The saskiad, p.8
The Saskiad, page 8
12
Elementary school was tolerable. None of Saskia's teachers knew what to do with her, so they were relieved just to let her work on her own projects, somewhere in the back of the room, or better, out of sight and mind in the library. No one had told Saskia that barns undergo a mysterious and sinister transformation during the summer after sixth grade. On Saskia's first day at Tyler Junior, someone in the crowded hall called, "Hey, White!" and when she looked around to see who it was, three dregs covered their faces and howled, "Aarrggh! What a dog! Arf, arf, arf!" Barns had broken out of their cocoons and unfolded leathery wings. For some unfathomable reason, sticking to yourself and not bothering anyone was no longer an option. The smallest things you did — a word you used, the way you looked at the bottom of your shoe — were immensely important to other barns. Fully half of them were outright lunatics, devoting great amounts of their time, energy, and ingenuity to making your life miserable.
Saskia wore the clothes she had always worn: nubby wool tights, ankle-length skirts, one cardigan over another, sturdy work shoes. The barns had a field day. Someone wrote "Saskia Witch" on her locker. "Just ignore them," Lauren said. But Saskia couldn't. She would walk up to a snorting dreg and stare balefully at him. Then she would inform him he had just been cursed to the seventh generation.
And the teachers! They were crazy, too. Paranoid. They wouldn't let Saskia work on her own projects, because they were sure she was trying to pull a fast one. They would even take her books away. "I'm sorry, I thought this was a school," she would say, but they never got the bitter irony. Like all paranoiacs, they were illogically, maddeningly rigid. They would begin, "I understand" or "I'm sorry," but what followed was a recorded message. Saskia wanted to scream and charge at them, stick them with pins to puncture their eerie robotic demeanors.
Even social studies was a problem. Saskia's first report was on ancient Egypt, and frankly, she outdid herself. The text was twenty-eight pages. There were drawings of clothes and tools; a series illustrating embalming, step by step; a foldout map of the Nile valley in six colors with a key. Saskia learned some authentic Egyptian writing from an Ithacan library book and wrote a whole page as Queen Shasakhiya of the Fourth Dynasty, outlining her glorious accomplishments. The report came back, and the only marks the Blatt had made were for misspellings. The comments were on the back: "Very enjoyable. Well integrated pictures. Good vocabulary! All in all, extremely well done. Sorry it was so late. D."
In other classes, things got downright ugly. When the Plebe, during the American poetry unit, ordered her inmates to show their creativity by copying from the textbook three poems they liked and pasting magazine pictures to accompany them, Saskia rebelled, wrote her own haiku, and drew the Plebe in jackboots, wielding a riding crop. The last haiku read:
We've learned so much here, Copying poems word for word. Thank you, Kommandant!
Not content with merely giving it an F, the Plebe ripped it up. After that, Saskia wouldn't stop barking "Jawohl!" and goose-stepping around the room until the Plebe caught her arm and actually slapped her (which, by the way, is against the law in this state). Saskia tried to slap her back but missed and, humiliatingly, burst into tears. She was sent to the V.P., who with his flushed bull neck straining at the collar of his polo shirt called her, with his usual self-control, a little snot and a spoiled little brat. Saskia sat quietly and looked at the football trophies on his wall, hoping he would disburden himself of her by, say, drop-kicking her out of school. But though she was snotty, she hadn't blown anything up, or been caught smoking, so her parole was held up.
Then Jane came. Linking up with Saskia was the worst thing she could have done, tactically speaking. Saskia's name is on all the bathroom walls. She is the kiss of death.
"What's a 'scag'?" Jane asks Saskia, bristling.
"It's sort of like a 'scuz,'" Saskia replies. "Only crustier, I think."
The same dregs who yell "Cross-your-heart bra!" at Saskia started to follow Jane with cries of "Tim-berrrr!" and "See Jane Sing! Sing, Jane, Sing!" They stopped only after Jane held one down by the throat and belted him, giving him the heaves and making him cry. "God, this place sucks," Jane says. Saskia struggles not to look pleased. There is little chance now that Jane will make other friends.
