The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  I’ll think about it, Mamie, Gwen said, because what else did you say to a failing grandmother—devout, kindly—who worried about your future?

  I’m so glad, said Mamie. Thank you, dear.

  She died a week later, of a second, massive stroke; and true to her promise, Gwen continued to think about what her grandmother had said. (For years the thought returned to her unbidden, whenever misfortune arose: There’s always the convent. This never failed to make her laugh.)

  But the conversation had another, more immediate effect. Gwen realized, suddenly and powerfully, the need for a change. That fall, without telling anyone, she applied for transfer to the University of Pittsburgh, where Andreas Swingard had been hired as the new chair of anthropology. She chose it for its large student body, where she could be perfectly anonymous, and its undemanding admissions profile: according to Barron’s they’d be perfectly happy with her B average, the undistinguished board scores that had wait-listed her at Wellesley.

  When the acceptance arrived in the mail, Gwen told her father first.

  “Pittsburgh?” Frank paused a moment, gathering his thoughts. Gwen could see a lecture taking shape in his head. “I have some experience with that part of the world,” he said tentatively. “It’s quite different from here, in many respects.”

  Gwen nodded, waiting. It was strange to see her father at a loss for words.

  The University of Pittsburgh, while a fine school, was not Wellesley. Gwen understood that, didn’t she?

  “Yeah, Dad,” she said. “That’s kind of the point.”

  She explained, then, about Andreas Swingard and cultural anthropology. Pitt’s department was larger than Wellesley’s, and more specialized. And of course, Pitt offered the PhD.

  Frank brightened visibly. Gwen knew her father, knew what pleased him. Shamelessly she invoked the Steelers, the Pirates, the Penguins. She could see that she had him. There was no need to mention that Pitt, unlike Wellesley, was coed.

  She had no intention of taking the veil.

  That spring Frank became her hero. She would go to Pittsburgh, he promised; her mother would be convinced. Gwen stood back while her parents battled. In the end, her father prevailed.

  All that summer Paulette raged. I can’t believe you’re leaving, she said again and again—alternately angry and weepy, in a way Gwen hadn’t seen since the divorce.

  Gwen’s response was always the same: Mother, it’s time.

  To her father’s amazement, she requested driving lessons. Together they cruised the back roads between Lincoln and Lexington, practiced three-point turns in parking lots. Frank called it a fascinating experiment: most Turners had difficulty in judging space and distance, he explained, and Gwen was no exception. In spite of this she was a better student than Scott, whose lessons nearly killed Frank and had, in fact, finished off his transmission. After Scott passed his test, Frank had unloaded the old sedan, and Gwen learned to drive on his new Saab 900.

  Her brother Billy, who ridiculed Frank’s love of all things Swedish, called the new car Dad’s Nobel Prize.

  Before she left for Pittsburgh, her father gave her another gift. Gwen learned to scuba dive. The certification class, an early birthday present, was held twice a week in a high school swimming pool two towns over. This gift would be important later, in ways Gwen couldn’t yet imagine.

  The Stott Museum sat north of the Allegheny, just over the Seventh Street Bridge, in a cavernous brick building that had served as the original Stott brewery. The place had been gutted in the early 1980s, a renovation financed through the generosity of Juliet Stott, the old-maid heir to the Stott brewing fortune. Miss Stott had poured millions into the project, imagining her museum a centerpiece of Pittsburgh’s renaissance, the city’s transformation from dying steel town to gleaming technology center, from Rust Belt dinosaur to American Florence, a center of intellectual and cultural life.

  Or something like that.

  The Stott’s collection was vast but eclectic (some said incoherent), its acquisitions guided largely by the whim of Miss Stott—who, accompanied by her cook, maid, and driver, had tagged along on a few archaeological digs back in the 1940s. Miss Stott had a great respect for the indigenous art of Oceana. The Minoans interested her. She was fascinated by all things Egyptian. The atrium of the Stott displayed a painstakingly reconstructed Maori meeting house. Yet the collection was light on the Cretaceous period; and when it came to the Jurassic and Triassic, virtually nonexistent. “No dinosaurs,” the grande dame had decreed early on, and though the staff had bent this rule with small tetrapod fossils, they had never broken it. Now eighty-nine years old, Miss Stott still visited the museum occasionally, prompting a flurry of activity among the development staff. Buffets were laid, fresh fruit and pastry from an outside bakery. (The rest of the time, the staff bought weak coffee and thawed bagels at the dank basement cafeteria.) Miss Stott, despite her generosity on certain fronts (folk arts, Egyptiana) could be tightfisted when it came to what development called added value and what Miss Stott called frills. Development had lobbied for years to get funding for an IMAX theater which, they claimed, would increase traffic by 30 percent in the first year. In the second year, it would wipe the Buhl Planetarium off the tourist map.

