On Wanting

I think I was eight years old, at a friend’s house, when I first saw this iconic film scene at the end of Grease. As Sandy Olsson, Olivia Newton-John enters the scene in a high-waisted leather number into which the actress famously had to be sewn. She is transformed, having abandoned her peter pan- collar dresses and trimmed bangs for a perm, gold hoops, and those red open-toed wedge sandals. And while Sandy’s desire for John Travolta as Danny Zuko is indisputably real, her presentation in this scene is all performance. See how—cigarette in hand, her first—she looks to the Pink Ladies (who are themselves undergoing something of a rehabilitating renaissance at the moment) for guidance. She follows their pantomimed instruction to drop and crush that cigarette. Although Sandy’s persona for Danny in this moment is all careless, brazen come-hither, her eyes dart to the Pink Ladies with the frank panic of stage fright—what do I do now?

Meanwhile, John Travolta’s Danny Zuko is utterly unselfconscious. He is totally carried away by his experience of wanting. Watch his face when he first sees Sandy. The cool-guy bravado falls away and we see a boy-almost-man naked with wonder. He is awe, he is shock, he is knocked to the ground with wanting. “It’s electrifying!” he quavers, shaking all the way down until his face meets the cigarette crushed under Sandy’s red peep-toe. Although Danny is initially wearing a letterman’s sweater in the scene (a nod at his attempt to fit into Sandy’s world—although, notably, it does not appear that he had to be sewn into his costume), he whips it off the moment he sees Sandy, perhaps because his desire is antithetical to artifice.

Sandy is sultry invitation— If you're filled with affection/ You're too shy to convey/ Meditate my direction/ Feel your way. Newton-John draws out “feel” until it is all vowel, sliding her hands up her thighs and looking up at Danny from beneath hooded eyes. Earlier in the film, Danny blew things with Sandy by trying to grope her at the drive-in movies, so you’d think he’d take her up on it and feeeeeel his way. But he doesn’t, because this kind of wanting is inherently humbling. Instead, his hands shoot above his head and his body drops to the ground as he lets out a yowl that sounds for all the world like a cat being electrocuted. Danny Zuko, cool, arrogant, all bombast and swagger, is suddenly childlike. The unequivocal joy spreads across his face and he wants only to deserve this inspiration—he will prove her faith is justified; he will keep her satisfied. These are not self-assured boasts. They are solemn vows.

Even at eight years old, I remember relating more to Danny’s experience—and it is pure experience—than to Sandy’s performance. This may be partly a consequence of being a queer kid: cut to age 14, and I’m lying on my bedroom floor listening to the Kinks’ All Day and All of the Night. Dave Davies slashed the speaker cones of his guitar amp with a razor for the song, producing a sound that the studio pejoratively criticized as “too blue collar,” “too working class,” “trashy,” and “like a barking dog.” Ray Davies joins in with a raucous, joyful yell, “Girl, I want to be with you all of the time.” The only time he feels all right is by her side. It dawns on me quietly, and because I don’t know about the varied possibilities of human sexuality, the words I think in a whisper are, “I feel about girls like a boy does.”  

But it wasn’t only girls that I wanted in that way—the yelling, knocked-to-the-ground, awed, lost, electrified way. It was also boys. And then again, it was everything. Everything that I wanted, I wanted in the way that John Lennon wants when he sucks his teeth and moans “gi-irl” in “Girl,” the Beatles’ most passive-aggressive and misogynistic song on Rubber Soul, but one I will always love because of the lost, overcome, almost mournful quality of desire that it expresses. The girl in “Girl” is, like Sandy, performing— “when you say she’s looking good, she acts as if its understood she’s cool.” But John, despite his toxic resentment, is consumed: “she’s the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry.”

When I was 17, I wanted to go to Georgetown. I wanted it so badly that it made me sorry. It was hot to the touch “like the metal on the edge of the knife,” as Meatloaf says in another song where a man’s desire is consuming and a woman’s is transactional. (Note, too, that in the duet Meatloaf is all big gestures, space, energy, pulling faces as his partner slides and slithers in a tight white outfit that, probably, she had to be sewn into).  But I didn’t have a realistic idea of what it would take to get there, and having dropped out of high school a month into ninth grade wasn’t what Georgetown was looking for. But I can do it. I can keep you satisfied! It wasn’t that I was arrogant, it was that I was inspired.

My high school boyfriend—a very bad boyfriend, as it turns out, but one with whom I was very much enamored—once said something to me about what I was wearing. As in, you know what you’re doing to me. I flushed with shame. I didn’t know. Sure, I knew the clothing was in some sense what he wanted, just like Sandy knows that those hoop earrings are a way to be closer to Danny. But I was, though my boyfriend didn’t notice, casting around for instruction from the Pink Ladies. What do I do now? The spark I had for that boy never had the air it needed to flame. He got to have an experience of being overcome, and I got to perform sultry invitation. As any professional performer will tell you, performance is work. When he left me, I was rage incarnate. Not because, I think, I loved him so very much, but because he didn’t keep up his end of the transaction.  Bitch better have my money. I don’t work for free.  

