by Gail Godwin
Yes, there was a boy eating peanuts, you could smell the oil from across the aisle; yes, there was an old lady with an apologetic cough; and yes, Nora spreads out her belongings on the empty seat to warn off any potential seatmate. There was no inebriated woman with her sad and distressing monologue. Instead it was “the sinister man” who went back and forth to the toilet at the rear of the bus. In this version of “The Bus Trip,” he pauses after three or four trips and asks if he may join her. He’s striking in a sharpish way, with eyes too deep-set to show their color and an unusual pallor under the short black haircut. He wears an open-necked white shirt that looks new under a formal black coat that is too large. He tells her he has been out of circulation for a while and hasn’t had much civilized conversation.
“What makes you think I am civilized?” Nora flippantly challenges. Already removing her things from the empty seat.
How would Chekhov end this story?
Perhaps there would be a brief attraction followed by the two going their separate ways after the bus ride, like the schoolmistress and the handsome alcoholic in the four-horse carriage. A “could-have-been” ending. Or maybe the strangers would decide to combine forces (his being a man, her stolen cash) against a city that neither of them was prepared for “until they were both on their feet.” Chekhov would leave them in their shabby lodgings, alternately clinging to each other and finding fault. (One day Feron returned from a walk and found him with his head in the sink, dyeing his hair black. “But now it looks fake.” “It will make it easier to get a job.”)
Uncle Rowan was taking Feron out for Thanksgiving dinner without Blanche Buttner, who traditionally spent that day in the church kitchen, cooking and serving a Thanksgiving meal for anyone who showed up at the Food Hall.
“Mabel, won’t you change your mind and come?”
“No, thank you, Rowan. I always hated Thanksgiving. I’m going to have some cornbread and buttermilk and take a nice nap while I have the house all to myself again.”
At the Greek restaurant they were settled into their reserved booth with much fanfare, and the owner’s entire family stopped by to pay obeisance to Uncle Rowan and make a fuss over his niece.
“Don’t tell your Aunt Mabel this,” Uncle Rowan said, when they were alone again, “but when the four of us were growing up, we called her ‘the tactless wonder.’ Mabel managed to make anything that came out of her mouth offensive to someone. So one day your father took her aside. ‘Listen, Mabel,’ he said. ‘You’re never going to get a husband if you don’t learn to gush.’
“ ‘Gush! I wouldn’t know how,’ she said.
“ ‘I’m going to teach you how,’ Woody told her. He said, ‘Now, I’m going to be you and you’ll be someone you’ve just met on the street. Now, say something.’
“ ‘Say what?’ Mabel asks.
“ ‘Just make the sort of comment normal people make when they meet on the street,’ Woody told her, ‘and remember you’re someone else.’
“So, being someone else, Mabel says, ‘It’s an overcast day.’
“And then Woody, being Mabel, says, ‘Yes, it is a little overcast, but now for me it’s a great day. And you know why? Because I happened to run into you!’ ”
“I wish I had known him,” said Feron. “I don’t have a single memory of my father.”
“Woody was the sweet one in our family. He had his faults, but he could be so funny. He was always making us laugh.”
“I wonder if he and my mother were happy, if they liked each other.”
“Well, honey, there was surely an attraction, or they wouldn’t have, you know, married.”
“Aunt Mabel said they had to get married.”
“Aunt Mabel tends to expect the worst of people. You came along about the time you were supposed to come along. It’s just too bad Woody didn’t live long enough to know you.” Uncle Rowan took off his glasses and made a big to-do about polishing the lenses with his pocket handkerchief. Feron could see he was trying to hide his annoyance at having been caught off guard.
“Why did the restaurant owner say you were a saint?”
“I’ve helped them out a little from time to time.” Uncle Rowan pronounced it “hepped.” “That nice young son of his you met used to have a wandering eye. It’s easily fixed but it costs money. And I helped with the daughter’s college and a few other things.”
She tried not to feel jealous that Uncle Rowan had paid for another girl’s college before he knew her.
Uncle Rowan asked about her friends.
“My closest friend is my roommate, Merry Jellicoe.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Hamlin.”
“The Jellicoe of Jellicoe’s bright leaf tobacco?”
“Yes.”
“You two get along then.”
“She’s easy to be with. And I can trust her.”
“No small compliment. Do you have any beaus?”
“I haven’t been on a date yet. I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“First-year Lovegood girls have to have written permission from their parents to go on dates.”
“I don’t recall anyone asking me for a written permission.”
“I haven’t missed it. Merry doesn’t date either.”
“I’m not a tyrant. I would have signed if anyone had asked.”
“It’s just as well. I like the safety of all the rules and regulations for first-year students. I can focus my mind and bring up my grades.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re getting on, honey. You’re not disappointed about the tooth, are you? The dentist thinks it’s better if we wait for the long Christmas break so you can go back to school with the porcelain crown, and not have to worry about displacing a temporary.”
“I’ve lived with this tooth since I was fifteen. Another month is nothing at all.”
