A friend read my course load for spring semester, shaking his head at one of the class titles. “Women in Literature?” he asked. “You’ll never get laid in that class.” I had learned to step away from him when I saw his eyes wander from our conversation to women walking along the quadrangle. He stood agog but my gender made me feel as culpable as the passing women deemed me complicit.
I had purchased my books, read the course outline, and looked forward to the poems and stories of female authors I would be reading. Waiting in the hall for class to begin one day, a female classmate with short brunette hair shouldered her book bag and mentioned the reading assignment. She asked if I wasn’t getting a little tired of stories about teenage menstruation. I realized that I was not alone. In fact, when I suggested the “Lab Fee” was probably for the cost of personal examination mirrors, she laughed and said, “Yeah, I thought I was taking a literature course, too.”
As one young man among thirty women and their professor, I would offer an opinion in her class and be ignored. Once the pronoun attached to my words had changed, my femaile peers were willing to discuss my ideas. They were free to plagiarize me, repeating what I said verbatim, as if I hadn’t just uttered those very words. Until they needed another talking point, I drifted.
Having moved a thousand miles away from home years ago, I found myself corresponding with a friend who was working as a nanny some fifteen hundred miles away near the Gulf Coast. She was blond, heavy-chested, and wending her way through life with her body. With me, though, it had been Chinese takeout and fortune cookies that read: Sorry, I can’t; I’m saving myself for marriage. Regardless, we remained friends as life lead us in different directions.
On a night when the Santa Anna winds were scorching my Indian summer, she called me. Hearing a friendly female voice was comforting, but I hadn’t given her my telephone number. The next call from Houston was a hundred percent hot with frightening humidity. Her voice was panicked and pleading for help. Apparently she had a boyfriend, and he was beating her again. She couldn’t take any more. “He’s black and he’s gonna kill me,” she cried. “But I don’t have enough money to leave, Robert!”
“You’ve got to get out of there!” I said. I couldn’t bear knowing my friend was in pain. So I wired her a thousand dollars that night and told her to stay in a hotel by the airport.
Her boyfriend calmed down for a week, until she needed more money, I would learn. She had taken me for another grand before I caught on to her scam. I imagined them laughing at me from their deadbeat apartment, smoking their crack pipe and convinced they could fleece me a third time.
Class ended upon a student’s recitation of a short story. After which the brunette in the desk across the aisle from me muttered in discontent, “Did anyone else see anything wrong with an adolescent girl trying to escape her period by climbing a cherry tree?”
B. E. Smith is a freelance writer from Utah. In addition to essay and article publications, his stories and poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Gutter Eloquence, Zygote in My Coffee, The Legendary, Static Movement, the delinquent, and in the current issue of The Binnacle. He lives in Salt Lake City and is writing a memoir.
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