Glimmering Girls

Glimmering Girls

by Merrill Joan Gerber
Glimmering Girls

Glimmering Girls

by Merrill Joan Gerber

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Overview

Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women’s dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or Be Lost Forever. Any thirst for adventure was supposed to be satisfied by the occasional panty raid. Francie and friends, however, find all this hard to swallow, and they resist their appointed futures as elementary school teachers and holders of the precious “MRS” degree. Francie yearns to be a writer and is encouraged by her Russian literature professor. Then she meets Joshua, a talented and dedicated piano student, who presents the ultimate challenge: does she maintain her “virtue,” or give in to her sexual desires, finally breaking fully free of repressive “respectability”? Glimmering Girls follows Francie, Liz, and Amanda through this and other discoveries and adventures. Ultimately, each finds a way to live fully at a time when their entire culture seemed arrayed against them.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781937854430
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Publication date: 07/02/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 190
File size: 373 KB

About the Author

Merrill Joan Gerber is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer. Among her novels are The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for “the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme,” Anna in the Afterlife, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as a “Best Novel of 2002” andKing of the World, which won the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. She has written five volumes of short stories. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New YorkerThe AtlanticMademoiselleThe Sewanee ReviewThe Virginia ReviewCommentarySalmagundiThe American ScholarThe Southwest Review, and elsewhere.
Her story “I Don’t Believe This” won an O. Henry Prize. “This Is a Voice from Your Past” was included in The Best American Mystery Stories.

Her non-fiction books include a travel memoir, Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence; a book of personal essays, Gut Feelings: A Writer’s Truths and Minute Inventions; and Old Mother, Little Cat: A Writer’s Reflections on Her Kitten, Her Aged Mother . . . and Life.
Gerber earned her BA in English from the University of Florida, her MA in English from Brandeis University, and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. 

Read an Excerpt

Glimmering Girls

A Novel of the Fifties


By MERRILL JOAN GERBER

Dzanc Books

Copyright © 2005 Merrill Joan Gerber
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4243-6



CHAPTER 1

HALL MEETING, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, l959


Francie's roommate, Mary Ella Root, sits like a small, dense rhinoceros on her bed, reading Bride's Magazine. Behind her, through the window of their third floor dorm room, moonlight showers down upon the silvery needles of an arrow-shaped pine tree. Much further away, invisible in the distant dark, is the long country road leading north from Florida, through Georgia, the Carolinas, and beyond, to the great crowded city of Francie's birth, New York.

Fate, the fickle hand of fortune, and her family's necessities, have conspired to transplant Francie to a land where the trees grow beards, where handsome, crew-cut boys say "Ma'am" to all females, and where—on the cafeteria line at the Student Union—she gets grits shoveled onto her plate as a matter of course before she can decline them.

"Honey, throw me that bag of Tootsie Pops from my desk, would you, angel?"

Where Mary Ella's ears would normally appear are two fat foam-rubber rollers, and strapped under her chin is her Face Lifter, an underwear-pink device of elastic guaranteed to tighten the little hammock of flesh that Mary Ella swears is hereditary, the feature with which all her female ancestors have been cursed. ("But even so," she tells Francie frequently, "most of them caught men, and in a few cases, two apiece!") She laughs as she always does when referring to her holy quest: finding a husband before graduation. After graduation, the odds fall to zero: she'll be a second grade teacher with no one to meet but other women teachers. "It's a rule of nature," Mary Ella has explained, "that all elementary school principals are married men."

Francie is supposed to become a teacher, too. A teacher or a nurse—that's about all there is for girls. Unless she gets married, and then a girl doesn't have to be anything. Her parents assume she intends to be a teacher. Even now, in her senior year, Francie hasn't had the heart to tell them otherwise.

But Francie does marvel at her roommate: how can Mary Ella be so cheerful, so optimistic, despite her dim prospects, despite her months of dateless Saturday nights? She talks non-stop, to herself, to no one, as she flips the magazine pages, comparing bridal fashions, interrupting Francie incessantly regardless of her protestations that she is trying to write a paper on Sons and Lovers for Dr. Reynold's Classics of Fiction class.

