The Wrong Kind of Woman

by Sarah McCraw Crow

  This accompanied by his trademark smile, and those dimples. Of course she’d heard older men talk like that, some of Daddy’s friends, but never with the sense of glee she saw on Arch’s face now. “I just need to run to the ladies’—” And she’d even smiled back as she untied her crab bib.

  At the pay phone outside the restroom, she wiped her buttery fingers on her dungarees, then called home. She walked out of the crab place, then put her head down and darted across the two busy lanes of Shore Drive to the marina on the other side, where she waited for Marnie.

  Marnie—thank God she’d been home doing her toenails—was laughing out the window when she got to the marina, barefoot and in shorts. A minute later, they sped over the Lynnhaven Bridge, the warm night air rushing through the car, and Virginia felt sick, guilty and exhilarated all at the same time.

  When Arch called the house an hour later, she’d refused to talk to him. After that he spread horrible rumors implying that she was a slut, and she’d had to say over and over that nothing had happened, that he was a conceited dolt.

  What a coward she’d been, slipping out of the restaurant like that, afraid to tell him that he was not only arrogant and braggy but terribly bigoted. What a coward she still was—she’d run out of her meeting today. Still, that long-ago incident had cemented her understanding of herself as different, as a New Englander, temperamentally at least. She supposed she should write Archer a letter and thank him for that. And yet here she was, twenty years later, listening to her mother yammer on about Norfolk and thinking about returning there with Rebecca.

  But was the North any better, even now, in 1970? Almost 1971, but you could hardly call New Hampshire progressive. She imagined an auditorium of Clarendon boys, full of themselves and perhaps just as bigoted as Archer. And how many black Clarendon students were there even now? Oliver had liked to talk about how the Clarendon frats had severed ties with their national organizations ten or fifteen years ago, turning themselves into local clubs to protest the national fraternities’ segregation policies. That was after Oliver’s time, but he’d been as proud as if he’d been part of those decisions.

  * * *

  “We were in Carter Junction today,” Rebecca said at dinner. “What a dump.”

  “Rebecca,” Virginia said. After her humiliating meeting with Arthur Gage, Virginia had spent the afternoon looking through her dissertation notes, trying to pick up the thread of Copley before he went to London, of his first portraits, assured and vivid. “What were you doing in Carter Junction?”

  “Just took a wrong turn somewhere.” Momma gave a little laugh. “And then we weren’t at all where I thought we were going.”

  “Ah,” Virginia said. Being out of her element, being stuck in strange New Hampshire with its cold, the snowbanks already lining their street, was tuckering her mother out. Momma might be brisk and energetic, and she kept up appearances with her constant red lipstick, but she was getting old. Momma was old. She was drooping: her eyelids, the skin on her jowls and neck. “You need to get home, Momma.”

  “Christmas is coming,” Momma said.

  “We’ll be just fine,” Virginia said. “Won’t we, Bec?” She reached for Rebecca’s hand, but Rebecca had already pushed back her chair and stood up, all in one motion. Rebecca left the kitchen without a word.

  Virginia got up to follow Rebecca, but Momma raised her hand. “Let her be,” Momma said. “It’s just going to take some time.”

  She nodded. Another day, another round of tears, that was the way it was. That and the memories, the endless memories that pressed on her. Some of them shouldn’t have stuck in her head, but they had, and now they scrolled one after the other. Like last Christmas, after Christmas Day but before New Year’s, she and Rebecca and Oliver had been home together watching TV, The Carol Burnett Show. Harvey Korman and Tim Conway, playing nineteenth-century explorers, had encountered Carol Burnett dressed in skins, and Harvey Korman had started laughing as Tim Conway crawled around on the floor looking for something. Harvey Korman couldn’t contain himself, which made Tim Conway start laughing. Only Carol Burnett stayed in character, until she too, broke up into laughter. And Virginia and Oliver and Rebecca had cracked up at the chaos on TV. Virginia couldn’t remember when she’d last laughed so hard. Oliver wheezed and then took off his glasses to wipe his eyes, and Rebecca had watched her dad, charmed by his wheezy laughter and his tears. Harvey Korman was kind of old, Virginia had thought; he needed to take better care of himself. Oliver was getting older too. He needed to lose weight, drink less, stop smoking that pipe. She needed to tell him that. But she never had.