  (That Miss Stott had no interest in effacing the Buhl, that she had, in younger days, sat on the Buhl’s board of directors, came as an embarrassing surprise.)

  “A movie theater?” the old lady repeated. “Who wants to look at movies when you’ve got all this?”

  The development staff exchanged glances, unsure how to explain that pottery and artifacts held little appeal for pampered suburban children who spent half their lives glued to high-resolution video screens.

  The Stott was a nonprofit, it was true, but in recent years had become so nonprofitable that its very existence was in jeopardy. Attendance was off, impairing the staff’s grant-writing efforts. Unlike its peers—Field in Chicago, Natural History at the Smithsonian—the Stott lacked big exhibits (e.g., dinosaurs) that grabbed headlines. And the building itself, while handsome, lacked profit-generating amenities. Its gift shop was minimal, its cafeteria in need of renovation. Development envisioned a full-service food court, with world cuisines thematically tied to the Stott’s exhibits. Led by a dynamic new hire named Lois Kraft, development conducted factfinding interviews with certain of the collections staff:

  These…indigenous tribes of Australia. The aborigines. What do they eat?

  Their diet has changed in the twentieth century, said Gwen. Now it’s not so different from ours.

  Lois Kraft looked disappointed. What about before?

  Roots and grubs, said Gwen.

  Grubs? Lois repeated.

  Worms, she said.

  Such was the tenor of Gwen’s interactions with senior staff. In her own department she was, if not precisely liked, then valued and respected. After seven years in collections she was considered a veteran, an in-house authority on Stott history, policy, and procedures. With her master’s degree she was overqualified for the job, yet without the intercession of Tova Windsor, Gwen wouldn’t have been hired at all. Tova—wife of her father’s old friend Neil Windsor—knew the director, and had gotten her an interview for an assistant curator’s job. Face-to-face with Bennett Whitley, the suave man of forty who would be her supervisor, Gwen found herself answering in monosyllables. He said you were too introverted, Tova told Gwen afterward. Honey, you need to relax a little. Learn to open up. She made a second call to the director and landed Gwen another interview. It’s a behind-the-scenes job, Tova explained. Not much interaction with the public. This time Gwen met with the human resources rep charged with hiring underlings, a bored-looking paper pusher who glanced frequently at his watch.

  “This job is physically demanding,” he said. “You’d be on your feet a lot, and you must be able to lift forty pounds without assistance.”

  Gwen tried to take offense at this remark, and found it impossible. The man scarcely looked at he
r, and she’d been sitting when he arrived. It was possible he hadn’t even noticed her size.

  “No problem,” she said.

  He made a mark on the open folder in front of him “We’ve never had a collections assistant with a Master’s degree,” he observed mildly.

  “That’s okay,” said Gwen. “I don’t mind.”

  And she didn’t. She enjoyed the research, the physical effort of building the exhibits. “Wow, you’re pretty strong,” said her supervisor, Roger Day, after watching her load an unwieldy plywood frame onto a dolly. For some reason, this pleased her immensely. She loved surprising people with what she could do.

  That was seven years ago. In that time her adult life had taken shape in the same gradual, quiet way the estrogen had shaped her body. (Modestly, as Dr. Chapin had said. She now wore, with some irony, a regular bra, in the hard-to-find size of 38AA.) She’d kept her modest Volkswagen, ten years old but still reliable; her modest grad student apartment in Oakland, an easy bus ride from the Stott. Her modest salary kept pace with inflation (though her modest inheritance from her grandfather Drew had, after a few years’ investing in an unprecedented boom market, nearly tripled.) Her modest circle of friends included her landlady, Mrs. Uncapher, and her master’s thesis adviser Andreas Swingard (she had never finished the PhD). There was also Sister Felicia Pooley, a friendly nun who visited the Stott with her fifth-graders. (Keeping my options open, Mamie, Gwen sometimes thought.) Yet friends her own age eluded her. Her peers were busy marrying and having children, a way of life that seemed all consuming and that Gwen could not imagine for herself.

