When I was six my family moved to Spain. My father was in the military, and though my mother had not been happy with the peripatetic life our family led, she was excited about this posting. This posting would let her go to Europe and take her daughters, my older sister and me, to museums and historic homes and castles. My brother wasn't interested in any of that. Like my father, he preferred duck hunting. But "the girls," as my father and brother called Mom and us, loved going to museums. My sister, who wanted to be an artist, liked looking at the paintings. I liked looking at the armor. I loved those huge tall statues of silver and bronze, with their shiny shins and pointy, sectioned feet that looked like armadillos. I liked the plush royal blue-and-purple brocade and quilted cloth and chain mail. I liked looking at the face-guards with slits and wondering what it looked like inside I loved the plumes on the helmets, the gold carved handles of the swords. I loved the red-and-white-striped and blue-and-gold-checked skirts the statues of the horses wore. I loved tile stories. I was learning to read about the olden days. I decided that I wanted to be a knight.
My best friend was our neighbor, Chuckie Thorn. Chuckie and I would get ratty old bath towels from our moms and draw insignias on them with magic markers, dragons or castles or lions or gargoyles, and safety pin them around our necks so they'd hang down our backs like capes. Then we'd run around waving our rulers or our big brothers' baseball bats as if they were swords and yell, "But my Lord, I am not worthy! I am not worthy!" while we stabbed out the innards and chopped off the heads of our imaginary foes. We'd turn garbage can lids into shields and our fathers' pool cues into lances and joust, or go on a mission to find my brother's baseball trophy, the Grail.
Most often Chuck was King Arthur, but he also got to be Edward the Black Prince, Henry the Fifth or Richard the Lion Hearted. He had a choice. I, because I was a girl, was always Joan of Arc. Except for how she was burnt at the stake and her religion, which I didn't get, I liked Joan of Arc, so mostly I liked being her.
Sometimes, when Chuck had been called home for dinner and I played late alone, I would imagine things. I would get very, very quiet, then I would lift my arms straight up toward the sky, close my eyes and tip my head back so far I would get dizzy. Then I would wait. I waited until I could almost feel against my skin, or at least in the air above my skin, a touch. Or if not exactly a touch, at least the passing of something through the air beside me, a spirit or someone right next, or at least near to me. I waited until, although, because my eyes were closed I couldn't see I could, almost, or so it seemed, see something like a figure, like a ghost, a shape, or colors, inside my tight shut eyes. I waited until I almost heard, not in my ears, but in my head, a sound, like someone was saying something, whispering, as if someone was telling me a secret. I stayed like that, my head tipped back and waited for, like Joan of Arc, a vision.
When we moved back to the States, it was to Texas, where we had never lived before. The next year I entered sixth grade. All of the Sixth grade teachers at Stephen F. Austin Elemenary School, except the football coach who was also the principal, were women. All of the women teachers, except one, dressed up for school. Mrs. Kreidler, my homeroom teacher, never wore the same dress twice and her shoes always matched her dress. Once she brought a record to class and sang to us in her high thin voice, a song about the mountains. The dress she wore that day had a pattern of mountains and stars. Miss Bryant, the art and music teacher, wore pink or other pastels, usually suits with big shoulders and you could smell her perfume all the way inside the room when she walked in the hall. Mrs. Grant, the science teacher, was old and wore lots of powder and had bright, red, perfectly round circles on her cheeks and lots of shiny rings on her knobby hands. Sometimes she tripped on her heels.
Miss Hopkins, however, was different. She had short, straight black hair that she never curled and you could see that it was shaved at the back of her neck. She always wore penny loafers or flats, never heels. Her clothes were plain, black or gray or navy A-line skirts with light blue or white or beige open-collared shirts. She never wore dresses and never patterns or pastels. Her glasses did not have cats' eye frames or pointy frames or frames held on with a gold-looking chain the way the other teachers did. Her frames were plain and black. She taught us math.
The first day of class Miss Hopkins told us that our grades would be based strictly on class average, "the average of all your homework and tests. Miss Hopkins did not give extra credit. There was no arguing, no mickey mousing with Miss Hopkins. Everyone was afraid of her. Nobody misbehaved with her. Not even the football players or the cheerleaders.
This was different from other classes. Football was a huge, huge deal in our small Texas town. Football boys were let out of class to practice. Some of the teachers flirted with them, or with their dads, or looked the other way when the football boys copied from the smart kids during tests. Some teachers had been known to hold some big boys back a grade so they would be even bigger and play even harder the next year. Miss Hopkins, however, did none of that. She treated the football boys and cheerleader girls like anybody else. She treated everyone the same. She had no pets.
Every fall there were cheerleader tryouts, and for the weeks before the tryouts our gym periods were devoted to learning cheers. We'd have class on the playfield outside learning cheers, where, instead of doing softball or track or even exercises, we did cheers.
I hated cheers. I was bad at them and couldn't get my hand claps and my jumps and arm flaps to coordinate. I couldn't do the splits and I hated the leg kicks that you were supposed to do in a line like the can-can. I hated the way you were supposed to wiggle your butt and smile and squeal and yell that high stupid way. But it was class so I had to do it.
Most of the girls, the Brendas and RaeAnns and Darlenes, the cute ones, liked working on cheers and were looking forward to the tryouts. These were the girls who had a chance. But there were also other girls. Girls with names like Carmen or Maria or Rosa, girls with the wrong religion because they were Catholic. Or girls who were fat or smelly, or wore dirty, old-fashioned clothes. Girls who only lived there for a while before they had to move again. There was one girl with a limp and one girl who had peed at the Girl Scout meeting once and one retarded girl. These were the girls who did not have a chance.
