by Meg Wolitzer
“The thing is,” Castleman finally said, “I always knew that when I had a baby it would have to have a literary name. I want my children to know how important books are. And I want all of you to know that, too,” he said. “Because as you get older, life sort of eats away at you like battery acid, and all the things you once loved are suddenly harder to find. And when you do find them, you don’t have time to enjoy them anymore, you know?” We didn’t know, but we nodded somberly. “So I named my baby Fanny,” he went on. “And when you girls start to become baby machines in a few years, I expect all of you to name your little girls Fanny, too.”
There was uncomfortable laughter; none of us had any idea of what to make of him, though we knew we liked him. He stopped talking for a moment, taking time to crack a few more walnuts, and then, in a softer voice, he spoke a little about the writers he particularly loved: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce.
“Joyce is it for me,” he said. “I bow down before the genius-shrine of Ulysses, of course, though I have to admit my heart really belongs to Dubliners. It doesn’t get any better than ‘The Dead.’ ”
Then Castleman said he was going to read to us from the final passages of “The Dead.” He produced a sea-green paperback copy of Dubliners, and as he read aloud we stopped twiddling our pencils and rotating the rings on our fingers and yawning silently in that sluggish, late-afternoon way. Parts of the novella, particularly near the end, were stunning, and the room became absorbed and silent. His voice, as he read, was reverential. When he was done, he spoke for a few minutes about the meaning of the death of poor, doomed Michael Furey, who had stood lovesick in the frozen night in James Joyce’s story, and died.
“I would kill to write a story half as good. Literally kill,” the professor said. “Well, okay, figuratively kill.” He shook his head. “Because when I really face the facts, girls, I remember that I’ll never even come close to doing what that man did.” He paused, looking away self-consciously, then he said, “Now comes the moment in which I have to confess that I’m trying to be a writer myself. I’ve written a few stories here and there. But for now,” he went on quickly, “we’re not supposed to be talking about me; we’re supposed to be talking about literature!” He pronounced the word archly, with humor, then looked around the room. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe one of you will write something truly great one day. The verdict isn’t in yet.”
I understood that he was implying that for him the verdict was in, and it wasn’t good. He continued to speak for a while longer, and the most diligent girls in the class took notes. I peered sidelong at Susan Whittle, the redheaded, blush-prone girl in mohair beside me. On a page of her binder, in perfectly formed letters, she had written:
Fiction = ART MIXED WITH EMOTION! i.e., the novels of Virginia Wolfe (sp?), James Joyce, etc., etc. Experience should be undiluted. Similes!! Note: MUST pick up streamers & keg TODAY for soph. mixer.
Outside the tall windows of Seelye Hall, the light was being wiped from the sky; I saw a few girls walking along the paths, but I didn’t register them particularly; they were people walking, nothing more. I looked back at Professor Castleman. He was a new father with a wife and a baby lying in the warmth of the nursery of the local hospital. He was a sensitive, intelligent man with a suggestion of a limp; he’d most likely gotten it in Korea, I guessed, or else as a child, having survived polio.
I imagined him ten years old, trapped inside the cylinder of an iron lung, lying with only his head sticking out, while a kindly nurse read to him from Oliver Twist. The image was pitiful, made me almost want to cry for the poor boy whom I was starting to confuse, in my mind, with the character of Oliver Twist himself. I felt an uncomplicated love for Professor Castleman, and even a kind of love for his wife and tiny baby, the three points that made up this delicate Castleman constellation.
When class ended, many of the girls tried to establish personal contact with the professor, as though to say: Yoo-hoo, over here! It wasn’t that they necessarily imagined him as their lover—he was already taken, after all—but even something about his being taken made the situation so much more exquisite.
“Write what you know,” he advised as he sent us off to complete our first writing assignment.
