The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

by Kate Hattemer

  And “Against Mack!”

  And “Which one is she, again?”

  Before calc started, Monique whispered to me, “Has this ever happened before?”

  “What, that two people have run for chairman?”

  “Oh, Jemima, quit it. You know what I mean.”

  “That one of the chairman candidates has a vagina?”

  She winced. “Must you?”

  “What, use a medical term for a body part that over half the population—”

  “Mr. Ulrich,” said Monique. “Has a girl ever run for chairman before?”

  Mr. Ulrich is a teacher who comes off as personable in front of a class, but when you try to interact with him one on one, he’s super awkward. Nonetheless, he was the right person to ask. He’d been teaching at Chawton longer than we’d been alive.

  “I was wondering the same thing.” He was capable of chatting because he was behind the lectern. The Lectern That Giveth Social Skills. “The position’s been open to anyone since the merge with Ansel, but only once, in 1999, did a female student take it upon herself to run.”

  “What happened?” said Monique. “I mean, obviously she didn’t win, but—”

  “There was a bit of a scandal,” said Mr. Ulrich. “This student, she was quite the rebel. She fought many a battle with the administration. Piercings, dyed hair, et cetera.”

  “What was the scandal?”

  “Quite sad, really. It came out that she’d, well, gotten involved with someone. And they’d, well…” Wow. Mr. Ulrich was literally squirming. “I wouldn’t want to gossip, but this could be considered a cautionary tale….” He took off his glasses and cleaned them vigorously with his tie. “She became with child.”

  “A chairman candidate got knocked up?” said Tim Beanie. Most of the class, I saw, had stopped their other conversations to pay attention to Mr. Ulrich.

  “Most unfortunate,” he said. “And although it was taken care of…well, she was not the ideal representative of the school, the faculty thought. And so her candidacy was aborted.” He brought a hand to his mouth to cover his nervous titter. “I assure you, the pun was unintentional.”

  * * *

  —

  On Wednesday after school, I skipped Quiz Team for Powderpuff. This took some serious self-justification, given that I was Quiz Team captain and our last-ever tournament was in two weeks. I told myself it was because I was the Tigers’ first-string running back and thus essential for practice, but I knew it was because I wanted to get a ride home in that Jeep.

  It ate at me, though, as self-justification tends to do. I stomped out onto the field and stood alone while all the other girls milled around looking sun-kissed and gorgeous. The grass only looks so green, I thought, because of a noxious dose of fertilizer. And my classmates, seniors in May—they were beautiful, sure, but they knew it. That was the problem. The rot of self-awareness, of self-congratulation for beauty and youth and privilege and promise, when they hadn’t done anything to deserve it—

  Andy blew his whistle. We were split into groups for drills. “What about Kincaid?” asked Tyler.

  “Oh,” said Andy, “she can go wherever.”

  Excuse me?

  I skipped Quiz Team for this?

  Andy went with the other group. I ran the drill grimly, receiving a handoff from Jessica, evading Melanie to run ten yards down the field. I knew what was going on. We had learned about it in psychology the year before. It was called hedonic adaptation. Whatever pleasures you have, you get used to them. Like, a few years ago, I went on a wilderness trip with Chawton Outdoors, and by day three I’d have killed for a shower. When I finally got one, I felt like I was living in a fantasyland. Was this real life? Whenever I wanted, I could seclude myself in a clean compartment, have gallons of hot water dumped all over me, step into a soft towel, daub on sweet-smelling ointments—oh, the hedonism!

  Then the adaptation. I got used to it in two days.

  Once, not long ago, I’d have been content with Andy’s presence. I’d have been content to be on the same field, to glimpse him out of the corner of my eye. But now that I’d been introduced to new pleasures, the old ones were no longer enough. Andy had become a necessity for me. Bread, not cake.

  * * *

  —

  In the parking lot, after we’d cleaned up from practice, Andy caught my eye. He raised his eyebrows and jingled his car keys in his pocket. I nodded. We didn’t say much on the twilit drive to my house. He pulled into the driveway and turned off the car.

  “Finally,” he said.

  Crispin was having a housewarming party that weekend. “I’m invited?” I said when he called me. “Oh my God, Bippy, you’re finally treating me like a real adult, this is so great—”

  “Um, clarification. You’re invited to the pre-party.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’ll be really fun!” Too much enthusiasm. I smelled a rat. “Come over beforehand, hang out with your beloved older bro….”

  “Ah,” I said grimly. “Come help you prepare. Come vacuum your couch cushions. Come get ushered firmly out the door before your real friends show up.”

  “Glad we’re on the same page,” said Crispin.

  I grumbled awhile for the sake of my reputation, but I have low standards. Mom dropped me off at the Vienna station on Saturday, and I zoomed past the befuddled tourists, rode to Clarendon, and marched to Crispin’s high-rise, all the while pretending I was commuting to my high-powered, world-saving job in DC. Never mind that it was Saturday and I hadn’t left Virginia and I was wearing Keds with a romper. I felt extremely grown-up.

  Crispin, in what appeared to be swim trunks and nothing else, opened the door.

