money I had made at the Iceberg Drive-In and flew to New Hampshire, because I’d been born there. I stayed in a hotel in Portsmouth by myself. I walked through the city and bought a book, which was written for lapsed Catholics, but I read it anyway, copying down lines like, “Do you have a body? Then go out and walk in the rain!” I filled up an entire notebook, writing about mosquitoes and about my parents, trying to work things out, and I’d pretty much decided to go to Louisiana or Oregon, or maybe California, where my boyfriend was going to go to college if he couldn’t muster enough insanity to try shrimping. One night I went to the beach. I could hardly see it, but I knew those black waves were out there. It came upon me heavily: I would go to BYU, I would sacrifice myself for my parents. A crying woman Christ without a clear vision. Or maybe that’s not right. Maybe I was just afraid.
Your eyes will adjust to anything: upside down, even. It’s the end of the world. The planets, we are told over some sort of loudspeaker, are in “bizarre alignment.” It is snowing, everything is shaking, and I am crouched low to the ground by a pale sand dune covered in a delicate sifting of snow as light as flakes of air. My shadow is lavender, shifting away under me, marking the sand with its wavering image.
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