by Susan Minot
Did they walk side by side? Mr. Tower probably carried his unclosed briefcase with papers sticking up, pressed against his open tweed coat, maybe securing with his other arm more sliding books or a bound manuscript with a clear cover.
* * *
—
She didn’t remember.
* * *
—
She did remember what she was wearing—a loose sundress to her knee, lilac colored, with cap sleeves and square-necked smocking.
* * *
—
It might have been awkward walking beside Mr. Tower, but she would probably not have felt it so much. Though it had been four months earlier when her mother had died, Sophie was still in shock. On an icy morning in January, her mother had been driving down the avenue where they lived on the winding coast north of Boston on her way to an exercise class. When her car crossed the familiar railroad tracks, it had been struck like a bull’s-eye by the train going by. The crossing signals had failed to work, having been frozen in an ice storm the night before. She’d been killed instantly.
Sophie had taken two weeks off from school, staying at home with her six siblings and disoriented father. There’d been a blizzard and a parade of friends and casseroles, sleepless nights and cigarettes and rueful jokes. There were the younger siblings to worry about. She returned having only four months till graduation, so the idea of stopping before the finish line, so to speak, was never raised, even if she felt that school now had turned thoroughly meaningless—she had often felt it meaningless, but it turned out she’d no idea how meaningless something could actually be!—and she floated through her classes in a numb air of shock. When she’d heard the news on the phone it had torn a hole in her and she went immediately hard and did not cry. If she let herself feel, the part of her that was left would be riddled with holes and there’d be nothing left. She had not, since then, shed a tear. Her body shut down; to allow feeling would sink her.
So she attended classes which were thoroughly altered now, as if a water wash had brushed over everything, streaking lines and pulling the color out.
Grief turned out to be slow moving. Situations which at another time would be anxious-making were far less so now. What did anything matter? What could possibly be worrisome? She would, therefore, have been less nervous than usual to walk with Mr. Tower to his car.
They might have talked about what she planned to do after graduation or maybe about her family situation.
* * *
—
When she looked back she could remember little of that spring, of her classes. She remembered seeing the movie The Battle of Algiers and being shaken by it, the war depicted with such horror she was able to feel that. She remembered the classes with Mr. Tower because writing was something she cared about. She felt, though, suspended, as if she’d stepped off a seaside cliff, but for some miraculous reason had not plunged down to the rocks and surf, but continued merely to walk in the air over the great drop beneath her.
* * *
—
Eventually they arrived at a small beaten-up car—a Datsun?—tipped on the hill. Sophie paid little attention to cars. Waiting by the passenger door while Mr. Tower unlocked the driver’s side, she had looked in the back, surprised by the mess. It was bucket deep in aluminum soda cans, glass bottles, and wrappers, and its back seat was scattered with paperbacks, files, flattened jackets, empty potato-chip bags. Inside, Mr. Tower reached across the front seat and unlocked her door, a gesture for a split second oddly intimate. But so many things were odd then. She was seeing, in fact, that things being weird were far more plentiful than things being normal. She was aware that this revelation now prevented her from being constantly surprised or charmed, as she used to be, by weird and unexpected things. She opened her door. It was quiet inside and smelled of stale smoke and rotten apple cores and cigarette butts.
* * *
—
Though it’s just as possible that as they walked to his car, Merlon Tower had talked about some injustice or some thing he was outraged by. And that the car was unlocked, as it could have been in those days.
* * *
—
Sophie remembered getting in and the too-close smell, but she did not remember the drive. The night before, she also remembered, she’d pulled an all-nighter, finishing a paper, it being the last week of school, and she had been feeling that spaciness of no sleep and of sandy eyes when your body feels either a little heavier or a little lighter, depending on how the fatigue is hitting you.
* * *
—
Then somehow they arrived there, in the parking area of a refurbished park. There was a new concrete promenade and a breeze making the newly planted saplings shiver.
An esplanade ran along a river which she had seen as they drove in but could not see now. Mr. Tower reached behind his seat and fished around in all the crap back there. He pulled out a silver flask and unscrewed the top. He took a swig. Did he really just do that? she thought feeling a trapdoor drop inside her. A swig?
She remembered thinking at least she was not wearing anything sexy. It wasn’t her leotard or a short skirt with boots. Had she ever worn either to class? God, maybe she had. Then she remembered she’d worn her leotard with her green tiered peasant skirt to their student-teacher conference—as the meetings were weirdly called—when she’d gone to his actual house the one time. And that, now that she thought about it, had frankly been weird. But then it was always peculiar to see a teacher outside the classroom in the real world. Seeing them join the banal world, they would turn more banal in it.