Also when I was a teenager, there was a girl. Two years older, my friend. I did not know what to make of our sporadic embraces, which always took me by surprise and felt like swimming in clear lake water, diving down to the bottom and pushing off the silty bottom with my toes, shooting to the surface with lungs bursting, sucking in air with the joy of being alive. Unlike my calculations with boys, there was no bravado. We can’t be gay, I thought. We both have long hair. Yet when her boyfriend—we both usually had boyfriends—said something to me about how he knew that the two of us, well, you know, I punched him in the face. I couldn’t have told you why.  The only time I feel all right is by your side.

In college, writing my honors thesis in philosophy, there it was again, that grasping, teeth-sucking desire. To understand Hegel. (I still don’t). To articulate the nature of cruelty. (I still can’t). To master language. (It’s never going to happen). I was working three jobs during college but every Saturday I got to the library at 6 am and stayed until long past midnight. Sometimes the concepts appeared with such stunning clarity that ego fell away and there was only awe. It’s electrifying!

Professors, and other students, found my wanting, well, embarrassing. It is embarrassing. I have no chill. It is unseemly. In seminar classes, my hand shot up for all the world like I was a cat being electrocuted. I didn’t have a ton of friends.

When I got pregnant with my first child the longing for her was bone-deep. It knocked me to the ground. It still does. The holy mystery of why I, a flawed human being, am trusted with growing something as precious and ineffable as a human being will never stop awing me. In motherhood perhaps more than in any other realm, I find performance impossible. I want their health and safety and happiness so much it makes me sorry. I have to hold myself back lest I crush my children with my love. I dive deep into the wholeness of them and come up gasping for air.

In music and in pop culture, wanting is most often sexual. But as a young person I didn’t see many portrayals of women wanting in the way I wanted. This was partly lack of exposure—later I would hear Joan Jett sigh “Ah, and I don’t hardly know her, But I think I can love her,” and recognize myself.  But it was also that my deepest wanting lacked all the seediness, stage fright, and constriction that I associated with female sexuality. The wanting I felt was, as Joan Jett wisely says, “a beautiful feeling.”

I married at 21, to a man who was a terrible match for me in all ways but one, which was that he shared my unseemly, unabashed hunger to learn. It was not enough to sustain us, and six years later it ended in contempt. I dated men indiscriminately.  My general tone was, “I don’t give a fuck about you.” I was callous. I was ironic. Which is another way, of course, of saying that desire was absent. Cynicism has no truck with earnest wanting. I also dated women, a little. One took me home and afterwards said she wasn’t looking for anything serious, and actually she was still living with her boyfriend. I cried myself to sleep, bereft. I wanted her that much.

I met my current spouse in this period. He was cute. I was bold, in that way that risks nothing. On our first or second date, if you could call it that, we were in the grocery store. I was saying who knows what. Cavalier, imperious, witty. In the checkout line, he stopped me. He looked right at me. “Hey. I’m lonely. I really need a good friend and I would like to hang out with you, but if this is just a game to you, I’m not interested.”

My face fell out of its studied almost-smirk, like Danny’s does when he first sees Sandy. This person was telling me you better shape up.  It was the beginning of the end for me. I will prove your faith is justified! Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, “a friend is, properly speaking, one to whom we wish good: while we are said to desire, what we wish for ourselves.” It’s a beautiful feeling. I hardly know you, but I think I could love you.

The pain of all the things I’ve desperately wanted and not gotten stays with me. Georgetown is the least of it. I wanted to be able to reconcile with my father. I wanted to make my first marriage a success so that my daughter could grow up living with both her parents. I wanted my best friend to love me back and rescue me from my pain instead of saying, “I’m not gay.” I wanted to adopt a child for whom I was a long-term foster parent. I wanted to get a federal court clerkship. I wanted to carry to term the twins with whom I was pregnant. I wanted, and want, to find a lasting peace for myself.

It hurts to want this badly, always glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife. But it has no resemblance to the choking shame I felt when I performed through stage fright so that others could be overcome. As I get older and more contended, my body expands. I favor clothing into which I not only do not have to be sewn but do not have to wriggle. My mind and body make big, explosive movements. I throw my toddler high into the air and pick up my now-taller-than-me preteen just to show her I still can, and it feels like swimming in the clearest lake water. I beg for a project at work that’s right at the edge of my abilities, barely able to stutter out the question yet even less able to contain it.

And when my spouse is feeling free and easy, or my children are safe and curious, or my coworkers and I are jamming on a really good brief, or my client trusts me with an especially tricky problem, ego falls away and there is only awe. I’m electrified.