by PAMELA DEAN
"I can't, it'd take another three years—oh. Ha, ha, ha. Very good. Is our timing really that bad?"
"Invariably," said Janet.
Thomas and Tina spent the bus trip back kissing one another. Nick was violently amused by this, and finally persuaded Janet up to the front of the bus with him so he could laugh quietly.
"It's not a completely worthless idea," said Janet. "You could kiss me."
"Once, if you like," said Nick, "but there is nothing romantic or stirring about this bus.
A dormitory room is bad enough, God knows."
"Some people take blankets to the Arboretum."
"In the spring, maybe," said Nick.
Because they took the commercial bus rather than the college shuttle, and saw Nick to the doors of Taylor, the remaining three ended up walking along the south edge of campus and then taking the asphalt road between Forbes and Ericson. Tina said good-bye lingeringly to Thomas. Janet thought of sneaking quietly away, but she was afraid Thomas might apologize to her. She and Tina finally turned toward Ericson and went in its side entrance. The first-floor landing smelled of ironing, the second of coffee, the third of that same sweet peculiar stuff Janet had noticed once before, and the fourth, stiflingly, of the same.
"Is that marijuana?" said Janet to Tina, as they gained their own landing.
"Is what marijuana?"
"That smell like somebody burning a rope covered with brown sugar."
"I don't know," said Tina.
They pushed open the double doors at the end of their corridor, and the smell hit them like warm water. Of course. It was at this end of the corridor that the freshmen lived who were causing Nora such worry. They must have joined forces with the more sensible pot-smokers on Third. Janet's eyes were beginning to water, and she wanted to get a look at Anne Beauvais's little sister.
"Let's ask them to open their windows," she said, and knocked on the left-hand door.
"I'm going to bed," said Tina, mildly, and went off down the hall.
Nobody answered that door. Janet turned across the hall and tried the other one, loudly. Somebody opened the door at once. They had put a couple of green towels—which they had certainly not gotten from the college laundry service—over their desk lamps and turned out the overhead. The resulting light was pleasant over the upper part of the room, but clashed viciously with the red carpet.
The student who opened the door was very like Anne. Her yellow hair was short and curly, and she seemed if anything even taller—her head brushed the top of the doorway—but those were the only differences. She was barefoot and barelegged, wearing a large muslin shirt with an embroidered hem. "Hello?" she said.
Janet introduced herself and suggested that a little ventilation was in order.
"Well, I don't know," said Odile, in the mellow voice she also shared with Anne. "It's not my smoke." She turned back into the room and called, "Jen, Barbara, come here a moment."
She stood aside as she spoke. Janet stared into the smoky green light of the room. It was like a dusty forest clearing at sunset. The shrouded lamps cast meaningless shadows and warped all the familiar college furniture. There were two other tall slender figures, one in green draperies and the other in nothing whatever, standing talking against the dark windows; and a third one, in white gauze, lying on the floor with a candle in a Food Service saucer balanced on her chest. The Food Service saucer was the only thing in the room that looked like itself. Janet's head hurt. She did not, really, want to speak to any of these people, and started to say so.
Then two more figures rose from the floor behind one of the beds, stepped over the person on the floor, and came up behind Odile. They were both brown-haired and ordinary-looking; much shorter and solider than Odile, and wearing jeans and sweaters. One of them had wire-rimmed glasses, the other horn-rimmed ones. Both of them looked as if they were suffering from sleep deprivation and pink-eye simultaneously; Janet could have hugged them anyway.
Odile said to them, "Janet here thinks we must open some windows."
"We paid a lot for that smoke," said the girl with glasses, as if she had had to think hard to figure this out, "and we're not done with it yet."
"You're losing it just the same," said Janet, "it's going down the stairway and all along the hall. I live in four-oh-four," she added, with perfect truth but lying intent. She wanted very much to ask why they didn't just drink themselves into whatever state they were all in and stop polluting their immediate environment, but it would be impolitic. And rather silly—they probably weren't old enough to drink, so it would be just as illegal, and just as bad for their college work, and they might even deck the room out like this to do it in, too.
