Taylor: Part IV
With her essay in hand, I hopped off the bed to my desk, which offered a hard horizontal surface ideal for proofreading and an unmistakably platonic message.
The Great Gatsby was written in 1925, and is a story of the American Dream-
Excellent, I thought. Taylor’s work was predictably atrocious, surely providing foolproof protection from her wiles. Even a page of this passive voice-riddled, meandering nonsense would easily consume twenty minutes. She would certainly tire of torturing me in twenty minutes.
So I got comfortable, furiously scribbling marginal notes, crossing out rogue commas, underlining obvious Wikipedia plagiarism. I attempted to ignore the sound of Taylor sliding off the bed, and slowly rolling herself over to my desk in Jennie’s chair.
Is this supposed to be a thesis statement? I managed to scrawl beside her first paragraph, before the scent of coconut submerged me.
At that moment, I realized Taylor had moved Jennie’s chair so close to mine that our knees were touching. I carefully placed the pen down.
As a tween, I attended a Jewish sleepaway camp for a few miserable summers. Camp Wecota, a cluster of bunks near a lake in the Catskills where weary suburban parents could deposit their spoiled children for six weeks, traumatized me. Nothing in this world is more horrifying than a Jewish American Princess (JAP) in heat. Sure, I’d watched them from afar in downtown Scarsdale, curly-haired, manicured twelve-year-olds foaming at the mouth at being refused a designer handbag or a lace brassiere. But whereas my parents sent us to public school to assimilate with the gentiles (“a clean break from the Old World,” according to my mother), those girls attended Solomon Schechter, a private Jewish school. In forcing me to summer with those Hebrew hellions, my parents dropped me into a combat zone or the cusp of an orgy, depending on the day.
Alas, as much as these girls scared the shit out of me, I could not help but find them captivating. They appeared to say and do whatever they wanted, without fear of punishment. Their seemingly limitless sense of entitlement rendered the counselors completely powerless. I am sure those haggard Aussies and Brits, who believed they would find something exotic at Camp Wecota, returned home with sterling reviews of American Jewish kids.
I suppose they were exotic. The sight of them shaving their legs, stuffing their training bras with toilet paper, coating on bright red lipstick they’d swiped from their mothers, and predatorily circling the boys’ bunks, rivaled a real zoo. I admired their rigid adherence to this arduous process. Revering routine myself, I recognized theirs as a hallmark of excellence.
For Taylor, I harbored similar dissonant feelings. Her unswerving pursuit of her desires, often at others’ expense, terrified me. Her behavior clearly stemmed from an extreme narcissism more common in men. But I could handle men, especially the heterosexual ones. The straight male menu of desires is mercifully brief. It typically doesn’t stray far from sex, validation, and physical aggression. I have since learned that these three items can often be combined into a single dish, a life-changing epiphany for someone with a busy schedule.
I did not expect Taylor of such straightforward desires. Fortunately, I was wrong.
But while I feared Taylor, I also idolized her. Her audacity knocked down your door, punched you in the gut, set your house on fire. It ran a finger down your spine, stiffening your body while loosening your loins. I merely fantasized about wielding such power myself. Unfortunately, I had not yet shed my homely, awkward, gender-confused past. While less visible than herpes, my past comparably crippled my confidence.
And so I simply allowed it, her knee touching mine. And surely, in moving my gaze from her Times-New-Roman-size-12 act of barbarism to her light blue eyes, I allowed what happened next.