  In her interests and attitudes, her daily routines, she had more in common with a sixty-year-old nun.

  Her coworkers were not friends. Most were just passing through. In seven years the staff had turned over several times. Collections assistant was an entry-level job, filled, except for Gwen, with recent college grads. She called them, privately, the Toddlers. They arrived in early summer; in a year most would leave for graduate school. The current crop—Colin, Connor, and Meghan—seemed like teenagers. Meghan wore a tiny hoop earring in her left eyebrow; Connor’s loose blue jeans pooled around his ankles and flashed the waistband of his boxer shorts. All day long they played music at a pulsating volume: rap, hip-hop, a frantic kind of dance music they called ska. The throbbing bass line gave Gwen a headache. She began wearing earplugs to work, but the noise wasn’t really the problem. The Toddlers themselves troubled her, their youth and exuberance, their unconscious high hopes for the future. They treated Gwen with quiet deference, which depressed her. She was too young to feel so old.

  Finally she’d complained to her supervisor. I can’t work this way. I need my own space. But instead of moving the Toddlers, Roger had installed Gwen in the only available office, a windowless corner of the basement. Reasonable, of course: there were three Toddlers, and only one Gwen. They’ll be gone in six months, she reminded herself, and settled in to her dank solitary confinement. Then Roger crammed a second desk into her office and hired Heidi Kozak.

  Gwen disliked her on sight.

  “Gwen’s the expert,” said Roger, by way of introduction. “She’s been here forever. She’ll show you the ropes.”

  Heidi smiled broadly, showing large teeth. Her smile was oddly familiar. Where do I know her from? Gwen wondered. She was a tall, bosomy woman with long hair the color of broom straw. Her fingernails extended half an inch past her fingertips.

  “Welcome,” Gwen said, relieved. The intrusion would be temporary. With those fingernails, Heidi Kozak wouldn’t last.

  But Heidi did last. She appeared for work each morning freshly bathed, it seemed, in floral cologne. Like her fragrance, she was impossible to ignore. Her first day on the job, she told Gwen her life story. She was a local girl, a steelworker’s daughter, raised in a South Side row house with five brothers and one bathroom. (Eight assholes, one toilet, she told Gwen.) She’d dropped out of Pitt to marry her high school sweetheart, and had kept busy as a volunteer tour guide at the Stott. Recently divorced (don’t even ask), she now needed a paycheck.

  All of which explained why Heidi looked familiar. Gwen saw the tour guides only in the cafeteria—the women in dresses, the men in ties. (The collections staff wore flannel shirts and blue jeans.) Never, in Gwen’s memory, had a tour guide come over to the collections side.

  Her résumé made Heidi unusual. Even stranger was her reaction to Gwen. Day after day, Heidi invited her to lunch, morning coffee, happy hour cocktails at the bar down the street. She likes me, Gwen realized, irritated and perplexed. Instinctively she refused these overtures. She wasn’t sure why. Her no, immediate and reflexive, seemed to come from deep within her. Her impulse, always, was to protect her solitude—a way of life she clung to and protected fiercely, yet didn’t especially like.

  But Heidi kept asking, and Gwen finally relented, haunted by her own creeping loneliness. Her social calendar was empty, her other coworkers pleasant but distant. Only Heidi seemed to notice she was there.

  They made an odd pair; walking down the street together, they invariably turned heads. Gwen had been watched by strangers her whole adult life, but in Heidi’s company the attention was different. Heidi wasn’t beautiful, but that didn’t matter if you were blond and buxom and wore tight sweaters and short skirts. In her teetering heels Heidi was six feet tall; she dressed more like a teenager than a woman of forty. Gwen’s mother would have raised an eyebrow at the bright colors and trendy styles. Any woman’s best color, she often said, was beige.