“I hope I never meet that man.” Through his polished glasses Uncle Rowan glowered toward the far end of the restaurant at his invisible adversary. “But you’re okay now.”
10
The snow fell hard and fast on Lovegood College. A thick white scrim turned the century-old oaks into silhouettes of themselves, the three-foot-high boxwood hedges were level with the snow-covered lawn, and the Doric columns seemed to be growing out of the snow without their brick bases. Where was Mr. Sikes and his snowblower? The high double doors of the front entrance were impassable. Sikes should have been on the job hours ago.
“Nevertheless,” Dean Fox informed someone just behind her, “this snow is exactly what this school needs.”
“Why so, Susan?”
“It’s time for it to start with a clean slate. As I did.”
“If you had been patient, no clean slate would have been needed.”
“You would still be entreating me to be patient if I hadn’t cracked.”
“—throwing rocks at my window!” The irresistible laugh.
Oh, God, she was dreaming. This was a dream. But she had to finish this dialogue. Susan Fox willed herself to stay in her dream.
“Not rocks. Gravel.”
“All right, gravel. But the cursing … and the biting! Dear Susan, why couldn’t you have waited?”
“If I had waited, you would still be saying ‘Oh, dear Susan, please wait a little longer’ and compounding your little treacheries.”
“When you attacked that policeman—!” Again the laugh. The complicit, intimate laugh she believed to have been inspired by herself alone. She could still go weak in the knees from wanting him. But inside her own dream she now understood that he had laughed like that with each of the others.
Was the presence fading? “One more thing,” she said, “then I’ll let you go. Were you lying only to me, or were you lying to yourself, as well?”
When Dean Fox looked out the tall sash windows of her college suite, of course there was no snow. Not a flake had fallen since her arrival last year. It was now a mild mid-December day, and two floors below, Mr. Sikes, i
n a light work jacket, rode the tractor-mower in swaths of his own design on the winter lawn. Bud, his young assistant, scything weeds that had sprung up around the trees, had tied his jacket round his waist.
Everything in Dean Fox’s living quarters was of her own choosing: the color of the paint, the curtains, the upholstery fabric on the furniture. She had only to say. The Lovegood trustees wanted her to be happy. She was their great acquisition.
A few things she had brought from her old life, purchased in those early days when she had had every reason to assume she would be fading honorably into her dotage inside Saxon Hall’s noble walls: a handsome oak dresser with a round bevel mirror, an English walnut writing desk, and the chair Florence said she had “carried” to her new job.
“I wish I had your skills,” she had exclaimed as Eloise Sprunt led her through her own uptown apartment, which the widowed math and science teacher had renovated herself.
“You have elegant living quarters already. Lovegood’s high windows and ceilings aren’t doable anymore. But if you ever do go looking for an off-campus residence, I’ll be glad to look over the sites with you and offer suggestions.”
Am I afraid to strike out on my own, she had asked herself that afternoon in Eloise Sprunt’s apartment. The Lovegood trustees had given her the choice. They would find her off-campus lodgings of the type she preferred. But if she chose to stay at the school, they would fix up the suite to her heart’s desire. She intuited that she would be more in control of her surroundings inside the school that wanted her.
It was one thing to be a widow of means and the mother of grown children, returning to trade on architectural skills like Eloise Sprunt, and another to be a spinster in your midforties with nothing to show for it.
They called it “the snitching hour.” Every week the dorm mistress came to the dean’s office, and they “went over the girls.” Not all hundred and fifty girls, just the reportable ones who had caught the dorm mistress’s attention. The dean spread a cloth at one end of the rosewood conference table and provided the carafe of Madeira, the glasses, the plates, and the napkins. Winifred Darden, famous for her sweet tooth, brought the choicest offerings sent by the mothers. Lovegood’s Christmas recess being a week away, today’s haul was a bonanza.
“Shortbread, lemon pound cake, brownies, and Patsy King’s mother’s devastating fruit cake into which she starts injecting bourbon with a hypodermic needle in August. Oh, and cheese straws!”
“Goodness.” The dean, who had gained fifteen pounds since coming to Lovegood, watched the skinny dorm mistress laying out the spread with the disciplined slowness of greed held in check.
“What about Stubbs? Is she still sleeping?” Pouring the Madeira.
“I’m afraid so. And since someone informed her she might have mono, she feels entitled.”
“Sore throat? Swollen glands?”
“Nurse said no.”
“How are her grades?”
“Falling. She failed her last chemistry test. Mrs. Sprunt thinks she can pull her through if Stubbs comes back restored after the holidays.”
“Let her sleep for another week. Meanwhile, I will write to her parents for a clean bill of health from their doctor. What about Trask and Wooten? Are they still poisonous to each other?”
“As far as I can tell, they’ve retreated into a sullen standoff. Both like their room, they just wish the other person wasn’t in it.”
“Can they maintain their standoff till the end of the school year?”
“I’d bet on it. Isn’t this fruit cake wicked? Patsy King’s mother has outdone herself. I’m feeling high already.”
