Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's ＂Learned＂(13)

It’s hard to grasp what my intent was here—we’re talking about a child who was fond of pretending a ghost was touching her nonbreasts against her will—but I guess the moral of this story is that my dad’s really nice, yet I’ve always had an imagination that could grasp, maybe even appreciate, the punitive.




There is a theory not often discussed—perhaps because I’m the inventor of the theory—that if your father is incredibly kind, you will seek an opposite relationship as an act of rebellion.

Nothing about my history would imply that I’d dig jerks. I went to my first Women’s Action Coalition meeting at age three. We, the daughters of downtown rabble-rousers, sat in a back room, coloring in line drawings of Susan B. Anthony while our mothers plotted their next demonstration. I understood that feminism was a worthy concept long before I was aware of being female, listening to my mother and her friends discuss the challenges of navigating the male-dominated art world. My feminist indoctrination continued at forward-thinking private schools where gender inequality was as much a topic of study as algebra, at all-girls camp in Maine, and as I looked through my grandmother’s wartime photo albums (“Nurses did the real work,” she always said). And underscoring it all was my father’s insistence that my sister and I were the prettiest, smartest, and baddest bitches in Gotham town, no matter how many times we pissed ourselves or cut our own bangs with blunt kitchen scissors.

I don’t think I met a Republican until I was nineteen, when I shared an ill-fated evening of lovemaking with our campus’s resident conservative, who wore purple cowboy boots and hosted a radio show called Real Talk with Jimbo. All I knew when I stumbled home from a party behind him was that he was sullen, thuggish, and a poor loser at poker. How that led to intercourse was a study in the way revulsion can quickly become desire when mixed with the right muscle relaxants. Midintercourse on the moldy dorm rug, I looked up into my roommate Sarah’s potted plant and noticed something dangling. I tried to make out its shape, and then I realized—it was the condom. Mr. Face for Radio had flung the prophylactic into our tiny palm tree, thinking I was too dumb, drunk, or eager to call him on it.

“I think …? The condom’s …? In the tree?” I muttered feverishly.



“Oh,” he said, like he was as shocked as I was. He reached for it as if he was going to put it back on, but I was already up, stumbling toward my couch, which was the closest thing to a garment I could find. I told him he should probably go, chucking his hoodie and boots out the door with him. The next morning, I sat in a shallow bath for half an hour like someone in one of those coming-of-age movies.

He didn’t say hi to me on campus the next day, and I didn’t even know if I wanted him to. He graduated in December, and with him so did 86 percent of Oberlin’s Republican population. I channeled my feelings of shame into a short experimental film called Condom in a Tree (a classic!) and determined that the next time I was penetrated it would be a more respectful situation.

That’s when I met Geoff.

Geoff was a senior, a fair-haired meditator who once cried in my parents’ hammock because, he told me, “You are forcing sex when I just want to be heard.” He had his low points.2 But for the most part, he nurtured and supported me. We loved each other in a calm, gentle, and equal way. Geoff was not a jerk, but he also wasn’t for me.

We broke up, as most college couples do. I spent the next month bedridden, unable to stomach anything but mac and cheese. Even my patient father grew tired of my cartoonish heartbreak. But at my first postcollege job in a downtown restaurant, I met a different kind of guy. Joaquin was almost ten years older than me, born in Philadelphia, and possessed a swagger that seemed unearned, considering he was wearing a FUCKING FEDORA. His body was long and lean, and he dressed like Marlon Brando in Streetcar. He was my overlord, a cynical foodie whose favorite maxims included “It would suck to live past forty-five.” Even though he had a girlfriend, we flirted. The flirting consisted of him questioning my general intelligence and noting my lack of spatial awareness and then winking to let me know it was all in good fun. One night someone took a shit not in the toilet but on the floor in front of it.

“I hope you know you’re cleaning that up,” he said.

I didn’t do it, but I sort of liked being told to. Joaquin was absolutely impertinent and, despite my “why I oughta!” faux consternation, I was melting. He was Snidely Whiplash, and I was the innocent girl tied to the tracks, but I didn’t want Dudley Do-Right to come.

We started emailing. Mine were long and overwrought, trying to show him how dark my sense of humor was (I can make an incest joke!) and how much I knew about Roman Polanski. His were brief, and I could read both nothing and everything into them. He never even signed his name. On the night I quit, we met after work and smoked some pot I had hunted down specifically for the occasion. I didn’t have rolling papers (because I didn’t smoke pot!) so we wrapped it in a page of Final Cut Pro for Dummies. When I tried to kiss him, he told me he shouldn’t—not because he had a girlfriend, but because he was already sleeping with a different hostess. We went out to a twenty-four-hour Pakistani restaurant and, having been rejected, I was hungry for the first time in days. We ate our naan in silence.

We maintained our version of a friendship until finally, the following June, we kissed in the street outside the restaurant. I was disappointed by how hard his lips were and how silent he was once he had an erection.