  But Gwen loved Heidi’s warmth and brightness, her vibrant plumage. She loved Heidi’s indiscreet laugh, her bottomless thirst for margaritas, the bawdy stories she told. Her aggressive driving, her willingness to flip the bird in traffic, her unselfconscious way of being in the world. Early on, over margaritas, she’d asked Gwen bluntly: So what’s your story? Are you married, single, what?

  I haven’t had a boyfriend since grad school, Gwen said, her heart hammering. Eric is married now. I haven’t seen him in ages.

  She hadn’t spoken of Eric Farmer in years, and was surprised by how it affected her. Confiding was a pleasure she’d always denied herself. It occurred to her that except for Eric, Heidi was the only friend she’d made since childhood, since becoming a Turner; and that she badly needed a friend.

  SHE’D MET Eric Farmer her first semester at Pitt. He was the graduate assistant who taught her Physical Anthropology class—a minister’s son from rural Indiana with a sweet, choir-trained voice that vibrated with excitement when he talked about primate evolution. His enthusiasm evoked snickers from the bored sophomores who’d expected an easy elective; but to Gwen his passion was inspiring. The lecture hall was enormous, twice the size of the classrooms at Wellesley, but Eric commanded it confidently despite his size. Showing a slide of Pygmy tribesmen in Africa, he had joked about his own height—five feet five, by Gwen’s best guess. Her spatial difficulties notwithstanding, she could estimate a stranger’s height with remarkable accuracy. She had been practicing for years.

  They met again a few years later when, a grad student herself, Gwen spent a summer working as a research assistant to Andreas Swingard. She’d refused her mother’s entreaties to come back to Concord for the summer. Paulette’s loneliness frightened her. Scott was MIA in California, and they’d scarcely seen Billy since he started med school. We could rent a place in Truro, her mother suggested. Just the two of us. Gwen imagined it: the family disbanded; the Captain’s House, sold years ago, now inhabited by strangers; herself and Paulette in a rented cottage on the Cape. The most pathetic figure would be Gwen herself, her defensiveness, her petulance. In her adult life she was sharp and competent, reserved but unfailingly pleasant. In her mother’s presence she regressed to a moody teenager. Her own behavior sickened her. Paulette, whatever her faults, had been a loving mother; she didn’t deserve such treatment. Gwen knew when she was being insufferable. She simply didn’t know how to stop.

  All things cons
idered, it seemed wiser to spend the summer in a cluttered little office in the cavernous Forbes Quadrangle—built on the site of the old Forbes Field, where her beloved Pirates had once played, where Babe Ruth had hit his final home runs. In June the campus was dead, the army of undergrads discharged for the summer; only Swingard’s PhD students stopped by the office. Gwen spent the day transcribing tapes from Swingard’s fieldwork, hundreds of hours of interviews with his Amazonians. At lunchtime she walked in Schenley Park. One morning she was sitting under headphones, rewinding for the umpteenth time, when a familiar, resonant voice penetrated the white noise.

  “Hey, I know you.”

  She looked up, startled. Eric Farmer stood in the doorway.

  “You were in my 201 class a couple years ago,” he said. “Gwen, right?”

  “Good memory,” she said, blushing. “There must have been a hundred students in that class.”

  “And exactly one interested one.” He sat on the edge of her desk. “You’re in the grad program now?”

  Gwen nodded.

  “Swingard’s my adviser,” said Eric. “You must be pretty good if he’s letting you near his tapes.”

  Gwen laughed. Swingard’s protectiveness of the tapes bordered on neurosis. Her first day he’d spent half an hour instructing her in the operation of a cassette player, as though it were some sophisticated piece of equipment only a career anthropologist would know how to use.

  Eric came by the office several times a week, to meet with Swingard or drop an envelope in his mail slot; and each time he stopped to chat with Gwen. Late one Friday afternoon, after Swingard had left for the day, Eric stuck his head inside the office door. “Happy weekend,” he said. “Let’s drink beer.”

  They spent two hours on the outdoor patio of a pub near campus, eating greasy things from plastic baskets and drinking Stott Golden Ale. After that, Friday-night beer became a weekly ritual, one Gwen looked forward to for days beforehand. She loved hearing about Eric’s boyhood in Indiana, the omnipresence of the church, the strict father he was desperate to escape. He was an only son, the only Farmer male in four generations to refuse the ministry. When he admitted to believing in evolution, his father had tried to call forth his demons.