Excerpt from Jenny Litt's "Girls"

To: Gretchen Frazer                Shaker Hts., OH
    Harvard/Radicaliffe            September 17, 1978
    Jordan Co-op J
    93 Walker St.
    Cambridge, MA 02138

Dear Gretch-

They will not let me bring my lunch to school, after all, as I am expected to perform Lunch Duty. This involves shepherding my girls to the dining hall, the mingled aromas of which (hot margarine, hoofed beast) suffuse the corridor like some foul incense; presiding at "Miss Nunn's Table," as the September edition of the Luncheon Seating Chart has it; glopping unnameable concoctions onto plates (today was something Tetrazzini, something au gratin (I think it had been cauliflower in a past life), and some kind of cookies); then, when every plate is clean, leading my table in prayer:

Behind the loaf is the flour;
Behind the flour is the mill;
        Behind the mill is the sun and the rain
And the Fa-ther's will.

Both days I substituted "Mother's will" for "Father's will," sotto voce. Naturally, I am expected to ingest the same slop the girls do. What's for dinner tonight at the Co-op? Solyanka, perhaps, with some Tassajara bread, and brown rice pudding for dessert? The loneliest part of living alone is eating alone. (These school lunches should nourish my spirit, if nothing else.) The good news is, I found a health food restaurant, not too far from my apartment. Even as I write, I am communing with some baba ghanouj.

Speaking of the Co-op, when I called yesterday we didn't speak of anything but the Co-op, which seemed unfair-I did want to update you on my life, such as it is (granted, it isn't much). And another thing: in the middle of our conversation Amy knocks unexpectedly on your door and suddenly you have to hang up? According to your story, Amy's the one who's been coming on to you. She couldn't wait five minutes? And why did you start whispering? It's not as if Amy doesn't know you and I have a relationship-she lived with us all last year, saw us come out of the shower together, and I distinctly remember her eating one of those Andrea's breast cupcakes you made for my birthday. Considering we hadn't talked in a week, I felt shortchanged. I'll shut up now because I'm sure I'm blowing this way out of proportion.

So, let me update you on my life.

From the front, the Flowers School looks something like a mausoleum (classical detailing; crumbling, ivied brick); the Lower School, tacked onto the back, looks like a shopping mall. The Headmistress has a house on the premises, the Flowers School in miniature (minus the shopping mall)-sort of in the back yard, like a monstrous dog house.

My classroom is in the mall: low ceiling, linoleum, forty-nine fresh blond desks, a row of lockers. I tried to make it more homey by putting up posters-Gerty and Alice, Sappho with lute and papyrus-but the Headmistress nixed them and issued instead a grim portrait of the school's founder, which I'm obliged to display.

Besides teaching sixth and seventh grade English, I'm also homeroom teacher for the entire seventh grade, which consists of forty-nine girls who are impossible to tell apart as they all appear to be named Lisa and wear identical outfits-white blouses, green skirts, green knee socks. They all have stickers of balloons and happy dinos and such-like on long scrolls of waxed paper, lip gloss that smells like root beer and peanut butter and watermelon that they wear on strings around their necks, attend "dancing school," belong to "the Racquet Club," and will one day "come out" at the "Junior Assembly." (I wish I'd come out at the Junior Assembly!) I sit at my desk and squint, and they look like forty-nine flowers, in their leaf-green skirts and Easter-lily blouses. I have an incurable desire to plant them.

Actually, there are only three Lisas. Lisa Goodfellow, a sexpot with breasts like little plums, and Lisa McLaughlin, a heavy girl with a snout, are (inexplicably) bosom buddies. Lisa G., who claims her dad invented Mr. Coffee, is the most popular girl in the class; behold her in homeroom, with her blunt-nosed scissors, snipping stickers and showering them like rose-petals upon her handmaidens. Lisa M. sits next to her and glowers, like an ill-natured troll. The third Lisa, Lisa Rosen, is heavy but no snout. She's new this year and shy, and has no bosom buddies; she's constantly reading in her lap (I had to "take her to task" for this). Lisa M. and Lisa R. are the only heavy girls, which I imagine makes them self-conscious; it's my job to affirm their inner beauty. Lisa M. called Lisa R. a pig the other day, for which I took her to task-after which she sauntered back to her cronies on the windowsill at the back of the classroom and announced, "That new teacher is a major hard-ass."

Predictably, I am a freak at the Flowers School. I feel like a Rita Mae Brown character plunked in the middle of a Jane Austen novel. The school library doesn't even own a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves! Both days I optimistically wore my labrys, but only the Headmistress remarked on it: "We ask teachers to keep jewelry to a minimum, Miss Nunn." This was when I was asking her about the possibility of veggie alternatives at lunch. You'd have thought I'd asked for a daily raw human flesh alternative. How did I expect the girls to get adequate protein? Was my understanding of the Flowers School mission to educate its pupils in socially aberrant behaviors? Maybe I'm paranoid, but right then I decided not to wear my labrys anymore. I'm so lonely for the Co-op, you can't imagine. I was normal there, wasn't I?