The girls are called "lesbos." In every class they sit together, until they are separated. After that they pass notes, which the barns in between can't read because Jane's are jn Latin and Saskia's are in Egyptian. The barns pass them anyway, because everyone knows Jane belted a dreg. When a teacher gets dramatic about the girls' behavior, they roll their eyes and croon "Onnh!" to each other in mock intimidation. "Tough guy!" "Dem's fightin' words!" Jane is impregnable, an old hand at this sort of thing. But Saskia is seen as the leader, and after a joint meeting with the V.P. Saskia signs her notes "Saskia 'Disruptive Influence' White" and Jane, "Jane 'Simon Says' Sing." They escape together to the stalls of the opium dens, where Jane smokes cigarettes, Saskia essaying a hit or two, and they plan their campaigns. They slip into the woods during recess to share hemp. They skip school once, planning to forge sick notes, but the school calls their homes and Jane is grounded for a week. "Why weren't you grounded?" she asks Saskia.
"Lauren said she could understand my feelings but skipping only made things worse. So I promised I wouldn't do it again."
"Shit, Lauren is great!"
Especially after the skipping episode, hemping in the woods is risky. Saskia tells Jane she wouldn't mind getting booted out of school, but Jane says her parents told her if she got booted one more time they were going to find a school with searchlights on towers and slavering German shepherds.
Of course sunny Ithaca, with its alternative school, has the answer to all their problems. Saskia saw the school one afternoon when Lauren and she went to see Lauren's goddess-friend who teaches there. There were students actually hanging around after school. They were dressed in long skirts and scarves. They were chatting in a friendly manner with bearded teachers. A girl went by in bare feet and she was wearing red-and-blue-corded ankle bracelets. She had oil paint on her clothes. Everyone had names like Matteo, Garland, Haven.
If Saskia lived in sunny Ithaca, she would leave her carved cedar box each morning to climb through oak and maple woods to the shining school on the hill. There would be no bells, no big clock. There would be a board for notes. "I'm in room 7," Saskia would write. "Anyone interested in trig can meet me there."
She would joust intellectually with the other scholars, honing her dialectical skills in debate: Who was wiser, Aristotle or Plato? Can there be beauty without truth? Which is more fundamental, fire or water? "Here's a better idea, Bob," she would say, and show a teacher how to organize his course. She would work prodigiously, memorizing enormous tables of Latin verb conjugations. She would take off her steel-rimmed glasses and pinch the bridge of her nose in scholarly fatigue. She would stay late, and when night fell she would ascend to the observatory and work for hours in the utter quiet, in the soft red light, arcing the telescope from star to star. Like Mim, she would get straight A's.
But there is a catch. The alternative school is public. You have to live in the district. "So have your parents figured it out yet?" Saskia asks Jane. She means the lower house prices in rainy Tyler.
13
Jewels are her eyes And satin her raven hair, Nor blemish has she.
Endless is the love
She dips from me like water
Into her cupped hands.
Now ponder — can you Guess of whom I speak? She is Here, if you but look.
14
Being thirteen, Jane can talk about private things, but Saskia will get embarrassed and clam up. Smoking hemp helps, so the weekend afternoons in Saskia's bed are important opportunities to be guarded jealously. The subject is inexhaustible. Even the briefest selection would have to include:
1) BREASTS
Jane would like a pair.
"You're kidding!" Saskia bursts out.
"It's not fair," Jane complains. "I'm older than you."
No matter how "ex" ex-hippies are, they still strip at the drop of a hat, so Saskia has seen naked folksens her whole life, but for some reason she still hasn't gotten used to it. Lauren is six feet tall. At night when she lets down her floor-length hair, she is Junoesque, a column fluted with the folds of her nightgown, a magnificent upward sweep of Woman. But remove that gown and you see that the classical line is broken. Lauren's breasts are not small. They are flattened along the top where they sag against her chest muscles, and they bulge out poutingly lower down. As she emerges siren-like from the water hole, they dip and collide with each other. Saskia, in her demure one-piece, quails, embarrassed for her. They are the only part of the female anatomy quite as painful to glimpse as men's things.
