When I was sixteen, I traded my prep school in Manhattan for an alternative boarding school in upstate New York’s Hudson River Valley to make Elijah Huck love me.
As is usually the case when one follows an up-and-coming feminist fashion photographer to a remote Quaker boarding school, I was in for a few surprises. These surprises were manifold, but perhaps most poignantly: Elijah broke my heart, I stuffed all my belongings into a vending machine, and I kissed a budding Marxist.
I left for Quare almost three years ago, before Elijah won his one-hundred-thousand-dollar MacDougall innovation grant and opened a gallery on Orchard Street. Before I started my freshman year at this small East Coast liberal arts college in one of those cramped dorm rooms I’m laying out these documents—the letters, journal entries, clippings, forms, and reports that comprise this collection—in chronological order on the floor.
Back then Elijah was a freshman at Columbia who worked part-time in the history department of the Bowen School for Girls, where I was in tenth grade. On an afternoon in late August, three days before the start of classes, I slid into Bowen’s darkroom, on the building’s eighth floor, to search for a bottle of fluid whose name I’ve since forgotten. As I stumbled forward, engulfed in darkness, someone called out, “Hello?”
I froze.
“Hello?” I asked, stopping in my tracks. It was still pitch-black. My heart pounded in my ears. “Who’s there?”
A pause.
“It’s Elijah.”
The voice could have been two feet from me, or it could have been ten; in the dark, it was impossible to tell. I did a quick mental recall of the self-defense techniques I’d learned the previous spring as part of Bowen’s five-step plan to defend its students from predators, and folded my hands into beaks, should I need them to poke at my would-be attacker’s eyes.
“Who’s Elijah?”
Step one was to speak in a firm, confident tone, and I was proud that my voice didn’t shake too much.
“Elijah Huck.”
I paused, hands still in beak formation, waiting for him to elaborate.
“I’m the new history Tutor.”
This rang a bell. Bowen had hired three Columbia University history majors as Tutors for the pilot program of the Bowen Tutorial, modeled off the Oxford Tutorial, which basically meant that we sophomores would meet with the Tutors to explore our individual interests in one-on-one intensive sessions.
We were both quiet. I didn’t know what to do with this information, and I didn’t want to step forward to search for the lights, lest I barrel into him. So I waited.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Flora.”
“Flora who?”
“Flora Goldwasser. I go here.”
A long pause.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he said.
I couldn’t find my voice.
“I’m holding out my hand.” His voice sounded ready to tip over into a gentle laugh, but no laugh followed.
I unfolded one of my beak hands and held it out tentatively, not sure how close he was. My hand collided with his. It was big and soft, slightly warm. His handshake was firm, almost crushingly so, and when he released me, my own hand lingered in the residual warmth.
“Do you have night vision or something?” I asked.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in darkrooms.”
“Dark rooms, or darkrooms?”
A short laugh. “Both.”
The lights flickered on.
It wasn’t until I saw him that I realized I’d been imagining someone completely different. Someone beefier, taller, someone with thick dark hair and an olive complexion. But there he stood, Elijah in all his five-nine, narrow-shouldered glory. Cuffed jeans, flannel shirt, tiny round glasses. Sandy hair long enough for him to run his fingers through, which he did at that moment.
We blinked at each other. One side of his face curled into a smile.
“Hey,” he said. He held a stack of photographs in one hand, which he now pressed against his chest.
I quickly tightened the band of fabric I’d used to tie my hair back from my face. The fabric matched that of my dress: white, spotted with huge sunflowers. I smoothed the dress, too, and tried to discreetly wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand.
“Hello.”
“Do you come here often, Flora?”
His voice was slightly raspy, like he was getting over a cold. He smiled as though he’d caught me mid-transgression, and a twinge of annoyance shot through me. He, not I, was the clear transgressor here.
“I’m helping Mr. Greenberg,” I said. My words felt heavy and insufficient. “What are you doing here?”
“Just developing some work.” The photos were still pressed against his chest, and I suddenly wondered if they were sexually explicit images of a lover, or something.
“Your own work?”
He nodded, still smiling with half of his face. I pressed my lips together to keep from grinning.
“You’re allowed to do that here?”
“Not technically.”
My heart was racing. We regarded each other. I didn’t know what look to give him, so I settled for half-hearted suspicion. His look was pure amusement.
“I should—” Instead of finishing the sentence, I gestured to the room at large.
“Have fun—” Here he mimicked my empty gesture, but he was smiling so hard that I smiled back despite myself. “See you around, Flora.”
