The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid Page 2

  “All we’ve got left is Jamboree,” said Andy. That’s Chawton’s big end-of-year celebration, an all-weekend affair with a bonfire and a Powderpuff game and an alumni reunion and prom. As Senior Triumvirate, we had a lot of shit to do.

  “We need a really good theme for prom,” said Gennifer.

  “Prom is the worst,” I said. “Maybe we should cancel it.”

  “Okay, Jemmy, no—”

  “The guys ask the girls. Always. I’m speaking heteronormatively because only heterosexual couples even go. The girls wait passively for an invite—sorry, a promposal—and the guys get to choose who to ask.”

  “That’s a problem?” said Andy.

  I rolled my eyes at him. “It’s practically a silent auction.”

  “The girls still get to say yes or no,” said Gennifer. “That’s a lot of power.”

  “What if we change the rules?” I said.

  “Let’s have, say, a silent auction,” Andy suggested. “The girls pose on tables and the guys stroll around and bid—”

  “You’re a misogynistic cretin,” I told him. He bowed. I smiled. I killed that smile so fast, but he saw it. I knew he did.

  Damn it.

  Andy freaking Monroe.

  We straggled out into the April evening. No legacy, no idea. Nothing behind us but a string of failures, nothing ahead but swiftly plunging blood sugar.

  “Think,” said Andy. “We’ll come up with something.”

  * * *

  —

  Crispin was at the wheel of our mom’s Lexus. “At last!” I cried, belly-flopping in. “My getaway car! Drive, Jeeves, drive!”

  “You’re always horrible after these things.”

  “Flee this accursed place!”

  He braked. The car stopped. We hadn’t even exited the circle. “You going to act normal?”

  I slumped back. “Yes, Jeeves.”

  He didn’t lift his foot from the brake.

  “Yes. I am acting totally normal. Unscarred and serene after an evening with a hundred Old White Dudes, Ghennifer Grier my only succor.”

  “You’ve got to stop using that word.”

  “It’s a good word.” Hadn’t anyone realized that the more they told me I couldn’t do something, the more I’d do it? “The word succor provides me much succor.”

  Crispin shook his head, but at least he started driving. He’d graduated from Chawton six years ago and from UVA two years ago. Now he worked at a consulting firm and lived in our basement, though Mom told me he was moving out. (I’d believe it when I saw it.) “Mom dumped the driving on you?” I said.

  “It’s a thankless task, but someone has to deal with the disagreeable runt of the litter.”

  “There’s only two of us. We don’t count as a litter.”

  “You had quite a night, huh, Bump?” said Crispin. “You’re arguing with literally everything I’m saying—”

  “Is that so unusual?”

  “—including this very sentence.”

  “I wouldn’t call it arguing—”

  “Relax. Deep breaths. Tell your old Bip how happy he should be he didn’t show.”

  Crispin had been chairman his senior year at Chawton. He’d gotten a thick, cream-papered invitation to this reception, and he’d recycled it immediately.

  “Did your Triumvirate do anything?” I said.

  “Besides each other?”

  “Ew, no details.” Though I was sort of intrigued. I weighed my gag reflex against my curiosity, but given the all-too-recent frosting debacle, I chose the prudent path and redirected the conversation. “Were you worried about your legacy?”

  “How quaint. No, we were too busy banging.”

  “All three of you?” I said impulsively. “No—wait—don’t—”

  “Not at the same time. Despite the Mildred’s repeated propositions.”

  I groaned.

  “Oh, high school,” said Crispin with a reminiscent sigh. “The weirdest time of life.”

  “Seven weeks left,” I said. Sometimes I felt like I had a foot out the door, and sometimes I thought, Can’t I just stay? Chawton wasn’t the real world. I knew that. It was a bubble, a snow globe, all privilege and academic glory and social hierarchies and free cake. I didn’t even like Chawton that much, but without my having had much choice in the matter, it had become my home.

