Selected Dates (1998)

Excerpt from Anatomy

Shawna Yang Ryan

The Librarian

The Librarian asked to share a table with me at a crowded café where I was writing a paper. He balanced a wooden salad bowl in one hand and a library copy of Blood Meridian in the other. I shrugged, hoping he would keep to his space and I could pretend he didn’t exist. I couldn’t afford a laptop, so I was scribbling the draft by hand and trying to finish it in time to type it up in the school computer lab. He dragged out his chair with one foot, and I huddled deeper into my jacket. I swept my arm around the top of my notebook to hide my work. He busied himself with sprinkling pepper on the salad from a tiny paper packet. I expected him to leave when he was done eating, but instead, he settled in to read. Every few minutes, he sniffed. I pulled a pack of tissues from my backpack and offered him one.

He was white, in his thirties, and had a PhD in English Lit. He worked in the public library. He said he was in charge of choosing the public jigsaw puzzle that they set out for the kids each week, and he intentionally tried to make himself sound idiotic and harmless, though, in fact, he was actually very brilliant if unambitious. He told me the most popular puzzle had been Monet’s Water Lilies because the repetition of the image made it challenging. It had one thousand pieces, and in the two weeks it was set out for patrons to work on at will, only a single piece went missing. His enthusiasm was contagious, and I found myself saying wow without sarcasm. I asked him about the book, and he talked to me about violence and anti-Westerns and failing civilizations. He spit when he talked. He seemed dopey and nice, and when he asked me to walk him home, I said yes. Yadda yadda yadda.

He called himself a reformed academic and said his degree had been a waste of time and money. He said art was useless. He said I’d been poisoned by that “women’s lib crap.” I didn’t like him, particularly, but I liked his disregard. All he wanted me for was sex, and it didn’t matter how dumb or smart I was. His previous girlfriends had been Japanese, Filipina, Thai. Just a preference, he said. Not that I was a girlfriend.

He fed me cereal afterward, then would walk me exactly halfway home. My roommate started slipping taxi money in my shoes.

The High School Football Star

C, a former high school football player, picked me up in his red Civic and took me to tacos, and then brought me to the marina in the dark to walk the single pier that jutted into the bay. We walked by the boats, slapped by salt water, that groaned in the dark. Behind a locked chain link fence, down a dock, one boat lit, laughter. I hadn’t prepared for the cold and C insisted I wear his navy pea coat that smelled like the taqueria, like beef and disinfectant. Along the way, he told me about the car accident that had broken his back, the anger he’d had during his recovery, how he’d lost sports forever. He had a passion for self-improvement and multi-level marketing schemes. He had moved through trying to sell fitness beverages, special exercise shoes, space pens, and green house cleaners. He’d graduated college already, but he liked to attend some of the club meetings, where—he explained—women were less jaded. His high forehead shone in the moon. We reached the end of the pier, and he waved his hand at the city across the water, and a Hemingway story came to mind, Jig proclaiming, “We can have the whole world. We can go everywhere.” (No, we can’t, I silently answered.) He grabbed my shoulders and squeezed, then flung his arms in the air and spun around. You make me feel so alive. I faked a small laugh. The dutiful audience, I’d barely said anything through dinner, so he must have been enlivened by my uncomfortable silence. I imagined he had a map of what to say to impress a date, things that had landed him in bed before. The jokes at dinner, the sad story of injury and alienation, the proclamation of joy. How do you feel? he asked. I know you feel this, too. This, he gestured between us, is real. I braced myself and by the time we made it back to my apartment and I slipped out of his coat and returned it, I’d mustered the nerve to tell him the feeling wasn’t mutual. His face greyed. Fuck off, he said. He threw the coat in the car, slid in, slammed the door, and rolled down the window. Bitch! he screamed as he drove away.