"I wonder if I should choose big puffed sleeves, or the long skinny kind of satin with the lacy point down over the wrist. An embroidered pearl bodice is so feminine but maybe lace is more graceful. Which would you choose, Francie?"

"If I were you, I'd probably wait to decide till I found myself a bridegroom. Styles may have changed by then."

"Oh, I doubt it," Mary Ella says. "Wedding gowns are classic. They last for generations. Maybe for all eternity."

"Like love," Francie intones. She can't help herself—she rolls her eyes heavenward. She is glad her back is toward her roommate. "Like true love."

"Oh, yes," Mary Ella sighs. "And we must never despair. There's a cover for every pot, you know."

"What if your juices boil away before you find the right one?"

"Honey—I don't know what you mean."

"Never mind. It's only metaphor, Mary Ella. I think in metaphors when I'm trying to write a paper."

* * *

She cannot in good conscience belittle Mary Ella's devotion to Bride's Magazine. In notes taken in her biology class last week, she recorded the pronouncement of her professor, a published expert on the subject, that an overpowering drive to mate exists in the human condition, and is known as "the biological imperative." As if to submit proof for this theorem, this very afternoon, in the very same biology class, while peering into her microscope, Francie experienced this truth first hand. On her slide, an amoeba, while dividing itself, presented to Francie's eyes the sudden appearance of what seemed to be a male sexual organ, engorged, in conjunction with a similar female receptacle. The male organ seemed to be injecting, by rhythmic pulsations, its contents into the welcoming orifice of its counterpart.

Suddenly faint, overwhelmed by an imperative she would not have previously been able to name, Francie excused herself from the classroom and, in a cubicle in the restroom—barely leaning against the metal paper dispenser—had a brief involuntary orgasm. Her body rushed through the various ascending levels without her consent; she had not even to form a single helpful thought. The tornado that overcame her blew away as fast as it had appeared. Delivered once again to a rational state, she washed her face, took a number of deep breaths, and returned immediately to class where she took her place before her microscope. She studied the proceedings on the slide and continued to take notes, using her ruler to underline primary headings. She was trembling.

Something had taken her by the hand, some inherent teacher of life, to prove to her how clear it was that reproduction ruled the world.

* * *

Just as Francie is getting her thoughts to a point where she might type a complete opening sentence on the page, the emergency bells go off. Within two minutes a hall monitor is pounding the door.

"Meeting in Broward Lobby! Everyone downstairs right now! Be at the hall meeting or be grounded!"

"Hell's bell's," Mary Ella moans. Once she has grounded her self in bed, covered with beauty creams, her toenails separated by cotton balls in preparation for being painted with a little brush, her teddy bears and her other childhood sacraments lined up in their rows, moving herself out of there is like moving a continent.

"Go for me, Francie, you can tell me what they want."

"They'll know you're not there, Mary Ella. The floor monitor takes roll! They'll ground you. Then you won't be able to go out on the weekend."

"That's what I want!" she says, in her good-natured way. "If I'm grounded, then no one knows I don't have a date."

"Maybe you'll get a date and then you'll be sorry you can't go out."

"You think there'll be a miracle, Francie? You're Jewish. I didn't think the Jewish People believe in miracles."

"Well, not specific miracles. I mean, Jews don't pray to get a date or to get an idea for a term paper. Jewish miracles are mostly about seas parting and bushes burning, events useful for a whole religious group. But listen, I have to go down now."

Francie throws her quilted bathrobe over her Baby Doll pajamas and tells Mary Ella to guard the fort. She joins the throng headed for the lobby, taking a few sheets of notebook paper, her copy of Sons and Lovers, and some chocolate kisses which she drops in the pocket of her robe.

* * *

She can never get over the herd of females who live here, the sound of their clattering feet stampeding down the slanted ramps, the bubbly hysteria of their high-pitched cries. They seem to share an intensity of purpose, a total devotion to their quest to achieve beauty and therefore, by simple logic, to conquer men. All of them by this time of night have tortured their hair into some type of contraption: if they have not skewered it in hair pins, they have spiraled it in rollers, or corseted it in rubber bands, or bound it in circlets, or tacked it with bobbie pins, or pressed it tight under sailor hats, or rounded it into pageboys over sausages of toilet paper stuffed into skins of old nylon stockings. This effort of molding and shaping is to affect a natural result for the next day's hunting.