  Crispin went out that Saturday night, and my dad was at work, so I had to ask my benightgowned mother to give Jiyoon a ride over to our house. I felt guilty. I didn’t like asking Mom for anything, meals or rides or advice or whatever: she offered what she could, I figured, and I tried to provide the rest myself. Mom gets migraines, these hellish headaches that make her curl into a ball and shun the light like a vampire fetus. She’s tried a bunch of medications and remedies and therapies and stuff, everything on the market plus some. Nothing’s worked. And no one knows what triggers the headaches, so even when she’s feeling okay, she has to avoid sugar, screens, cheese, sleep disturbances, caffeine, loud conversation, and excitement. Basically, everything that makes life worth living.

  She put a sweater on over her nightgown and I followed her out to the car. “You’d never have to drive me anywhere if I had my license,” I pointed out.

  “Once your father’s schedule eases up, he’ll teach you.”

  I’d had my permit for two years. Twenty-four months. One hundred and four weeks. And my dad had taken me driving exactly once, and a few minutes in, before he’d even let me switch seats with him, he got an important call and we had to go home. “He taught Crispin right away.”

  “Crispin was different.”

  “Well, that’s a little sexist.”

  “Jemima. It has nothing to do with your gender. He just doesn’t want to have to replace the brake pads again.”

  “Who says I’d suck as much as Crispin did? Crispin’s not known for his motor skills. Besides,” I said, suddenly processing, “that’s the real reason? I thought he was too busy!”

  “That too.”

  “Crispin could teach me.”

  “Crispin’s working long hours these days.”

  “You could teach me.”

  “Sweetheart. Be patient. We’ll take you where you need to go.”

  Did having a kid wipe all your memories of being a kid? There was a huge difference between getting a ride and being your own ride. And it wasn’t like I was going to absquatulate with the car for a wild road trip to Mexico. I was a nerd. My best friends were from Quiz Team. The closest I had ever come to pot was when I went to a lecture at George Mason last April 20, and I’d spent the whole afternoon thinking that someone was burning rope.

  I mean, guys. I was the Mildred.

  “Give a girl a fish and she eats for a day,” I said into the silence. “Teach a girl to fish and she eats for a lifetime.”

  My mom sighed and switched on NPR.

  * * *

  —

  Some friends you go places with and some you just chill with, but Jiyoon and I always make stuff. It’s funny because alone, we aren’t crafty; alone, all we do is read, not out of virtuous self-betterment or anything but because we’re lazy and escapist and, I guess, kind of lonely. Together, though, we do weird projects like building a functional scale model of an Archimedes’ screw or sewing an Arachne doll that turns inside out into a spider. A few months before, we’d turned Pride and Prejudice into a card game called Pemberley, sort of a cross between gin rummy and The Bachelor. It was a big hit among the Quiz Team crowd.

  “My mom suggested we have chopped salad for dinner,” I said to Jiyoon. “That okay?”

  “Sure.”

  We chopped for a while, talking about unimportant stuff like:

  Jiyoon: “The only accurate word to describe this cucumber is flaccid.”

  Me: “
No. The word flaccid belongs in just one context.”

  Jiyoon: “Feel it, really.”

  Me: “Limp as…”

  Together: “…a dick.”

  Cackle, cackle. Dick jokes are funniest when you’ve never seen a live one. We ate on the spinny stools at the kitchen island. “What makes the perfect prom?” I asked her.

  “Not going,” she said immediately.

  “You like dances.”

  “Not prom. Prom’s about three things. One, the ask. Two, the photos. Three, getting wasted at the after-party, despite graduation the next morning. I will never go to prom.”

  “I bet you’ll go next year.” Jiyoon was a junior.

  She started twirling on her stool. “Not a chance.”

  I hadn’t twirled on these stools for years, but I joined her. Conversation briefly ceased.

  “Oh, gross, so dizzy,” said Jiyoon. “What was I saying?”

  “Prom?”

  She clutched her stomach. “Blech.”

  “Do you need a bucket?”