The Grad Student

The Grad Student was the TA for my History of Feminist Movements class, a gen ed requirement I had to fill. He marked on my essay that I’d used “myriad” incorrectly, and I came to his office hours to complain. He said I could not use myriad as a noun, only an adjective. I said he was too rigid. He brought out the dictionary to prove his point and found that he was wrong. On my next assignment, he’d written: there are a myriad of reasons why I’d like you to come to my office hour, and I fell for it, and when I showed up, he shut the door and stood close, and I didn’t blink and I didn’t blink and he kissed me and I kissed him back in part because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but also because his breath was sweet, like crushed cilantro and he was a good kisser. It made me feel powerful when I showed up at his place that night, and he said oh my god, don’t tell any of your friends, and I said no, of course not, and he had a real apartment—a studio—but a real apartment with living plants and food in the fridge, and I thought this is the life. He cooked me scrambled eggs afterward, with lots of butter, Alice B. Toklas-style, he said.

The Art Student

There had also been Agnès. She had a name like a French actress, and she moved and talked like one. She was the kind of girl you’d find only in the Art Department, making Annagret Soltau-like collages of stitched female faces and bodies, but Agnès replaced facial features with vaginas and breasts cut from what she called “girlie mags,” as if she were a seventy-year-old man. We all called her brilliant.

I asked her to hang out after class and we lay in the sun on the lawn in front of the library and complained about our classes. She said everything in a half-whisper that made one want to lean closer. She had white blonde hair and eyebrows so light that they were almost invisible, giving her an alien look. Her intensity and sincerity intimidated me to awed silence, yet I didn’t want to leave.

After our next class, she dropped off a fold of paper wrapped in red ribbon. It was Carole Maso’s “The Women Washing Lentils,” and I read it three times before leaving the studio. The title was French slang for lesbians. At the library, I found the book that the story was from and copied this line on a sheet of binder paper: You’re in love with the crazy white-haired girl. She’s sewing poems into her sleeve, they read: “dreamy lighthouse keeper mild Steven.” I did not give her the paper.

The next week, she invited me over to the ramshackle co-op where she lived with eight others for coq a vin, and I did not tell her that I did not eat chicken. I ate the chicken. Then, in her room, we sat on her second-hand brocade sofa—each leaning on opposing armrests—and drank wine, and she put her leg on mine and told me how she’d been sent to one of those outdoor schools for problematic children, where they make you chop wood and learn to make fires out of flint and cotton. I tried to imagine her with her pale hair and translucent skin in the desert. She put her wine glass down, took mine and set it down, then leaned forward and kissed me. She smelled like burnt sugar and cheap apple conditioner. I put my hands on her face and felt her narrow cheekbones beneath my palms. Her hand at my waist, then under my shirt hem. I slid onto my back and twisted my leg around hers. I slipped my hand into her soft wetness and listened to her shifting breath. We kissed until we were exhausted.

The rest of the semester was the exchange of mix tapes, grotesque and romantic visual collages, lines of poetry (Marie Howe: I want to write a song/ for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,/ just before we’d made ourselves stop), her tall, slim body glowing in the orange streetlight haze through her bedroom window, until in late April she told me she was dating a pre-med student who believed in monogamy. She breathed the word monogamy like it was exotic, and then she was gone.

The Creative Writing Workshop Classmate

In my creative writing workshop, I wrote a story about the word cunt because that was a provocative thing to do, and I’d read in the Feminist Encyclopedia, a hardcover tome that I’d bought for five bucks at Half-Priced Books, that the word shared roots with kin, kind, and queen. I was reclaiming the word. The men in my class hated the story. One of them, a thirty-year-old “nontraditional” student, wrote in my critique that the narrator was selfish and immature and had no idea what love was. His name was Robert. Three weeks before that, Robert had invited me home to lend me a book, and while there, in the yellow light of his dim apartment, standing in front of his bookshelf, he’d declared I want to make love to you. I laughed, nervous and perplexed by the formality of his declaration. I said I had to leave. Later, I got an email from him: Fuck you. And then, even later, Your mistake is thinking a woman’s quotidian life is interesting enough for a story.