some of them—the most brilliant ones—managed to pick up the right answers from the general atmosphere of the schoolroom and that others came with the information somehow ambiently preinstalled from their homes, knowledge drifting in from the sea of conversation in which they’d grown. But even when a teacher called me to the blackboard and explained the lesson, I was like a stunned cat. I stared and swallowed, distracted by the glare of the teacher’s attention, the loudspeaker roar of her voice.
Released, I raced back to my chair, content to be stupid as long as I could be ignored. I truly believed I was mostly invisible, and passed my days with a novel held open under my desk, obliviously offering my teacher the wandering part in my uncombed hair. The bright boys, my classmates, plump children in button-down shirts so white they were blue, played the violin with a handkerchief pressed fussily under their downtucked chin like Haifetz and rallied their facts like a lieutenant. Some even flirted with me, but I found it merely mortifying. “Don’t look at me. Don’t notice!”
I was in a state of being uninvented, unseen, private. I didn’t know how to value my own observations. Sochial Studies, I wrote on my loose-leaf tab. When a boy sitting near me laughed at my spelling, I laughed, too. My pages tore at their unreinforced holes and their top right corners hatcheted down. As the months progressed I obliviously added more and more paper to the binder until the crammed wedge of pages balked when I tried to move from one tabbed subject to another. Almost instantly infuriated, I grabbed a recalcitrant heap and mauled it over the rings. The teeth of the binder sprang open, jagged, and out leapt a passel of pages to splay across the floor. I didn’t respect my own work. Why should I? I didn’t know that respecting one’s work was a trait that could be cultivated, and that respect actually often precedes achievement.
At the start of ninth grade it was announced that in October the tests would be administered for New York City’s specialized high schools. My father grimly said he would help me study for the Bronx Science exam. Both of my brothers were attending Science, and it was assumed that this would launch their futures (as indeed it did: one went into medicine, the other became an engineer at MIT Research Corporation)—but they were far more grounded in the world than I. They took apart toasters and assembled them again; they understood about vacuum tubes and electrical currents, and even laser beams. Nevertheless, on Saturday mornings I sat with my supplies—a battery of sharpened goldenrod Ticonderoga #2 pencils (specified by my father) and a kitchen timer that muttered “tsk, tsk, tsk,”—and worked my way through the mock exam. Occasionally I employed a desiccated eraser hard as a Jujube, leaving a shaming dark smudge. Once I didn’t use a #2, and my father, infuriated at the faintness of my handwriting (and, I suppose, my ill-disciplined, lassitudinous mind), grew red in the face and, yelling, snatched up that wrong pencil and threw it hard into the empty tin trash can, where it exploded like a cherry bomb. Other times he merely sighed, shoving his hand against his forehead. I was hopeless—and as surprised as anyone when Bronx Science accepted me.
I explained this to myself by recalling that, when I’d written my address on the index card that the proctor distributed, I’d printed the x in Bronx in a special way. My left-to-right stroke curved like a sine wave while the right-to-left stroke was strictly straight. This was how scientists inscribed the letter, my brothers had instructed me. An influential person must have noticed the secret insignia. Rationally I understood that there was likely more to my acceptance than this, but in the back of my mind I still saw that x.
The first day of high school it thrilled me to step through the doors of the school under the famous lofting Venetian glass mosaic (legend had it that the school had bought this rather than a swimming pool), and in fact over the years to come I never failed to enter without at least flinging a respectful glance up at Archimedes with his splayed compass taking the measure of the world, Charles Darwin dressed in street clothes of brown serge, and Madame Curie with her glittering test tube, charting the radiant realms. Madame Curie! There she towered dozens of feet tall, discovering an incandescent element that emitted gamma rays (I’d read a biography of her in sixth grade), and that occurred in minute quantities in the alchemical-sounding mineral pitchblende. Her notebooks were so radioactive they were stored in boxes lined with lead. Beneath these Olympians twinkled the words EVERY GREAT ADVANCE IN SCIENCE HAS ISSUED FROM A NEW AUDACITY OF IMAGINATION—JOHN DEWEY. Impressive phrases, and it required a humanist to write them! I walked in under that banner of poetry, not at all sure I belonged there, as at Bronx Science I still got terrible grades, but heartened by the shimmering vision nonetheless.
