In One Person

Kittredge would ask Richard Abbott.
    “Earth and water, Kittredge—brute force and guile,” Richard had repeated.
    “But what
sex
is the guile supposed to be?” Kittredge asked. “Is Caliban a
lesbian
monster? Is it a she or a he who tried to rape Miranda?”
    “Sex, sex, sex!” Elaine Hadley screamed. “All you think about is sex!”
    “Don’t forget those earplugs, Nymph,” Kittredge said, smiling at me.
    Elaine and I couldn’t look at him without seeing his mother, with her legs so perfectly crossed on those uncomfortable bleacher seats at Kittredge’s wrestling match; Mrs. Kittredge had seemed to watch her son’s systematic mauling of his overmatched opponent as if it were a pornographic film, but with the detached confidence of an experienced woman who knew she could do it better. “Your mother is a man with breasts,” I wanted to say to Kittredge, but of course I didn’t dare.
    I could only guess how Kittredge might have responded. “Do you mean my
stepmother
?” he would have asked, before breaking my arms and legs.
    I spoke to my mom and Richard in the privacy of our dormitory apartment. “What is it about Grandpa Harry?” I asked them. “I know that Ariel’s gender is polymorphous—more a matter of
habiliment
than anything organic, as you say,” I said to Richard. “Okay, so my trappings, my equipment—the wig, the tights—suggest that Ariel’s gender is mutable. But isn’t Caliban a
male
monster? Isn’t Grandpa Harry playing Caliban like some kind of …” I paused. I refused to call my grandfather
Queen Lear
, because that was Kittredge’s nickname for him. “Like some kind of
dyke
?” was how I put it. The
dyke
word was in vogue at Favorite River—among those students (like Kittredge) who never tired of
homo, fag
, and
queer
, which they used viciously.
    “Daddy isn’t a
dyke
!” my mother snapped. Snapping had once seemed so unlike her; now, increasingly, when she snapped, she snapped at
me
.
    “Well, Bill …” Richard Abbott started to say; then he stopped. “Don’t get upset, Jewel,” he said to my mom, whose agitation had distracted Richard. “What I really think, Bill,” Richard began again, “is that gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.”
    A lame response, I thought, but I didn’t say so. Was I growing disappointed in Richard, or was I just growing up?
    “I guess that wasn’t an answer to your question, was it?” Elaine Hadley asked me later, when I confessed to her that the sexual identity of Grandpa Harry as Caliban was confusing to me.
    I T WAS FUNNY HOW , when Elaine and I were alone, we didn’t usually hold hands, or anything like that, but when we were out in public, we spontaneously reached for each other’s hands, and we would maintain contact for only as long as we had an audience. (It was another kind of code between us, like the way we would ask each other, “What happens to the duck?”)
    Yet, on our initial visit together to the First Sister Public Library, Elaine and I didn’t hold hands. It was my impression that Miss Frost wouldn’t be fooled into thinking that Elaine and I were romantically involved—not for a minute. Elaine and I were just seeking a possible place where we could run our lines for
The Tempest
. Our dormitory apartments were claustrophobic and very public—unless we ran our lines in her bedroom or mine, with the door closed. We’d been too successful in masquerading as boyfriend and girlfriend. My mom and Richard, or the Hadleys , would have had a cow if we’d closed our bedroom doors when we were together.
    As for the yearbook room in the academy library, there was the occasional faculty member at work there, and it wasn’t a room with a door you could close; our voices would have been heard elsewhere in the building. (Elaine and I feared we could be heard
throughout
the much smaller First Sister Public Library!)
    “We wondered if there might be a more
private
room here,” I explained to Miss Frost.
    “More
private
,” the librarian repeated.
    “Where we wouldn’t be heard,” Elaine said, in her sonic-boom voice. “We want to run our lines for
The Tempest
, but we don’t want to
bother
anyone!” Elaine hastily added—lest Miss Frost think we were seeking some soundproof asylum for Elaine’s aforementioned first orgasm.
    Miss Frost looked at me. “You want to run lines in a library,” she said, as if this were a well-fitted piece to the puzzle of my