After half a lifetime of dating, Lena Michaels realized her most torrid affair had been with a girl—whose brash style had indelibly influenced the woman she'd become.
Because I was a shy child who was paradoxically frightened by all things new and ashamed of the things I did not know, I became infatuated, at the age of 11, with a girl whom I can only describe as the opposite of me. I first saw Larissa in the yard of our Brooklyn Catholic school: her school-issued plaid skirt rolled up at the waist, her blond hair pulled back and gelled firmly to her head (a look appropriated from the Latino girls), her backpack stamped with a million overlapping graffiti tags drawn in colorful Sharpies. Her facial features were blunt, her eyes greenish and a little wild, and her walk like that of a rare bird—loose-hipped and confident, her ample chest thrust out, leading the way. One day, after weeks of staring at Larissa, studying her, I saw her womanly hips swaying in my direction. Did I want to, like, hang out after school?
Larissa, like me, was the daughter of Eastern European immigrants and lived in a scarcely furnished apartment on the second floor of a two-family row house where Cyrillic lettering lined the bookshelves. Watching her after-school transformation was not unlike watching a rock star get ready for a performance. The plaid skirt and collared blouse were discarded on the floor and replaced by second-skin jeans and a low-cut top, the school flats by Air Jordans. (This was the first time I saw thong underwear; Larissa didn’t hide or leave the room to change like other girls our age.) She applied bronzer to her fair skin that left streaks along her jaw and then, with the quick, practiced motion of a calligrapher, outlined her mouth in dark, heavy lipliner. She pulled out one strand of hair from her tight bun and sizzled it with a curling iron, producing smoke. Gold hoops entered her earlobes.
“Okay, let’s go for a walk,” she said. Except that it was more like a parade. Larissa seemed to know every kid on every stoop. She greeted each one with a kiss on both cheeks, and when she introduced me, they kissed me, too, and I tried not to look startled. There was a girl named Nicole who had a scar across her orehead because, Larissa later explained, she’d been in too many fights. There was a boy named Angelo whom Larissa chased through the basketball courts and smacked across the face after he called her “Sweet Ass.” And Tiffy, who lived with her father, a prison security guard, and two younger brothers in an apartment that smelled of cats and beer; they called each other “Boo” and “Hon” and “Mama.” At some point we’d stop at a deli and buy 25-cent “juice drinks” in small plastic barrels and a “loosie”—three cigarettes for a dollar. By then it was dark out, and my mother, somewhat concerned when I called after 9 P.M., came by bus to pick me up.
The word prude, a word I hadn’t known until Larissa started playfully taunting me with it, describes how I thought of my mother. The daughter of academics, she’d grown up with her nose in books, lost her virginity to my father in her twenties, and, though they’d separated before I was even born, would never be with anyone else. She never wore makeup and always kept her hair boyishly short. She was afraid of highways, spicy food, action movies, and the evening news. Cursing made her go pale. And though I couldn’t quite articulate it, I realized then that I’d inherited her fear, her shaky nerves—and more importantly, that I could become her if I didn’t do something about it. I wanted to be shocked out of what I saw as her limited and dull existence, to learn what I thought my mother had failed to. The day I met Larissa, I knew she was the teacher I’d been waiting for.
Because our parents worked several jobs, we were like house cats you’d check on from time to time with preoccupied curiosity. I can hardly remember what we did each day, but none of it, to me, was ordinary; most of it, in retrospect, reckless; and all of it fun. Like the time Larissa and I walked around in the rain all day (“It’s just water,” she said as I hesitantly threw my mom’s battered umbrella in the trash can) until our hair hung in wet spirals and our sneakers squished. Or when I slept over at Larissa’s grandmother’s in Coney Island, and we took our blankets to the beach at two in the morning and waited for the sun to rise. And, this being the early days of dial-up Internet, the time Larissa persuaded me to meet a couple of “guys” we’d been “chatting” with on AOL Instant Messenger. They could have been anyone but turned out to be 17-year-old boys, and Larissa hooked up with the better-looking of the two while I sat on the couch with the other and watched Full House.