  “Hey!” I said. “Wow! It smells so good—”

  Then the heat struck.

  “Is the AC broken?” I said, fanning myself. “It’s got to be ninety degrees in here!”

  Crispin skipped over to the fancy Nest thermostat. “Eighty-two, actually.”

  I was already sweating. “Have you called maintenance?”

  “You must not have read the invitation,” he told me.

  “I didn’t get an invitation.”

  “The theme is global warming.”

  “You’re having a global-warming housewarming?”

  “Hence the temperature!”

  “That’s so tasteless!”

  He poked at the Nest. “This little guy was going haywire, but I’ve managed to override all his warning settings. Here’s hoping we hit eighty-six by the time the real guests arrive.” For the first time, I was happy to not be a real guest. “I got this idea back when the leasing agent told me heat was included. What do you think of the decor?”

  I looked around. He’d loaded up on tropical plants, and he’d garlanded blue crepe paper under a poster of a polar bear so it sort of looked like it was swimming. “My vision,” he said, “is for the futon to be the focal point of the party. It represents the melting polar ice cap.”

  It was white, I guess. “What’s to show it’s melting?” I said. “Shouldn’t you put some pans of water under it?”

  “I knew I invited you for a reason.”

  The heat was getting to me. I sat on the ice cap, plucking my romper from my sweaty back, and said, “I hope you told everyone to come in swimsuits.”

  “Of course. The dress code is Doomsday Beach Party.”

  “Is Thomas coming?”

  “Why else do you think I’m having a party?”

  I added throwing a party to my mental list of the extra things people do because of crushes. “Have your bosses found out yet?”

  He grimaced. “No, but this could be the night. I think the work people I’ve invited have been carefully vetted, but you never know….”

  Jeopardizing your job: another thing
to add to the list. “Be careful,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah. So, Bump. Your first challenge, should you choose to accept it—”

  I smiled. That was how Dad had always given us chores as kids.

  “—is to help me arrange these glass panels against the walls.”

  I thought about it. “Oh. The greenhouse effect.”

  “You got it.”

  “I still think this is super tacky.”

  “Does it help that I’m collecting donations for Greenpeace?”

  “Actually?”

  “Thomas’s idea. He said everything you’re saying, except with more profanity.”

  We propped up the glass panels. To be honest, it looked like it’d be a fun party. If, that is, the festive mood wasn’t shattered by the ever-present reminder of apocalypse. “In a global calamity,” said Crispin, “you probably wouldn’t care about a perfectly clean bathroom, right?”

  “Bip. You’re having people over. You’ve got to clean your bathroom.”

  “Your challenge,” he began, “should you choose to—”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Well, keep me company, then.”

  I sat on the edge of the tub while Crispin dumped cleaning solution into the toilet. “Cleaning tip number one,” he said. “Use enough Mr. Clean that the fumes make you dizzy.”

  “I’m already dizzy, it’s so hot in here.”

  “ ‘It’s getting hot in here,’ ” he warbled. “Stop whining. Chat. How’s everything at school?”

  “Busy. Quiz Team, Triumvirate, exams—”

  “You sound like a talking college application. You know what I’m asking about.”

  “Haven’t the foggiest.” I did, of course.

  He grimaced as he used the toilet brush on the inside of the bowl. “I’ve lived here three weeks. How is this possible? Okay. Come on. Andy, kissing, sex faucets. Tell me everything.”

  “We made out. In his Jeep. Twice.”

  “Well, shit,” said Crispin. “The good kind of shit. Not…” He wrinkled his nose at the toilet bowl. “Start at the beginning.”

  “I haven’t told anyone about this. I haven’t even told Jiyoon.”

  “All the more reason to tell me.”

  It sounded like I took some persuading, but I didn’t. I’d been thinking all day that I’d tell Crispin. I’d been thinking that even before Wednesday, when Andy and I had moved to the back seat and taken off our shirts with no discussion, and Andy had taken off my bra and draped it like some sort of beached sea creature on the passenger’s headrest while we rolled around and panted and felt each other’s skin and sucked each other’s necks and built up a slidey, glidey layer of sweat. He worked his hand up my shorts and teased the elastic of the built-in underwear—there was that un-Jemima mewl again, uncontrolled—and finally he set a few fingers over the fabric, right where I was pounding for him. “Wet,” he said, and I mumbled, “That’s your fault,” and he let out a half laugh before he resumed kissing me.

  But fair’s fair, I managed to remember before those fingers on my underwear stole all my capacity for rational thought. I girded my courage and moved my hand to the silky athletic fabric draping his crotch, which, as I guess I might have expected, was bulging. Oh. God. I mean, I knew it would be hard, but, like, purely in terms of physics or physiology or whatever, how was this possible? I’d been expecting a water balloon—something that, when prodded, would give—but this, well. This didn’t give. All that slang, boning and screwing and so forth, suddenly made a shocking amount of sense. And when Andy let out a quick breath as I tentatively moved my hand along the bulge, which, upon manual inspection, was revealed to have a rather predictable cucumberesque form, it all made sense. A shocking kind of sense. Sex, that is. I got it. This was why Helen of Troy. This was why teen pregnancy. This.

