Featured Fiction: Eileen Pollack
An Introduction from John Fulton
Arrowsmith Journal is delighted to feature the opening pages of Eileen Pollack’s new novel Smart Girls. Set in upstate New York in the early 1970s, Pollack shows us a small farming community that appears to be ideal for families and children but that seethes beneath the surface with violence, racism, sexism, and the thwarted desires of its small-town citizens. But the problem here is not only the prejudice and brutality of this (and our own) age, problems that after all appear to be an integral part of humanity, it is the blindness and willed inability to see the barbarity. In fact, the denial at the center of this community motivates the narrator to tell her story in the first place or, as she so poignantly puts it, “I am trying to understand how I could have been so blinded by my own puny troubles that I failed to notice all the violence and abuse going on all around me.” Of course, this narrator’s troubles aren’t exactly “puny.” They are the troubles of young women then and now, the yearning to fulfill one’s gifts by realizing one’s full potential, the desire to avoid the fate that so many “smart girls” meet, namely of faceless domestic drudgery. They are also the troubles of anyone growing up in rural America—poverty, intellectual stagnation, the humdrum stink of the farm, and, perhaps worst of all, boredom. Smart Girls is a beautiful novel giving voice to a necessary and painful story that needs to be told today more than ever. Arrowsmith Journal is so pleased to give our readers a preview of an important work. Enjoy!
Most mornings, I didn’t mind the two-mile walk from my parents’ chicken farm to school in the town below. I could have ridden the bus. But my classmates in Paradise—technically, my family lived in a hamlet called Lenape Springs, a few miles north—looked down on those of us who resided beyond the village limits. Woodchucks, they called us. By sauntering up to the front of the school rather than slouching around from the parking lot in back, where the buses vomited forth my tainted neighbors, I might qualify as one of them.
Of course, I should have considered those neighbors to be my allies. But most of us who are bullied in our youth try to emulate our aggressors. Being treated as inferior causes you to look down on those who share the traits that caused you to be bullied in the first place. In elementary school, the kids from town followed me around the halls, cackling, bobbing their heads, jamming their thumbs beneath their armpits to simulate wings, squatting and clucking as if straining to lay an egg. On warmer days, when the acrid stench drifted down from the egg and dairy farms, they held their nostrils and squealed: “P.U.!”
Later, the abuse sprang less from my family origins than my status as the nerdiest girl in school. I learned never to raise my hand. Never to lead group discussion. Never to admit I had earned a perfect score on any test or placed in the 99th percentile on the standardized exams we were administered year to year. (“The Iowas” these exams were called, though why the residents of a state famous for raising pigs should be accorded the right to measure our intelligence I couldn’t figure out, raising pigs being no more an intellectual pursuit than raising chickens.)
If that weren’t bad enough, I became the only female debater on our high school team. Late one afternoon, as my partner, Henry, and I were practicing for a tournament, a classmate caught me standing behind the lectern in our coach's homeroom, finger raised, spewing arguments at a prodigious rate, and everyone started imitating me in the halls, jabbing the air with their middle finger, twisting their face, sputtering gibberish.
What puzzled me was that succeeding at school—the only task we kids were expected to succeed at—resulted in my being tortured. It was as if a rat had been trained to paw at a certain door, and the scientists rewarded it not with food but an electric shock. The popular kids took it as their responsibility to uphold the tenet that a girl who got good grades couldn’t be desirable. On Friday nights, as the band played hormonally charged renditions of “Satisfaction” and “If I Were a Carpenter,” I slouched beside the cubbyholes with the other rejects.
My classmates made fun of the way I held my books—at my hip, like a boy, instead of across my chest, like a girl. I clomped around in the same shitkickers the other students clomped around in, but mine were rumored to be smeared with actual shit from my parents’ farm. I wore the same Levi’s as everyone else, but mine were too short and I drew snickers for pairing them with white cotton socks. Most girls wore their hair long and loose and parted in the middle; mine burst from my scalp in stiff black corkscrews, as if to provide a visual representation of the radioactive waves my superheated brain gave off.