I didn't have a chance either, but not because I was Mexican-American or poor or fat. I didn't have a chance because I didn't want to. I didn't want to be a cheerleader. I didn't want to wear the little skirts they did and worry-or hope-that the boys would see my underpants when I jumped up. I didn't want to go out with the boys and I didn't want to act the way girls did when they were around them. I was the only girl in the sixth grade class who didn't try out for cheerleader.
By the time I went to college in 1975, very far away from Texas, I wrote poetry, listened to cool music, ate vegetarian, had sex with boys and girls my own age and told stories. It was fun to tell my artsy, liberal, drunken, feminist young friends stories about Texas. I shaped the story of my not trying out for cheerleader as a mock heroic tale of escape from an oppressive, Southern-style femininity. Though I was a white girl who got to go to college, I allied myself, in my retelling, with the Mexican girls and the fat, poor girls who couldn't get away the way I did. I attributed to myself a sassy rebelliousness that I had never actually had as a kid. In fact I was self-conscious and any rebelling I ever did I only did in private.
A lot of my life occurred in private, more and more of it as I slipped away from childhood and toward whatever difficult thing was coming next. More and more I imagined things. I often did not understand them or admit them to myself and I certainly never told them to anyone else. But I imagined some things so earnestly, so hopefully and longingly, that in my mind, I think, I almost saw them.
It's right after the tryouts and it's a huge, huge deal that I have not tried. It is the talk of the school. It is notorious. I go to Miss Hopkins.
No. No-she comes to me.
She comes to me. She puts one of her handsome hands-for I have looked at her hands and they are handsome, square and firm, with short, round nails, clean. Her watch is face down on her wrist, not face up like the other women's watches, and the band is dark brown leather, not thin and gold-looking like a bracelet. She puts her handsome, competent hand on my shoulder. I feel it on me. It feels firm as if it steadies me but also light, like pulling me, like lifting me toward-toward-. I can smell her skin, like Irish Spring soap, right next to me. I feel so much, like everything. And I can hear, I think, the sound of the air, its breath, as if the air is alive, around her marvelous hand.
She leans her face down close to me and says, her breath like mint, "I heard you didn't try out for cheerleader."
I can't-I don't-but I don't need to say anything.
Because she knows.
I look at her and, for the first time ever, see behind her glasses. Her eyes are blue, lighter than blue eyes usually are, like ice, but also with a warmth to them, like water, like you could fall into and be swept away. I see her start to smile, her thin lips somehow fuller, softening, and the skin creasing around her mouth and I see the shine on her white, white teeth, one canine slightly sharper than the rest. Her tongue is wet. I hear her do this little laugh, then something else from inside her throat as she removes, first, her plain black-framed glasses, then mine.
She tips my head back a bit and I close my eyes and tip my head further back and I am very still then feel something near my skin and hear a whisper, telling me.
I can't hear what she says.
Of course that didn't happen.
Not that, exactly. Not exactly then.
Her name was not Miss Hopkins. I was not thirteen.
But someone, sometime somethinged me. There was some thing I almost felt, if not beside my body then above me, in the air. Something or someone passed nearby. Or someone came toward me and I heard, almost, if not a voice, then something, then I saw and someone kissed me.
Though neither that exactly.
I kissed her.
It happened later.
She turned a corner in the hall I couldn't see (though I have seen it since, yes, many times in memory and still I do). She stepped down the steps by the window in the ball I was standing in. I was talking to someone else who I forgot immediately because already it had happened.
I saw, in the light of the late afternoon, the perfect light go over her. I saw illuminated her perfect face, her slightly open mouth. A brilliant light surrounded her. It pulsed around her everywhere and I was almost blinded. Her hair was black, her eyes were blue, her mouth was slightly open. There was the way she breathed, the way her chest and shoulders rose and fell. There was the way her throat moved when she swallowed. There was the line of the throat. There was the cup in the flesh at the base of her throat. There was the light in the air around her. She was beautiful.
I wanted to put my mouth on her. I wanted to eat her alive. I wanted to possess her, to devour, to consume her. I wanted to something . . . her into next year and back and back again. I wanted to, with her, annihilate myself.
I was, however, half her age.
For this and other reasons this did not occur.
Not then.
Later.
Later I went back to her and took us to the bed. Therein did we do what we were meant.
I still believe, despite the rest, that this was good.
I loved her.
I saw in her the possible. I saw the real embodiment of what, in some way, I had longed for years. I saw she who, though I could not possess, I might hold for a time.
I believe what I remember.
I believe that what I saw and did continues in a place outside of time, that it remains.
I believe that what remains occurs and will again.
I believe the vision I was shown, the body I was given.
I believe what I desired was made manifest as love.
This is what I tell of my religion.
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Rebecca Brown's new fiction, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary, was published in 1998 by City Lights. She is also the author of six other works of fiction, including The GUIs of the Body, The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Haunted House, The Children's Crusade, and What Keeps Me Here. Her work has been awarded the Boston Book Review Award for Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award, the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association Award, and a Washington State Governor's Award. It has been widely anthologized, including stories in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and the Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories. She has taught at the University of Washington, Extension, Pacific Lutheran University, and The Richard Hugo House, and has recently joined the MFA faculty at Goddard College. In 1998 she coproduced, with Nico Vasilakis, the Stein-a-thon, the first ever twenty-four-hour marathon performance of the work of Gertrude stein. Her criticism and reviews appear frequently in the arts weekly The Stranger. She lives in Seattle, Washington.