Francie almost imagines she hears in the lobby the sound of hounds gathering for the hunt, waiting to be freed from confinement so they may set upon their quarry. Reaching the lobby where the hall meeting will be held, she takes her position among them.

* * *

The emergency concerns the discovery that toilet paper is being used for the blotting of lipstick. The housemother, Mrs. Taylor, has discovered, all around the bathrooms, little angel wings of toilet paper fluttering in the air currents with the imprint of kissing lips on them.

"The state budget does not allow such abundant funding for the blotting of lipstick; the state pays only for the purpose for which toilet paper is designed. Do we girls understand? Will we continue to abuse the privilege of un-doled out toilet paper? Or would we prefer to check out and sign for a packet of little paper squares each week?"

No, we would not, is the obvious answer. Mrs. Taylor, a middle-aged woman with her gray hair in pincurls, seems very upset, indeed; she has been betrayed by her charges' profligate use of paper, she has a feeling of deep personal shame that the young women for whom she is responsible are not well-behaved.

"It's as if I haven't taught you manners, girls!" Her face is strained and sad. She has been there and back, to where the girls long to go. She holds herself before the throng as a model for each one of them, a walking outline of what may befall every woman here: love, marriage, children—then the ugly swipe of the scythe, and a woman is undone. Widowed and bereft, not only does she have to take a job in a dormitory, guarding an army of recalcitrant virgins, but she must police the wasting and misuse of toilet paper as well.

"Do you girls realize that this investigation into our supplies is a blot on my name?" she cries, raising her eyes heavenward, where they light upon something that causes her to gasp. Francie and the other young women follow her gaze. On a ceiling light fixture shaped to look like a candelabra hangs a limp white rubbery tube.

Someone names it in a whisper. The girls begin to scream. Francie has never seen one of these but she knows what it must be. Pandemonium is breaking out. The girls are screeching and rushing about the room, seeking their friends and falling against them and screeching again. One girl appears to faint upon a couch. Mrs. Taylor throws her pen at the object which clings tenaciously to a bulb shaped like a candle-flame. She cannot dislodge it.

Francie is transfixed by the spectacle. Is she really of the same species as these girls? Is she really programmed by nature to jump and scream and shriek and wiggle her behind?

At this moment her eyes fall upon two girls who are sitting motionless on a couch, taking in the panorama with wide, slightly stern eyes. She and they exchange glances. Their expressions are bemused, ironic. Pure intelligence shines out of their faces. They seem to invite her into their camp. In any case, she finds herself walking toward them, as to an island of sanity.

"Can you believe this?" one of them says to Francie.

"College life," says the other.

"Girls will be girls," says the first. Both of them are fair, delicate as pastel angels, glowing. They look lighted from within.

Does Francie know them? They seem more than familiar, as if they speak the language of her interior spaces.

Around them in the lobby, the riot is still going on. Mrs. Taylor has run to her apartment, apparently to call maintenance for help, to have someone (a man, it can't be helped) bring a ladder and remove the hideous object. A circle of girls is trying to revive the girl on the couch; they fan her, they bring her a paper cup of water.

Francie, for comfort, reaches into the pocket of her robe, feeling for the chocolate kisses rubbing against one another in their silvery tear-shaped wrappers. She holds out her palm, offering them to her new friends. Each girl accepts and unwraps one.

"Say, would you like to come up to our room for a while? Liz was going to play some guitar before this emergency broke out."

"Well, I don't know ...," Francie says. "I have a paper to write." She indicates her copy of Sons and Lovers.

"Don't we all?" says the one who must be Liz. She wears her gold hair in a short, shimmering cap.

"Come just for a while," says the other girl, whose hair is incredibly long, like the hair of princesses in fairy tale books. Not only does it cascade, but it tumbles, it falls in ringlets and waves and ribbons of light.

"We can discuss Anna Karenina," says Liz, revealing to Francie the reason she senses she already knows them—both of them sit across the room in her Russian Literature class.

"I'm Amanda," says the girl with golden tresses.