When the bottle on someone’s basement floor stopped spinning and the boy who’d spun it chose to kiss the girl to my left or right, when I seemed the only female member of our seventh-grade class whose wrist remained bare of the ID bracelet some guy had bought her, I pretended I couldn’t care less. When my classmates sneaked off to Hanover Lake to get high on peppermint schnapps and pot, I reminded myself that my only way to escape our town was to rely on my superior intellect, which I certainly didn't want to ruin with alcohol or marijuana.
Once, a girl named Randi Raymond invited me to her party. I showed up at her house … only to find the front door locked and the backyard empty. I still have nightmares in which I am wandering a shadowy yard, calling, “Guys? Guys? You can come out now!,” hoping against hope a host of friends might spring out from behind the hedges and shout, “Surprise!”
I could go on about those taunts and pranks, the carefully orchestrated campaign to freeze me out, so sadistic it made the savagery in my father's chicken house seem harmless by comparison. But the point isn’t that I was bullied. All but a lucky few suffered far worse than I did, especially if they were Black, disabled, or homosexual. Even the bullies suffered; as we later found out, many of them were being beaten or sexually abused by their troop leaders, coaches, ministers, priests, or relatives and were only passing on their anger and pain to the rest of us.
What concerns me here—the reason I am writing this account of my senior year in high school—is that I am trying to understand how I could have been so blinded by my own puny troubles that I failed to notice all the violence and abuse going on all around me. If only I hadn’t been led to distrust most members of the female sex. If only I hadn’t been so obsessed with winning the favor of my debate coach, Garry Tennyson, or my boss at the screwy insurance company where I worked summers to earn tuition.
At the very least, I can’t bear to keep reading all those glowing posts on Facebook about how we grew up in a time and place that was free from poverty, crime, sexual abuse, and racism. What a happy childhood we had! We could ride our bikes and play outside until our mothers called us home for dinner. Black and white, rich and poor, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish—everyone got along!
True, we lived only a few miles from the festival of love and light that forever became known as Woodstock. The hippies who were desperate to escape the muddy cesspit at Yasgur’s dairy farm showed up in nearby Lenape Springs, built fires to boil the eggs my father handed out, and romped naked in the pond that bordered my parents’ property. On Earth Day, my classmates and I scoured the fields and streets, picking up newspapers, cigarette butts, and rusted tin cans, stuffing these in plastic trash bags and carting these to the dump, where they no doubt are rotting still. Watergate exposed the corruption in our government, but the hearings we watched that summer seemed to prove the evildoers would all be punished, or at least forced to resign from office.
Surely, none of us were as prejudiced as our parents. Hadn’t we marched for civil rights? Or, if we hadn’t actually marched, hadn’t we mourned the brutal deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner? A few evil white supremacists like George Wallace still spewed their hateful filth. But, like the dinosaurs, they soon would be extinct. Our mothers required us to cook and clean while our brothers were asked only to take out the trash. Our fathers were overly protective of our virginity. But the biggest battles of Women’s Liberation had been fought and won.
How could we have been so unaware of all the violence bubbling beneath the surface? Did we see it but not recognize it for what it was, like the fires that raged beneath those coal-mining towns in Pennsylvania? And here is what truly worries me: If we didn't see what was so obviously wrong back then, what aren’t we seeing now?
My father, an old-time socialist, vowed he would never serve any man. His own father immigrated to America in the early 1920s and used the pittance he saved working in the city’s sweatshops to acquire a few acres in upstate New York and build a chicken coop. My father tried to escape his fate by parlaying his benefits from the GI bill to attend engineering school at Cornell. But my grandfather died of a burst appendix and my grandmother pleaded with him to return home and run the farm. He finished his sophomore year, but not before he switched to poultry science. (My mother, who met him at a dance at our local synagogue, misheard this as “poetry science,” and the tragedy of their marriage can be compressed in that one bitter anecdote.)
