She’d been right, but she’d also been petty. She hadn’t bothered to consider how much pressure Oliver put on himself, how it all weighed on him, his late start in academia and that second book he couldn’t finish. And yet he’d never admitted that Louise probably deserved her promotion and that award. Still, Virginia wasn’t going to be friends with Louise, dinner or no dinner.
* * *
At the Lamplighter Restaurant, Virginia and Corinna sat at a low round table in the bar. Nearby, two couples stood waiting for a dinner table, and a few men sat hunched over their beers, watching hockey on the corner TV. Virginia had asked Corinna about her summer research at Woods Hole, and now Corinna was rhapsodizing about single-cell algae, beautiful little things that moved about in the water with tiny forked tails. Corinna’s blond hair was serviceably short, and Virginia could imagine Corinna standing in a pond, in rolled-up khakis and a fisherman’s hat, nose sunburned and peeling, gathering those beautiful little things in a jar.
“You all know each other,” Corinna said a few minutes later, as Helen and Lily seated themselves. “And of course you know Louise.”
“Old friends,” Louise said.
“Yes, of course.” A wave of unease slipped through her. She’d been rude that time Louise had phoned her, about Shirley Chisholm. She recalled that bookstore display, Kate Millett’s enormous book about sexual politics and Shirley Chisholm’s biography. She was a dolt; she never should have accepted Corinna’s invitation.
“How’s your teaching going, Virginia?” Helen asked. Helen’s wavy red hair was threaded with gray, and she’d twisted and pinned the front part of it up into an old-fashioned yet appealing style.
“Arthur Gage was kind enough to finish out the semester for me,” Virginia said. “But they canceled the class I was supposed to teach this semester.”
“Aha,” Louise said, inexplicably, and the other women made sympathetic sounds.
“Art history’s in trouble, isn’t it?” Helen said. “Science and economics—that’s all the administration wants to think about these days.”
Virginia frowned and nodded, as if she too knew what the administration wanted to think about these days.
“You’re lucky, Corinna,” Louise said. “There’s always going to be money for bio and chem.”
Corinna shrugged. “Maybe. Word is, we need to be more self-sustaining, get more grants.”
As the other women grumbled about Clarendon, Virginia relaxed a little. She’d been both grateful and irritated about the way her neighbors Eileen and Gerda and the others brought casseroles and soups, clucking at her—“Wow, you’ve had such a time of it, Virginia, your ski accident on top of...everything else,” or “I’m just so sorry” for the hundredth time—so she couldn’t help but tear up.
But tonight she wasn’t with other wives, she was out with the Gang of Four, drinking Chablis, and no one was clucking at her, or saying it was for the best that the spring Northern Baroque class was canceled.
“Stuart Jaquith told me that applicant numbers are down again.” Louise passed the stuffed mushrooms. “The writing’s on the wall. If Clarendon wants to keep up, they’ll have to go coed.”
“That’s what we keep hearing, but coeducation has been on the agenda at trustees’ meetings for years now and I don’t see any sign of them giving in,” Helen said.
“Yes, they always find another reason that it’s too soon,” Louise said.
“But if we can hang on a little longer, sooner or later they’re going to need us even more, to teach all those girls,” Lily said.
“Eh, I can’t see it,” Corinna said. “The alumni will drop a bomb on this place before they let that happen.” The rest of the appetizers arrived and they served themselves crab dip and meatballs.
Virginia’s own college years rushed up at her, before her grad-school years at Harvard, before her doomed dissertation. Before Oliver. She tried to picture Smith as coed, but she couldn’t do it.
Lily said something about English-department openings at Wisconsin and Northwestern.
“I should be applying too,” Corinna said. “But I don’t want to start all over. The algae and seaweed don’t care that I’m a woman, but to everyone else it’s inexcusable, or at least problematic.” She laughed, but slumped a little as she speared a meatball.
