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Yet I could not sleep. I had more or less abandoned my room to Deedee and her friends, returning to it only to change my clothes. When the basement study room emptied out, after midnight usually, I tried to sleep there; on the battered old leather couch smelling of cigarette smoke and laced with burns. In the Kappa house I yearned for the aloneness of my previous life; as, in that previous life, I had yearned for the sisterhood of the Kappas. I was writing a paper titled "Free Will and Determinism in Spinoza" but it was a paper meant to penetrate the actual truth. For each page of my paper, each paragraph, each sentence, I was afflicted by others of equal authority swarming into my head like hornets. In my notes for this paper, there were strips of paper marked A, B, C, etc.; others marked 1, 2, 3, etc. There were vertical scribblings in blue ballpoint, horizontal scribblings in green ballpoint. Some of this was smudged. In an ecstasy of sudden clarity I wrote Spinoza made of his madness, art. I did not believe that my professor would admire this insight so I attributed it to an invented scholar. I could not sleep, yet to my dismay I could not maintain a reliable wakefulness at other times. My eyes open, I felt myself begin to flicker like a candle in a draft. Going out, out. And good riddance. My German-Jew grandmother scolded, shaking a flour-whitened forefinger. Why does flour, grainy and powdery, on human flesh, so appall? My mother, Ida, stood in a doorway staring at me, a hand lifted in greeting, or in farewell. Where her smiling mouth had been there was now a blood-blotch. They were concerned for my health, my sanity; though they did not give that name to it-sanity. A decent girl did not speak of sexual, and a decent girl did not speak of sanity I became worried that the soiled sanitary napkin might be traced back to me because I'd been the one to wrap it in newspaper and throw it into the trash. There was the fatal closeness of sanitary, sanity. I caused a gang of Kappas to laugh raucously by suggesting how the two might be linked. Oh, I was fu
"You!-what the hell are you doing here?"
I stammered what sounded like Nothing and fled.
Behind the day-old bakery on Mohawk Street a few blocks from the university. Off-campus, another world. I walked with my head lowered in shame, my face burning. It wasn't the first time I'd prowled behind the bakery but it was the first time I'd been caught. If I couldn't eat with my Kappa sisters, I'd discovered other ways of eating, or at least of locating food. (For sometimes I was unable to eat the purloined food, too. Teeming with invisible bacteria, the germs of hepatitis and death.) Unsold poppy seed rolls, broken cookies, smashed pies, rock-hard loaves of bread and coffee cake, stuffed loosely into garbage bags.
Should be ashamed of yourself!
Why? It's delicious.
Beyond the university in the reverse direction was Auburn Hills, a residential neighborhood of large, handsome houses on tree-lined streets, where sometimes on Sunday mornings I would prowl the alleys between Auburn Avenue and Palmer Street, making my way sniffing like a hungry dog, for in this well-to-do neighborhood, no one parked on the street or brought garbage or trash to the curb; there were garages to the rear of houses, opening onto unpaved alleys, it was caterers' cartons that brought my eye in the trash, the aftermath of Saturday night parties, leftover canapes, caviar jars where always some caviar remained, even deviled eggs, or parts of eggs, bread sticks, even, once, a sizable portion of an angel's food wedding cake. Sometimes I devoured these foods where I stood, hardly troubling to glance around to see that no one watched; sometimes I stuffed them into my duffel bag to carry away and eat in private; sometimes, stricken with remorse, or a fear of food poisoning, or a wish to punish myself further, I threw everything away. I saw no contradiction between my ideal self and my animal self. As Spinoza said We yearn to persist in our being.
In terror that tiny cysts were forming in my breasts I dared not touch myself. In terror that I would fall asleep in one of my classes or faint and fall out of my desk, embarrassing myself in front of a professor I adored, I cruelly pinched the insides of my arms or stabbed myself with my pen. On my pale forearms were smears of blue ballpoint ink like broken arteries. In any philosophical system of genius the professor pronounced there co-exist contradictions. A hand was raised like a puppet's jerked on a string. I was not one to speak in large classes, this could not be me. Not my voice ringing anxiously amid the banked tiers of old-fashioned desks. Yet if X is not wholly non-Y, how can it be X? Or is it something else? Which we agree to call X? In our cavernous lecture hall on the top floor of the ancient Hall of Languages. The professor mimed applause at the question but said it might best be addressed later in the course, in the study of Hegel. My eyes began to cross with fatigue. There came in quick cartoon flashes the humiliation, but it was comical, of having been chased from the rear of the day-old bakery, the apparition of a startled looking young black man with whom I nearly collided; but I'd had no incriminating evidence on my person, I'd dropped the rolls, the breads, the smashed cherry pie in order to flee. At the Kappa house, I dragged myself to the table. My vacant place at the head table. There, the humiliation, less comical, of a sinewy piece of roast beef quivering at the end of my fork, tumbling to the floor to escape like a living thing. Mrs. Thayer spoke briskly, her Brit accent brittle with sarcasm. The other girls looked upon me with pity; or did not look upon me at all. Perhaps I had mistaken them as predator birds. Mrs. Thayer summoned me into her sitting room. The glare of her impatient gas-blue eyes. I could not keep straight what I'd overheard: Mrs. Thayer had had no children, or Mrs. Thayer had had children and they'd died in the terrible London bombing? What is wrong with you, Janice? Do you behave like that to a