"But Lauren is in her thirties," Jane points out. "And she never wore a bra." The role that bras play in eventual boob sag is discussed. Jane cleaves to the old line that years of bralessness cause the breast muscles to stretch and weaken. Saskia read a magazine article in which the opposite was asserted. Bras, it said, allow the breast muscles to atrophy.
So what is a person to do? Bind them, perhaps, thus obviating the dilemma. "I could wrap a towel around myself every day," Saskia says. Slide a rod through a twist and rotate it, winch-like. Perhaps as it squeezed her, it would make her taller, too.
2) mooniness
Not having had a bout yet, Jane is dying of curiosity. "My mother refuses to discuss it. Whereas I know Dad has given fucking Peter a few man-to-mans." Saskia can see Mr. Sing in the leatherized den, his meaty arm around Peter's shoulder, talking and gesticulating obscenely while his son nods and brays. Meanwhile, Mrs. Sing in the gleaming kitchen waggles her head and chirps "No!" as she lightly slaps Jane's hand.
If Jane's moor is reluctant to talk about it, Lauren seemed oddly eager. She argued that mooniness was something women should be proud of. Women were in touch with the cycles of life, while men were cut off, oblivious. Every bout of mooniness was like spring, a renewed contact with the powers of regeneration, the turning wheel underlying being and becoming, the mystic female link with blah blah blah.
Saskia wasn't buying. She was struck only by the lunar connection. "Although my clock isn't quite right," she confesses to Jane. "I run fast." Aye, a precocious Moon! the Sun might say, clapping her proudly on the shoulder.
Lauren's speech was only the beginning. She was dead set on holding a show-and-tell. "Women's shame and ignorance of their own bodies is slave mentality, a result of male-dominated society." Lauren was the only person in the world Saskia could be sort of undressed with, when, say, trying on thrift store clothes. But when Lauren sat on her bedroom rug facing Saskia with her floor-length legs spread and told Saskia to do the same, Saskia wanted to run away. "The female body is a beautiful thing," Lauren scolded. Saskia spread her legs, and hung her head. Following Lauren step by step, in a daze, she felt around some outer things, touched some inner things, named a couple of things. There was room in her for only one other emotion, throbbing painfully at the edges of her vast embarrassment: envy at Lauren's perfectly bushy triangle. Lauren had to smooth the curls to either side to show Saskia what she was talking about.
The crowning humiliation came when the first bout arrived shortly afterward, as if Lauren had ordered it for Saskia from a catalogue. "Western life is so empty of ritual, so soulless," Lauren said. This was by way of explanation for her brainstorm: the mensis meal, which was something like a birthday party except that the guest of honor hid upstairs, refusing to come down until Lauren shamed her into it by reminding her how much work she had put into the preparations. And so, among the red candles, the tomato soup and the beets, while the crew looked on with goggle eyes, Saskia was formally inducted into Womanhood, wishing all the while that the Earth, with which she, as a woman, was supposed to have such affinity, would open up beneath her feet and swallow her.
3) A CERTAIN OTHER M WORD
Jane calls it "the dirty deed," and it takes Saskia so very long to catch on. Even then she cannot believe it of Jane, not really. It belongs to another world, light-years distant. Could Jane be so far from Saskia that she would have a part in it?
Jane draws well, and since she is not allowed to hang her sketches in Sing Sing, her large brilliant butterflies and her bare-legged girls astride Arabian horses have added to the luxuriant chaos on Saskia's walls. In her own bedroom, she removes a drawer from her dresser and takes from the space beneath it a sketchbook, which she holds on her lap, turning to Saskia. "You show me everything you do, right?"
"Of course."
"Absolutely everything?"
Saskia nods.
Jane hands the sketchbook to her. "If you want to look," she says with uncharacteristic shyness. "These are my secret drawings."
Secret! How Saskia loves that word. Treasure maps? Codes? No. Naked dregs and pigs. Saskia glances away.
"You think they're awful!"
"No —"
"You're turning red!"
"No!" Saskia looks back at the drawings. She turns the pages. "No, I like them," she says weakly. She frowns judiciously, focusing on a point a few feet beyond the book. They are only kissing and hugging, really. No big deal. "Nice," she says.
When the sketchbook is back in its hiding place, Jane says, "Don't you ever?"
"Ever?"
