When I was a senior in high school, I learned that literature is not simply a collection of books, dusty words separated from life, distant, ethereal, somehow higher or better than the real world. Literature, I discovered, is as immediate and real as dirt, or sweat. It was my advanced placement English teacher who gave me that knowledge, and for that precious gift I can never thank her enough.
I'll admit I was something of a teacher's pet. Why not? I was eager. A good student. I loved to read. I was smart. It was the spring term and I'd already been accepted to a very good college. All of my teachers were proud of me, but Ms. Catlin seemed especially proud.
I'd already had her for creative writing as a junior, where she'd encouraged me to write honestly and openly about my deepest feelings, thoughts and desires. We kept journals for that class. "A writers journal," she said, "is not a diary. Dear god please, please don't start any entry with 'Dear Diary!' If you do, I'll explode!" She said it as a joke, and she laughed as she told us some of the silly things that had appeared in previous students' journals. "No," she said, "a writer's journal is a record of thoughts, observations, ideas, snippets and snatches to be used later, a place for the trying out of words and phrases, sentences and paragraphs. It comes from the material of the day; from the world outside and the world inside your head and heart. And above all," she said, "it must be ruthlessly honest!"
So I wrote my journal as much for her as for me. I forced myself to write my deepest concerns and ideas. My most intimate thoughts. And when I wrote stories or poems for her, I did the same. By the end of the term, there was almost nothing she didn't know about me. She knew that I hated my mother because she'd given up utterly and fallen beyond redemption into the blur and distance, the pit of drugs. She knew that my love for my father was complicated by the fact that I never saw him. He lived a thousand miles away, and although he sent checks and called regularly, I had not been able to feel the warmth of his hugs since I was nine. She even knew, because she'd encouraged me to journal about it, about my first experiences with sex--the awkward boys who'd asked me to give them blow jobs, who'd touched me roughly with inexperienced hands. I wrote about my own self-explorations, about how I'd discovered my own ability to experience orgasms not at the hands of others, but with my own hands.
And then, when I was senior, she was my favorite teacher again. She felt more like a friend than a teacher, and I--already off to college in my min--was very much a lame duck high school student. I felt very adult and beyond most of the students around me. Ms. Catlin was the only person I knew who loved books as much as I did, who could speak about poetry as if it were the elixir of life. Although she taught the standard AP curriculum, she gave me extra things to read. She met me at a coffee shop to talk about what she'd given me, and as the term grew closer to its end, the books became more wonderfully intimate.
For my eighteenth birthday, Ms. Catlin gave me a collection of erotica and feminist literature and poetry that would, she said, "Open me up in ways I'd never imagined." Fear of Flying, Delta of Venus, The Dream of a Common Language. And as if to underscore the change, the fact that I was eighteen, an adult, her friend not merely her student, she invited me to her house to discuss the books and their meaning.
I want to admit some things, but it's a little difficult. The things I do in my room are not dirty. I never think of them that way, and I'm not ashamed of them. But they are intensely private. I think it somehow tawdry to speak of them to strangers, but writing, as Ms. Catlin always said, must be brutally honest and I cannot tell this tale without speaking of those things. I pray you will forgive me if it appears unseemly to speak so directly, but truth requires it.
I had never read about sex before receiving those books. What little reading I had done in that regard was in my mother's silly women's magazines. Articles about finding the perfect partner, having more fulfilling sex, making yourself attractive to the opposite sex all seemed so disconnected from the world where I lived. I really didn't care much about sex with boys. I didn't feel the need to make myself more attractive for anyone. And a partner was the last thing I wanted just now. But the books Ms. Catlin gave me were different. The sex in them smouldered. It built slowly. Like a warm coal in the belly, it grew, setting fire to everything inside me. A thousand times I found myself squirming as I read. A thousand times I found myself amazed at how arousing words could be, how clearly a writer could speak about herself and her own fire while at the same time seeming to speak with my thoughts and voice. A thousand times I read. A thousand times the fire grew. And a thousand times, as I read, I found myself trying to put that fire out with my fingers frantically rubbing and poking into the places where the heat was the greatest. It was the stories about women making love that most inflamed me, that found me in my room, door locked, beneath my covers, hands frantically roaming across my body as if they were those of a woman from a book or poem, sent by the author to quench my passion. But the passion was not quenched, and I seemed to leave each book with the fire smouldering just a little hotter inside me.
In late May of my senior year, two weeks from graduation, three months before leaving home for good on my way from the jagged mountains of Colorado to the worn crags of Vermont, Ms. Catlin invited me to her house to talk about the books she'd given me. She asked me to bring the journal I'd been keeping. When I arrived, she opened the door and smiled at me. Inviting me in, she put her arm over my shoulder. I did not expect the feeling. My tummy heaved and there was a tingle inside me. For the first time it dawned on me that I was in love with her.