Convinced he could modernize his old man’s chicken house, my father made a go of it, at least at first. Then his former professors at Cornell advised he pen the hens in cages stacked one atop the other. This struck my father as cruel—to the chickens and to him, given he needed to gather eggs from the bottommost cages, which were fetid with droppings from the birds above—but he followed their suggestion. Rather than shovel the coops by hand he installed a system by which the manure was blasted from the cages with a stream of water. This method sounded cleaner and more efficient than the old one. But it resulted in a bubbling vat of fermenting gases that stank abominably, as the drier manure hadn’t.
“Was I a fool to listen to those chochems up in Ithaca!” my father groaned, chochems being the Yiddish phrase for “wise men,” which, as is often the case in Yiddish, were the opposite of their definition. Even with such “improvements,” farmers like my father couldn’t compete with the massive agribusinesses in the Midwest and South. “Go big or get out” became the mantra and, by my senior year in high school, my father spent his evenings slouched at our kitchen table riffling through his account book and the latest issues of American Poultry Journal, muttering that he had better get out while getting out was even possible.
In truth, we were living off my mother’s salary even then. She supervised the sewing section at the local department store, as well as the linens, curtains, and bathroom supplies in the aisles that bordered hers. She took pains to make my father feel he was head of the house. But she was the one who paid the bills.
My mother claimed she had always wanted children. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed caring for the kids she’d given birth to. Once, while I was waiting for her to finish work, I flipped through the books of patterns and saw a mother holding hands with a daughter who wore a miniature version of the dress the woman had on herself—a bow in the girl’s Shirley Temple ringlets, white anklets and Mary Janes on her feet—with a boy in a cunning Western outfit the woman must also have sewn, and I understood that this was the family my mother envisioned loving. My brother and I, falling so far short of these ideal patterns, weren’t worth the ministrations she longed to give.
Usually, my father was in his coops by four, especially when he needed to make sure the pipes hadn’t frozen overnight. My mother rose an hour later to get ready for the department store—she took pride in confounding anyone who expected a farmer’s wife to wear frumpy housedresses, clumsy shoes, or a graying rat’s nest for a hairdo. I packed my own lunch, never including the hardboiled eggs my father advertised for their freshness; the lunchroom jokes about roosters, hens, and ovaries were bad enough.
But on the morning I’m describing here—this would have been a Saturday in early March 1974—I had risen before my parents, showered, dressed, eaten my cereal and toast for breakfast. I was waiting for my father to give me a ride downhill so I could meet the rest of my debate team and be driven to the state championships at a parochial school not far from Albany. I suppose most young people want to win something as desperately as I wanted to win that tournament. The lead in the school play. The homecoming crown. The hockey or football championship. I wasn’t wrong in thinking that tournament would change my life; I was only wrong in thinking it mattered if I won or lost.
“Dad!” I called. “I don’t want the team to leave without me!”
“Hold your horses!” he boomed. “If you’re such an important member of the team, they’ll wait the few extra minutes until you get there.”
What my father had said was logical. If we had been engaged in a debate, he would have won. But logic does nothing to quell your anxiety that you’re about to miss your own private version of the Olympics. To calm my nerves, I peered out the small, wavery window in our kitchen door. The lights snapped on in the coops across the driveway—the idea was to fool the hens into thinking the day was longer so they’d lay more eggs. I often compared myself to those hens, laying not eggs but A’s. Our town was too poor to offer Advanced Placement classes, so I needed to study those subjects on my own to convince an Ivy League university that the daughter of a chicken farmer attending a second-rate public high school in upstate New York was worthy to be admitted. (Only later did I realize the term “Ivy League” didn’t refer to the poisonous weed my father waged war on behind the coops but to the vines that shrouded the regal walls of those venerated institutions. I imagined a castle surrounded by thorny moats to keep out the hordes.)
The pressure to produce those A’s came entirely from within. I wanted to believe I amounted to more than my father’s chickens—pushing out egg after egg until they grew so exhausted he carted them to the slaughterhouse. But my parents didn’t care if I attended college. Even in the socialist utopia my father dreamed of, women would work only if their husbands needed them to earn a few extra bucks until the price of eggs went up in the spring. If a girl attended college, she might increase her chance of marrying a man who would provide her with a suitable standard of living and not get drunk or commit adultery. But without the means to afford such luxuries, my father trusted I would find a husband on my own.
