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had other plans, in Manhattan. I wanted to
suggest now in my swaggering manner that, even as I assured him I felt fine,
really I’d been stunned, shaken. Violence had been done to me by a
meanly-wielded hockey stick which despite my big-girl body I hadn’t been able to
absorb. And I wanted to punish Roland Marks for staring so avidly at certain of
my teammates—my friend Ardis and the sloe-eyed Estella with thick dark hair like
an explosion of tiny wires. He’d even gaped after some of the St. Ann’s
girls.
    â€œMaybe the tooth could be put back in ? Some kind of fancy orthodontic
surgery . . .”
    Roland Marks was looking faint. Nearly wringing his
hands. The sight of blood was confounding to him. Infamously he’d written about female blood —a notorious passage in an early novel,
frequently quoted by hostile feminist critics as an example of Marks’s unconscionable misogyny.
    But Dad was no misogynist. Dad loved me.
    I laughed. I was feeling excited, exalted. This was
a key moment in my young life—I was fifteen years old. I had not always been so
very happy and I had not always been so very proud of myself despite my
exemplary status in my father’s eyes. I believed now that my teammates were
concerned about me—and that they knew who my father was—who Roland Marks was.
I’d seen the curiosity and admiration in their eyes, a hint of envy. The Rye
Academy was an academically prestigious school (it was ranked with
Lawrenceville, Exeter, Andover) but it was not Miss Porter’s, St. Mark’s, or
Groton— there were not nearly enough celebrity-daughters enrolled. So Roland
Marks—a much-awarded, much-acclaimed and frequently bestselling literary author
whose picture had once been on a Time cover—a name
particularly known to English instructors and headmasters—carried some weight.
As Dad complained to his friends It’s a come-down to discover you’re the celebrity yourself. You know what Groucho Marx said.
    (Did I know what Groucho Marx had said? I wasn’t
sure. As a young child, I’d assumed the name my father meant was Groucho Marks .)
    Dad had given me one of his handkerchiefs to press
against my bleeding mouth. Not a tissue—a handkerchief. White, fine-spun cotton,
neatly ironed and folded. My mother would have grabbed me tight not minding if I
got blood on her clothing.
    â€œLou-Lou darling, we’ll—sue! Someone is liable
here! This is worse than Roman gladiatorial combat, you don’t even get a decent
crowd.”
    Dad’s lame attempt at humor. The more nervous he
was, the more he tried to be “funny.”
    As soon as he’d arrived at school, as soon as he’d
seen the number of spectators in the bleachers before our game with St. Ann’s,
he’d been vehement, disapproving. Where was “school spirit”? Why weren’t the
field hockey team’s friends and classmates supporting them in greater numbers?
And where were their teachers, for Christ’s sake? (This was unfair: there were
teachers amid the spectators. No choice for them, our fancy private school
decreed that instructors attend as many sports events as they could, as well as
concerts, plays, poetry slams. Our teachers were substitute-parents, of a kind.
You could see the strain in their faces, before their cheery-instructor smiles
broke out.) Dad’s quick alert eye had moved about my teammates’ faces—and
figures—seeking out those images of female beauty, utterly irresistible female
beauty, that made life worth living—or so you’d think, from Roland Marks’s
novels; and during the game, even as I ran my heart out to impress him, stomping
up and down the field like a deranged buffalo and wielding my hockey stick with
bruised hands, even then I saw how he was distracted by certain of my teammates,
and one or two of the St. Ann’s girls, whose field-hockey ferocity