  She put a hand over her mouth and waved me away. While she recovered, I thought about prom. Blech indeed.

  “Okay,” she said. “When did I get old? Next thing I’ll realize I hate roller coasters.”

  “I already hate roller coasters,” I confessed.

  “You know? Same.”

  “Maybe we should bust out the sherry and prunes.”

  “High-fiber crackers.”

  “Cottage cheese.”

  “We should make something old-fashioned tonight,” she said. “Like…a diorama.”

  I went with it. “A diorama of when we’re aged spinsters, living together, eating high-fiber crackers, hating roller coasters.”

  “And men.”

  “We already do,” I said.

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “Men hate me.”

  “Uh-huh. Right. Find a shoebox.”

  We made a gigantic mess on the kitchen table as we turned the shoebox into a parlor suitable for Old Jiyoon and Old Jemima, blue-haired troll dolls who were briskly christened Dotty and Dorcas.

  Jiyoon measured the sides of the box for wallpaper. “My dad got another job in Indiana. Three more months.”

  “Ji! That’s—well, great. And not great.”

  “Yep.” Her dad, who does construction, couldn’t get work here in Virginia, but when he’d heard there were jobs in Indiana, he’d gone out there with a few other guys from their church. “He hates living in a motel.”

  “I bet.”

  She was quiet, her bottom lip between her teeth as she cut gold-and-green-striped wrapping paper.

  “It must be hard on your mom,” I ventured. “Not to have him home.”

  “The money is nice. More than nice. Necessary. But my mom gets down. When he’s home, she cooks and cleans and, you know, moms, but now…well, I try to get Hae-Won and Min to help me, but Hae-Won sleeps all the time, she’s such a blob, and Min’s sweet, he says he wants to help, but he’s ten, so how much can you expect? He tries but gets distracted, or I get mad at him because he does a sucky job….” She shoved the wallpaper into the back of the shoebox. “Damn. The stripes aren’t straight.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters.” She laughed. “I may have to hide out over here for a few months. That’s all.”

  “Can I—”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Can we do anything to help?” I finally said.

  “No,” she said flatly. “It’ll get better once my dad gets back.”

  Jiyoon and I are best friends, and we supposedly talk about everything. But we don’t talk about money. We don’t talk about the fact that my dad is general counsel for a corporation you’ve heard of, and her dad is a construction worker. And my mom has stayed at home since Crispin was born, and her mom is a receptionist at a gastroenterologist’s office in Annandale. When Jiyoon and I met, back in elementary school, her mom cleaned houses. That’s how we met, to be honest. Her mom cleaned our house.

  I’m not like some of the kids at school, going to Antigua for long weekends, getting a Maserati for sweet sixteen. But we have a big house in a pricey suburb; we have three newish cars. If I need—want—a haircut or cleats, I ask and get. When the school put on a dog-sledding trip to Maine, I went. Chawton costs as much as a private college. Jiyoon is on scholarship.

  Nobody at Chawton talks about money.

  “Seriously, Dorcas,” she told me. “Pretend I didn’t say anything. Everyone’s fine. Like, we’re getting fed. It’s just a little depressing.”

  “Okay,” I said uncertainly. “But tell me if—”

  “Will do. New subject.” She ripped the crooked wallpaper from the shoebox with perhaps more force than necessary. “Dotty and Dorcas do not tolerate shoddy workmanship!”

  “We need a couch,” I said. “What would you say to papier-mâché getting involved?”

  “Do you know me? I am always down for papier-mâché.”

  I found some balloons and stirred up a batch of flour-water paste. A papier-mâché couch, however, was a more intricate project than I’d imagined. “This is going to look like a blob,” I said.

  “Maybe Dotty and Dorcas want beanbag chairs instead of a couch,” said Jiyoon.

  “Good call.”

  I got the hair dryer to hasten the process. “So,” I said as I blasted the soggy beanbag chairs. The scent of lightly toasted flour filled the air. “About prom. It needs to be the best dance ever. I don’t know whether we need to up our game with the decor, or the theme, or—”

  “None of that matters.”

