accomplishment. I almost wanted to e-mail the rat bastard in California to tell him how well I was surviving.
Well, on second thought, perhaps not.
On the Sunday night after my first week of working for Peach, I sat in my apartment with Scuzzy contentedly purring nearby, and I wrote checks to help pay off debts that had been hanging over my head seemingly forever. I’d already spent some of my money on what I was already thinking of as professional expenses, smart little suits at Next and the Express, lingerie from Cacique. Even with those extravagances, I made bill payments. I was going to be able to start answering the telephone again, instead of ignoring it so I could avoid potential creditors. I was going to stop feeling that tight fist of panic in my stomach when I opened my mailbox, wondering who was threatening to shut me off today.
To say that I was feeling good would have been the understatement of the century.
It showed, too. There was a new confidence about me. It may have been due to my new employment; or it may have just been the fact that I finally wasn’t slinking around avoiding bill collectors anymore. Whatever was happening, people were noticing.
The head of the sociology department, for whom I was teaching On Death and Dying, was the first to comment. “So – new boyfriend?”
I nearly spilled my coffee. “No, Hannah, why?”
She looked amused. “You’re looking so good these days. You look happy. I heard you humming in the ladies’ room, to tell you the truth. I thought that there might be somebody.”
No, Hannah, there are a whole lot of somebodies. There is a different somebody every night, if you really want to know. I repressed the thought and replaced the impish grin it engendered with a proper professorial attitude. “I’ve been working out more; maybe that’s it.”
The other sociology elective that I was teaching that semester was Life in the Asylum, a course that examined the shifting ways in which the well-intentioned but fundamentally cruel institutions of medicine and psychiatry dealt, historically and currently, with the mentally ill. I spent some time focusing on the so-called “paupers’ palaces,” the immense, grandiose state mental hospitals built in the nineteenth century to try and do the right thing – whatever that was perceived to be at the time.
The day after my shopping and mini-spa, I went into the “asylum” class (as its own inmates liked to call it) with a mixture of feelings that I was hard-pressed to sort out. We were in the middle of what I always found to be a difficult couple of weeks in the subject area: society’s use of mental hospitals as dumping-grounds for unwanted women.
I could never treat these classes with any kind of proper academic distance or dispassion, because they never failed to anger me. The superfluous spinster, the outspoken wife, the aging mother, all could be incarcerated if the man who wished to be rid of them found a doctor willing to sign a form attesting to her insanity. Once committed in such a manner, the victim could be released, not by the signature of the committing physician (or by any evidence of mental health), but only by permission of the male relative who had instigated the process.
I found it outrageous. Every time that I think or talk about it, I can feel my blood pressure rising.
The students had that week been reading Geller and Harris’ Women of the Asylum. They were presumably prepared to comment on the first-hand accounts recorded in the book, the voices of real women who had lived for years and even decades in lunatic asylums, the women who were no more crazy than the men who had sent them there.
Not more crazy, just more powerless.
I had begun to read, in my own newly-acquired independent study (or independent obsession, take your pick) about how prostitution was sometimes used as proof of insanity, and was feeling rather more passionate anger than usual. Perhaps not a strictly academic point of view.
Some of the women in the class were feeling even more vehement about what they had read than I was. That was usually the case, I have found, which is one of the highs, the joys, of teaching: give people information that they did not have before, and their passions come alive. Tell the truth, and watch it change lives.
Maybe even some day it might change the world.
There was a somewhat heated discussion involving most of the class – well, I’d anticipated that. It is, after all, really difficult to read words that express so much pain in such an eloquent way without having some emotional response to it. I let them go at it, walking around the classroom, making a comment here, asking a question there. Inevitably, we were drawn away from the topic, and I let that happen, too, to see where it might go, before reeling them back in again.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it, it’s just history, that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”
“Are you kidding? It looks different now. Maybe it’s less blatant, but nothing has really changed.”
“What exactly hasn’t changed?” That was me, the question asked quietly, innocently.
“What hasn’t changed? What has changed, that’s the real question! People still think that there’s something unnatural, something abnormal, about women who choose not to do exactly what they’re supposed to do.”
“That’s bullshit! Women are presidents of companies now!”
“What is it that women are ‘supposed’ to do?” I asked.
The response was vehement. “Everything! They’re supposed to do everything, be everything, and still be nurturing and non-threatening to everybody around them! They have to be sexy. They have to be a fantasy woman and at the same time be as good a cook as their husband’s mother! They’re supposed to want to have children, and if they don’t want children, if they want a career instead, they’re seen as selfish, self-centered, and not normal. I’d probably be put in an asylum if I lived a century ago!”
Another female voice chimed in. “And it’s sexual, too. Men used to be imprisoned for doing something wrong, women were incarcerated for being too sexual. If you wear skirts that are too short, or blouses that are too low-cut, or too much make-up or jewelry, you’re not fitting the expectations, so you get punished, you get called names.”
I looked at her. “What kinds of names?”
A shrug. “You know. Whore. Slut. Bitch. Either you fit into their image of you, or you’re insulted for it.”
“But you can’t win, because men want that, too! They want you to be a bitch at the same time that they call you names for being one!”
Another student said, “That’s the real difference. We only get insulted for being different. Back then, they got incarcerated for it.”
The voices continued as I looked off into the distance. I knew the truth of what they were saying, but I was hearing it as though for the first time. The first time that it applied to me, anyway. To call someone a prostitute, even now, was an insult. Even my students said it, so it must be true.
I gave them a writing assignment, told them to capture their thoughts and anger and passion on paper, because I knew that I would get primal, angry, real words from the women and primal, defensive, real words from the men. I sat down behind the desk and frowned down at the blotter. I was still dressed in my teaching clothes – skirt, knit silk shirt, jacket, flat shoes. I didn’t plan to change anything but the underwear before signing on tonight. So I was safe from society; if I didn’t look like a hooker, then maybe at some level I was still a nice girl.
Later, when I got to know some of the other women who worked for Peach, I would be surprised that no one would ever look at them and guess that they worked for an escort service. They didn’t look the part.
What was “looking the part?” I wasn’t even sure, myself, anymore.
* * * * * *
Peach called me at seven-thirty. “How late are you going to be around tonight?”
I