But unless they got sick in the hall, she would at least be able to walk past their door in blissful ignorance.
"You can come in too," said the other brown-haired girl. "The night is young. Odile has stuff she hasn't distributed yet."
"Thank you," said Janet, "I've been to a Stoppard play, and that's enough for one night."
Odile smiled distantly.
The two with glasses looked wide-eyed at each other.
"Are you a butterfly dreaming it's a Chinese philosopher?" said the girl with the wire-rimmed glasses, looked again at her companion as if for corroboration, and giggled contentedly.
"No," said Janet, wearily. She felt a hundred years old. The shadows in the room wavered like water. The light in the corridor was beginning to hurt her eyes. The sickly smoke rasped in her throat like the taste of Tabasco sauce. She thought of Nora, shouldering her senior year as an Economics major and having to listen to nonsense from these creatures, people most other RA's would either have let go to hell or reported long ago. "I'm a Puritan masquerading as a college student. And I advise you to open those windows, because I'm going to talk to Melinda Wolfe."
They looked at her blankly.
"Never mind," said Odile. She put a hand on each of their backs and pushed. "You go down to bed now; we'll manage."
They walked at Janet as if she weren't there; she dodged hastily, and they went past her, through the stairway doors and, from the sounds, down the steps without any mishap.
"Now," said Odile. "Do you know Melinda Wolfe?"
"She's my advisor," said Janet.
Odile opened her eyes in an expression just slightly exaggerated—theater types, thought Janet—and ducking her head she stepped outside into the hall and shut the door behind her. "What is your major?"
"English," said Janet, taking a step backwards so she coul d hold Odile's eye without
hurting her own neck. Odile smelled of violets, and the embroidery of her shirt was columbines. Her skin was like honey.
"Ah," said Odile. "You had not thought of Classics?"
Janet stared at her, and stopped an impatient answer just in time. She had heard the question too often. It made no sense, but it meant something. "I haven't decided for certain," she said. "I'm only a freshman."
"Ah," said Odile again. "Well, attend for a moment, then. You see that the more foolish children are asleep across the hall and that I have sent the less foolish children downstairs to bed also. With what remains you have nothing to do."
"I have to breathe it," said Janet, so as to have said something. "And you're fretting Nora terribly."
"We do not fret Nora," said Odile. "The children we may leave out of account from this day forward."
That was what Nora had called them, children. Odile was a freshman herself. Janet suppressed, again, the urge to argue; this was not what was important. She wished she knew what she was bargaining with. She said, "If Nora thinks things are under control, I do too."
"So," said Odile. She smiled suddenly, and Janet smiled back completely without meaning to. Odile said, "This is not your atmosphere, I think? But Classics has room for Puritans also. We need you; we are the leaven, but you are the loaf. Do you remember that, when you think on which major you will choose."
Her tone was kind and friendly, and Janet's ski
n prickled all over. "I'll remember," she said. While memory holds a seat in this distracted globe; you bet. "But the smoke?"
"I think one puts a towel along the crack under the door, that keeps the smoke from leaving. We will do so. Good night." She slipped back into her room and shut the door.
I wish I knew what just happened, thought Janet. She went quickly down the hall and into her own room as if she were heading for home in a game of hide-and-seek. It smelled comfortingly of the Russian tea Tina made. Janet opened all the windows anyway, and made Molly and Tina wrap themselves up in their bedspreads while they drank the tea. It took the burned-rope-and-sugar taste out of her throat, but eventually she was obliged to go take a shower to get the smell out of her hair. It was almost as bad as the lake water.