That night after dinner (shepherd’s pie, I remember, for I sat there looking at it and trying to describe it to myself in a writerly fashion, though the best I could come up with was, pathetically, “a roof of mashed potato spread thickly atop a squat house of meat”), I climbed to the upper reaches of the Neilson Library. On tall steel shelves all around me were ancient bound volumes of scientific abstracts: Annals of Phytochemistry, Sept.–Nov. 1922; International Journal of Haematology, Jan.–Mar. 1931. I wondered if anyone would ever open any of these books again, or whether they’d remain shut for eternity, like some spell-fastened door in a fairy tale.
Should I be the one to open them, to plant kisses on their frail, crisp pages and break the spell? Did it make any sense to try and write? What if no one ever read what I wrote, what if it languished untouched on the chilled shelf of a college library forever? I sat down at a carrel, looking around at the ignored spines of books, the lightbulbs suspended in their little cages, and I listened to the distant scrapes of chair legs and the rumble of a lone book cart being rolled along one of the levels of stacks.
For a while I stayed there and tried to imagine what it was I actually knew. I’d seen almost nothing of the world; a trip to Rome and Florence with my parents when I was fifteen had been spent in the protection of good hotels and pinned behind the green-glass windows of tour buses, looking at stone fountains in piazzas from an unreal remove. The level of my experience and knowledge had remained the same, hadn’t risen, hadn’t overflowed. I’d stood with other Americans, all of us huddled together, heads back and mouths dropped open as we peered up at painted ceilings. I thought now about how I’d never been entirely naked in front of a man, had never been in love, had never gone to a political meeting in someone’s basement, had never really done anything that could be considered independent or particularly insightful or daring. At Smith, girls surrounded me, the equivalent of those American tourists. Girls in groups were safe as shepherd’s pie.
Now I sat in the upper part of the library, freezing cold but not minding, and finally I made myself begin to write something. Without censoring it or condemning it for being trivial or narrow or simply poorly constructed, I wrote about the impenetrable wall of femaleness that formed my life. This, apparently, was what I knew. I wrote about the three different perfumes—Chanel No. 5, White Shoulders, and Joy—that could be smelled everywhere on campus, and about the sound of six hundred female voices rising up together at convocation to sing “Gaudeamus Igatur.”
When I was done, I sat for a long time at that carrel, thinking of Professor J. Castleman and how he’d looked in class with his eyes closed. His eyelids had had a purplish, nearly translucent quality, making them appear inadequate to the task of keeping the world out. Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.
* * *
During his office hours the following week, sitting on the bench in the hallway, I waited with nearly rabid anticipation. Someone was already in there; I could hear the dueling murmurs of a male voice and a female one, punctuated by an occasional shriek of female hilarity, all of which increased my annoyance. Was there a cocktail party going on? Were drinks being served, and damp little sandwiches? Finally the door opened and Abigail Brenner, one of the other students from the class, emerged, holding her tedious story about her grandmother’s recent death from double pneumonia, which she had been reworking pointlessly since the first day of class. From within the office, I could see Castleman at his desk; his jacket was off, and he was in his shirtsleeves and tie.
“Well, hello there, Miss Ames,” he said, finally realizing I was there.
“Hello, Professor Castleman,” I said, and I sat across from him on a wooden chair. He held my new sto
ry in his hand, the one I’d left in his department mailbox.
“So. Your story.” He looked at it serenely. There were almost no markings on it, no red-pen hieroglyphics. “I’ve read this twice,” he said, “and frankly, both times I’ve found it to be wonderful.”
Did he say this about everyone’s story? Had he even said it about Abigail Brenner’s dumb story about her grandmother? I didn’t think so. It was my story that was good. I had written it for him, specifically wanting to please him, and apparently I’d succeeded.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, not meeting his eyes.
“You barely know what I’m talking about now, am I right?” he asked me. “You have no conception of how good you are. I love that about you, Miss Ames; it’s a very touching quality. Please don’t change.”