"Do it?" Then, accusingly: "You don't, do you?"
Do it? How? She doesn't want to know how. God, what would her men think? Marco, the Captain, and Odysseus are with her always. Would they stand in a circle and watch her? How was it? they would ask at the end, gazing at her intently. Nice? "Do it? Sure," Saskia says. But a little later, not looking at Jane, she says, "No."
"Never?"
Must she spell it out? "Never," she confesses miserably. She feels as if she should shout it so that Jane, on the other side of a widening chasm, might hear it. What? Jane would call back, her voice faint in the rising wind. I said "Never!" Saskia would yell, and the word would be lost, swallowed in the abyss between them.
"I don't know what's wrong with me," Jane says. "I think of it all the time."
4) dregs' things
Hemp does work wonders. On the first warm day of Tylerian spring, in the post-daffodil, pre-apple-blossom period when the ponds in the dirt roads are at their deepest, Saskia and Jane lie on a warm rock by the lake, looking up at those cumulus clouds flung away by Bluf-faroo's shameless nature, and run through every name they can think of. "Dick," Saskia is suggesting, her head propped on a root, her legs crossed.
"A kid's word. Don't you think?"
"OK. Dink?"
"Come on, even worse."
"Well J don't know . . ."
"Prick," Jane takes over.
Saskia winces. "It's ugly."
"Sharp, like pricking your finger."
"There's not enough vowel sound. All the really ugly words are like that."
"Like what?"
"Like . . . you know . . . like shit, or whatever." "Shit. Bitch. Tits. Clit. You're right!"
"What else?" Saskia asks.
"How about penis?"
"How about it?"
They giggle. "Well..." Jane says, "you always want to say peeenis. Sounds whiny."
"Sounds shrimpy."
"Like a mosquito flying into your ear. Pee-EEEE-nis." They laugh. "Then there's always phallus."
"Oh, always." More laughter. "It's too academic."
"It should go next to a diagram. 'Pictured at right is the human phallus...'"
"It could be a Roman general."
"Punctillius Phallus. Phallus Maximus."
They are laughing hard now, rolling on the slab. Saskia jumps up and declaims over the water, "Friends, Romans, phalluses, lend me your ears!" This leads to "Four score and seven phalluses ago," "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their phalluses," "Shoot if you must this old gray phallus," and "Give me liberty or give me a phallus."
"So what else?" Saskia gasps.
"Cock," Jane says.
That one, for some reason, does pack a punch. Saskia takes a hit off the joint, blushing.
"It's a tough-guy word," Jane says. "The leather-jacket guys by the stone wall never say 'Suck my penis,' they say 'Suck my cock.'"
God. Suck my . . . God. Don't be such a barn. Cock, cock, cock. Suck my ...
"Hog," Jane says.
Saskia splutters.
"I heard a guy call his that once. 'My hog is cold,' he said."
"That's sooo disgusting!"
"Yes, you think of something ... I don't know, something snuffling around —" And for minutes afterward, the girls simply howl.
5) IT. HOME BASE, ALL THE WAY,
WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT
Once you begin on this matter of sex, there is no turning back. Vistas open only on other vistas, depths are plumbed only to reveal depths beneath them. Each revelation is like a door bursting open, letting in an icy blast. Vastamundus! In all its terror and mystery, Vastamundus waits for Saskia. A limitless frozen lake fanned by leathery wings, it is unimaginably, hugely out there. Jane must eventually speak of her personal encounter with sex, with the real thing, dreg and all. One listens to such a thing only in the safest of places: miles under the covers of one's own bed.
In one of Jane's schools in Boston there was a dreg, pale and blond with a smooth, angelic face. He was always hanging around the pigs but saying nothing, serenely staring at them with his cloud-gray eyes and listening to their talk. They were used to him and they talked about all sorts of things as if a dreg weren't there. One day he came up to Jane and said, "Let's go into the woods together."
She had heard about this, about him going into the woods. "What for?"
"We could have some sex."
She laughed. "Forget it."
He said he had done it with some of the other pigs. He named them. They had gone to a certain place — Jane knew the spot — and they had taken their clothes off. They had lain in the leaves. "It's beautiful," he said. "It's love."
"Fuck off."
