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At once I began to wonder: Who was that woman? She seemed familiar: was she a student at the college, a real person I might meet? There was a woman she resembled and I remembered having wondered—now I was sure she was a lesbian. But how would we meet (she was older) and how would I seem? And when would I ever chance upon her in a swimming pool? Later that year my bunkmate moved out and we pulled the beds apart and made way for another woman, one who had very tiny feet and worshipped her own legs: she would shuffle to the hallway bathroom in her loud clogs and place her foot in the sink, the better to admire the leg. Strangely enough, a woman inhabiting the same room one year later was often spotted standing naked in this very sink. By that time I was living on another floor of the building and we didn't have full-length mirrors in our rooms either; but we did have one of the few open lesbians on campus—a freshman poet with an interest in linguistics—and one of several women she became the first lover for was me. The woman from the pool did not materialize, and the woman who resembled her continued her evidently heterosexual existence somewhere on the outskirts of my life. back / next |