And my mother? She had grown up on a dairy farm in an even smaller town than Lenape Springs, where her family were the only Jews. Her own mother died when she was twelve. She was able to finish high school, but she needed to fit her classes around keeping house for her father and two younger brothers. In her heart of hearts, she yearned to become an actress. But the classes in Home Economics provided the assistance she would need to sustain her family, and she never found time to try out for the school plays she longed to star in.
She didn’t discourage my attempts to get ahead by studying. But with every A her worry grew. “A girl can price herself out of the marriage market," she kept reminding me. She curled her nose at my jeans and T-shirts and hectored me to apply the makeup she brought home on discount. (This was the early 1970s. The only makeup we girls wore was the cherry-flavored gloss we dipped like snuff from our tiny pots of Yardley.) Worst of all, she kept trying to teach me to cook and sew.
One afternoon, she was demonstrating how to whip the whites for an angel food cake when something about the eggs in the bowl having caused my father so much drudgery and my mother having devoted so much of her life to cooking for our family inspired me to back away. “You know,” I said, “when I die, I won’t really care if I learned to make the perfect angel food cake or not.”
She lifted the beater beside her head. I was about to laugh—she resembled a domestic version of Lady Liberty—when she slammed the beater in the bowl and shouted: “You can go directly to hell,” then hurried to her room and slammed the door.
Surprisingly, I finished beating the eggs, rotating the handle so furiously the peaks stood stiff as plaster, which prevented the cake from rising, so when my mother finally emerged from her room, she dumped the cake in the trash with a dramatic flourish.
Like most daughters, I was so intent on fulfilling my own desires I didn’t pay attention to my mother's. Maybe, if she had admitted she was jealous of my opportunities, I would have commiserated with her sense of grievance. As it was, I didn’t understand that she saw a woman's beauty and proficiency at keeping house as her only means to escape the muck and filth she had wallowed in as a child. How could I not sympathize? When she met my father, she thought she was marrying a man who loved to write poetry and was acquiring a degree in electrical engineering. Instead, she ended up living on a chicken farm that demanded as much backbreaking labor as her father's dairy farm and was similarly awash in shit.
The previous fall, I’d begged her to take me on a tour of colleges, my father being unable to leave the hens. But my mother rarely drove farther than Monticello. She was afraid we would get in an accident. The engine would overheat and we would end up stranded beside the highway, targets for rape and mayhem. I threatened to buy a ticket for the bus or hitchhike. But my father said if I pulled a stunt like that, I needn’t bother returning home.
In the end, I made do with catalogues. No one in those carefully curated photos looked as if they had grown up on a chicken farm. But even our guidance counselor, Mrs. Litvak, who discouraged most of us girls and the poorer, darker students from applying anywhere but the local community college, admitted that my grades and SAT scores might mean I had a chance to be accepted at “one of the lesser Ivies,” though how my father would pay tuition she couldn’t imagine. Maybe I could apply to the School of Human Ecology at Cornell, this being a public college that had ended up within the far more expensive private university, like a public pool on the grounds of a rich man’s estate.
My mother favored this idea, "Human Ecology" being a fancy name for Home Economics. I tried to share my excitement about studying philosophy and English literature. But she cut me off. “See if majoring in philosophy will help you to raise a child or keep your husband well fed and satisfied."
I pouted. How could my mother, of all people, fail to understand what I wanted?
But she understood perfectly and couldn’t admit it. One afternoon, I came upon her leafing through the colorful bouquet of brochures I’d sent away for. “Oh,” she sighed, “this one is beautiful.” She held out the brochure for Brown, which I barely had considered because they didn’t allow professors to give real grades; how could I know I was superior to the other students if no one recorded how many A’s I laid?
“This is where I would have gone,” she told me dreamily. “I would have majored in art history. Or drama. If you major in one subject, do they let you take courses in all the others?”
Sensing how desperately my mother wished she were the one heading off to college was more upsetting than believing she didn’t understand my desire to make more of myself than a housewife. Now that I was leaving home, our mother might be able to go back to school. Maybe she could convince my father to let her try out for the PTA musicals. I felt I was being generous, granting her as much as that.
