Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

newly gendering girl-mind—not merely denying to others that one knows what one knows, but denying it to oneself.

      Sometimes I actually believed in my own innocence. Why not? Like some picture of Dorian Gray, I found in the mirror a more and more radiantly blank girlhood face, a face that did not give me away, though behind it might twist the woman taken in sin, tensing for the blow of the first stone.

      If I exaggerate these intersections of feeling, it is not perhaps beyond their significance to my story. I am convinced that sexual curiosity is a metaphor for all curiosity. And I believe in what has been called epistemophilia, which is not the love of knowledge but the love of knowing itself. This, then, may be the story of a certain defiant receptiveness to wayward knowledge, a story about my epistemophiliac way of loving to know, my slow and thwarted and even pitifully innocent way of resisting a forced unknowing. Mine but also maybe a bit of everywoman’s.

      For now that I (secretly) wanted to know everything, the capsule I had once used to wrap safely about me as I moved through the world seeing and unseen seemed to have become an imposed and suffocating bell-jar. Train trips to New York and back were carefully circumscribed, every movement had to be accounted for, every deviation from routine approved. Until I was graduated from high school and considered old enough to take a job, July and August at home were sheltered stretches of time—if “shelter” is the word for such a witches’ brew of repression and conflict among Carlo and Ann and me. Friends could not visit while my parents and Lou were out working, which was always the better part of the day and evening. Not even Janet, who lived two doors away in the same semidetached row on Sickles Avenue.

      Still, the summer after my junior year in high school, Janet filled a brief need for escape. On good beach weekdays I was allowed to go with her to Glen Island, a short local bus trip away. We could walk downtown to shop. I could visit her at her house if her mother was at home. Nevertheless, being her friend was like an initiation into a strange religious rite. She was All-American Girl personified. She could have modeled for the first Barbie, except that she wore her satiny brown hair in a short pageboy which she frequently smoothed with the palm of her hand, and had a cheekbone spitcurl. Janet wore her day-of-the-week panties on the right days of the week, making sure they fit discreetly under the neatly cuffed boy-shorts that showed off her long, tan, shining, smooth-shaven legs in bobby sox and penny moccasins. This was a uniform, I realized, and got my own. And when we went to Glen Island, I studied how to be coy and make myself nonchalantly invisible behind my shades, and swoon on cue at every evenly toasted lifeguard with the obligatory patch of white ointment on the bridge of his nose.

      Janet, I came to see, was everything I wasn’t. She was the only child at home, her parents having legally separated. She attended a Catholic girls’ high school. She went routinely to confession and to Sunday mass, hated to read, ate something made of hamburger every day, never did dishes, and repainted her fingernails at least three times a week. Our conversations were like her swimming—strong to start, but a few minutes out of her depth and she made for shore. Yet behind that wide-eyed Stepford face with the pouty rosebud mouth, that babydoll way of licking her painted fingertips and touching them to her bangs, lurked a knowing woman—more knowing than anyone among my M&A circle of New York City school chums—a woman with serious boyfriends and drive-in movie dates and an authority about soul-kissing that, had my mother known about it, would have thoroughly justified her putting her house to the torch. And yet it was my mother herself who might have said of Janet that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

      We had chores, at my house, and Janet was never an excuse for not doing them. Cooking was one, and specifically mine, but I considered it salvific. I was already learning to do a few things well, as people will who love to eat, and I not only still loved to eat but was newly enraptured by the miraculous chemistries of breads and soups. We often saved other chores for the absolute end of the day, just before our parents came home—“we” meaning my brothers as well as my sister and me, until Lou was recruited into store duty—to be done in what we termed with desperate hilarity “record time,” as we raced furiously about the house with vacuum and dust-cloths and sponges in the last minutes before the car lights flashed in the driveway.

      The rules guarding what we did in their absence were strict. We mostly obeyed them. There were some pardonable minor violations they couldn’t see to rebuke. Once Lou was gone, there were some unpardonable major ones we didn’t tell.

      Carlo’s temperament had not softened as he grew. Certainly not toward Ann and me, whom he seemed to despise with a dull and motiveless malignancy. Being a boy he had a certain license to be less often at home. Ann and I, alone together, might quarrel and make our peace. But he would burst in on us suddenly or after a petulant lull like a stalking, and fly into a bullying, hectoring rage. He seemed to drive at us, to hate us in some essential way, to target our fresh shame about ourselves, our uneasy new womanhoods, and attack us there, where the mind and flesh were tenderest, first with filthy words and then physically, brutally, with his hands, hunting Ann down with some special demon anger when she fled him, pummeling me when I stood in his way, taunting us, crowing when we wept, laughing when we screamed. And then he would dare us to phone and tell, fearless, having nothing to lose, as if he knew the only thing we could betray was our own shame. We would huddle together in our room, even there not feeling completely safe. I would try to console her outrage and pain. Sometimes I couldn’t. Sometimes I could not console myself.

      I read. I read to escape, but also to know. Perhaps, obscurely, to know where such demon hatred could come from that seemed to come from so much more than my brother’s private little soul.

      This was a universe where Janet feared to tread, and I did not try to recruit her. I took most of my lonely reading ration from my father’s library, many of its volumes bound in factory-tooled leather just as they had come, one by one, from subscription book clubs. The double-column, small-print Shakespeare I had already devoured, cover to cover, taking lessons in old bawdy from its treacherous pages, discovering the powerful, the talky, the free, the cross-dressing women Janet would never have understood. When we weren’t dancing, Ann and I took turns standing on the round-backed Chippendale chair pretending it was the Globe balcony and trying out our favorite parts.

      I moved more surreptitiously now to Boccaccio, to Zola, both of them powder kegs from which I might have blown up my captivity from the inside. Had my father actually read them? My mother discovered a copy of Zola’s Nana under my pillow, a weary, blue, illustrated clothbound edition from the twenties that I had turned up in a casual dig through the abandoned reliquary of the basement. She had flipped its pages, seen the sensuous line drawings, the large buttocks, the bare breasts and upturned nipples.

      She looked terrified. Betrayed. “Where did you get this?”

      But she knew I was no longer afraid of her anger. She was almost more astonished, I think, that such a book could be found in her house than that I should be reading it. Darkly, she said that my father would have to be consulted. But nothing happened, and I found it again weeks later, untouched, layered with a thin new bloom of dust, as I was polishing the highboy on her side of the bed.

      How had I not internalized this censoring father she invoked, of whom I was actually afraid, whose sleeping violence kept even my mother’s soul in check, who seemed transparently to stand for God? Except in my beloved Boccaccio, who opened another continent of Italianness to me, every female sexual transgression I had read of, including Nana’s—especially Nana’s—had been punished either by a tragic or a miserable, lingering death. Why didn’t I think this would happen to me?

      I plowed on like a termite, consuming virtually everything that lay behind the glass doors of the oak curio cabinet and the secretary desk, including Pearl Buck’s Good Earth, with its scene of solitary childbirth somewhere in the hills of China, until I turned up an oversized leather-bound volume with the title Animal Magnetism, pontificating some strange metaphysics of the body and containing a chapter, oblique but unmistakable, on masturbation. What was this cruel disorder, it protested, but a clear sign of mental and moral derangement, especially in girls and women, root cause of other more dire and unnamable disorders?

      I may have questioned the authority of my father, but I had not yet learned to question the authority