Being friends with Larissa was a little like being abducted: I never could decide whether I should have run—run far, far away from her— or if I loved her in a sense so pure that were it a case of Stockholm syndrome, I’d have never known it. More than any boy who’d come later, it was Larissa to whom I lost my innocence; it was Larissa who would inform—and direct the course of—every romantic relationship I had thereafter. The subconscious checklist when I met a boy in my teens, and, later, men in my twenties, was simple: Did I feel intimidated? Frightened? Was there something strange about them—a kind of otherness?
My fascination with someone would begin with a kernel of information that baited my curiosity. There was the premed student who, having been diagnosed as bipolar, refused to take his medication; a philosophy professor who on our first date told me that his mother had recently attempted suicide by driving off what she thought was a cliff but turned out to be the edge of a ditch; a career waiter who revealed, also on our first date, that a freak accident had left him impotent; a musician who wore women’s clothing; a male model; a car dealer; a drug dealer; an art dealer; a successful author; an unsuccessful author; and an eccentric video artist. “It’s like you’re playing Choose Your Own Adventure with dating,” a friend once said to me. “You don’t look for partners. You look for teachers.”
But there were also times when I found myself not only reenacting the role of Larissa’s student but copying Larissa herself. Whereas she was what my mother called “healthy,” with thick hips and thighs and C-cup breasts, I, as a teenager, was shapeless, scrawny, frizzy-haired, cherub-faced. (Larissa’s friends nicknamed me ELF: Larissa’s Little Friend; only later, as an adult, did I come to prefer my thin, elongated frame to her exaggerated curves.) I loved watching the way Larissa was with boys. The way she’d playfully throw her leg over a guy’s with aplomb. How she’d shout back at catcallers (“Thanks, hon!”) when they called her “baby” or attached an adjective to one of her impressive body parts. By modeling my movements and the way I talked after her, I hoped some of her prodigious confidence would rub off on me. It was always in the moments when I felt most shy or apprehensive—most like myself—that I’d walk taller, laugh louder, curse too much, swing my hips, plant my heels.
To understand the effect this act had on the opposite sex, all you have to do is consider the difference between Lyla Garrity and Tyra Collette—Jackie and Marilyn resurrected—on the show Friday Night Lights. Lyla, with her cooing voice and baked goods, may be marriage material, but it’s Tyra, with her exposed midriff, who always turns heads. That someone like Tyra or Larissa could not keep male attention for very long is not the point. It was the control, the ease with which I learned I could obtain full command of the male libido (a concept I’m sure I didn’t actually grasp then) simply by pushing my shoulders back and using my limbs as tentacles to be casually rested on whichever male friend was nearby.
As we started eighth grade and Larissa told me about losing her virginity—the same year the nuns had begun preaching abstinence—the details she divulged about her sexual encounters disturbed me almost as much as they fascinated. She told me that men liked to pull her hair, that “shower sex” is not a good idea because the tiles hurt your back. Once, I turned around from the front seat of a car and saw Larissa running the tip of her tongue up the side of her boyfriend’s neck.
I knew what I saw in Larissa but not what she saw in me: What would a girl like her, who could easily find a sidekick as daring as herself, want with a prude? I never thought deeply about the answer until Andrew and I split up. I met him in my early twenties, and, like Larissa’s, his life seemed foreign and seductive. Only seven years my senior, he lived in a large apartment with bookshelves and expensive, antique furniture. He was a successful screenwriter. He was the kind of person who would decide midweek to buy a plane ticket someplace simply because he could, because he wanted to.
The three years I spent with Andrew were careless, impulsive. I’d just graduated college and should have been looking for a job; instead, I spent almost every day with him. In Los Angeles, we’d go to house parties and seedy Hollywood clubs. In New York, we’d get in his car and drive—upstate to visit open houses, pretending we were “in the market to buy”; to the beach in winter; to Brooklyn, where I would show him the places I used to hang out with Larissa. Other times, he’d work all day, and I’d lie in bed reading and watching him work. Or he’d read his writing aloud to me, and I’d listen with affection. I loved the way I felt around him, and so I stopped focusing on my life—full of worries and bills and questions about the future—and moved into his.
