A Plea for Eros

the Victorian language of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
all the while riding high on a wave of what children call “popularity.”
    The following year, my old wound reopened. It began in February and lasted until the school year ended. For reasons that were obscure to me, I precipitously fell from favor with the girls who had once liked me. I turned into a despised outcast—the butt of cruel jokes and torments. I was jostled, pinched, and pushed. Every remark I made was met with snickering and whispers from the girls who by some stroke of magic had become omnipotent in that tiny world of sixth-grade pubescent girlhood. I lived in a state of bewildered anguish for months. Like most stories of female bullying, mine began with a single girl. I am sure she had detected my bruised inner sanctum and took aim. Had I been tougher, I might have resisted her machinations. She came from a family in which the sibling rivalry was ferocious. Her desire to hurt me was no doubt homegrown, but I had few tools at the time for analysis of her psyche, and even if I had, they probably wouldn’t have done me much good. Open hostility—making sure I was kept out of games and conversations—mingled with surreptitious cruelty, false acts of kindness to trick me into believing that I had been accepted once again. These deceits were worse. The duplicity sickened me. I drooped and dragged my sorry self around like a kicked dog. My only defense would have been genuine indifference. I had seen it in others and would have loved it for myself, but this quality evaded me. I wanted to be liked and admired and couldn’t fathom what had decided my abject fate. One day, however, I returned to my desk and found that a drawing of mine had been marked up and torn. My enemies had made a strategic error. A small breeze of comprehension blew through me. I was the best artist in my class, and I knew it. My pictures were universally praised, and I was proud of my gift. Desecrating a drawing was a sign of envy.
    My visual memories of those months are like gray fragments. I can see the hallway in the school building and the door to the toilet where I would sneak into a stall and shed a few tears as quietly as possible. I remember contemplating my pleated skirt and the gray ribbed wool stockings I often wore in winter as I sat there alone and, despite my unhappi-ness, felt relieved to be away from the others.
    At my mothers urging, my father took up my case with the teacher, Mr. V. That encounter took on mythical dimensions in our family because Mr. V. was surprised by what my father had to say. Oblivious to all the intrigue that had been lurking in his own classroom, he spoke the words my parents would both later repeat to me: “But why Siri? She has so much going for her.”
    It must have been in November or December of the following academic year that I had an epiphany. I now think that moment was simply a self-conscious recognition of my own dramatically changed circumstances. My family had left Minnesota for Bergen, Norway. My father was spending his sabbatical doing research at the university in the city where my mother’s brother and sister and their families lived. I loved the Rudolph Steiner School I attended. I loved my teachers. I loved my best friend, Kristina. The moment came one night after a party given by one of the boys in my class. He came from a wealthy family that lived in a large, low, elegant house outside Bergen. I was wearing the pink dress my mother had sewn for me, a minidress with a lace ruffle down the front, and the pink suede shoes with a small heel that had been purchased at the largest department store in Bergen. At the party I had danced with every boy in my class. Each one in turn had wrapped his arms around me and swayed slowly to the maudlin class favorite, “Silence Is Golden.” As I stepped out the door into the cold night, I saw that it was snowing. Outdoor lights illuminated the circular drive in front of the house as well as the snowflakes, which were so large I felt I could see the articulated form of each one as they fell slowly to the ground and turned it white. The scene wasn’t only beautiful; it was touched by magic. The dull, brown, and barren world of only hours before had been transfigured into a new and radiant albescence. I didn’t understand it at the time, but no picture could have matched my inner life more perfectly. I told myself to remember the snow and to remember my pure, strong happiness at simply