And then, one day in my second year, my American history teacher, Mr. Harrison, explained how to study, and my brain began to perform. Halleluyah! Facts stuck to it! I loved to practice this teacher’s method, which was to read through the textbook chapter while my hand scribbled notes, then to shut the book and set down all I’d retained. Apparently the path to my head was through my hand, for I swiftly recalled more and more, as if I were stocking the shelves of my mind. I did thrillingly well on tests, for the first time in my life. 98s. 97s. The glittering apex of the grading system. I cinched my belt tighter, having discovered anorexia at the same time, and walked home merrily from Bronx Science under the roaring elevated train. Perhaps I wasn’t worthless after all.
As my brain developed, my body dwindled. In junior high I’d obliviously plumped up on A&P jellyrolls and deep-fried knishes and French toast with maple syrup—treats I allowed myself right after school. One day when I was in high school, though, my mother beckoned me to look into the mirror, and suddenly I had a body, and it was one with knobby hips and a gaping shirt. I associated this pudgy body with my stupidity, and began to carve away at both. Each Monday evening I sat beside my mother on a metal folding chair at the local Y and listened to the Weight Watchers lecturer, a kind man with loopy hair and expansive gestures, and then I carried home with me a fresh blank food chart on which to write down all I ate.
I loved filling out the chart. I loved noticing what before had been invisible. I seemed to be extracting myself out of oblivion. And I loved best of all when, at the start of each meeting on Monday, I stood in my stocking feet on the scale and the lecturer nudged the wedge of iron along the bar to establish my new weight. 104. 103 and a half. I was presented a black round pin holding a diamond sliver that glinted like a drop of Curie’s radium. I grew so thin that a new hole needed to be gouged in my belt, and then another new hole. I was happier than I’d ever believed I could be. I’d found a power. I’d discovered I could influence my life.
Still, I didn’t confuse the high grades I got at school with actual thought. It was merely performing a good trick, like playing three-dimensional tic-tac-toe. Still, my grades got me accepted into a liberal arts college that had a library reference room lined with faded tapestries. Every night from six p.m. until midnight I sat in one of the creaky, black-painted Windsor chairs and read the assigned books, underlining, copying out, savoring the monastic existence, which felt like virtue incarnate. I sipped scalding coffee with chalky whitener dispensed from a machine in the basement, and, on study breaks ate so many carrots my skin tinged orange.
Then, junior year of college I fell in love with a droll senior, and the anorexia ended. I gave up the charts on which I wrote down everything that I ate. Happiness itself was a bleary drug. For lunch I bought kaiser rolls and fresh sliced provolone cheese at a corner deli and picnicked with my boyfriend on his bed. When I was awarded Phi Beta Kappa I learned the fraternity handshake but didn’t invite my parents to the initiation. I believed that secretly I was still that girl unable properly to add things up because I hadn’t yet kicked shut that door inside me. It was still hanging wide. I was awaiting the signal that I had taken in sufficient information to be allowed to come to my own conclusions, to be a separate person.
In the meantime I remained merged somehow with those around me, agreeable, compliant. I understood that my perspective was often distorted, and that such a person should not draw conclusions. It was as if I had one giant eye and one tiny one, one eye the size of a jar lid and the other the size of a sewing needle’s. I responded with too much enthusiastic intensity to some situations, and at other times missed the crucial ramification and responded with a mechanical, irresponsible nonchalance. At some point in the future when my eyes were the same size, which would happen because I’d taken in sufficient information and had acquired some kind of balance, then I would trust myself to form judgments. I was waiting