Louise said nothing, Virginia noticed. Of course: Louise had tenure; she didn’t need to look for better work elsewhere. Louise hadn’t taken Oliver’s job, Virginia thought now. She’d just gotten promoted a couple of years faster. If Oliver had finished his book on Francis I, he’d have had tenure too, and eventually, maybe, an endowed professorship. But what if Oliver had gotten tenure first? Maybe his aneurysm would have stayed a tiny, innocuous balloon, unburst. God, when would she ever stop ruminating?
“Your ankle bothering you, Virginia?” Corinna asked. “You look a little pale. Drink your wine, it’ll help.”
Virginia took a sip of her wine. “It’s fine.” She took another sip, bigger this time.
“Looks like something just occurred to you,” Lily said.
“Don’t put her on the spot like that, Lily,” Helen said. Then, to Virginia: “She can’t turn off the teacher part of her brain.”
“Oh, I was—” Virginia cast about for a topic that had nothing to do with Oliver or Louise or aneurysms or tenure. “I was thinking about Smith College.” She felt a sudden homesickness for Smith, not for the big rituals, like Ivy Day, but for the smaller moments, the endless hands of bridge between classes, their heads wreathed in cigarette smoke, and the candlelight dinners where they solved the world’s problems. They’d been brave, obsessed, hilarious together. At Smith, she’d felt powerful for the first (and last) time. “I was remembering college, and I didn’t mind that it was all girls—er, women—what I mean is that our professors took us seriously, that it was the first time anyone had ever taken me seriously. And we cheered each other on. I’d hate for all of that to go away. Although come to think of it, almost all our professors were men.”
Helen nodded. “Lily and I went to Smith too. I always loved Mountain Day.”
“Radcliffe,” Corinna said. “But I never fit in there.”
“Michigan,” Louise said.
The others talked over one another about the Seven Sisters going coed, how soon that could happen and whether any boys would ever apply.
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation, in this decade,” Helen said. “The dorms are coed at UConn, even dorm rooms—”
“And Oberlin and Stanford, all those teach-ins and protests—” Lily said. “I mean, we’ve never—”
“On every other campus, it’s anything goes,” Louise said. “And Clarendon is stuck in the ’50s. Or the last century.”
“Maybe best to just get out of here,” Corinna said.
“Oh no, don’t leave,” Virginia said, surprising herself. “You can’t leave—”
The others burst out laughing, and Helen patted Virginia’s hand. “Don’t pay any attention to us,” Helen said. “We always have some version of this same tired conversation, don’t we, ladies?”
Louise let out a sigh. “The world is passing us by.”
Virginia got a glimmer of Oliver calling Louise that strident, pushy woman, she’s always angry about something. She wondered what Oliver would think about their conversation tonight. He’d say, These things take time, Virginia, you can’t force change.
She was angry. Angry at Oliver, for dragging her into this life in Westfield, and then dying like that, disappearing in the middle of things. She was angry at President Weissman too, for pretending to have nothing to do with Oliver’s pension. And Arthur Gage, she wanted to sock him right in his thick, smug lips.
“I never finished my dissertation,” Virginia said. She’d just said that out loud. What else had she said out loud tonight? Lily and Corinna were still excla
iming about the anti-war classes at Berkeley, and how at Stanford, a student committee had finagled approval power over the entire curriculum. Only Louise heard her lament.
“Well, you’re clearly too old now,” Louise said.
Yes, she was too old; of course she was too old. Louise wasn’t afraid to say the sad, bald truth. Virginia wasn’t a has-been, she was a never-was, a won’t-be.
Louise barked out a laugh. “Don’t look so defeated. That was a joke, Virginia. You can finish. Just go do it. Go to the library, check into a motel. Just map it out, write it out, and a couple of us can read it and proof it for you.”
This night wasn’t going as she’d expected. No one had bothered to ask her how she was holding up, because they all had their own, legitimate woes. And now she’d gotten drunker than she’d meant to. But she was having a good time. For the first time since—for the first time since she’d lost Oliver, she was having a good time. No, she thought. She was having a great time.
Awake in the middle of the night, Virginia thought about the four women. Louise, Helen, Lily and Corinna were the women that she and her fellow Smithies had once dreamed of becoming, more or less. None of the four were mothers. Possibly they thought she was freakish for having a child, the way Eileen and Gerda thought she was freakish because she sometimes sat staring at the typewriter, not answering the phone.
