The thing with the camp counselor might have been a classic lesbian childhood trope, but Sally was no Harriet the Spy. (She hadn’t even liked that book, and following folks around to discover things about them and write it all down in her notebook? It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, and also a little bit mean.) She viewed her upcoming mission not as a great adventure or some piece of an ongoing fact-finding mission, but as a likely unpleasant task that she just needed to perform, and not for anyone’s edification but her own. Pretty much the only pleasurable element of her plan was the fact that she would be withholding information about it from her brothers, and as a result she might conceivably know something they did not know when it was over. For that reason alone, she hoped the woman would be there, and that she’d be able to get a good look at her for subsequent analysis.
On the day in question she called her mother from a pay phone to say that she and a few friends were heading to Manhattan to see Clueless, after which one of the dads would be bringing them all home in a cab. Then she went straight to Lincoln Center and lurked, finding the American Folk Art Museum right beside the Latter-Day Saints visitors’ center. The museum was closed to set up for that night’s big event, so she couldn’t go inside to scout out a place not to be seen, but she did go into the gift shop where there were endless postcards of quilts and weathervanes and two apparently new and very expensive coffee table books all about Henry Darger, the “Outsider Artist” of the moment. Sally, seeing more of the man’s work, was thoroughly mystified by the weird simplicity of those cut-out girls and cartoony backgrounds, often featured in states of pain or degradation. Just looking at it gave her a funny feeling, and not a pleasant one, but she kept turning the pages: girls being throttled, girls being hung, girls being stabbed. At least the illustration on our father’s invitation had merely showed them tied together. She wondered if he knew about the rest of it.
When they closed the gift shop she went to get herself a falafel, and ate it across the street from the New York State Theater, watching the dancers duck-walk to the stage door. Then she went into the Library for the Performing Arts, back behind the opera house, and changed into a simple black dress and a pair of black boots with a bit of a heel. (Even at thirteen, Sally was a New York Woman. She knew how to wear black.) She also put her hair up in a bun, like those dancers going in the stage door. She wasn’t in disguise, exactly, but she knew she didn’t look like her usual self, the one who attended Walden with her brothers and (official version) hadn’t liked summer camp in Maine. The way she looked, it was entirely possible that, even if our father happened to see her, he might very well not recognize her. Not that she intended to be seen.
She’d been worrying about a guard or someone checking tickets, but there was nothing like that, only a woman who wanted to take her coat and a man offering wine and water. Sally darted deep into the galleries, searching for places where she could look at others without being looked at herself, but nobody seemed to be looking at anything but the pictures. They were huge and bright and on all of the walls, but also suspended in the middle of the rooms: long and uncoiled scrolls of paper, some of them painted on both sides; those little girls, naked or with butterfly wings, armed and dangerous against orange or seafoam skies, or spurting blood on the battlefields. She tried to avert her eyes from them as she moved, searching for Salo Oppenheimer’s tall and angular shape, but when she looked up it was into the face of an agonized girl being bayonetted by a grim, almost bored-looking man, or some other beautiful outrage. No one had spoken to her, not since the man with the tray of wine and water glasses. No one seemed to regard her with any interest, let alone suspicion. Perhaps the presence of so many tormented children detracted from one not-quite child making a creditable attempt to look even older than she was, or perhaps Sally really had succeeded in camouflaging herself at a New York art event in the year 1995. She nearly felt invisible as she completed her circuit of the rooms.
Just as she returned to the lobby in search of a safe place to watch the door, two things of immense significance happened, almost simultaneously. The first was that Sally found herself immobilized by the exposed back of a woman who happened to be standing a few feet in front of her, near one of the long double-sided panels. This back, narrow but muscled, delineated by a visible spine, warm brown in color, was on display between the slim white straps of a linen dress all the way down to where it curved into hidden places, and its impact on Sally was immediate. She felt this not just in the form of conscious admiration, but in a breathlessness and a bolt of weakness, and, perhaps most distressing of all, in the sharp, hollow feeling between her legs, so powerful and so impossible to dismiss that it mocked every one of her efforts to deny the obvious. Before her eyes, as the woman that back belonged to turned to the person on her right and then to the person on her left, alternately speaking and nodding in agreement, that warm back tensed and relaxed, flexed and straightened. The woman had long dreadlocks, but they had been swept aside and over her left shoulder, obscuring her neck. The white dress was long, but not so long that Sally could not see her calves and lovely ankles. Those ankles confused her. She could not understand why they seemed to matter so much.
Anyway, that was the first thing.
The second thing followed so closely on the first that Sally did not immediately separate them, especially since, in a wave of bonus confusion, there was a certain sensory overlap. That sharp, hollow feeling where her two legs met was moving decisively into a related but distinct sensation, less sharp than dull, less hollow than unarguably … moist. Sally had a sudden powerful and unhappy conviction of what it might signify.
She turned and made her way to the bathrooms beside the gift shop, went in and took the farthest stall, and there, with trepidation, she reached under her black dress and pulled down her underpants.
Oh. Naturally.
For fuck’s sake.
A year or so earlier, when she’d gotten her period for the first time (at school, between classes, and while wearing very unfortunate white jeans), there had been no rush of delight at having achieved, however misattributed the term, womanhood. In fact, Sally had been dreading the great milestone, and was actually enraged at the brown stain on her underpants. That she’d also been completely unprepared, from a practical standpoint, when the great day arrived, was totally her bad, since Walden had been drilling down hard on health and sexuality for years by that point and many of the girls in her class had already jumped from one side of the roster to the other, often broadcasting the fact to their classmates.
Sally had not been one of those eager for public transition. She had not been eager for transition at all. She had no great need to bleed into her underpants every month (a prospect that seemed, at the very least, totally gross) and no desire to be any closer to the awesome prospect of motherhood or, for that matter, sex. (Sex was a thing she’d been trying hard not to think about.) She was generally resentful about the extra burden she would now have to shoulder, and had a particular resentment for the kind of sacred mother-daughter sharing that was a standard scene of Young Adult fiction: Johanna, who had already burdened her with words about how important this was, and already asked, on more than one occasion, whether there had been any sign of Sally’s period. (Sign? What kind of a sign would that be? Surely it had either materialized or it hadn’t!) In response to these queries, Sally had issued a silent plea—to whom she didn’t know—for more time. More months, another year … maybe never? And indeed, at twelve-going-on-thirteen, she’d been one of the last girls in her grade to reach the momentous milestone. So yes, she’d had a decent run, but you couldn’t stay lucky forever.