  “Of course it matters.”

  “Nope.” She motioned down to the diorama. “Look at Dotty and Dorcas. Shitty crooked wallpaper, swampy-ass beanbag chairs, and they still love it, because they get to hang together. Prom’s like that. It’s who you’re there with.”

  “Right,” I said. “You’re so right.” In the corner of my brain, the hazy outlines of an idea came into being. But ideas are skittish. You can’t show them the whites of your eyes. “I love it too,” I said, moving the hair dryer even closer. “Hanging together, just Dotty and Dorcas. Shitty wallpaper and all.”

  Jiyoon sniffed. “Something’s burning,” she said. “You should turn that off. Now.”

  It is a Chawton tradition (get used to that phrase) that Senior Triumvirate meets alone. As the school tells prospective parents, the level of autonomous responsibility allowed to Chawton’s student government is truly unique.

  Translation: they give us a lot of tedious shit to do and they don’t have to sit through us figuring out how to do it.

  “We need to get Powderpuff going,” said Gennifer after school on Monday. She usually ended up running our meetings because she was the only one who prepared beforehand.

  “Powderpuff is the reason I wanted to be on Triumvirate,” said Andy, stretching his arms behind his head. “I can take charge of that.”

  “Ugh, Powderpuff,” I said, even though I was distracted by the pleasant bulge of Andy’s biceps. He’d taken off his tie and rolled up his sleeves. He had nice forearms. Lean, tanned, golden-haired—

  “I’ll assign the girls to teams,” said Andy.

  “Don’t forget dealing with jerseys and fan gear,” said Gennifer, who is a walking to-do list. “And you have to organize the fund-raising competition, find faculty refs, appoint senior guys to coach—”

  “I’m appointing myself,” said Andy.

  “Fair,” I said sarcastically. I was ignored.

  “And I’ll survey all the guys in our class to see which team they’re rooting for.”

  “I hate Powderpuff,” I said.

  “I thought you hated prom,” said Gennifer.

  “I do.”
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br />   “Is there anything you don’t hate?”

  “It’s all so…problematic.”

  Powderpuff is the biggest event at Jamboree. The senior girls play football: the Angels vs. the Tigers, since our school mascot is the Angel Tiger. Everyone gets so into it. The guys all support one team or the other, cheering or literally cheerleading, and the alumni love it too because it’s a lifelong allegiance, which team you root for. There’s even a big secondary competition over whether the Angels or the Tigers get the most donations to the Chawton Annual Fund.

  “You think it’s sexist?” said Andy.

  I knew what I would write if I were doing an op-ed for the school paper. A mockery of female athleticism. A throwback to an era when the idea of girls on a football field was a hilarious reversal of gender roles. But I knew this, too: If you were going to call something out, you had to be like a chess player. You had to think a move ahead. It’s not a mockery, they’d say. The girls are serious about winning. There are practices, a playbook. It’s like any other sport.

  I wasn’t satisfied but I didn’t know how I’d rebut the rebuttals, and so my pawns held fast and my queen mused, silent and still, behind her army.

  “It’s the twenty-first century,” said Andy. “If it were sexist, someone would have gotten rid of it already.”

  “So are you playing?” said Gennifer.

  “Me?” I said.

  “You play soccer,” said Andy. “You’d be good.”

  “But it’s so…” I struggled for the right word. “Problematic,” I said again.

  “Lighten up, Jemmy,” said Gennifer.

  “As the newly appointed head coach of the Tigers,” Andy said, “I’m drafting you, Kincaid.”

  He smiled at me and I felt a rush of warmth, a cozy and anticipatory stirring, like when you get home and you smell dinner before you open the door and that’s when you realize how hungry you are. Like there were good things in store. What if I let go and got excited for Powderpuff? What if I dropped the Jemima Kincaid, Angry Feminist thing for like three seconds and…and had a good time?