Mislaid. Nell Zink
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other famous poets came all the way to Stillwater to read to his classes. Tommy, the smartass owner of the white snack bar in town, called them “international faggotry” and always asked them if they wanted mayonnaise with their coffee.
Peggy Vaillaincourt was born in 1948 near Port Royal, north of Richmond, an only child. Her parents were well-off but lived modestly, devoting their lives to the community. Her father was an Episcopal priest and the chaplain of a girls’ boarding school. Her mother was his wife—a challenging full-time job. This was before psychologists and counseling, so if a girl lost her appetite or a woman felt guilty after a D&C, she would come to Mrs. Vaillaincourt, who felt important as a result. The Reverend Vaillaincourt felt important all the time, because he was descended from a family that had sheltered John Wilkes Booth.
The Vaillaincourts had a nice brick mansion on campus. Peggy went to the local white public school to avoid a conflict of interest. Her mother had gone to Bryn Mawr and regretted not sending Peggy to a better school. “Can’t you imagine a college that’s academically a little more intellectual?” she asked Peggy. “What about Wellesley?” But Peggy wanted to go to Stillwater.
It came about like this: Her PE teacher, Miss Miller, had said something about her gym suit, and Peggy had realized she was intended to be a man. Gym suits were blue and baggy, but as you got older, they were less baggy and sort of cut into your crotch in a way that was suggestive of something, she didn’t know what. Miss Miller had stood in front of her and yanked her gym suit into position by pulling down on the legs. She placed her big hands around Peggy’s waist and said something to the effect that her gym suit had never fit her right and never would.
She had felt close to Miss Miller since the day she fell down in third grade and knocked out a tooth. Miss Miller dragged her to the bathroom to wash the blood off her mouth, and the tooth went down the drain. “There goes a nickel from the tooth fairy,” Peggy had said. Miss Miller dug into her pocket and produced a quarter. No other adult had ever given her so much money all at one time. The scene was stuck indelibly in the child Peggy’s mind. Her allowance was nine cents—a nickel and five pennies, of which she was required to put one in the collection plate.
Realizing that her girlhood was a mistake didn’t change her life immediately. She could still ride, play tennis, go camping with the scouts, fish for crappie, and shoot turtles with a BB gun. Around age fourteen, it got more complicated. She informed her best friend, Debbie, that she intended to join the army out of high school. She knew Debbie from Girl Scout camp. Debbie was from Richmond, a large and diverse city. “You’re a thespian,” Peggy heard her say. “Get away from me.” Debbie picked up her blanket and moved to the other side of the room. Then Peggy’s life changed. Debbie had taught her to French kiss and dance shoeing the mule, knowledge that was supposed to arm them for a shared conquest of debutante balls. And now this. Betrayal. Debbie never spoke to her again. Peggy told her mother.
“A thespian,” her mother said, bemused. “Well, darling, everybody gets crushes.” Her mother was from the generation that thought a girl’s first love is always a tomboyish older girl. She gave Peggy Cress Delahanty to read. It was counterproductive. “You are not, absolutely not, going to join the army. Do you hear me? You are going to college. Get this out of your system. You’ll laugh at yourself someday.” Her mother suspected her of having a girlfriend already, and sent off for brochures about early admission to Radcliffe. She didn’t believe in coeducation, but her daughter’s plight called for desperate measures.
But Peggy didn’t have a girlfriend. Once she accepted an invitation from Miss Miller to a barbecue at the state park. There were only women there and no other girls. She recognized the woman everybody said was the maintenance man at the elementary school. It was indirectly her fault that Peggy thought of “man” as a job title. They were playing softball and taking it really seriously, hitting the ball so hard you could get hurt. Peggy left the party to play horseshoes with kids from the Baptist church instead and get a ride home on their bus.
