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wave of rage rose within me. He walked all around the apartment in my shoes. I didn't dare say, "Listen, Ray, you're going to stretch out my favorite shoes," because he had just given me all that furniture, and I didn't want to embarrass him. My mother always said, "Lend people your clothes, but don't wear other people's shoes or lend yours, because your shoes conform to your feet and other people's feet are different shapes and will stretch them out." Ray didn't have very large feet, but I just didn't see how he could fit them into my shoes, which were definitely small. I didn't have the money to replace them, anyway.
    Then Ray tried on my straw hat. Maybe he was trying to be playful. But it was almost one in the morning, and he was walking around in my straw hat and shoes. I couldn't laugh. I finally said, "Well, I'm tired and I have class in the morning."
    At the door Ray kissed me good night and looked at me pleadingly. It was too late. I felt a rush of incipient hypertension, but I tried to calm myself. When Ray had finally gone, I examined the shoes. They weren't ruined after all, but I pushed them to the back of the closet.
    I was the youngest in my family, but now I'm an only child. When I was eight, Ellen, my sister, then twelve, died of leukemia. When Ellen got sick she asked for a dog and got a Chihuahua named Midnight. It lived until four years ago. Now it's just my mother and I. I rarely think about Ellen. My mother doesn't like to talk about her, and for me she's become bleached to an image on a flickering movie screen. Photographs show me standing next to my sister: she had wispy blond hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a pointy chin. Once, during a squabble, I ran into the kitchen and came back at Ellen with a handful of pepper which I threw in her face. Just after that, she got leukemia. I also have three half-brothers, whom I've never met. After Ellen's death my father offered to
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    pay for a ticket to New Zealand for me, but I didn't want to go —or perhaps my mother didn't want me to—and the offer was never repeated. The boys are now fifteen, thirteen, and six. In September my father sent me a miniature jade baseball bat, highly polished, and a note congratulating me on my acceptance to the Women's Studies Program at Yale. With the jade bat was a card saying this was a replica of a Maori war club. I brooded about what my father had meant by it, but I was too busy with my courses and schoolwork to think about it for long. At the beginning of the semester my courses seemed quite interesting; but a few days after Ray tried on my shoes I was sitting in class, taking notes as usual, when it became apparent that not one word that was being said made the slightest bit of sense. The teacher, Anna Castleton, a well-padded, grayish woman with clipped, poodle hair, was discussing a conference she had attended the week before—a Poetics of Gender colloquium—where she was severely attacked for her presentation. I carefully wrote down everything Anna said but when I got home that night I reread the notes and found they still sounded as if they had been written in a foreign language.
    Status of empirical discourse.
    Post-structuralist account of dissolving subject precludes formation of female identity.
    The notion of the subject in progress.
    It was assumed she was calling for a return to fixed identity.
    Post-gendered subjectivities.
    If gender is constructed — a gendered identity 99% of the time is built onto a person who has a sex.
    Here I had made a little sketch in the margin: a picture of a beaver, paddling frantically, with a tree stump clutched in its large buck teeth.
    The only text of rupture is right wing.
    To speak of identity is to speak of racism.
    Anyone who throws out the word "essentialist" believes
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    that there is such a thing as real women who are trans-historical. ANYONE WHO THROWS THIS OUT AS AN OPENING
    REMARK IS PROVING THEIR MIDDLE-CLASS
    PARANOIA. The most important thing about Marxism