Her thoughts roamed back to her own grad-school years. Especially that first year, how she’d felt turned loose. There were only two women in her program year, but as she sat with Rembrandt etchings and Sargent drawings in the Fogg Museum’s storage files, and as she cataloged photographs for her work-study job, she’d had visions: she’d end up a curator for one of the New York museums, part of the American staff. Deciding for everyone else what counted as Art. And maybe making some wonderful discovery about one of these artists.
Later, after all her PhD coursework, she’d lost heart. She’d been working in Houghton Library’s reading room, a room that had been opened to women only a few years before. She sat copying out Copley’s letters home from London to use for quotes, the bound letters on their protective cradle, her friend Linda across the table doing her own work. There was a man from France at their table, and at the next table, one from India. All the world was in this high-ceilinged reading room, resplendent with antique books tucked inside the fluted woodwork. Plus her and Linda, two young women moving into the future together, their pencils in hand, exchanging mirthful looks when the librarian left his desk to tell the Indian man—again—to put away the fountain pen, pencils only, please. Those were the rules.
The portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, its glaze darkened with age, had glared down at her then, as he always did.
Half an hour later she felt it. She looked down at her notebook, her scratchings, and she lost her confidence. I have nothing to add, she thought. It was a sudden but quiet realization. All the good things have been said, and whatever else I say is going to be too far-fetched, so I might as well stop now. The sensation filled her body: she’d been sliding along in the slipstream of every other art historian, and now she didn’t know how to reach an original yet scholarly enough conclusion. She had nothing worthwhile to contribute.
Chapter Six
After Mom broke her ankle, the meals started arriving again. Chicken divan, beef stew, Mrs. Koslowski’s pierogies. Disgusting salads with disgusting dressings. Other moms would let themselves in the side door, stomp off the snow, and set a dish on the kitchen counter or slide a pan into the oven, and Mom would hobble into the kitchen, and they’d talk for a few minutes in those loud, cheerful voices moms used with each other. It was good to have something for dinner and cookies to snack on, but it felt like the first week or two after Dad died, like they’d gone back to square one.
On the way home from school on Friday, Rebecca was walking with Molly but not listening because Molly was talking about Todd, and maybe going to his hockey game on Saturday. The clouds were low and heavy looking, and the air felt like it might snow, and Rebecca was thinking about this stew Mom made sometimes, Brunswick stew. It was one of Grandmomma’s Norfolk recipes, and Mom didn’t make it all that often—Dad didn’t like it because it had lima beans in it. Maybe Rebecca could make a pot of Brunswick stew herself. She had her cooking badge from Girl Scouts, and she’d made bread with Molly’s mom last summer. She said goodbye to Molly and went in through the side door.
Mom was at the kitchen table reading an art book, judging by the old-fashioned portrait of a colonial man on the cover, and writing in a notebook, one foot propped on a chair. Mom’s hair was dirty, pulled back in a messy ponytail, as if she were a fourth grader who hadn’t learned to wash her hair.
“Can I make Brunswick stew?” Rebecca asked.
“Hello to you too,” Mom said. “Brunswick stew? Now? I think we’ve got a lot of Gerda’s spaghetti pie leftover.”
Rebecca’s nose wrinkled at the memory of that spaghetti pie, burnt black and crusty at the edges. “I can cook dinner until your ankle’s better. You can just sit there and tell me what to do. Or give me one of your recipe cards and I’ll figure it out.” She didn’t say, and also so people can stop coming into our house every night and bringing us their weird meals and all their stupid pots and pans with the labels on them.
Mom gestured with both hands out—come here, she meant—and Rebecca crossed the room to lean down for a hug. “My great big girl,” Mom said. “We’re going to be all right, you know that? I know you didn’t mean anything by what you said the other day.”
“Uh, okay.” Mom always said things that made sense for a while but then stopped making sense. But Rebecca didn’t want to make Mom cry, so she crossed the kitchen to get the recipe folder, and found the Brunswick stew recipe card, with half the ink—was that her mom’s neat cursive, or was it Grandmomma’s?—blurred by a red splotch. She handed it to Mom.
