It must have been strange, to find his pint-size daughter rummaging through his battered old work clothes. But in the fall of 1993, the accidental lumberjack look was a uniform. I liked the drape of that flannel and how those jeans slid down my hips. I had to keep yanking them up, like a tiny girl in a giant’s clothes.
I wore two of my dad’s undershirts as well, which were thin and nearly transparent from multiple washings, so they had this luxurious softness. I liked that you could see straight through to my bra, which makes no sense, given the insecurity about my body that had dogged me since adolescence. But the shirt points to some essential conflict. A desire to flaunt and be masked at once. The undershirt was like a side door to exhibitionism. I had to be careful not to look too deliberate. That was the worst sin of all: trying too hard.
Sometimes I wore those undershirts inside out. I have no idea why I did this, except that it seemed daring to show a disregard for propriety.
“Your shirt’s on inside out,” a guy told me at a party.
“Your life’s on inside out,” I snapped back.
And he smiled. “You’re right.”
I had a crush on that guy. Mateo. He had a poof of curly hair like John Turturro in Barton Fink, and he was gruff and unsmiling like so many 19-year-olds. But if you nudged him right, he could be adorable and silly. I have a picture of him sitting in my apartment wearing my silky Victoria’s Secret bra over his T-shirt and another of him paging through an old Teen Beat magazine with mock excitement.
My off-campus apartment was the party hub that year. The place was named the Casbah, so we were almost contractually obligated to rock it. My drink was Keystone Light. You could buy two six-packs of tall boys for five bucks at the Fiesta Mart—the equivalent of 16 beers for the price of a Wendy’s value meal, which turned Keystone into the unofficial sponsor of our ragers.
That’s what we called our parties: “ragers.” A word associated with anger and weather systems, which is appropriate given the state of our living room the next day. Halogen lamp kicked over, beer bottle floating in the fish tank. What the hell raged through here last night? Oh, yes. It was us. We raged.
It was during one of these ragers at my apartment that Mateo and I had sex. At the time, we were in a play together, and we would sit in the dressing room before and during the show, knees brushing thighs. The flirtation had been building for weeks, but I needed some inciting incident. A match thrown on our diesel fuel. We were outside on the walkway of my crumbling cinderblock complex. I was chain-smoking, one cigarette lit on the tail end of another. And I said to him, with the confidence of six beers, “I bet you won’t kiss me right now.”
He was leaning against the wall. His forehead rippled as he looked up, all squint and slouch. He looked at the parking lot, at the dozens of people around us. He looked everywhere but at me. Then he said, “I don’t think you’re going to win that bet.”
The idea of coming on to men was new. In high school, this would never have occurred to me. I had waited for Miles to kiss me, for months that felt like years. My coquettish signaling: sit next to him in class, play with my hair, cross my legs so they looked thinner. I read the tea leaves of his every gesture. He called me last night. What does it meeaaaan? This was how I understood seduction. Keep inviting the guy closer, but sit still until he pounces.
College flipped that script. The new imperative: If you want a guy, go after him. What’s stopping you? We didn’t use words like “feminism”—a fussy term for earlier generations, like “consciousness-raising” or the ERA—but it was understood that we ran with the boys. Argue with them. Challenge their ideas about sex and Ernest Hemingway, because they’d been holding the megaphone for too long, and we needed to wrest it from their grip. I even wore cologne. Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men. And slathering my neck in that rich, oaky musk gave me a kinky thrill, like I’d been rubbing up against some low-rent Johnny Depp.
But my lessons in women and power did not extend to the classroom. I was not a hand raiser of any kind. I took a C in my Literature After the Holocaust seminar, because I couldn’t force myself to open my mouth, despite participation being 25 percent of the grade. I ran into the professor on campus one day. She had dreads and a wry smile. I didn’t even know they made professors this cool. We chatted for a bit, and she said, “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you ever talk in class?” And I blushed and said, “I’m shy,” and she said, “Well, you shouldn’t be.”
No, I shouldn’t be. I wasn’t meant to be. And on the balcony of my apartment, I was not. Under cover of night and Keystone tall boys, I was full of righteous fire and brimstone. How I loved the taste of conviction in my mouth.