That is all, my flower. I must prepare tomorrow's lesson plan.

I love you-

Andrea

Oct. 16

I don't know, Gretchen, is it okay that you slept with Amy? I don't see why it should affect our relationship. However, that shamefaced little confession I found at the bottom of your care package-I practically needed a microscope to read it-makes me think that you think it should. WHY DON'T YOU ANSWER YOUR PHONE??

Honestly, I don't know how to feel. How many times have we said we wouldn't get ourselves caught up in the Fascism of Straight Culture monogamy-possession trip? Dealing with this is only challenging because it's the first time I've had to wed theory to practice. It is the first time, isn't it?

At any rate, the pumpkin-zucchini bars are scrumptious and the tape is absolutely divine. Kate Bush is quite a name. I am convinced this woman is the goddess incarnate. You say she was on "Saturday Night Live"-and I missed it?! I can picture you salivating all over the common-room TV. And what was I doing that night? Grading mid-terms. I'm becoming pitifully unhip here in OH. You should have called to make sure I was watching!

Things are bad here: trouble with me, trouble with the girls. My trouble:

Ever since school started, I've had this sense I'm being spied on. Mere paranoia? But there have been incidents-one day at lunch, the school dietitian sidled up behind me and whispered, "Eggplant parmigiana!", and another time, also at lunch, the Headmistress asked me how I liked the salad (I admired its brown color). But I don't wear my labrys to school or my red bracelet when I'm menstruating, nor have I uttered the words "Fascism of Straight Culture" within a two-mile radius of the Flowers School. So why did the Headmistress want to see me?

She is a rotund little person in Chanel suits and lavender hair. Around her neck she wears a clinking loop of gold coins. It will strangle her one day. "My dear," she said, "the school nurse complains that you've been traumatizing the seventh grade at a very sensitive juncture in their, ah, development by informing them their uteruses are-" she consulted a page of notes through her lorgnette-"reversed." I thought, Is this woman from space? Then I remembered one time when one of the girls was complaining of back cramps, and I suggested that her uterus might be a little retroverted. Well-woman gynecology 101, right? I explained this; the Headmistress said, "Ah," and consulted her notes again. "The Flowers School is an ecumenical institution," she went on. "Some of our families, however, might object to someone standing in loco parentis to their daughters promoting occultism." No doubt the school nurse saw me conducting a Black Mass on the field hockey pitch? No; evidently the teacher at the lunch table next to mine is offended when we say grace after meals and I thank the earth for my food instead of the Father-God.

"My dear Miss Nunn-" the Headmistress tapped my knee with her lorgnette-"I know you'll keep these controversial behaviors to a minimum in future."

I was such a cocky bitch; I thanked the Headmistress with massive insincerity, then dashed home to laugh my head off about her on the phone with you-forgetting, for the moment, that you haven't answered your phone since the autumn equinox. You still didn't. I started heating some half-&-half on the stove to make yogurt. Then I got mad. An all-girls' school, and they're squeamish about uteruses? Talk about the Fascism of Straight Culture! I whanged open the refrigerator door and grabbed my jar of starter yogurt off the shelf; the door whanged right back and hit me in the ear, I dropped the jar and it shattered all over the floor.

My historic Co-op yogurt! Great-great-great-granddaughter to the yogurt you and I were in the very act of making on May 19, 1977, when I came out to you in the Co-op kitchen! There was no way I could salvage it; it was full of glass shards. I could almost hear it weeping. No, that was me weeping. My yogurt! It lay there, splat, at my feet.

And then I got this image of myself, lone freak in random kitchen, about to be fired from the low-status, slave-wage job which is all I'll ever be fit for in this hostile culture, for perpetrating gratuitous acts of freakishness. Because really I was just showing off, telling the girls their uteruses were retroverted. And I didn't have to be so in everyone's face about the grace-after-meals thing. What happens if I lose my job? Gretchen, I don't like the real world! And it doesn't like me! I'm a disgusting coward and you're going to hate me for this, but as long as I'm at the Flowers School, I'm in the closet.

Then there's the girls' trouble: someone has started writing "I HATE LISA GOODFELLOW" and "I HATE LISA MCLAUGHLIN" in public places with a red magic marker. Lisa Goodfellow's desk was targeted first. The Mad Scribbler uses indelible marker, so poor Lisa G. had to sit at her desk of hate until I managed to wangle a clean desk from the custodian.

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