Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. Lena Dunham
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I shared a bed with my sister, Grace, until I was seventeen years old. She was afraid to sleep alone and would begin asking me around 5:00 P.M. every day whether she could sleep with me. I put on a big show of saying no, taking pleasure in watching her beg and sulk, but eventually I always relented. Her sticky, muscly little body thrashed beside me every night as I read Anne Sexton, watched reruns of SNL, sometimes even as I slipped my hand into my underwear to figure some stuff out. Grace had the comforting, sleep-inducing properties of a hot-water bottle or a cat.
I always pretended to hate it. I complained to my parents: “No other teenagers have to share beds unless they’re REALLY POOR! Someone please get her to sleep alone! She’s ruining my life!” After all, she had her own bed that she chose not to sleep in. “Take it up with her,” they said, well aware that I, too, got something out of the arrangement.
The truth is I had no right to complain, having been affected by childhood “sleep issues” so severe that my father says he didn’t experience an uninterrupted night’s rest between 1986 and 1998. To me, sleep equaled death. How was closing your eyes and losing consciousness any different from death? What separated temporary loss of consciousness from permanent obliteration? I could not face this prospect by myself, so every night I’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming to my room, where I demanded a series of tuck-in rituals so elaborate that I’m shocked my parents never hit me (hard).
Then around 1:00 A.M., once my parents were finally asleep, I would creep into their room and kick my father out of bed, settling into the warmth of his spot and passing out beside my mother, the brief guilt of displacing him far outweighed by the joy of no longer being alone. It only occurred to me recently that this was probably my way of making sure my parents didn’t ever have sex again.
My poor father, desperate to end the cold war that had broken out around sleep in our house, told me that if I retired at nine every night and stayed peacefully in my room he would wake me at 3:00 A.M. and carry me into his own. This seemed reasonable: I wouldn’t have the opportunity to be dead for too many hours by myself, and he would stop yelling at me quite so much. He kept his end up, dutifully rising at 3:00 A.M. to come and move me.
Then one night, when I was eleven, he didn’t. I didn’t notice, until I awoke at 7:00 A.M. to the sounds of our morning, Grace already downstairs enjoying organic frozen waffles and Cartoon Network. I looked around groggily, outraged by the light streaming in through my window.
“YOU BROKE YOUR PROMISE,” I sobbed.
“But you were okay,” he pointed out. I couldn’t argue. He was right. It was a relief not to have seen the world at 3:00 A.M.
As soon as my issues disappeared, Grace’s replaced them, as if sleep disorders were a family business being passed down through the ages. And though I persisted in complaining, I still secretly cherished her presence in my bed. The light snoring, the way she put herself to sleep by counting cracks in the ceiling, noting them with a mousy sound that is best spelled like this: Miep Miep Miep. The way her little pajama top rode up over her belly. My baby girl. I was keeping her safe until morning.
It all began with Jared Krauter. He was the first thing I noticed at the New School orientation, leaning against the wall talking to a girl with a buzz cut—his anime eyes, his flared women’s jeans, his thick helmet of Prince Valiant hair. He was the first guy I’d seen in Keds, and I was moved by the confidence it took for him to wear delicate lady shoes. I was moved by his entire being. If I’d been alone, I would have slid down the back of a door and sighed like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass.
This was not technically the first time I’d seen Jared. He was a city kid, and he used to hang around outside my high school waiting for his friend from camp. Every time I spotted him I’d think to myself, That is one hot piece of ass.
“Hey,” I said, sidling up to him in my flesh-toned tube top. “I think I’ve seen you outside Saint Ann’s. You know Steph, right?”
Jared was friendlier than cool guys are supposed to be. He invited me to come see his band play later that night. It was the first of many gigs I’d attend—and the first of many nights we’d spend in my top bunk, pressed against each other like sardines, never kissing. At first, it seemed like shyness. Like he was a gentleman and we were taking our time. Surely it would happen at some point, and we’d remember these tentative days with a laugh, then fuck passionately. But days stretched into weeks stretched into months, and his fondness for me never took a turn for the sexual. I pined for him, despite sleeping pressed against his body. His skin smelled like soap and subway, and when he slept, his eyelids fluttered.
Despite his indie-rock swagger and access to free alcohol via his job as a bouncer, Jared was a virgin just like me. We found the same things funny (a Mexican girl in our dorm who told us her parents live in “a condom in Florida”), the same food delicious (onion rings, perhaps the reason we never kissed), and the same music heady (whatever he said I should listen to). He was a shield against loneliness, against fights with my mom and C-minus papers and mean bartenders who didn’t buy my fake ID. When I told him I was transferring schools, he teared up. The next week, he dropped out.
At Oberlin, I missed Jared. His midsection against my back. The slightly sour smell of his breath when it caught my cheek. Coagreeing to sleep through the alarm. But it didn’t take me long to replace him.
First came Dev Coughlin, a piano student I noticed on his way back from the shower and became determined to kiss. He had the severe face and impossibly great hair of Alain Delon but said “wicked” more than most French New Wave actors. One night we walked out to the softball field, where I told him I was a virgin, and he told me he had mold in his dorm room and needed a place to crash. What followed was an intense two-week period of bed sharing, not totally platonic because we kissed twice. The rest of the time I writhed around like a cat in heat, hoping he’d graze me in a way I could translate into pleasure. I’m not sure if the mold was eradicated or my desperation became too much for him, but he moved back to his room in mid-October. I mourned the loss for a few weeks before switching over to Jerry Barrow.
Jerry was a physics major from Baltimore who wore glasses, and unusually short pants (shants), and who alternated between the screen names Sherylcrowsingsmystory and Boobynation. If Jared and Dev had been beautiful to me, then Jerry was pure utility. I knew we would never fall in love, but his solid physical presence soothed me, and we fell into a week of bed sharing. He had enough self-respect to remove himself from the situation after I invited his best friend, Josh Berenson, to sleep on the other side of me.
Right on, bro.
Josh was the genre of guy I like to call “hot for camp,” and he had a nihilistic, cartoonish sense of humor that I enjoyed. Despite my practicing “the push in,” the move where you advance your ass slowly but surely onto the crotch of an unsuspecting man, he showed no interest in engaging physically with me. The closest we came was when he ran a flattened palm over my left breast, like he was an alien who had been given a lesson in human sexuality by a robot.
By this point, word was getting around: Lena likes to share beds.
Guy friends who came over to study would just assume they were staying. Boys who lived across campus would ask to crash so that they could get to class early in the morning. My reputation was preceding me, and not in the way I had always dreamed of. (Example: Have you met Lena? I have never met a more simultaneously creative and sexual woman. Her hips are so flexible she could join the circus, but she’s too smart.) But I had standards, and I wouldn’t share a bed with just anyone. Among the army I refused:
Nikolai, a Russian guy in pointy black boots who read to me from a William Burroughs book about cats, his face very close to mine. He was a twenty-six-year-old