The Summer Without Men

Mom. Watch me! Look, Mom!” Lola watched with a faint smile as her bald babe’s eyes flickered open and shut, open and shut, his little arms reaching tremulously for nothing, before he sank back toward her breast into sleep.
    *   *   *
     
    Boris wrote back:
     
Thank you for answering, Mia. I have a conference in July in Sydney. Will keep you posted on all dates. Boris.
     
    There was no love to my love. I gathered he hoped to push our relations onto a civil but cold plane for the sake of the beloved, shared offspring, and I had a brief fantasy of bursting in on him and the Pause in the lab, and flying from one cage to the next. Mia, the Fury of perpetual anger, releases all the tormented rats from their prisons and looks on with malicious glee as their milk-white bodies shoot across the floor.
    *   *   *
     
    The classes continued into the second week, and as we eight sat around the table and wrote and talked, I began to sense an invisible undertow among the girls that ma me uneasy. I knew that the real pull of this force took place before and after class, during the hours of their lives that had nothing to do with me, and that its dynamics were part of the necessary secrecy and alliances of early adolescence. There were glances exchanged among them and barely discernible nods that sometimes made me feel as if I were watching a play that was taking place behind an opaque screen. The bits of their conversations I overheard were stereotypical in the extreme, a primitive banter punctuated by the words like and so, used chiefly to telegraph approval and disapproval.
    Like why do that? I mean, that’s so retarded .
    Well, isn’t it? Oh my God, don’t you know that’s like so uncool?
    Did you see Frannie’s brother? He’s so hot!
    No, dummy, he’s fifteen, not sixteen.
    Did you see her bag? Like it’s so bad.
    You called me a lesbian! That’s sick. Oh my God.
    When I listened idly to their talk during the minutes before we began and after I had dismissed them, I often felt the girls’ speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon, with the exception of Alice, whose diction was not infected with as many like s and so s, and yet even she fell into the curious, moronic dialect of Early Female. But after each child had sat down, she became suddenly differentiated from the others, as if a charm had been lifted and she could speak for herself. Little by little fragments of her family story appeared, which altered my perception of her. I discovered that Ashley was one of five children and her parents divorced when she was three years old; that Emma’s little sister had muscular dystrophy; and that Peyton’s father lived in California. She was going to visit him in late August, as she did every summer. He was the parent with horses. Alice had lived in Bonden for only two years. Before that she lived in Chicago, and her repeated references to that lost metropolis inevitably set off a contagion of looks among the others. Joan and Nikki had become fast friends in the third grade. Jessica’s parents were serious Christians of some kind, perhaps of the newish variety that mingled pop psychology and religion, but I wasn’t sure.
    In order to scrape at their inner worlds, the ones I felt were as distinct as their stories, we began to work on the “secret me” poems. I introduced the cleft between outer perceptions and our own sense of inner reality, the misunderstandings that can sometimes shape our relations with other people, that most of us have a feeling of a hidden self, that the social self is different from the solitary self, and so on. I emphasized that this was not Truth or Dare, a game I remembered from my own youth, not an exercise in confession or betrayal of secrets we want to keep hidden. I suggested contrasting two lines: You think I’m … and But I’m really … We discussed metaphors, using an animal or thing instead of an adjective.
    I praised Joan’s lines.
     
You think I’m bland and a little silly.
But inside I’m a red-hot chili.
    Emma compared her inner self to mud, but it was Peyton who produced the most startling image. She wrote that on the inside she was a “chipped piece of a door that looks like an island on a map.” When she read this, Peyton’s thin, narrow face had a pensive, taut expression. She hesitated, then explained. When she was eight, she told us, her parents had a terrible shouting fight