I nodded, embarrassed, and I understood that this was how he wanted to see me: unusual but innocent, and I found that I didn’t mind appearing this way. Maybe, I thought, it was even true.
“Miss Ames, Miss Ames,” he said, smiling. “What am I going to do with you?”
I smiled back, beginning to feel at ease in this strange new role. “As my friend Laura would say,” I told him, “maybe you should pickle me.”
Castleman folded his hands behind his head. “Well,” he said slowly, “maybe your friend Laura has a point.” Then the playful moment passed and we got to work, leaning together over my story. There was walnut on his breath, I noticed. “ ‘The trees bent back, as if in apprehension,’ ” he read aloud. He made a bunched-up face, as though he’d eaten a bad nut. “I don’t think so. Kind of phony, don’t you think? You’re better than that.”
“Well, yeah, I wasn’t sure about that line,” I said, and all of a sudden I knew it to be the worst line ever written in the history of student assignments.
“You got carried away with your own voice there,” Castleman said. “I did that myself when I was an undergraduate. Of course, unlike you, I had no reason to get carried away.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re a good writer,” I assured him.
“I don’t know what I am, but I’m certainly not one of the naturals,” he said. “I’m the type that sits there slaving away all day and thinking someone will give me credit for effort. But here’s an important thing to remember, Miss Ames: In life, no one gives you credit for effort.”
There was a knock on the door, and Castleman quickly closed my short story, then said, “So when you’re sitting up late at night agonizing over your work, just know that you have an admirer.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And for God’s sake,” he said, “get rid of those apprehensive trees.”
I laughed in what I hoped was a knowing way, and then stood, taking the story from him. Our hands briefly touched, knuckle to knuckle.
“Come in!” he called out, and the door swung open and Susan Whittle, the redheaded girl from class, entered. Her skin, I’d noticed before, was so sensitive that all her reactions expressed themselves plainly on its surface. She seemed in a constant state of mortification; even now, a doily of pink spread down her neck. I, however, was entirely calm, as though I’d been given a horse tranquilizer. I glided from the office, past the other offices where students and professors bent solemnly together, past the bulletin boards with their flyers about summer programs in Rome and at Oxford, past the elderly English department secretary with her glass jar of hard candies.
After that day, I felt peaceful in class, as if the imaginary horse tranquilizer had a long half-life. I was totally absorbed whenever Castleman spoke about literature or the craft of writing. He sat with his scatter of walnuts on the table, and he kept cracking the shells, picking the meat from the pried-open lips and chewing while he spoke.
One day he told the class that a “talented lady writer” would be giving a reading at the college the following week, and we were all required to attend.
“They say she’s very good,” he said. “I’ve only read the first chapter of her novel; it’s kind of bleak and disturbing for someone of the female persuasion, but I think she’s terribly smart, and you all have to go. I’ll be there with my attendance book, checking off names, so don’t even think about skipping it.” A few of the girls glanced at each other uneasily, actually seeming to believe his threat.
The following Wednesday evening I went to the Reading Room of the Neilson Library to listen to Elaine Mozell. This was the first reading I’d ever attended, and the chairs were arranged informally. Someone from the English department gave a brief introduction, and then the writer, a big and blowsy fair-haired woman with a purple scarf at her throat, stood at the podium.
“This is from my novel, Sleeping Dogs,” she said in one of those voices that seemed to have been extensively primed by alcohol and cigarettes. I recognized the timbre and admired it; nobody I knew really talked like that. “I know most of you haven’t read it,” she went on, “because it’s only sold 1,503 copies, despite so-called rave reviews. And most of those 1,503 copies,” she went on, “were bought by my relatives. Who were paid handsomely by me.”