Then something happened. It began when, after two years of watching him work, I found a job I loved. I began acquiring things he had, things I’d wanted: connections, nicer clothes, furniture, rent money. Trips now had to be planned around my few vacation days. Our conversations changed from talking about his work to talking about mine, too. When he showed me his writing, I offered edits. And without my realizing it, our chemistry began to dissolve into polite resentment. I desperately wanted his attention and praise; he missed mine. We were still together when he went to bed with someone else—someone much younger, someone who was just like me when he and I first met. I didn’t understand, couldn’t see why, when I was inching closer to becoming his equal, he no longer wanted me. When we broke up, he looked down at his feet and said, “I can see the way you see me now, and I don’t like it.”
Treating relationships like a class in school means realizing that the semester always ends, the student learns, and the professor moves on. Or worse, the student loses faith in the teacher, sees his flaws, stops believing in the curriculum.
In junior high, I tried to keep up with Larissa in small ways: wearing lipliner, parting my hair on the side and gelling it. Clothes didn’t fit my prepubescent body the way they did hers, so I had my jeans tailored to hug what were not hips but bones. I learned to inhale.
I would have gone further, become more and more like Larissa until she inevitably adopted a new recruit, leaving me heartbroken and confused, like a monster abandoned by the scientist who created it. It would have happened were it not for the time when I saw Larissa in a way I never had before: as a young girl no more sure than I was about how to maneuver the adult world she so wanted to be a part of.
It was very late on a cold February night, and we were walking some 20 blocks back to Larissa’s because, as usual, she didn’t have enough money for bus fare. I must have been complaining, because the next thing I knew, Larissa was pulling me by the sleeve into the street and raising her thumb. “Let’s hitch-hike!” she said. A black Lincoln pulled over, and before I could object, Larissa opened the back door for me and hopped into the passenger seat herself. I couldn’t see the driver’s face, but I could see the bald spot that loomed above the car’s headrest and a large, hairy hand on the gearshift. The radio was loud, and if they talked, I couldn’t hear them.
What happened next I remember as a series of muted images. When we pulled up to Larissa’s house, Bald Spot began whispering in her ear, and the hairy hand took hers across the glove compartment. I saw Larissa shaking her head no. I opened my door halfway, one foot on the asphalt, the other still inside the car. The hairy hand took hold of the back of Larissa’s head, and then Bald Spot was bobbing up and down along her neck. I saw Larissa try to pull away. Then, suddenly, the driver recoiled. Sound returned, and I heard Larissa: “Run!” As we ran past Larissa’s dad and into her room, she told me that she’d bitten the driver’s hand. The cool, indifferent tone of her voice was gone, and for the first time I saw what Larissa looked like when she was afraid. We didn’t speak for the rest of the night. I can see the way you see me now, and I don’t like it. And when a few months later my mother said that we were moving to the suburbs, I didn’t argue.
It’s ironic that I missed what was perhaps the most important lesson that Larissa could have taught me. And I missed it again and again as I looked for her in the men I’d go on to be with—until I met Andrew and finally saw how skewed our power dynamic was, how completely I’d lost myself in the myth that he had created. Comfortable as I was in the role of elfin sidekick, I’d never chosen a relationship that required me to be an active party.
And yet there are still so many times when I think of Larissa. I think of her whenever I see Catholic schoolgirls acting out on the subway, away from the watchful eyes of the nuns, and remember how complicated, how fraught their lives may be when they’re not in their uniforms. I think of her when I leave home without an umbrella and tell myself that it’s just water when it starts to rain. Other times, I find myself imitating her exaggerated stride in the presence of men whose attention I want, or when I get catcalled by men whose attention I don’t want and have to remind myself not to be afraid. I think of her when I casually throw my leg over a guy’s and suddenly see— with the same disquieting wonder that comes when you look down at your hands one day and see your mother’s—Larissa’s denim-wrapped thigh.
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