  Chapter Three

  Home for the three weeks of Christmas break, Sam and his old friend Tommy wandered the Village, checking out the head shops and record stores. They’d gotten high at Tommy’s apartment, like they always did before they headed downtown. The city was cold but sunny, and no wind, not so bad for poking around downtown; on days like today the trash and grit stayed on the ground, instead of getting whipped up into their faces. That briny-sewery smell that wafted from the rivers was stronger down here, but Sam didn’t mind it.

  In a basement record store, Sam and Tommy flipped through albums in the bins the way they used to do, only now they mostly hunted for the old and the obscure. The Beatles’ Revolution 1 floated out of the sound system, and Sam sang along with McCartney’s slow “shoo-be-doo-wop” backing vocals.

  Everyone had a signature band, the band whose albums you owned every one of. (Not the Beatles. Beatles didn’t count.) Tommy was into Creedence—a lot of the guys in Sam’s frat liked CCR, its clangy guitars backing up Fogerty’s freaky voice. Sam liked Crosby, Stills & Nash and Three Dog Night, and he pulled out Three Dog Night’s new album, Naturally.

  Tommy sang about lonely numbers, butchering Three Dog Night to irritate Sam. “They hardly write any of their own songs.”

  “Uh-huh, and Creedence is authentic Southern roots music,” Sam said, like he always said back. “Imposters from California.”

  Tommy shrugged, not agreeing or disagreeing.

  Nothing anyone listened to was authentic; everything was borrowed or stolen. Elvis and the Beatles and the Stones borrowed from black rhythm and blues singers. At least Three Dog Night gave credit to the people who wrote their songs, didn’t try to pretend they were something they weren’t.

  “So lay it on me,” Tommy said, when they were back on the street. “What’s the latest?” The latest about girls, Tommy meant. Sam never had anything to share, but he’d never corrected Tommy’s impression that Clarendon guys had all the fun and got all the girls. Swarthmore, where Tommy went, was coed, and Tommy even had a girlfriend now, Jane.

  Instead of making up fictional girl-details, Sam usually talked about his frat, which had an okay mix of guys. Guys in the jazz band, a few Nordic skiers, a bunch of runners. Sam was the only Jewish guy in Lambda Chi, and he hadn’t told Tommy that they’d made him chaplain, a supposedly hilarious reference to his Jewishness. He didn’t talk about the way he got made fun of at house meetings, the whole Jewish chaplain thing, or the humiliating rituals, like the night of the peckerwood ruler, when the pledges had to strip and look at Playboy centerfolds and get measured, and he’d had a hard-on for the wrong reason. He’d been terrified that the upperclassmen would somehow know.

  They backtracked, Bleecker to West Third. Sam felt a grass-induced rush of love for the crazy mess of downtown streets, arrows pointing in too many directions, where even the old people looked like hippies. They hadn’t crossed Christopher Street today, but that flyer he’d seen there last year—an ad for a new club, a photo of a guy in a tight T-shirt looking away from the camera—had stayed with him. He wondered absently whether the club was still open. Where it was. Whether the guy on the poster was a model or someone who might actually go there.

  On the sidewalk outside the place that used to be Cafe Wha?, two vets camped, with flattened ca
rdboard boxes for their beds. One was missing an arm, his jacket sleeve hanging loose. It was better not to look, so Sam focused on the awnings above, the glow he’d felt a few minutes before gone now.

  They ducked into their coffee shop on Waverly Place, and slid into a booth at the back. They’d been coming here for fries and sodas since they were twelve; they could sit and watch the NYU kids, the hippies and the folkies, the guys who wore all black and grew pathetic beards and mustaches, and the beautiful girls with their miniskirts and long hair that fell to their asses. Everything had happened right here: the peace marches and the demonstrations, the music in Washington Square Park, the pervasive sweet-sharp smell of grass smoke. If only he’d gone to NYU, he’d have something to say. He should never have listened to his mom about colleges.