"And I'm Francie."

"Good name," both girls remark at the same time.

"We like good solid names," Amanda adds. "Not Lizzy. Not Mandy."

"Not Franny," says Francie, though she doubts this reasoning will hold.

"Exactly," says Liz, sweeping her bathrobe regally over the lobby rug. "You understand what's important. So come on up with us. This urgent hall meeting seems to have adjourned. Let's arise and retreat to the privacy of our palace."

Francie follows the girls up the rubber ramp. A red carpet seems to unroll before them, just as it seems to Francie that Liz and Amanda are wearing golden crowns on their golden heads. Up they go to their fourth floor room, their palace, at whose threshold Francie hesitates, then enters.

CHAPTER 2

TEACHERS OF LIFE


Their room is just like Francie's and Mary Ella Root's. Two beds, two desks, two chairs; two trunks, two radios, two lamps. But three girls. Francie, feeling like a third wheel, looks for a place to sit. Liz is perched on the edge of her bed with her guitar already balanced on her knees. Amanda has flung herself, face up, on her bed, and crossed her hands over her breasts, as if she is the decoration on her own tomb.

Liz strokes the hip-like curves of the guitar, lightly brushes her fingertips over the strings. "Francie," she says, "we need to ask you one thing. We hope you don't mind, but we have to find out if you're an Education major. We seem to have a problem with anyone who has chosen The Required Path For All Decent Young Women. The truth is, Amanda and I just can't be friends with Education majors."

"I'm a lapsed Education major," Francie confesses. "I had to give up on it. In my freshman year I took Music Education and I learned how to play "Three Blind Mice" on the autoharp. In my second year I took Art Education and I learned how to finger-paint and glue straws and seashells to a shoe box. Then last year, when I was a junior, I took the required Education Observation course, where you have to visit an hour a day at the elementary school. You pick one child to observe and you write down everything he does. My little boy knew I was watching him. Every child in that class knew there was one adult in the back row writing down everything he did! Day after day all my boy did was sit there. Then one day he brought a switchblade to class and flashed it at me with a really evil grin. I think he wanted to be sure I'd have something interesting to write in my notebook."

"Smart little kid," Liz says. "But we're glad you aren't going to go over the cliff with the other lemmings. Amanda and I got out, too. We couldn't bear all that nonsense. Don't ask us what we'll do after graduation, we haven't the faintest idea."

"We better figure out something by the end of the year," Francie says. "Or we'll all end up being typists."

"Heaven forbid," Amanda says.

"Actually, I like to type," Francie says. "Writers type, too. James Joyce typed his books. Hemingway typed his."

"But not Emily Dickinson. Not Tolstoy."

"Not Thomas Wolfe, either, I think. He wrote leaning on his refrigerator."

"Well, pull up a chair, Francie," Liz says. She leans over and slides her desk chair out. Then, without further preliminaries, she begins to play her guitar. She bends her head over the strings and in a high, pure voice, begins to sing:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Glimmering Girls by MERRILL JOAN GERBER. Copyright © 2005 Merrill Joan Gerber. Excerpted by permission of Dzanc Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

1 HALL MEETING, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, 1959,
2 TEACHERS OF LIFE,
3 THE LAND OF LOVE,
4 GREASE MONKEYS,
5 PARTY KITCHEN,
6 SHELLFISH,
7 PANTIE RAID,
8 FLUFF,
9 SERMON,
10 LETTER HOME (1),
11 PLAYING HOUSE,
12 BY FIRELIGHT,
13 TOSCA,
14 EVERY POT HAS A COVER,
15 MUSIC OF THE SPHERES,
16 LETTER HOME (2),
17 THE BENCH,
18 LA BOHEME,
19 GYNECOLOGY,
20 COLLUSION,
21 PEACHTREE LAKE,
22 TERROR,
23 THE OTHER WORLD,
24 THE HAZEL WOOD,
25 CROSS CREEK,
26 PURGE,
27 PHI BETA KAPPA,
28 "YOU WOMEN HAVE A HABIT ...",
29 NEW YORK, NEW YORK,
30 LIFE!,
31 THERE'S NO STOPPING ME NOW,
32 LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY,

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