He nodded once, and then he strode past me and entered the revolving door to exit the darkroom. The air behind him smelled like men’s deodorant. It was nothing special—probably the drugstore brand, even—but smelling him, smelling the suggestion of a body that moved and sweat and required deodorant, made my cheeks hot.
I know.
And I promise, it gets way worse.
If I were Molly Ringwald in a John Hughes movie, I would have slid to the ground with my back against the wall, knees at my chest, a hand clutching my throat, and a dazed expression on my face. But I was more of a take-action type of girl, so I grabbed a set of prints that Mr. Greenberg hadn’t asked for and hurried through the door. But by the time I reached the art room, Elijah was gone. I worked for the next few hours in a distracted trance, and when I went home, I organized and reorganized my closet until I was calm enough to slice some strawberries and read Anna Karenina.
When school officially started, I scoured the hallways for Elijah, but it wasn’t until the end of the first week that we met again. This time, a pair of shoes brought us together.
They were sunflower pumps, and they were gorgeous. (In hindsight, maybe it was the sunflower print that summoned him. Maybe, like a bee, he’d been drawn to both my floral dress and my floral shoes.)
The shoes violated the Bowen dress code, which explicitly stated that all students were to wear white-and-green saddle oxfords. All offenders were forced into the Shoes of Shame, a pair of battered, dirt-streaked saddle oxfords left over from the first Bush administration. As evidenced by my tendency to come to school early to help teachers set up their rooms, I was hardly the rebel type. I wore the offending shoes for no other reason than halfhearted curiosity about whether anyone would say anything. At around noon, Ms. Loren, my English teacher, apologetically sent me to the head of Upper School, Dr. Muamba, an ex-ballerina from the Congo, a slightly embarrassed look on her face, as though she, too, believed the whole saddle oxford rule to be ridiculous.
Oh my GOD, we had another interaction today.
I was sitting in the office of the head of Upper School, feet bare, the sunflower shoes resting in my lap, when I caught sight of Elijah. Dr. Muamba had gone to fetch the Shoes of Shame. Elijah first walked by the open door of the office so quickly that I caught sight only of his narrow back. In seconds, he did a double take and appeared in the doorway. He stood, half-smiling again, peering down at me. I almost passed out.
“Flora Goldwasser,” he said. It was a statement, a confirmation, an affirmation. It was him saying my name. It was everything.
I nodded. My stomach caved in on itself. My chest cramped.
“Those are nice shoes,” he said, cocking his head at my lap and leaning one shoulder against the doorway, knocking one toe of his loafers into the carpet.
I nodded. I was jumping out of my skin.
“Why aren’t they on your feet?”
“They violate the dress code,” I said.
Elijah straightened and took a few steps toward me. My heart jumped up into my throat. The office was small. I held out one of the sunflower shoes, sensing that was what he wanted, and he took it, examining it from all angles: the narrow frame, the slightly pointed toe, the sturdy heel. I stared at him the entire time, not sure whether he’d been a shoemaker in the old country, or something, and was interested in the delicate stitching, or whether he was about to pitch it out the window to start a shoe revolution.
As I’d soon come to learn, Elijah’s emotions were inscrutable.
But he didn’t say anything about crafting shoes in Lithuania, and he certainly didn’t hurl the shoe. When he was done, he handed the shoe back to me gently, like it was made of glass. He didn’t leave immediately, but he retreated back to the doorway and crossed his arms in front of his chest. He smiled wider.
“I knew it was a violation,” I said. “I just wanted to see if I could get away with it.”
He was silent for a few seconds. Then he finally opened his mouth to speak. But at that exact moment, Dr. Muamba appeared in the doorway, just behind Elijah. She held the Shoes of Shame in her left hand. My heart collapsed.
“I’m afraid they’re in a bit of rough shape,” she said, sliding past Elijah and into her office. She looked expectantly at him.
“May I help you?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Godspeed,” he said, and ducked out.
My heart rate didn’t slow down until sixth period. I’m still kind of wigging out, eating Lael’s chocolate-covered cranberries so fast, my tongue hurts. God, I have it bad.
The next morning, after spending the night furiously exfoliating my feet to slough off all the skin cells that had touched the Shoes of Shame, I dressed in my Bowen kilt and white collared blouse in front of my full-length mirror. Tying a white silk scarf around my waist, I turned to my open closet, fixing my gaze on my shelf of shoes. I thought of the way Elijah had marveled at the sunflower pumps and then at me as I sat with my bare feet tucked around the curved mahogany bar of my chair. I snatched a pair of red velvet flats, shoved them onto my feet, and ran out the door.
By noon I hadn’t been caught.