CHAPTER 9
September ran out in a late and freakish thunderstorm, and October breezed in, golden and smiling. Daily life, which had been full of starts and uncertainties, settled into a routine. Tina and Thomas became a model couple, making sheep's eyes at one another and explaining one another's views whenever one of them was absent. Molly and Robin pursued an erratic and puzzling course. You could not make any assumptions about whether Robin would be present, whether for dinner or lunch or an afternoon walk or the Wednesday night foreign films or the Friday and Saturday night popular ones. He always sat by Molly, or on her bed if she wasn't there when he dropped by, which was fairly often, since he never seemed to take the trouble to learn her schedule. But he never touched her. It was true that Molly was so scornful of people who snuggled in public that you would not expect her to do it herself. She and Tina did take the bus up to Planned Parenthood early one Saturday while Janet was struggling in Professor Evans's class with his comparison of
Volpone with Peter Rabbit. But Janet was half convinced that Molly had gone only to get better help for her cramps.
They both came back looking a little white and subdued. It was like an assembly line at a factory, Molly said; she supposed they couldn't help it, but it made you want to go find a nice nunnery in Spain and spend your time writing steamy poetry in cipher. Janet looked at her anxiously; Tina, for once, sat down on her bed and whooped with laughter. It was uncertain which reaction Molly wanted. She and Tina showed Janet their birth-control pills, in clear plastic boxes, thick round things the size of a hamburger bun, with the days of the week written around the edge; they looked like some aberrant perpetual calendar.
Neither of them was at all good at remembering to take the things. Janet ascribed this to the fact that both of them, having meekly taken the first pill after dinner as recommended, spent the entire night in the bathroom, being sick, and walked around hollow-eyed from lack of sleep all next day, refusing to walk in the woods in the most beautiful weather imaginable.
Molly was sick the first three nights and then felt fine; Tina was sick every night for the whole month of October, and refused to stop taking the pills. She also refused to go to the college Health Service, which, given that the doctor in charge had persistently declined even to do pregnancy tests, let alone any gynecological work, was perhaps not completely unreasonable. Tina lost ten pounds and took to having an afternoon nap; Janet and Molly nagged at her and got nowhere. Molly gained ten pounds, all around the waist, and grumblingly offered to trade metabolisms with Tina. Tina just smiled. She was still a nice pink, except that on her thinner face the color looked more hectic than healthy.
Janet finally lay in wait in the lobby for Thomas one late-October evening before dinner, and asked him if sex, however wonderful, could possibly be worth all this. "Do you realize Tina's throwing up every night? It's not good for her."
" I didn't make her do this," said Thomas, scowling. "She can stop for all of me. And she has to take the bloody things for a month before we can have sex, wonderful or not—and as you may possibly have noticed, there is no privacy in this damned college anyway."
He stamped up the stairs. It was the first time he had showed his temper since she had met him in the library—even in the face of chronic provocation from Nick. Janet sat down in the lounge, where a mixed group of students was watching the news on television, and wrestled her own temper back where it belonged. She had in fact noticed. Whatever provisions Nick had or had not made against the intrusion of a third party into their proceedings, there had been no occasion on which it was necessary to inquire, except in a purely academic sense.
The problem was not really privacy, it was time. Janet was carrying a normal term's load, three ten-week courses with their accompanying reading and writing. Nick was contemplating a double major in English and Classics, and was accordingly taking an extra course—and it was beginning Latin with Medeous, who was extremely demanding. He also kept thinking of dropping either the English or the Classics, depending on which was giving him more trouble, in favor of a Music major, and was taking piano lessons, as well as singing with a group of people who had not been able to get into the Chamber Music class this term. And he had his own projects: arguing with Robin and Thomas over The Revenger's Tragedy they would produce winter term, setting poetry to music, writing an opera of Cyrano de Bergerac, writing a sonnet a day "to keep his hand in." Janet had not written a line of poetry or a word in her journal since she got here; she suspected him of never sleeping.