* * *
—
He lived about a half mile from campus. The house was relatively large, painted gray shingles, in the style of the city, on a rise above the sidewalk, with a lawn swelling up from a low stone wall. A cement walkway banked with shrunken snowbanks led to an echoing porch. Sophie had rung the doorbell and gotten no response. Narrow paned windows on either side of the door showed the sheen of a wooden hall inside. Dim natural light came from windows another room away. She knocked then on the black door and waited. After a while a shadow inside darkened the floor sheen.
The heavy door was opened and in front of her stood a teenage girl with an unimpressed expression, light brown hair parted on the side. She was wearing a light blue Fair Isle sweater with the snowflake design around the neck, in contrast to her dead eyes. Sophie said hi, and that she was there to see her father.
The girl swung her head like a horse and stepped back. I’ll let him know someone’s here, she said, and gestured for her to wait in the room across from them. Gloom in the hall, winter light on a dark green sofa which Sophie approached and sat on. Another figure passed in the hall going the other way, a younger traipsing boy—the son—who didn’t glance at her, used to seeing students in the house. Or girls. Sophie felt a wave of creepiness. His “Up the Down Coed” now seemed more condemning, here in his house. Then she immediately dismissed it, rejecting herself as being part of any cliché. And, really, Mr. Tower was like a troll, and old.
Another person’s heeled footsteps entered the hall, continuing the feeling that she was an exhibit being viewed by a parade of family members. This time it was the wife clicking by. Was her name Joan? Sophie vaguely knew she was a writer, too, with her own last name. She wore a narrow skirt above heavy calves, and a cardigan sweater, with her hair up in a twist. She paused in the hallway, not stepping toward the arched entryway.
Hello, the wife said, holding a cigarette piquantly at her jaw. Does he know you’re here? Even in the shadow Sophie felt the appraising look.
I think so, she said. Your daughter let me in.
The wife lifted her chin and dropped it conclusively and walked blithely away.
Sophie resisted the urge to get up and leave.
Where was he anyway. And why was he making her wait?
* * *
&n
bsp; —
A girl was used to creepiness from men. The leer from the guy at the newsstand, the crude comment from some jerk standing at the bus stop. One felt a prickly buzz in the bloodstream. One learned to ignore it, and to drop it as quickly as possible.
Sophie did admire the girls who were able to spar back to the rude whistle with a snappy line. Showing outrage sometimes made you feel you weren’t so vulnerable.
More than feeling danger or finding insult, Sophie was intrigued by the fact that simply by being female, regardless of personality or size or even age, you were a target for the random shot of—she wasn’t sure what to call it—male aggression? Expression? Joy? Scorn?
Sometimes she could see an expression of desire, crass as it was, and that was intriguing. She’d learned early on that desire contained some of life’s more magical and fascinating aspects. And she had experienced desire enough to know that the transports of sex were pleasures of the highest inexplicable order. So it was eerily breathtaking when men showed boldness in this department. Of course, her body did not register the boldness that way. At the first sign of any affront, her body would register it as danger—not intrigue or wonder—and its defenses would kick in.
Bottom line, she learned that a girl alone should be on guard.
What was he doing in there?
* * *
—
She sat in the winter dusk on his stupid couch. Finally he appeared in the doorway, ragged-headed, looking shorter. She’d only seen him in the classroom, up close.
Miss Vincent, he said. There you are, he added as if he’d been the one waiting. Come along this way then.
Carrying her coat and canvas bag, she followed him through more darkness down the hall to a study walled with bookshelves and with a block of a desk behind which Mr. Tower seated himself. A bay window faced out on the front lawn farther down from where she’d come in, and an occasional car hummed by on the white salted road. She had walked there on a sidewalk pocked with holes cut out of dirty ice sharp as crème brûleé.
Years later she would not remember what they talked about, though she remembered—she thought—the configuration of him in his place behind the desk and her in a chair in front. They would most likely have discussed the story she’d submitted, and certainly the death of her mother, only a few weeks previous. She’d missed some of his classes. She was able to describe and talk about her mother’s death without crying, though she had picked up a peculiar sort of stutter. She did not feel herself in the world on the surface of things where life was happening. Her emotions had taken the form of a huge churning ball of adrenaline circulating through her, with her real self strangely still and hard at its center. The emotions waiting to accost her swirled outside the thick skin of her refusal to respond to this as a normal person would, to fall apart and to weep, to grieve whether it was listlessly or voluptuously. No, this was too big to respond to in any expected way. It was too big to respond to at all.
* * *
—
The stories she’d been writing around that time were postmodern experiments, with characters struggling with dark fragmentary thoughts and longing and the surprised recognition of the absurdity of time.
* * *
—
This also not remembered.
* * *
—
As for that day of visiting Mr. Tower where he lived, she remembered the house being underlit and wearing her green peasant skirt, being eyed by each member of the family, given a particularly cool appraisal by the wife, and how she was made to wait. She remembered nothing said, no words.