There were a few uncertain laughs, including mine. Whatever her book was like, I wanted to admire it. This suddenly seemed to be an important goal, and when she began to read I was relieved that in fact I could admire it. It was the story of a girl’s sexual initiation on a farm in Iowa, and Elaine Mozell used graphic language about the way the new farmhand pushed himself into the girl as they lay together in the hayloft, with the animals grunting their approval below. The girl’s point of view was represented, as well as the farmhand’s. This wasn’t a domestic novel by any means; it jumped outside the world of the girl’s farm life and even graduated into some actual detailed facts about corn and soybeans, and, very briefly, about the history of the John Deere Company.
Contemporary novels by men often seemed to include Homeric catalogs of information, moving from the costs of things to what they felt like and tasted like. Land, sea, the difference between wheat and chaff. Elaine Mozell’s novel was similar; her carefully chosen words rolled out in that nicotined voice, and as she read aloud she seemed to wake up the entire dreary room. She finished reading to great applause a solid hour later, and her face was flushed. Then she chugalugged the glass of water on the podium, her lipstick scalloping its edge.
Afterward, at the small reception, she stood in a corner of the room with its thin carpets and its old rust-and-sepia-colored globes, flanked by two faculty members, a man and a woman, and all three were talking in loud voices, though Elaine Mozell was the loudest of all, her voice rising up every so often in laughter and relief. She didn’t have to perform anymore tonight; she didn’t have to stand there in front of us, talking about sex and irrigation. She didn’t have to use the word “thresher” anymore. She was free again, and it showed in her bright eyes and now frankly red face. She was knocking back some whiskey, and while the other faculty members seemed to grow subtly drunk, Elaine Mozell became obviously so.
I stood in a gawking cluster of girls from my creative writing class, all of us watching the novelist and the animated satellites around her. Professor Castleman had now become one of those satellites, and I saw him angle for a place at Elaine Mozell’s elbow. She turned to him, they briskly shook hands, he whispered something into her hair, and then she laughed appreciatively and whispered something right back at him. I felt ridiculous standing at the side in my cardigan and tartan skirt. My skirt had one of those oversized gold safety pins stuck in it, and I suddenly wished I could pluck it out and jab myself in the eye with it.
I wouldn’t have approached her on my own, but now Professor Castleman saw me and beckoned, and soon he was introducing me to Elaine Mozell, telling her that I was “an extremely promising young writer.” She looked me over; I felt convinced that her eye went right to my stupid safety pin. I’m better than I look, I wanted to say, cringing as I shook her big, hot hand. I told her how much I’d loved her reading, and that I planned to read the rest of her novel on my own.
>
“Good for you, if you can find it,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to dig through lots of piles of loud male songs of innocence and experience. And then maybe you’ll get to my little tale, buried at the bottom.”
All around me, Castleman and the others protested, telling her how that wasn’t true, that her novel was powerful in its own right, and blah blah blah.
Suddenly my professor said, “Oh, come on, Miss Mozell, it can’t be as bad as all that.”
“And how exactly would you know?” she asked him.
“Well,” he said, “there are quite a few female novelists out there whom I admire greatly. Like those Southerners, that quilting bee made up of Flannery O’Connor and those others. Women whose work is inseparable from the region they inhabit.”
As he spoke to her I saw the looks exchanged, the dot-dash code between them, the cocking of her head, the way he leaned his elbow against a wall to appear casual, the way both of them were interested in each other, and the rest of the faculty members and students stood in a docile ring around them like people singing the parts of villagers in an opera and stepping back to let the two principal players have their moment. She was bitter and difficult, a once-good-looking woman who had gotten a little too heavy and shouldered too much resentment to attract many people anymore, and yet Professor Castleman was taken with her. Maybe he was repelled by her, too, but still he was attracted. She was gifted; her gifts were strange and discomforting and sort of male. She was one of those angry women, this Elaine Mozell, angry because her novel had sold 1,503 copies and because she understood how talented she really was, but that it might never really matter.
“Listen,” she was saying now, “Flannery O’Connor is a genius, and I mean no disrespect to her, but she’s also something of a freak of nature, so visionary and devoutly Catholic and stern.”