As far as she could tell, studying at Blackstock was a full-time job, and nourishing a beginning love affair was a job and a half. And yet it would be quite impossible to disentangle oneself. Staring at black-and-white images of the carnage of the war in Viet Nam and listening to the unimpassioned voice of the television announcer recite horrible statistics, Janet found herself thinking of Claudius's words near the end of Hamlet. "It is the poisoned cup; it is too late." The audience, for some inexplicable reason, had laughed at the line. Thomas said they always did, people in theaters thought death was funny, probably because they had seen too many movies. Even in the midst of that laughter, Janet had felt cold, clear through, at that line. It seemed to describe not the complex and foolish and only half-believable situation the supposedly canny Claudius had gotten himself into, but the sum of wrong choices and irrevocable actions. Nick was not a wrong choice; but associating with him seemed to have been an irrevocable action. Four years, Janet told herself again. You have four years. There will be lighter terms, Thanksgiving vacation, summer, something.
Was it possible that when people objected to coeducational colleges, it was this sort of problem, and not an impertinent and disgusting desire to police other people's morals, that really moved them? No, probably not. Morals had very little to do with this, not the kind of morals that people who wanted to police other people's were most concerned with, anyway.
Whether this affair was ever consummated or not, it required patience, attention, energy, wit, and generosity.
The source of these requirements banged through the front door of Ericson, whistling
"Sweet Baby James." Janet ran out of the lounge and intercepted him. Since Molly wasn't around to complain, she kissed him. The kiss became complex. Somebody came in the front door, and they let go of each other.
"What's up?" said Nick. "Has something happened that you're lying in wait for me?"
"I was lying in wait for Thomas, actually, but he's in a terrible mood."
"Don't tease him; they just told him he couldn't graduate this year."
"Tina will be delighted. Between bouts of nausea. I'm not sure I think much of a method of birth control that mimics pregnancy."
"I've got something better than that," said Nick. "It just came in today." He dug in all the pockets of his shabby brown jacket, finally emerging with a little white box stuck shut with a blob of red wax. "An old herbal remedy."
"Are you sure it works?"
"If it doesn't, I will pay the fee."
"What does that mean?"
"You decide."
Janet weighed the box in her hand. "Does it have side effects?"
"My sister said it made her ears itch."
; "Does it really work?"
"Word of honor."
All right, thought Janet, let's find out just what that means. "When?" she said.
Nick sighed. "I think it must be after the end of the term. Robin is going home, but I'm not; I'm going to paint Ericson Little Theater for the College, and they're going to let me stay in my own room during vacation."
"Why aren't you going home for Christmas?"
"My family's in England."
"They've got lousy timing. You can have Christmas dinner with us."
Robin came in the front door then, and the three of them went upstairs to collect the other three. They had an engagement to go see Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, this weekend's offering by the college. Janet was afraid Robin would laugh at it, but he was very quiet. He did abuse the music afterwards.
As October disappeared in piles of leaves, Janet felt her classes drift out of sync with her preoccupations. Fencing was all right; but the philosophical problems in classical science became foggier every class, and Anthropology was only a little better. English class had by slow degrees attained the sixteenth century, marched with wary smiles through Volpone, gazed with horror and guilty laughter upon The Duchess of Malfi, and run aground on the enormous rock of King Lear. There was love poetry behind and before them, but Lear blocked their path like a broken statue in a narrow pass of the mountains.
Evans had cheerfully explained to them that Lear was for mature tastes and they were reading it for his pleasure, not for theirs.
Janet read the loveless squabble of Regan and Goneril for the favors of Edmund, and felt distinctly sick. The main movement of the play seemed to her completely chaotic; her only comfort was that Evans would probably not compare it to Squirrel Nutkin or The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit.
She sat in class the Thursday before Hallowe'en, listening to a discussion of Albany's inability to move quickly and its effect on the play from Act III onward, and contemplated with pleasure the beginning of Fall Term Recess at five o'clock this afternoon. Friday and Saturday were free of classes. She wondered what anybody would be doing for Hallowe'en.