Let me state again for the record: I was a kiss-ass. I was a straight-A student, the president of my class, the founder of the Bowen Feminists for Girl Power!, and the managing editor of the Bowen Bulletin. The day of the velvet flats dragged on, uninterrupted.
“Are you sure about those?” one of my best friends, India, asked as we washed our hands in the second-floor restroom after lunch. “I mean, they are red.”
The Bowen School had a rule that forbid us from wearing any hue of red or any color with red in it, like orange, purple, or pink; it was something about their not wanting us to look like Christmas trees, what with our green skirts, and all. I shrugged off India’s concerns.
As soon as I opened the bathroom door and stepped outside, Elijah breezed past me. He carried an old-fashioned briefcase, and his tiny round glasses called to my mind a first-year law student at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1962. In my memory, a gentle mist soared past my eyes, clouding my vision, but in retrospect it was probably just a puff of India’s perfume.
He’d passed me but then suddenly turned sharply, just as he had the last time we’d met. His eyes immediately shot down to my feet. My chest tightened. I silently berated myself for staring at him, but I couldn’t look away. His eyes returned from my shoes to my face. He studied me.
“The revolution marches on,” he said.
“It marches,” I said.
We hadn’t broken eye contact in what felt like four minutes. My heart pounded. I didn’t know what to do with my shoulders, my hands, my knees. My whole body felt like it was hanging wrong. So I cocked my head, turned on the non-heel of my flats, and strode away, heart hammering. India scurried behind me, quietly exclaiming, “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Readers, I was acting more confident than I felt. Maybe it was because while exfoliating my feet the night before, I’d listened to the Shangri-Las and felt empowered. Maybe it was because, even then, I could see that although Elijah looked like a baby bird, a) he was a man, b) he was my teacher (sort of), c) those things, in combination, were a certain amount of thrilling, d) the whole baby bird thing was, like, intentional and also a look that suggested emotional depth and intuition, and e) I was extremely into it.
In the beginning of October, the Tutorial debuted, and Elijah was assigned to be my Tutor. I wasn’t surprised by this development. I was sure he’d request me, just as I’d requested him. After pairing us up, Dr. Levin, my history teacher, allowed us to find locations outside of school that were convenient for both Tutor and Tutee. Elijah and I settled on Thursdays at Margot Patisserie, south of my family’s apartment on West Seventy-Ninth Street and his dorm at Columbia.
Before our first meeting, I stopped home and changed into something I thought was more suitable for the occasion: a light blue dress with slightly puffed sleeves that made me feel like a rebellious sister wife. I paired the dress with striped pastel sandals that the brand Classique had made in the eighties, fluffed my hair, and applied rouge to my cheeks on the elevator down to my lobby.
My doorman, Saul, gave me a look when I stepped out of the elevator. I strode out the door and walked leisurely to the café. Elijah was sitting at a table by the window. I approached him.
“Gediere uff re Bauerei,” he said, without missing a beat.
My mouth dropped open. “You speak Pennsylvania Dutch?”
He laughed. “Just a few phrases.”
“What did you just say?”
“ ‘Animals on the farm.’ ”
“Where’d you pick that up?”
He took a long sip of his cappuccino.
“A place called the Quare Academy,” he said.
“What’s that?”
He leaned back in his chair and smiled slightly. “It’s a long story.”
I tilted my head, waiting for an explanation, but he just opened his briefcase and slid a stack of papers toward me.
“Let’s get to it,” he said.
We spent the hour talking about peasants in medieval Europe. Elijah knew his history, and despite the flirty stuff that had happened before, when the boy got down to business, he really got down to it. Seeing his intellectual side—in particular, the way he pushed up his glasses and gesticulated wildly when he got excited about the effect of rocky soil on England’s economy—made heat rise to my face. When I got home, I tore off my clothes and took a long bath, watching my heartbeat send tiny ripples through the water. If you’re familiar with the works of Judy Blume, you’ll understand me when I say that I identify with Deenie on a deep level.
So this is where we begin: me, naked and in love in the bathtub, like many a tragic protagonist before me.
I’ve assembled the documents that follow to make sense of the year that ensued. But maybe sense is the wrong word. The year still avoids, in my mind, any sort of stark understanding.
Compiled from my own collection and those of my friends, this project gives a glimpse into the complicated process by which I went from loving Elijah to, if not always loving myself, then at least maybe becoming myself. Taken together, the pieces are a portrait of a jumbled contradiction of a person and a place not in their final forms, but very much in progress. One of my aims here is certainly to tell a story. But assembling this collection is really about seeing that story happen in just the way it happened, in all its urgency and all its absurdity.