a bitter wish to stop me from having what she could not have.
I dressed provocatively on purpose, but when I was with any adults I admired who disapproved of me, I felt that they had seen into my soul and that there was something lascivious and wanton about me, impossible to mend. A wickedness my friends would never possess. Once I’d stayed for a night with my aunt Linda at her condo in Fremont.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.
“I’d like to,” I said. She played me her favorite song: “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.”
“What’s your favorite?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I can tell you,” I said. “It’s by George Michael.”
“Which song?”
“‘I Want Your Sex,’“ I said. She scowled and looked away.
At Nueva we sometimes had class in the library. The library was an open room at the end of two parallel hallways, a series of low shelves with books on both sides. In the middle were three couches around a chair where we sat while Debbie, the librarian, read to us from a book about the components of toothpaste, which turned out to be mostly chalk, the chalk itself made from the bones of marine creatures that lived thousands of years ago, died, sank to the bottom of oceans, and were compressed, then ground up. Debbie was tall and handsome with short, brown pixie-cut hair and thick gold-rimmed glasses. She wore long corduroy skirts. Her skin was a waxy layer of white on top of red, and when she became angry, the red bloomed through to the surface.
When she finished reading out loud, we were supposed to read quietly to ourselves.
I was not interested in books; I wanted to talk with Catie and Kate and Elena, who followed the rules and didn’t talk, unless I was with them. I was an indifferent student and lured my friends into fooling around with me. For this reason Debbie singled me out for censure.
I put a book on my lap as a prop and whispered to Catie and Kate. We sat at the farthest area from Debbie, with our backs to the shelves and our legs out, elbow to elbow, whispering the in-breaths, making consonants with a light clicking sound.
It seemed impossible that Debbie could hear us from that distance, but there she was, towering above us, blooming red.
“Lisa,” she said, pointing to a new patch of carpet, too far to talk. “You sit there.”
In the library, now isolated from my friends, I picked a book at random from the shelf and opened it up to find pictures of naked women, drawn in exacting detail, down to the patches of hair and the bumps on the nipples.
I moved farther away to another corner, holding the book against my side so that if Debbie looked up, she would see it only in profile. I sat on the floor, opened it up, and leaned over to look. My heart raced: in the middle of the book across the two center pages were five drawings of the same woman moving through the stages of physical maturation.
In the pictures her breasts swelled and her nipples became larger. As the hair on her body took on a definite shape, the wavy hair on her head went from long to short. She began without glasses but acquired them in the fourth picture, kept them in the fifth. One of her feet was angled to the right in the same way in all the pictures. She smiled unself-consciously, as if unaware she was naked, like a paper doll poised for a business meeting before the clothes are cut out and attached.
The sequence was like the charts I’d seen of the evolution of man, from the chimpanzee to the profile of Homo sapiens in final form, heading off the page, bound for civilization. He began hirsute but ended almost hairless; this woman’s progression was in reverse. She ended with hair but started putty-colored, chromatically unified except the nipples and the hair on her head, like me. And while the final man seemed to look out at possibilities beyond the page, the final woman was planted, hips wide and square, smiling like she wanted to stay where she was.
I knew that grown women had pubic hair, breasts, and hips. But I didn’t know the stages in between, and it was this becoming, more than the first or last version, that gave me a feeling of disgust and excitement. I wanted to mock it, but also to keep