else as a child, having survived polio.
I imagined him ten years old, trapped inside the cylinder of an iron lung, lying with only his head sticking out, while a kindly nurse read to him from Oliver Twist. The image was pitiful, made me almost want to cry for the poor boy whom I was starting to confuse, in my mind, with the character of Oliver Twist himself. I felt an uncomplicated love for Professor Castleman, and even a kind of love for his wife and tiny baby, the three points that made up this delicate Castleman constellation.
When class ended, many of the girls tried to establish personal contact with the professor, as though to say: Yoo-hoo, over here! It wasn’t that they necessarily imagined him as their lover—he was already taken, after all—but even something about his being taken made the situation so much more exquisite.
“Write what you know,” he advised as he sent us off to complete our first writing assignment.
That night after dinner (shepherd’s pie, I remember, for I sat there looking at it and trying to describe it to myself in a writerly fashion, though the best I could come up with was, pathetically, “a roof of mashed potato spread thickly atop a squat house of meat”), I climbed to the upper reaches of the Neilson Library. On tall steel shelves all around me were ancient bound volumes of scientific abstracts: Annals of Phytochemistry, Sept.–Nov. 1922; International Journal of Haematology, Jan.–Mar. 1931. I wondered if anyone would ever open any of these books again, or whether they’d remain shut for eternity, like some spell-fastened door in a fairy tale.
Should I be the one to open them, to plant kisses on their frail, crisp pages and break the spell? Did it make any sense to try and write? What if no one ever read what I wrote, what if it languished untouched on the chilled shelf of a college library forever? I sat down at a carrel, looking around at the ignored spines of books, the lightbulbs suspended in their little cages, and I listenedto the distant scrapes of chair legs and the rumble of a lone book cart being rolled along one of the levels of stacks.
For a while I stayed there and tried to imagine what it was I actually knew. I’d seen almost nothing of the world; a trip to Rome and Florence with my parents when I was fifteen had been spent in the protection of good hotels and pinned behind the green-glass windows of tour buses, looking at stone fountains in piazzas from an unreal remove. The level of my experience and knowledge had remained the same, hadn’t risen, hadn’t overflowed. I’d stood with other Americans, all of us huddled together, heads back and mouths dropped open as we peered up at painted ceilings. I thought now about how I’d never been entirely naked in front of a man, had never been in love, had never gone to a political meeting in someone’s basement, had never really done anything that could be considered independent or particularly insightful or daring. At Smith, girls surrounded me, the equivalent of those American tourists. Girls in groups were safe as shepherd’s pie.
Now I sat in the upper part of the library, freezing cold but not minding, and finally I made myself begin to write something. Without censoring it or condemning it for being trivial or narrow or simply poorly constructed, I wrote about the impenetrable wall of femaleness that formed my life. This, apparently, was what I knew. I wrote about the three different perfumes—Chanel No. 5, White Shoulders, and Joy—that could be smelled everywhere on campus, and about the sound of six hundred female voices rising up together at convocation to sing “Gaudeamus Igatur.”
When I was done, I sat for a long time at that carrel, thinking of Professor J. Castleman and how he’d looked in class with his eyes closed. His eyelids had had a purplish, nearly translucent quality, making them appear inadequate to the task of keeping the world out. Maybe that was what it was like to be a
I imagined him ten years old, trapped inside the cylinder of an iron lung, lying with only his head sticking out, while a kindly nurse read to him from Oliver Twist. The image was pitiful, made me almost want to cry for the poor boy whom I was starting to confuse, in my mind, with the character of Oliver Twist himself. I felt an uncomplicated love for Professor Castleman, and even a kind of love for his wife and tiny baby, the three points that made up this delicate Castleman constellation.
When class ended, many of the girls tried to establish personal contact with the professor, as though to say: Yoo-hoo, over here! It wasn’t that they necessarily imagined him as their lover—he was already taken, after all—but even something about his being taken made the situation so much more exquisite.
“Write what you know,” he advised as he sent us off to complete our first writing assignment.
That night after dinner (shepherd’s pie, I remember, for I sat there looking at it and trying to describe it to myself in a writerly fashion, though the best I could come up with was, pathetically, “a roof of mashed potato spread thickly atop a squat house of meat”), I climbed to the upper reaches of the Neilson Library. On tall steel shelves all around me were ancient bound volumes of scientific abstracts: Annals of Phytochemistry, Sept.–Nov. 1922; International Journal of Haematology, Jan.–Mar. 1931. I wondered if anyone would ever open any of these books again, or whether they’d remain shut for eternity, like some spell-fastened door in a fairy tale.
Should I be the one to open them, to plant kisses on their frail, crisp pages and break the spell? Did it make any sense to try and write? What if no one ever read what I wrote, what if it languished untouched on the chilled shelf of a college library forever? I sat down at a carrel, looking around at the ignored spines of books, the lightbulbs suspended in their little cages, and I listenedto the distant scrapes of chair legs and the rumble of a lone book cart being rolled along one of the levels of stacks.
For a while I stayed there and tried to imagine what it was I actually knew. I’d seen almost nothing of the world; a trip to Rome and Florence with my parents when I was fifteen had been spent in the protection of good hotels and pinned behind the green-glass windows of tour buses, looking at stone fountains in piazzas from an unreal remove. The level of my experience and knowledge had remained the same, hadn’t risen, hadn’t overflowed. I’d stood with other Americans, all of us huddled together, heads back and mouths dropped open as we peered up at painted ceilings. I thought now about how I’d never been entirely naked in front of a man, had never been in love, had never gone to a political meeting in someone’s basement, had never really done anything that could be considered independent or particularly insightful or daring. At Smith, girls surrounded me, the equivalent of those American tourists. Girls in groups were safe as shepherd’s pie.
Now I sat in the upper part of the library, freezing cold but not minding, and finally I made myself begin to write something. Without censoring it or condemning it for being trivial or narrow or simply poorly constructed, I wrote about the impenetrable wall of femaleness that formed my life. This, apparently, was what I knew. I wrote about the three different perfumes—Chanel No. 5, White Shoulders, and Joy—that could be smelled everywhere on campus, and about the sound of six hundred female voices rising up together at convocation to sing “Gaudeamus Igatur.”
When I was done, I sat for a long time at that carrel, thinking of Professor J. Castleman and how he’d looked in class with his eyes closed. His eyelids had had a purplish, nearly translucent quality, making them appear inadequate to the task of keeping the world out. Maybe that was what it was like to be a
Similar Books