  The car windows steamed. I’d always thought that was a dumb movie cliché, but no, they actually steamed.

  I gave Crispin a highly censored outline of the above while he, riveted, knelt by the toilet.

  “You’re severely lacking in details,” he said. “Any clothes off?”

  “Shirts. And, er, an undergarment. My undergarment. The topmost one.”

  “Was there exploration of the nether regions?”

  “Ew, must you—”

  “Sorry, do you prefer ‘Did you touch his dick, did he rub your—’ ”

  “Stop!” I slid all the way into the tub and drew shut the shower curtain.

  “I’m just trying to get the story straight!”

  “You’re my brother!”

  “Which makes me the perfect person to tell. As a guy who’s, one, your kin and, two, gay, I’m so far from interested in you that it’s totally nonweird to tell me.”

  “When you put it that way…” I opened the curtain.

  “Well?”

  “A bit. But the nether clothes stayed on.”

  “So far, anyway,” he said. I had to hide in the shower again. “Hmm. Do you want advice? Or did you just want me to listen?”

  “Advice,” I said.

  “Emerge, then.”

  “I’m thinking you should leave the shower on during the party,” I said as I drew back the curtain. “To mimic rain-forest conditions.”

  “I’m paying the water bill, so no. Listen. Here’s my advice. Have fun. But be careful.”

  “We’re making out in his car, not sleeping together.”

  “You’d be surprised how thin the line is. Not that, though. Didn’t I tell you to think about what you want? Is this what you want?”

  “It’s exactly what I want.”

  “Then there’s some stuff you need to know.”

  “I’ve had sex ed. Condoms, consent, blah blah—”

  “Repeat this after me,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a tease.”

  “I know.”

  “Repeat it. Seriously.”

  “There’s no such thing as a tease,” I said.

  “Teases are a concept men invented to make people feel like they owe them sex. And you don’t owe him anything. Even if he’s up and ready to go. Still listening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can stop whenever you want. You don’t have to be polite. Keep thinking about what you want. Every minute. And if that changes, change what you’re doing.”

  I wondered what had happened to Crispin that was making him so serious. “Okay.”

  “Just be careful. Be careful about your…your heart, Bump.”

  “Isn’t it men who have heart attacks during sex?”

  “Very funny,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Come on.”

  “Andy and I—it’s a purely physical transaction,” I said. “No strings, no feelings. And that is what I want. I’m not expecting him to ask me to prom, or ask me on a date, or like me….”

  Crispin shook his head. The bathroom was moist and sparkling, the surfaces faintly steaming in the warm air. I followed him to the kitchen. “There are always strings,” he said, washing his hands. “Your feelings are always going to get involved. I’m saying, be careful. Do what you want. But you won’t be able to stop your heart from getting mixed up in it.”

  He shrugged and made a production of dunking the paper towel into the trash. Like he’d gone shy. And Crispin, my brother, my loud and ebullient big brother, he never went shy.

  “At least,” he said, “that’s my experience.”

  I had the attention span of a gnat. This was unfortunate, because life demanded concentration these days. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Andy. There was the intense kind of thinking (daydreaming, cruising his social media, lying in bed before I went to sleep), and there was the background kind of thinking, when I’d be doing something else—trying to do something else—and he’d be there, like a humming refrigerator
, like clinks and chatter at a coffee shop.

  Jiyoon and I were sitting on the floor by our lockers. We had sweatshirts over our school clothes with the hoods all the way up. It was that kind of Monday morning. “I know it’s stupid,” she said, “but I’m already nervous about the debate.”

  As Andy had announced, it was scheduled for Thursday’s Town Meeting. “You’re going to be awesome.”

  “I prepped a lot this weekend, but I don’t know, does prep even matter in this situation?”

  “Of course it does.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. Mack won’t get votes because he’s ready for the job.”

  “He’ll get votes because he’s Mack.”

  “And you’ll get votes because you’re Jiyoon and because you’re ready for the job.”

  “As many votes as I’ll lose because I’m Jiyoon?” she said.

  I glanced over, but with her hood up, all I could see was the tip of her nose. “I guess you can’t know,” I said, and she shrugged, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so we sat there in silence. Our hoods and the early morning reminded me of the monks we’d learned about in European history, the ones who sat in monasteries and copied Latin manuscripts and basically single-handedly saved classical civilization from extinction. I would have taken that life. I bet you got a lot of sleep, in between novenas and sharpening your quill. I bet the weight of heavy wool, not to mention original sin, made you not even want sex. You wouldn’t even have to worry about it. You wouldn’t have this tantalizing, painful glimpse, stuff in the back of a car that you weren’t even sure would happen again, and you wouldn’t ever think about someone so much that it felt like worrying a bump on the inside of your mouth.

  “Did you submit your Last Chance Dance picks?” said Jiyoon.

  “Last night.”

  “Without consulting me? Who are you?”

  The door at the end of the hallway opened. Andy came in this door when he parked in the back lot. But this was only some freshman, straggling along with a gym bag, pillow creases still on his cheek.