* * *
•
So there they were now, parked. There they were, always. Mr. Tower had just taken a swig from the silver flask. A lens seemed to alter the scene and a Novocain feeling coated the air.
Then, as if there were any doubt as to the lurid turn this excursion had taken, he looked at her sideways, with an actual leer, and said, in his croaking voice, Let’s speak in a language any cat or dog could understand.
The words drained the car cabin of what little oxygen was left.
She did not respond. Or maybe she mumbled non-words.
Later when she thought back on it, she saw how the overture could not have been less conducive to a response. It wasn’t even a question. What was he talking about? That is, she knew precisely what he was talking about—her body alarm was alerted—but what did he actually expect that she do? It was such a demented thing to say; she couldn’t imagine what response he might have hoped for. That she bark? Laugh? That she jump on him? It was ridiculous.
Yet, it also was terrifying.
* * *
—
She also thought, Really? Me?
The effort is toward me? That was hard to compute.
* * *
—
No physical contact had been made yet her body felt hit with the same force as if she’d been thrown to the ground. Her nerves vibrated with adrenaline, numbing her.
The language of cats and dogs indeed. Her animal instinct said, Freeze. In the back of her mind was another flag waving…Flee! But instinct, faster than reason, knew this was less feasible. To open the door and run would somehow make it worse, more dramatic. To bolt and go running down the waterway…she was not even sure where exactly she was, or how far they had come. No, wait it out, said her hammering heart.
He wouldn’t do anything more.
It wasn’t as if a gun had been pulled on her or anything, so why did she have the feeling of fearing for her life? The highway close call or the stumble at the top of stairs spikes an adrenaline shot of fear, which immediately vanishes when your car swerves in time or the banister is grabbed. But the jolt of fear now bloomed like a cloud of black ink, filling the car with danger.
Also, she felt embarrassed. Also, she felt ashamed, the shame one feels at not having done a sufficient job of looking after the one person you’re supposed to keep track of: yourself.
* * *
—
Also, it was such an odd thing to say, not his usual way of speaking. She thought for a split second she was hallucinating. Maybe it was the all-nighter hitting her.
* * *
—
Later she would learn that a mistrust of one’s senses was a normal reaction to situations like this. Though the body is alerted and absolutely certain about what is happening, the brain might try to find a way to reason out of it. Was there a word for disbelief in one’s own senses?
* * *
—
That Tower was making a pass at her was baffling enough. She was genuinely surprised. Was there a compliment in it somewhere? Her body did not think so: an electric buzz had shot through her and her tired heart was throbbing.
* * *
—
She had sometimes tried to take the attitude she saw practiced by other girls—of arrogance and dismissal, of seeming not to care, and was relieved in the rare times when a man’s approach did in fact leave her neutral if not cold. But those times were rare.
When a man made a move toward you, it could have a hypnotic effect. A strange chemistry happened. The appraising look—down to the feet, then back up to the face—could not be ignored. One’s blood fizzed regardless—on guard, repelled, and maybe even flattered.
* * *
—
She did not register it then, but thought later how different this was electrically from her usual thrilled reaction to the boy she liked, Curtis, of the long black eyelashes, who sometimes gave her velvety looks and leaned on a radiator lingering while they discussed their admiration for Beckett. But Curtis’s attentions were intermittent. He had a girlfriend—she was still in high school, a quiet beauty from a prominent family, famous for having posed in a “High School Playmate” spread in Playboy.
* * *
—
The esplanade to the right where not many people were had a railing of gray aluminum. A man walking by adjusted his baseball cap in the wind as if resetting a compass. A woman jogged along with a high swinging ponytail, the soles of her sneakers representing the normal world and the peace and safety there.
Maybe she made that up, the woman running. Still, it reflected the truth of her feeling.
* * *
—
After your mother dies suddenly, you’re no longer as taken aback by surprises as you might have been before. You learn the truth that terrible things happen out of the blue—a breezy phrase her mother liked to use. You feel then as if there will be no blow equal to that terrible blow, and you may be right. In a life of receiving blows, there must be, after all, one blow with the strongest impact.
* * *
—
It was hard to measure now if Mr. Tower’s suggestion to speak in a language any cat or dog could understand would have been more shocking if her mother had not been dead, or to know if indeed he would have chosen to venture such a proposal to her were her mother still alive.
Did he think such an idiotic thing would actually work?
It was the same impulse behind the street catcalls, behind the swagger lines thrown from a pack of boys, or the murmured innuendo of a man maybe not even wanting to be heard—as if the men were tossing things extravagantly overboard, gestures to demonstrate how far their throws could go, or how little they cared for the tossed object.