A Plea for Eros

are inseparable from the story of myself, and my reading of these peculiarities over time has been decisive in determining who I was and am.
    I don’t remember having any “rules” at home. We had routines that my three sisters and I accepted without question: getting up and eating breakfast, brushing our teeth, dressing for school, doing our homework, and going to bed early. Although we were sometimes scolded, we weren’t punished. A look of disappointment in my mother’s or father’s eyes was usually enough to prompt a heartfelt apology from a momentarily wayward daughter. School, on the other hand, was all regulations, prohibitions, and punishments. I was well behaved, not only because I dreaded the cloakroom where children were rumored to be beaten but because I believed in an idea of goodness. I wanted to be pure, truthful—a diminutive saint. It’s a good thing I wasn’t an only child. My three younger sisters did me a great service when they laughed at my pious notions, my seriousness, my overdeveloped need to be responsible, conscientious, perfect. I’m afraid this unattractive portrait of my earlier self is accurate. I felt so much all the time that I longed for a way to order my inner tumult. Although I was a kind child, I could also be a rigid, humorless little person who took almost everything too hard. I wish I could say these flaws in my character have vanished, but that would be a lie. I remain attached to order, to moral thresholds, to all the forms that keep chaos at bay.
    At Longfellow Elementary School, talking in the lunchroom was forbidden. Not even a whisper was tolerated. We ate in silence. If the rule was broken, the miscreant was sent to the far end of the room by an adult person known as a “lunchroom monitor” to eat at one of the brown tables with folding chairs. The tables for good children were white with long, smooth benches. The world of the brown tables was a remote place, inhabited by the naughty, the restless, the high-spirited—mostly boys who hadn’t mastered the art of keeping quiet. I was in the first half of my second-grade year when it happened to me. The school principal, an intimidating, immensely tall person with the uncannily apt name of Mr. Lord, strode into the lunchroom to deliver an announcement. He began speaking, stopped suddenly in mid-sentence, and, to my horror, pointed in my direction. “You!” he bellowed. “Go to the brown tables!” I was stunned. I hadn’t uttered a word. I had done nothing, but I picked up my tray and made the long, mortifying journey past the other children to take the brown seat of humiliation.
    I was so troubled by the incident that I mustered the courage to speak to Mr. Lord on the playground after lunch. I walked toward him, looked up at his face, and said, “What did I do? I wasn’t talking.” I detected embarrassment and discomfort in his expression. He hesitated, and in that brief moment when he said nothing, I could already feel my triumph. He peered down at me without looking me in the eyes and muttered,
“You were swallowing your food while I was talking.”
I was seven years old, and I knew this was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. The sentence burned itself into my consciousness as a sign of absolute sadistic stupidity. It had the force of an inner revelation: Some adults are as mean as some children. It was my innocence that had given me the strength to speak up and my innocence coupled with the Stalinist whims of Mr. Lord that removed every trace of humiliation from my trip to the brown tables.
    My internal moral compass was extremely sensitive, however, and that same year I did something that tormented me for a long time afterward because the sin I may or may not have committed hinged on the interpretation of a single word. The class was doing arithmetic problems. As usual, I was struggling with the little numbers and the dreaded subtraction sign, which for some reason was so much worse than its friendlier companion, the plus sign. Our teacher, Mrs. G., left the room, and after she was gone, I realized I had to pee. I paused for a moment, then stood up and walked downstairs to the lavatory. My memory of that walk includes no feeling that I was doing anything particularly wrong. It’s almost dream-like now. I wandered into the murky green hallway, made my way down the steps, peed alone in the little toilet stall, and then walked out the door marked GIRLS. As I left, I saw Mrs. G. straight ahead of me. It