My mother had seen her own mother die. She had seen calf after calf ripped from its mother's udders. My father, who had served in World War II as a mechanic with General George Patton’s armored division, witnessed children stacked like firewood beside the gates of a concentration camp, women and girls forced to sell their bodies, raped by invading—or liberating—armies, paraded naked through the streets as punishment for collaboration. All my parents wanted was that I remain healthy and safe. That I marry a financially secure Jewish man. That I maintain a decent, orderly home. That I raise a few grandchildren over whom they might fret and worry.
I understood none of this at the time. I viewed my parents’ discouragement of my ambitions as evidence I must escape the drudgery of that chicken farm. I had only the haziest notion of where my success might lie. But it seemed to require my gaining entry to an Ivy League university. And I counted on extracurriculars to pad out my resume. I had been writing for the school newspaper since seventh grade. I ran hurdles in track. The sounds I made practicing my clarinet sounded like our chickens squawking, but I had clawed my way up to play third chair in our dismal orchestra. To prove how selfless I was, I had collected used toys and shipped these to a pediatric cancer hospital up near Rochester.
But what I really was counting on to win a scholarship to Cornell—the regular part, not the School of Human Ecology—was my prowess at high school forensics. I don’t mean the kind of forensics that involves studying clues and solving murders, although that would have been a more useful skill, given the crimes that were going on all around me. Rather, I belonged to a team that debated both sides of a proposition, which, that year, was whether the federal government should guarantee a minimum annual income to every family in the United States.
The season before, our top two-man squad had qualified for the national championships, held that past June in Pittsburgh. My partner and I hoped to repeat that accomplishment, Henry having been part of the two-man team that qualified the spring before. As a senior, he was one of the top debaters in the country. Every team was required to devise a plan by which the government might carry out the proposition, and Henry’s plan was so original the other teams couldn’t figure out how to counter it. I can’t recall all the points and subpoints. But the gist was that every family in America would be required to buy insurance that guarded against their descending into poverty. If anyone’s income dipped below a certain level, the company would send them a check to make up the difference. In theory, this provided the industry with an incentive to invest in programs to improve their policyholders’ education, employment opportunities, health, and housing. Our faith in the power of the free market to cure society’s ills strikes me now as touchingly naive. But by relying on the private sector to administer our proposal, we headed off the most common objections from other teams—namely, that a guaranteed income would foster inefficiency, lead to a hike in regressive taxes, or serve as a reward for unemployment—which were the same objections Henry and I raised when we argued the negative of the proposition. I was the weaker of our two-man team. But I was a demon at cross examination, not least because the boys didn’t expect a girl could think faster on her feet than they could.
That we were able to compete against teams from far richer districts was a consequence of our desperation to escape our fates. None of us wanted to take over our parents’ chicken farms, shabby hotels, or kosher butcheries. (The only non-Jewish kid on our four-man squad was Freddy Zee, whose father was the salad chef at one of the larger hotels; like us, Freddy left town as soon as he was able, moving to LA, where he ended up producing some of Hollywood’s highest-earning films.)
Most debaters went on to study law or run for office. I’m often shocked to realize that the politicians who run our country are the same pimply boys I nailed in cross-ex in the early ‘70s. I didn’t want to spend my life generating reams of garbled legalese like my bosses at the insurance company where I’d worked the previous summer. And I’d never considered a career in politics. The only female politician I’d ever heard of was Bella Abzug, who, with her outlandish hats and mannish voice, hardly qualified as my idol. If my classmates mocked me for daring to raise my finger while delivering a debate speech, how could I charm enough voters to become a senator?
Besides, I was frustrated by how difficult it was to change anyone’s mind about anything, let alone their behavior. Nothing I said or did was able to prevent my father’s male chicks from being dumped by the fluffy handful into grinders. I wasn’t able save our hens from their filthy pens, the wire mesh chafing their skin, the more aggressive birds ripping their victims’ flesh to expose the bloody muscles (left unchecked, the bullies turned into cannibals).
