A Structural Problem

I am seven. Wooden blocks from a wooden box are my favorite toys and I spend hours constructing miniature houses on the brown linoleum floor of our family room. I want to build houses like the ones my grandpa and uncles build, like the houses they live in. But I never see them build. Only my cousin Joe is invited to join them at their work sites, to watch, to practice, to learn. Joe is a boy.

I am eleven. I spend gobs of free time drawing blueprints on the smooth green drafting table my parents give me for my eleventh birthday. I know who I want to be by then, I’ve seen my future job on television. I bend over my creations like Mike Brady, the architect and patriarch on The Brady Bunch, even though I don’t approve of the Bradys' house, with its stupendously high ceilings and wasted space between the living room and kitchen. And it doesn’t seem as though Alice’s room, located behind the oven, has any windows. I favor smaller, more practical homes. Often at night as I slip into sleep, I mentally conjure new floor plans, then tweak them. Should the hall closet be so far from the bathroom? How can I get the plumbing closer together? Could I place a stairwell at the rear of the house instead of the front?

 I am fourteen. I am the only girl in my junior high's Mechanical Drawing class. At first everything’s fine as I familiarize myself with the lexicon, with the tools. But as we draft our way into winter quarter, the hormones of a dozen teenage boys begin to smother me. Some of them comment regularly on my physique. I start to dread the class. On one occasion, I get a pass for the bathroom and a classmate named Blair follows me and yanks me into the phone booth in the hallway. He pins me with his legs against the cinderblock wall, kissing my neck as his hands rummage my body. I don’t move. Then he laughs. Then he stops.

I don’t tell anyone. I know what rape is but I don’t have words for this.

One afternoon, a classmate named Brian tells me again that he loves my backside, since, although I’m white, I apparently have “an ass like a Black girl.” He says it loud enough that I’m sure Mr. Hansen hears. Everyone hears. Everyone laughs. After the other students leave I approach the desk of our pale and wizened teacher.

“Mr. Hansen, some of the boys are saying things about me that are personal,” I say. He considers me with rheumy blue eyes and chuckles softly. He is old. Maybe he doesn’t understand.

“It makes me uncomfortable,” I add.

His smile wanes. He levels his gaze. “Yes, but your job in here is to look pretty for the rest of us.”

I thought my job as a student was to learn.

The smile returns to his face. My dilemma seems to amuse him. I am 14 and say nothing more to him, and say nothing to anyone else, because somehow it seems like my fault. Maybe I’m too nice or not nice enough or too smart or not smart enough or just a fake, pretending to be someone I’m not meant to be. If this is what the world of architecture feels like, I don’t want it. In June I hang up my T-square for good.

I am seventeen.  I return to my junior high, to pick up my younger brothers at the end of a school day. Mr. Hansen, who looks about seventy, hobbles from the woodshop into a hallway that’s empty, except for me and the beige metal lockers that line the walls. The woodshop is like my grandfather’s, only ten times larger. I can see the sander and miter saws through the double doors that I’d never crossed. Girls weren’t offered Woodshop, weren’t privy to the power of drills and planes and chisels. We were funneled into Home Economics, where we baked lemon cakes and sewed aprons, skills some boys might have wanted too. 

Mr. Hansen sees me in the hall and considers me. “My God, you look beautiful,” he says in a way that makes my insides curdle like a salted slug. I pleasantly arrange my good-girl face.

This is nothing, I know, in the scheme of things. I’m in high school now, and it’s the early 80s in America and apparently it isn’t a big deal that our bearded English teacher bonks his female students or that the pretty blond gym teacher sleeps with the female field hockey goalie. It is, however, a big deal when the swim coach is busted for molesting a boy on the varsity team.

I am fifty. I am a public school teacher, a job which gives me ample opportunity to encourage children to follow their hearts, no matter their interests, no matter their gender. The local paper blows up with a story about an educator in my school district. He harassed female students and colleagues for thirty years while administrators repeatedly dismissed numerous allegations, allegations that he ogled girls’ and women’s bodies, touched them inappropriately, made unwanted remarks about appearances, and solicited sex.

For thirty years.

In 2013, a group of twenty-three 8th grade girls boycotted the perpetrator’s physical education class, saying he leered at them, commented on their bodies, called them pet names, and videotaped them. He was fired the following year, but only after a male coworker complained that the educator had slapped and poked his rear.

 A few years ago I told the story of my Mechanical Drawing class to a female acquaintance. She said, “There are plenty of women who have made it as architects. You could have done it if you really wanted to,” which might be true, and which made me doubt my teenage self, and question whether or not that class was as bad as I remember.

 It was.

-Tess Kelly

Tess Kelly's essays have appeared in Ruminate, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Cleaver, Sweet Lit, and other publications. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.