“What makes you bet on it?”
“Trask’s boyfriend is transferring to Wake Forest, and she’s begging her mother to let her transfer to Salem Academy. It’s more expensive, but they want her to be happier than she is here.”
“She told you that?”
“Many of them confide in me, you know. My omnipresence in their lives is a sort of camouflage. They don’t see me as threatening. I told Trask she would have to get her grades up or they wouldn’t touch her, and that she’d better start playacting the part of a cheerful, outgoing girl.”
“How did she take it?”
“She liked the playacting challenge. And it will be a challenge for Trask.”
“Good work. Who else is on your list? A little more Madeira?”
“I shouldn’t, but why not. There is something else, but I hesitate to bring it up …”
“If I know you, Winifred, that sounds like a preface to a real problem.”
“Well, it concerns Dr. Worley.”
“Dr. Worley?”
“He gives free counseling on Tuesday nights to girls who type up the stencils for his Psychology classes.”
“Yes, I know that. What? Are more girls showing up for free counseling than he has time to give?”
“No, it’s something else.”
The dean’s eyebrows went up. She decided against a second piece of the whiskey-logged fruitcake.
“I was above them on the stairs, out of their sight line, and Ginny Rogers was saying she almost threw up when he forced her to kiss him.”
“This is Alistair Worley?”
“Well, I didn’t know that … yet. And the other girl, I don’t know who she was, said, ‘Everybody knows he’s like that. He tells you the psychological reasons that you act the way you do, and gives you advice about things, and then comes the payoff.’ And Ginny Rogers said, ‘You mean you did it?’ And the girl whose voice I didn’t recognize said, ‘Well at least he soaks them in Polident. You can taste it in his mouth. And when I go back upstairs, I gargle with Listerine. Everybody knows that’s part of the deal.’ ”
“She said ‘everybody knows’?”
“Yes, my heart sank when I heard that. You wonder how many is ‘everybody.’ ”
The dean took some more Madeira herself. “I am going to have to think this through, Winifred.”
“I dreaded telling you and having to upset you just before the holidays. But I know you well enough that after you think it through, you will make the right executive decision.”
11
“Feron, you never—I wanted to ask, but—”
“Wanted to ask what?”
The roommates were returning from Cobb’s Corner, a seedy store three blocks from Lovegood. They had to step carefully over upended slabs of sidewalk where old tree roots had broken through.
“Your story. You read mine, but you never let me read yours. I showed you my note from Miss Petrie, but you didn’t offer to show yours.”
Both were sucking grape-flavored Tootsie Pops. The store was popular less for what it stocked than what it offered: a permitted destination Lovegood girls could walk to and from during daylight hours with the sense they were venturing outside Lovegood boundaries.
“That’s because mine was never really finished. Miss Petrie wrote that it wasn’t a story. And it wasn’t. It isn’t.”
Though alerted to Feron’s “lay off” voice, Merry pushed it a notch further. “But I would be interested. I don’t even know what your story was about.”
“I just told you. It wasn’t a story. I knew it when I turned it in. And she said it wasn’t a story. It had some good sensory details, but I didn’t reveal enough about the main character for it to be a story.”
“But still. I would have liked …”
“Okay. It was about a girl running away on the bus. Only I neglected to reveal why she was running away or where she was headed. And this drunk woman loses her balance and falls into the empty seat beside her and tells horrible stories about why she’s a drunk and her life is ruined. Then she tells my main character she’s going back to her own seat to have another nip from the bottle, and she says, I won’t remember a word I said in the morning and what’s more I won’t even remember you. And that’s the end of my nonstory.”
“Oh, Feron.”
“Oh, Feron, what?”
“It so
unds compelling. What you said about the end, it sounds like a Chekhov ending.”
“I must admit, that flicked through my mind when I turned it in. Maybe she’ll think it’s like Chekhov. But she didn’t. Now, with you, she said it was engaging from beginning to the end and that the fever dream part was convincing and it was masterly the way you stayed inside her point of view right up to her last breath.”
“But it was you who helped me improve it!”
“All I did was suggest putting 1918 right at the start and thinking of a better adjective than ‘ordinary’ for your main character.”
“Well, anyway, Feron, thank you for trusting me enough to tell me about your story.”
“How many times do I have to say, it was not a story. What a terrible sidewalk this is! Why don’t they have it fixed?”
“Cobb’s Corner won’t be here next September. These entire three blocks are coming down, including all the trees that caused the damage.”
“What?”
“The contractors and the architects still have to turn in their bids, but this whole area we’re walking through already belongs to Lovegood College. Next summer they’re going to break ground for new buildings, a cafeteria and a gym with a swimming pool.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“From Miss Darden.”
“Old Motormouth herself.”
“When the architect draws up the plans—after we decide on one—Dean Fox will throw a big reception for the girls and the old girls and the trustees. It’s not a secret, Miss Darden says, it’s only that the plans aren’t far enough along to excite everybody.”