The proof that no one cared was everywhere. In sixth grade, I had read my brother’s copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and been stunned to discover an innocent man could be shot for a crime he didn’t commit. I read the novel a second time, hoping Tom Robinson might somehow be acquitted for raping Mayella Ewell, saved from getting shot, maybe even elected mayor.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” my brother scoffed. Eugene was six years my senior, well over six feet tall, with wild black hair and a bristling beard the vice-principal at our high school was perpetually threatening to chop off and shave. “It’s not just some yokels in Alabama who convict and lynch innocent Black guys,” Eugene informed me. “It happens every day even in the so-called liberal North.” He proceeded to deliver a sermon about Civil Rights that I barely understood and didn’t quite believe. “Aw, what’s the fucking use,” he said when I asked if he actually thought what had happened in the book could happen in the town we lived in. “Do you have two eyes?” He jabbed two enormous fingers right at them, the way Moe did to Curly on TV. “Do you have a brain?” Eugene thwacked my head. “Look around, little one. Look around! Or are you like all the other girls, who only care about making the fucking cheerleading squad and getting crowned the fucking homecoming queen?” He yanked the novel from my hands and waved it. “You think this is bad? This is nothing. This is a book for children. You might as well read Mother Goose.”
He tossed the novel in my lap and stomped out, allowing the screen door to slam behind him, and I sat there trying to imagine how anything could be more upsetting than what I had read in a book my brother had just dismissed as a fairy tale. Was I wrong, or was Bob Ewell having sexual intercourse with his daughter? I only recently had learned what sexual intercourse was, but my intuition whispered that the Ewells were the fictional counterpart of the MacGregors, who lived in a trailer beside the junkyard in my own hometown. A rumor had gone around elementary school that Dotty MacGregor had been forced to drop out because she was pregnant—this at a time when most of us girls had yet to get our periods. And the person who had gotten her pregnant was her father! A father having sexual intercourse with his daughter wasn’t anything I wanted to imagine, let alone discuss with the other girls. If my father had been having sexual intercourse with me, I wouldn't have wanted the other girls to be discussing us. But why hadn’t the adults prevented Dotty’s father from doing whatever he was doing before he got Dotty pregnant? Wouldn’t her mother have tried to stop him? What about Dotty’s brother, if she had one? If fathers having intercourse with their daughters was such a common practice it was alluded to in a book that had sold millions of copies, and if I could think of an example right there in my nothing-special town, then the adults ought to have headed off such behavior before it happened, shouldn’t they?
Then, when I was a junior in high school, three Puerto Rican families died in a fire on Main Street, the inspector having been bribed to overlook the lack of fire escapes that extended to the third-floor apartments. Several of the victims were my age or younger. Filled with righteous outrage, I had written an editorial for the school newspaper calling for the officials implicated in the children’s deaths to be charged with murder. But the vice-principal, fearing, as he put it, “repercussions,” refused to run the article.
After Dotty MacGregor disappeared and those Puerto Rican kids got burned up in that fire, I got the idea we were expected to ignore whatever ugliness we saw around us. It was as if we children had witnessed a bunch of rowboats flip over on Hanover Lake. A few hapless tourists vanished beneath the surface; the rest were still flailing about, waving their arms and trying to keep from going under. But the grownups turned away, and they seemed to assume we kids would keep playing in that lake, ignoring the thrashing limbs and cries for help. Writing for the school newspaper and joining the debate team seemed less like skills a person might use to change what needed to be changed than a means to get into college. That I could debate the affirmative of a proposition one round, then the negative the very next round, rendered the enterprise so much sophistry. If you were able to support both sides of a proposition, then neither side could be worth much, could it?
What I really hoped was that a win at States might earn me admission—and a scholarship—to Cornell. Besides, traveling to all those tournaments allowed me to escape my town most weekends. The few female debaters tended to represent all-girl Catholic schools and were far more heavily chaperoned—and schooled in guilt—than a Jew like me. I had made out with one or two of our competitors. I’d even enjoyed a brief fling with Henry.