  Tommy pulled a photo from his wallet and slid it across the Formica. A photo from a formal dance, Tommy with Jane. Big smile and big dark eyes, and petite, which Tommy, at five foot six, must have appreciated. At least Sam had his height. And his eyes: he had beautiful eyes, according to Cynthia, the Wellesley exchange girl from his American Diplomacy class. He’d managed to talk to Cynthia at a Lambda Chi party in October. Cynthia had danced two songs with him, and when he’d returned from the basement with more beers for the two of them, she’d started dancing with Bruce, a senior, and Sam hadn’t had the heart to try again. He could see why she’d rather dance with Bruce than with him. Cynthia had probably left Clarendon with an engagement ring on her finger.

  “Nice,” Sam said. “She’s very—”

  “I know, I’m the luckiest guy,” Tommy said. “Hey, can you get me something from Red Wagon?” Sam’s dad’s company. “Jane likes jazz.”

  “Sure, I guess.” He’d only seen his dad once this break and not at all during Thanksgiving. His dad had gone to Minnesota with Patty, his new wife, to see Patty’s family. “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know, Coltrane?”

  “Coltrane was with Impulse.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Tommy had an elaborate memory for rock bands, but he couldn’t keep jazz musicians straight. Maybe Tommy didn’t even know that Coltrane was dead four years already.

  “Stones are doing a US tour this summer,” Tommy said. “Did you see the thing in the Voice? Want to go?”

  “Sure, maybe. I don’t know what I’m doing this summer.”

  Tommy said he was applying for a summer job at Chemical Bank, and maybe Sam could work there too. Working at a bank sounded deadly, but Sam didn’t say that.

  “Too bad you don’t want to work at Red Wagon,” Tommy said. “At least your dad’s not as big a stuffed shirt as mine is.”

  Yeah, too bad. Dad was a jerk, and Sam hardly talked to him anymore. And yet why not? He knew music. He knew the standards, he even knew some of the musicians, a little. You have to make something of yourself, Sam, he could hear Dad saying. I did all this on my own—not true, his dad had had partners and a loan from Zayde Waxman—and my father came here with nothing, absolutely nothing, and made something of himself. You, on the other hand. The way you mope around—and art history? What the hell is that?

  Math, Sam would remind him. Dad made all this noise just because Sam had taken a few measly art history classes. Sam hadn’t even mentioned the computer stuff, because his dad would only say something negative. Computers, eh, why bother, his dad would say. Some kind of fad.

  Irritation rose up inside him. In the next booth, two couples rehashed the never-ending subjects of draft deferments and the lottery. “At least we’re not freshmen,” he said, trying to shake his mood. He and Tommy had drawn high lottery numbers, possibly because they were both born in the fall. They’d compared numbers, trying to puzzle out the odds, since people said the supposedly fair lottery wasn’t random at all but a plot to grab the guys with spring birthdays. Still, this year’s freshmen had it worse—they all got I-A, available, instead of II-S, student deferment, which made no sense if the war was winding down. Maybe the war wasn’t winding down and would keep scooping up guys like him. The image of the two vets on their cardboard beds, their long oily hair under their knit caps, and that empty sleeve, intruded and wouldn’t leave him. Those two vets weren’t dead, at least.

  “Yeah.” Tommy let out a sigh.

  “Man, I wish they still had the Tenth Mountain Division,” Sam said, trying to joke. “If you have to go to war, that’s the way to go.”

  Tommy laughed, aspirating his coffee. He coughed and smacked his chest. “Yeah, you’d be a lot of help on your skis in My Lai.”

  “Water skis,” Sam said. Every guy at Clarendon knew about the way the Tenth had taken Mount Belvedere in northern Italy because of all the Clarendon men on skis in the division. The waitress brought their fries, and one of the girls in the next booth started to cry.

  Me too, he wanted to say to the girl in the next booth. It felt weird to be sad about losing someone he didn’t know all that well. Yet Oliver was—had been—a friend; at jazz band, Sam felt like he belonged, and Oliver was a huge part of that feeling. And then Sam had misinterpreted something important, and that felt weird too. That’s not me, man, he’d thought of saying, you got the wrong guy. But a deeper part of him figured that Oliver had his number.

  “So this professor at school, Professor Desmarais, he, uh, he died a few weeks ago.”

