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Across the Page (March 2007)

This month’s round-up includes first-time novelist Lu Vickers on a young girl’s coming-out in the Deep South during the early 1970s, a breakdown of why the book version of Notes on a Scandal is far more successful than the controversial film, and the new anthology of Michelle Tea’s top picks.

Breathing Underwater, by Lu Vickers (Alyson Books)

Lily Edwards, the narrator of Lu Vickers’ Breathing Underwater, has a whole host of troubles: Her town, Chattahoochee, Fla., revolves around a mental institution – “a trap, like one of those man-eating plants” – where everyone is either a patient or an employee; her father is detached and unreliable; her brother, James, is favored because he’s a boy; her sister, Maisey, because she’s the youngest; and her mother, the pivot of Lily’s existence, relies on pills and alcohol to treat her depression and psychosis. Being “a lezzie,” a term she learns at her Baptist church camp, is the least of her problems.

But, of course, being gay is rarely the least of any adolescent’s problems, especially in the Deep South during the early ’70s. Lily does her best to disguise her emerging identity and sexuality. When she plays “the kissing game” with her friend Rae, they always insist that someone plays “the boy.” She keeps her hair long. She carries her books by her side rather than against her chest. If she needs to look at her nails, she holds her fingers out flat rather than turning her hand around. Still, Lily knows she’ll be “in deep trouble if anyone ever found out that I hated wearing dresses, that I’d kissed Rae, or that I’d stood in a souvenir store looking at a doll’s titties.”

Breathing Underwater begins when Lily is 12 years old. She is fishing at the lake with James, Maisey and her mother when she accidentally falls in to the water. Unable to swim, she frantically kicks her legs and tries to call out for help. As her head bobs up and down, she spots her mother standing on the dock: “Mama didn’t move. She was going to let me drown and was weighing her gains against her losses. Watching me, eyes flat as pennies. I was Not the Right Kind of Girl. Never had been.”

Finally, Lily’s mother jumps in and saves her from drowning. But the hesitation and the understanding that she was “Not the Right Kind of Girl” continues to haunt Lily as she grows up. Lily decides that the only solution to her problem is to fall in love with a boy named Ronnie. “I needed to be normal,” she thinks, though the relationship comes to an end when Lily meets Cat Reeves, a new girl at school who, with her “fluffy Afro and dark glasses,” looks like a ” Jackson 5.”

When Lily’s mother discovers the relationship with Cat, she finally has the opportunity to unleash her venom, and the two get into an all-out brawl: “I held her tighter,” Lily says, “and she screamed even louder, ‘Let me go, you goddamn queer, you goddamn queer,’ and it was strange, hearing my own mama call me a name I hadn’t thought of calling myself.”

Later, when Lily’s mother sobers up, they’re in the bathroom tasting baby powder. “I don’t remember the first time I saw Mama eat baby powder; it was just something she always did, as if it were ordinary,” Lily says, and then tastes it herself. “The powder felt like chalk in my mouth, tasted faintly of perfume. Not ordinary, but something I could get used to, like the way it left the palm of my hands feeling like silk, soft and slippery. Like being queer.”

Toward the end, as Lily begins to confront her sexuality and family, she remarks, “I felt tired, like I’d been awake for a million years.” Her exhaustion is well-earned, and the overall narrative pace of the book is exhilarating. Breathing Underwater is a coming-of-age and coming-out story. But it’s also more than that. It is a story about accepting circumstances and people you cannot change. It is about understanding how to grow up, to move forward and away.

What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, by Zoë Heller (Picador) Much has been made of the depiction of lesbianism in the film version of Heller’s book, originally titled What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal. For the most part, the criticism is fair: The film resorts to a familiar stereotype of the pathological lesbian stalker. The rebuttal is also fair: Not every lesbian character needs to be a good person because, well, not every lesbian is a good person.

There are several differences between the book and film, but the basic premise is the same: Notes on a Scandal is the story of two women — Barbara Covett and Bathsheba ( Sheba ) Hart — who work at the same school and become friends. When Sheba enters into an intimate relationship with a 15-year-old student, Steven Connolly, Barbara becomes her greatest and most dangerous confidant. The primary difference between the two works, however, is that the book develops and actually relies upon Barbara’s humanity.

Notes on a Scandal is narrated by Barbara, a reserved and brilliantly unreliable misanthrope. Unlike the film, in the book Barbara does not write in a diary. Rather, she chronicles the story of her friendship and of Sheba’s relationship with Steven in a manuscript of sorts. Also unlike the film, Barbara does not discover Sheba’s illicit affair and then hold it over her head to garner loyalty and companionship. In fact, Sheba tells Barbara of the relationship and is perilously open about her devotion to the boy despite — or perhaps because of — her deteriorating family life.