But the real object of my obsession was our debate coach, Garfield Tennyson. Until recently, my feelings for Mr. T seemed the stuff of daydreams. Lately, though, I had started to suspect he might reciprocate my affections. A meaningful stare. A comment loaded with innuendo. But I was wary of that interpretation. How could I not be, reminded of the time my classmates invited me to a party that didn’t exist to witness my humiliation? That Mr. T. might be in on the joke seemed unbearable.
My anticipation grew so intense I might have run downhill to town if I hadn’t needed my father’s help transporting the canvas duffel into which I had crammed my dresses, shampoo, and underwear, the briefcase that held my flow-charts, multicolored pens, and the first-affirmative proposal Henry and I had perfected the night before, as well as the two cumbersome metal file-boxes that contained the color-coded index cards that served as evidence.
First, Henry and I would need to sweep the preliminary rounds. Then, the quarters and semifinals. After that, we would debate the other finalists in an auditorium packed with our vanquished rivals. We would humbly accept our trophies, basking in the knowledge that we were the best debaters in New York State and therefore qualified to compete at Nationals, to be held that year in Dallas. After that, we would go out to celebrate. And after that, I would enjoy the long drive home with Garry. Why should I regret not having been invited to some rowdy party at a classmate’s cousin’s cabin in the woods, to be puked on or ignored as I tried to remain sober enough to drive myself home rather than risk being driven by an inebriated senior (our class having lost two members to an alcohol-related accident).
I hated to ask my father to drive me to the bus. He acted as if I were running away to turn tricks at the highway rest stop. I wanted to shout: The other kids in my school are about to spend the weekend smoking dope and screwing on a pissy mattress behind a bush and you're giving me a hard time about spending those same two days arguing about whether to provide a guaranteed income for the nation’s poor? But my father would have answered that no daughter of his earned points for declining to rut behind a bush, while my mother would have prohibited me from attending any future parties to which I might be invited.
The bathroom door thudded open. My father’s boots measured a funereal pace toward the kitchen.
“Dad,” I said, “can’t you hurry?”
“Don’t get ruffled,” he said, as if I were a hen who’d flown into a frenzy at the sight of a mouse or dust mote. He looked down at the duffel, which was his. The briefcase. The file boxes. “I went off to war with less equipment than that," he said. Like my mother, he found something unseemly in a girl trudging off with a briefcase and file boxes to stand on a stage and argue against young men in suits and ties.
I bent to pick up the duffel. But my father wasn’t about to let a woman carry her own luggage, even if he disapproved of the journey she was about to take. He wrested away the bag, then hoisted both metal boxes. Secretly, I admired my father’s strength. Compared to the other farmers—stodgy immigrants whose English was mangled by their Hungarian or Polish accents—my father was the Gary Cooper of his profession. Tall for a man back then, he had a rectangular head and eyebrows thicker and darker than his thinning gray hair might indicate. Most farmers schlumped around in work-stained khakis and discolored undershirts; my father started each morning in laundered jeans and a collared shirt, with one of the navy-blue commando sweaters he had stocked up on when our department store still sold military surplus.
But what you really noticed about my father were his hands. He seemed born to be a pianist … or a man who spent his days plucking eggs from nests and cradling them in his palm—one, two, three, four, five, and, yes, if he was inclined to show off, an entire dozen. I loved my father’s hands. In second grade, our music teacher taught us that song about the superhuman being who held all our brothers and sisters, all the itty-bitty babies, everyone in his giant hands, and I imagined my dad cradling not a dozen eggs, but the entire planet. Even with his arms weighed down by luggage, he insisted on holding the door. Then he took care not to allow it to slam shut and wake my mother. The sun was rising, and I felt so intoxicated by my possibilities, I could see my future glowing right there on the horizon.
Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels The Professor of Immortality, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, and Breaking and Entering, which won the Grub Street National Book Prize and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, as well as two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and In the Mouth. Eileen’s work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was published by Beacon Press in 2015; a long excerpt appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and went viral. Her work has been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Travelappeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and went viral. Her work has been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Travel. Her most recent book is an essay collection entitled Maybe It’s Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman, which received starred reviews in PW and Kirkus; she also hosts a podcast by that name. Eileen is a former director of the MFA Program at the University of Michigan; she lives and writes in Boston.