Mom patted Rebecca’s arm as she took the card and scanned it, but then shook her head. “Oh, but the chicken’s frozen,” Mom said. “Maybe you can make it tomorrow.”
A mean feeling seized her. She knew it wasn’t Mom’s fault that the chicken was frozen, but it wasn’t just that. Mom didn’t act like a regular mom anymore; she was always about to cry, and she forgot to sign things, like the form for the field trip to the statehouse in Concord. Mom was such a klutz that she couldn’t ski even one run without a giant accident. “Forget it.” Rebecca grabbed her books and blasted out of the kitchen. Upstairs, she slammed the door to her room.
She pulled a Jackson 5 album out of its sleeve and set it on her record player. Their voices sounded stupid, too bouncy and harmonious, while Michael Jackson sounded too sad. And Molly hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to go to the hockey game tomorrow. Everything was stupid.
She started her English homework, but she couldn’t focus. Instead, she kept thinking about Molly and how things used to be. Like the magazines she and Molly used to make when they were bored. They’d cut up notebook paper, staple the pages together, and fill them in with games and puzzles and beauty tips. The best part was their advice column. “Ask R.M.,” they’d called it, for themselves, with crazy answers to made-up questions from people they hated, like certain teachers and obnoxious boys. Dear R.M., Rebecca thought. My mom is useless and my best friend is leaving me behind. She likes her boyfriend Todd better than me. Should I just show up at Grayson Rink tomorrow like I was included? Sit down to watch the boys play and cheer for Molly’s stupid boyfriend?
She thought about all the time she used to spend at Molly’s house. Molly’s house was kind of a mess. With five kids, how could it not be, even though Mrs. Koslowski was always folding laundry, vacuuming, making pierogies, making soup. Molly’s dad worked in the chemistry department, and he spoke with a trace of an accent because he’d been born in Poland. Molly’s mom wasn’t Polish but she knew how to make Polish dishes, and Rebecca loved the way Molly’s house smelled, a mixture of cab
bage and garlic and mothballs, delicious and repellent all at once. One time she’d tried to tell Molly about the smell, but Molly didn’t get it. She looked kind of offended, even after Rebecca tried to explain that it was a good smell. Then Rebecca had gotten the idea for them to run across the yard to her own house, so Molly could say what she smelled the moment she went through Rebecca’s front door. Hmm. Dust? Molly had said. Or no, maybe it’s paper, like an old book. And smoke. Definitely smoke.
Rebecca missed the scent of Dad’s pipe smoke, a smell that reminded her of old wet leaves mixed with something sweet, dried apples, even though she’d kind of hated it when he was alive. The front hall closet still smelled a little like him. It was another layer of sadness on top of the others, that Dad’s smell would be lost before long, and that she would forget it, and over time she’d forget so much that Dad would be about as detailed in her mind as a hard-boiled egg. She would keep losing Dad forever; she would never be okay. You won’t forget, hon, Mom said a few weeks ago. But Mom had looked so sad, as if she might start crying again, that Rebecca could tell she didn’t mean it. Mom was only trying to stay positive because she was a mom.
Heloise answered a lot of questions about smells and stains in her column. Getting smells and stains out of curtains, carpets, furniture, towels, the leather upholstery in a motorboat. Heloise always had a good answer, no matter how weird the question. What would Heloise say if Rebecca wrote and asked how to preserve her dad’s smell? It was the exact opposite of all those other questions. Heloise would have the perfect answer. Or maybe she’d say, Sorry, can’t help you. Try some other advice lady.
The warm smell of bacon frying wafted into her room. What a brat she’d been, demanding to make Brunswick stew like that. She smoothed her hair, tucked her homework under her arm and went downstairs. At the stove, Mom watched over the bacon, one knee on a chair to keep her weight off her foot. “I can help, Mom.” She hadn’t meant to be a jerk. She’d only wanted to make things more normal in their sad little house. “I can do that.”
The Wrong Kind of Woman Page 6