Though there is certainly more than enough evidence in both versions of the story to suggest that Barbara is a closeted lesbian, the book focuses more on her loneliness. In a particularly poignant scene, a male teacher at the school, Bangs, asks Barbara out to lunch on a Saturday afternoon. The date comes after a disagreement with Sheba, and Barbara spends the entire day getting ready.

In the film adaptation of this scene, Bangs randomly stops by Barbara’s apartment, but in the book the invitation takes on great significance: “He had noticed me. He had chosen me to share his Saturday lunchtime. And who was I to pick and choose? For a few days, I’m afraid I let my imagination run away with me. I pictured myself shedding my old, unfortunate self and stepping forth into the light and air of the regular world.”

The “regular world” that Barbara longs to join is not necessarily a “heterosexual world,” but one where she becomes a person who spends her “weekends having dates” and carries photographs in her wallet. It is a world away from her relentless solitude. When Bangs reveals that he asked her out to lunch only to discuss his crush on Sheba , Barbara finally betrays her friend. ” Sheba likes younger men,” she tells Bangs. “Much younger men. You are aware of her unusually close relationship with one of the fifth-year boys?”

When Barbara and Sheba first become close, rumors circulate that they might be too close. “The implication was that Sheba and I were engaged in some sort of Sapphic love affair,” Barbara writes. “I have been on the receiving end of this sort of malicious gossip more than once in my career, and I am quite accustomed to it by now. Vulgar speculation about sexual proclivity would seem to be an occupational hazard for a single woman like myself, particularly one who insists on maintaining a certain discretion about her private life. I know who I am. If people wish to make up lurid stories about me, that is their affair.”

Sapphic love affair. Malicious. Vulgar speculation. Sexual proclivity. Does Barbara know who she is? It’s uncertain. Is she denying a very obvious aspect to her attachment to women? Most likely. Either way, the book allows for a far more complex character to emerge and deepen the story. Here Barbara is not the only predator, and Sheba is not the only victim.

After the incident with Bangs, Barbara returns to her apartment with her ailing cat and collapses: “I cried from guilt and remorse that I had not been a better, kinder pet owner … I cried because I had been desperate enough to consider a liaison with a ludicrous man who collected baseball jackets and even he had rejected me..”

But the film fails to bring out Barbara’s humanity, as well as her biting and often spot-on sense of humor. When she describes Sheba’s unconscious classism she writes: “Like so many members of London ‘s haute bourgeoisie, Sheba is deeply attached to a mythology of herself as street smart.”

Zoë Heller’s treatment of friendship, obsession and loneliness is as sharp as her prose. Even if you were put off by the film, check out the novel for a genuinely convincing and intricate psychological thriller.

Baby Remember My Name: An anthology of New Queer Girl Writing, edited by Michelle Tea (Caroll & Graf)

Edited by Michelle Tea (Rose of No Man’s Land), this anthology includes 23 diverse, edgy selections of fiction, memoir and comics.

Page McBee’s affecting “Keep Your Goals Abstract” follows a young man on a road trip in rapid-fire snapshots. As the narrator makes his way to the West Coast and to his lover, he uses photographs to reveal something about his past (“Tomorrow my dad will kill himself. I have ring around the collar and my tie is too short”), present (“I told her about our trajectory, the growing mythology of my cross-country odyssey, and she got full in her throat”) and future (“Something tastes salty. Maybe it’s the air. It can’t be that much farther from here”).

Chelsea Starr’s “T-Ten” is an accomplished story about a young girl who receives 20 dollars from her grandmother for her birthday and needs to spend it before her mother borrows it and never pays her back. The narrator — who suffers from both a stutter and a head full of lice — visits a Fred Meyer’s store and reflects on everything from her twin sister’s morality (“me sister’s selfless virtues”) to her teacher’s cruelty (“she already hates me enough”). Starr’s writing is magnificent, and she captures the perspective of a child with pitch-perfect tone and voice.

Katie Fricas’ comic “Nobody Will Find Me Here” is a smart reflection on reality television, both its seduction and its absurdity. Meliza Bañales’ “Coming-Out versus Sex versus Making Love” dissects the difficulty and joy of all three for a young lesbian growing up in South Central Los Angeles “where there was no PFLAG to save” her. Beth Steidle’s lyrical short piece “Stay” reads like poem, beginning with a meditation on the meaning of desire.

The anthology as a whole introduces several new and fine writers — ones we hope and expect to hear more from in the future.

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