  Tommy looked at him blankly. Like why would Sam bring something like this up, what was interesting about that? “An old guy, huh?”

  “No, maybe late thirties or early forties.”

  “Old guy,” Tommy repeated.

  Sam shrugged. There was nothing more to say. “When do you go back?”

  * * *

  That night, Sam and his mom went to dinner at the French place where his mom was a regular, four blocks from the apartment. He liked the restaurant’s old-fashioned lighting, and the way the waiters greeted him, as if they knew him.

  But the waiters were also a million years old and most of the other people in the restaurant were either old or people his mom knew, other thin and brittle women, and tonight they all wore the same kind of dress that looked like a short coat with big buttons down the front, and their hair puffed up in the back. When he thought about his parents, he couldn’t parse out whether they’d always been so different from one another, or whether their differences had amplified after the divorce. His mom so Upper East Side, his dad still trying to be a beatnik or something at his late age.

  “Do you mind if I’m out tomorrow night?” Mom asked. “I know you’ve only got a few days left at home, and I hate to be out when you’re—”

  “It’s fine, Mom. I’m supposed to get together with Tommy anyway.” He didn’t want to hear about her latest date with some other old guy.

  He couldn’t tell if his mom was lonely, or just trying to compete with Dad, who not only had Patty but a baby on the way. When he was a kid, Sam had asked for a little brother, and his mom always said, We’ll see, we’re doing our best, honey. Now at the exact wrong time he was going to get a sibling. Half-sibling. So embarrassing, the way his dad tried to act young, such a dope. If only Sam had known then, he would never have asked for a brother and maybe none of this would have happened. Ha, still thinking like a child, like he’d learned in Psych 1, how children were so self-centered that they thought they had the power to cause all kinds of adult disasters.

  One of his mom’s friends stopped by the table. Mrs. Bemis. Mom complimented Mrs. Bemis’s dress, which was a dead ringer for Mom’s, and they spent a few minutes discussing it. Mrs. Bemis mentioned an article she’d read, something about a revival of New York’s jazz clubs. “Of course I don’t usually read the Village Voice, but that’s just wonderful that Harry was quoted. He’s an expert after all.”

  Mom smiled and nodded, as if she were perfectly pleased that Dad had been quoted in the Village Voice about jazz clubs.

  “And, Sam
, remind me, you’re at...” Mrs. Bemis said.

  “Clarendon.”

  “High honors, math major,” Mom added. “Plays two instruments in the college jazz band. And ski patrol.” Mom widened her eyes as if the very phrase ski patrol frightened her. She asked Mrs. Bemis about her children, and Mrs. Bemis went on at length about the two daughters at Wellesley and the son at Taft, bound for Yale like his father.

  “Wonderful,” Mom said. “Just wonderful.”

  Mrs. Bemis patted Sam’s shoulder, and wound around tables on her way to the bathroom. Mom’s smile disappeared. She pressed her lips together and leaned across the table. “Sylvia Bemis is a horrible person,” Mom whispered. “Of course she knows that Harry and I are...” She left the sentence unfinished, avoiding the D word. “She’s just fishing for gossip about your dad. Or me. God only knows what he’s up to. Sheesh. A new father at his age. That’s even worse than...” She trailed off and Sam said nothing, not wanting to hear any more confiding.

  When Sam was little, he’d been wowed by his dad. Dad would come home late at night and check on Sam in bed, and sing him back to sleep. Whatever Dad yelled about, like the time Sam unscrewed all the doorknobs from every door in the apartment, or had taken apart his alarm clock and left the pieces scattered on his bedroom floor, got washed away with those nighttime moments. And a few times Dad brought Sam to his favorite recording studio, a place on the West Side that used to be a church, and Sam would get to put on headphones and listen to someone practicing drum fills, and then the actual music, until he got bored and went back to his comic books, and then later on, everyone would join him in the lounge to eat pizza and drink Scotch and tell dirty jokes.

  Sometimes when Sam was at a frat party, and the smoke got to a certain level and he’d hear a tenor sax line or a quick blurt of trumpets, he’d be transported for a second back to those Saturdays in the studio, and the way his dad was happy there, his nervous energy contained, deferring to whatever the engineers said.