She began paying more attention to the thespians at school. They were fat girls and nice boys with scarves around their necks under their shirts. She auditioned for a part in Our Town and didn’t get it. Afterward the drama club went to the drugstore for milkshakes, and the director, a senior, explained to her about lesbians. He chuckled and shook his head a lot. Everybody else laughed so loud that Peggy felt inconspicuous, despite the topic. His voice was almost a whisper. “You and your friend Miss Miller are bull dykes. You should go to dyke bars in Washington. Or Stillwater College.”
“Miss Miller is not my friend!”
After that, word got back to Peggy’s mother, and Miss Miller and the maintenance man were fired and moved away. Peggy insisted Miss Miller had never done anything untoward. Becoming a man and a thespian had been her idea. Her mother said, “You have chosen a very difficult life for yourself.” Then they shopped for patterns, because Peggy’s debut was coming up and, lesbian or no lesbian, you had to have a tea-length off-the-shoulder dress made of boiled cotton with a flower print and tulle underskirts. Cutoff overalls were fine for hunting turtles in the woods, but even Peggy wanted to be pretty for cotillion. In the end she was so pretty she stopped herself cold. She stood in front of the full-length mirror in the ladies’ dressing room at the Jefferson Hotel in her slip and silk stockings and felt an almost overwhelming need to masturbate. She adjudged herself the prettiest girl she’d ever seen. “I feel pretty, oh so pretty,” she sang instead, waltzing with her dress as though it were a girl. Pinocchia, granted her wish. Someone to love. Then she graduated and went off to Stillwater.
For freshman orientation she bobbed her hair and took up smoking cigarillos. She had bought some new outfits at an army surplus store. She did not question her childhood equation of liking girls with being a man, and in black khakis and a black crew-neck sweater, she found herself rough, tough, and intimidating. She looked darling. The short cut made her curly hair form a crown of soft ringlets. She regarded her narrow hips and flat chest as boyish, but in 1965 they were chic.
Also, as much as she wanted to be a man, she was revolted by hairiness, fat bellies, belching, vulgarity, etc. Her slim father wore ascots and got manicures. His face was soft and his shirts had monogrammed cuffs. She thought black penny loafers with white socks à la Gene Kelly was the epitome of working-class butch.
The campus was a complete universe. You never had to leave. There were visiting boyfriends and girlfriends from other schools, parties and mixers, intercollegiate sports, a mess hall and a commissary, even a soda fountain. As self-contained as an army base. But no basic training. No cleaning, no cooking. The work you had to do consisted of things like ponder Edna St. Vincent Millay. If you screwed it up, they didn’t criticize you. They invited you to their offices, offered you sherry, and asked you what was wrong.
I can’t believe it, Peggy thought. My parents are paying for me to do this for four years. If you majored in French, you could spend your third year at the Sorbonne. But the seniors who had been away came back looking lost. New cliques had formed without them, and their French friends never visited. Peggy took Spanish instead. She decided to major in creative writing. She wanted to write plays for her fellow thespians.
Peggy’s roommate was a girl from Newport News whose father was in Vietnam. This girl was used to a strict, confining regimen. She obeyed Peggy to the letter. If Peggy said “Your alarm clock goes off too early,” the girl would set it an hour later. If Peggy said “I like your pjs,” the girl would iron them and wear them all weekend. It didn’t make her terribly interesting. Peggy was attracted to a sophomore from Winchester who was boarding her horse at a stable up in the hills. This girl routinely wore fawn jodhpurs and ankle boots, and every day for breakfast she ate ice cream, which the cook kept for her in the freezer. Because her valuable horse needed to be ridden every afternoon, she was permitted to have a car. Seniors were allowed cars, but only if they were on the honor roll with no demerits. Since among seniors demerits were considered a badge of honor, the sophomore Emily was currently the only student allowed to drive. She was majoring in art history and planned to join her father’s import-export business.
Peggy stared at her and smiled until she was invited to sit in the passenger seat of her Chrysler New Yorker, parked behind the former dairy barn. Emily talked