Chapter Ten
Virginia had a job. She had a job. And not a secretarial job, either. Part-time, but with a possibility to advance. As she moved through the Clarendon library, she let her hand trail along the rows of card-catalog cabinets. She always felt the urge to open a few drawers and see if she knew the book or the author that her fingers had landed on, to feel like a student again.
She’d gotten the call two days ago from the college employment woman—an opening in the library. And this morning she’d run over to the library to meet with Cliff, the college’s reference librarian. Cliff had gushed about Oliver’s impeccable research skills and then cleared his throat repeatedly as he’d looked over her CV. “A library science degree would be helpful,” he said, over his reading glasses.
“I have a master’s degree, and all the coursework for a PhD,” she said. “I can track down whatever needs tracking down, I know all the citation styles.” Surely he didn’t expect someone with a library science degree to magically appear in tiny Westfield to take this part-time, assistant-level job. She didn’t want to beg for this job.
But it turned out that she didn’t need to beg; Cliff had bent to scrawl a note on library letterhead, and now he reached across the desk to hand it to her. If she’d take this note to the employment office, she could fill out the paperwork and start next week. “Talk to Jeannette for a bit on your way out,” he said. “And welcome aboard.”
Jeannette, the other assistant, was stylish, in a short knit dress with Mondrian-like color blocks, chunky necklace and bracelets, her red hair in a layered pixie cut. “It’s been a little lonely with Mariah gone,” Jeannette said. “Her baby’s fine, just six weeks early, in case you were wondering.”
“That’s good,” Virginia said, not sure what to say about Mariah or the early baby.
“It’ll be nice to have some company,” Jeannette said.
She and Jeannette would work four mornings a week together and take turns with the afternoon and Saturday shifts. She’d meet with students who needed help getting started on research or who didn’t know how to cite their sources, she’d order books and materials for students and faculty, and she’d manage the microfilm machines.
That night, Virginia and Rebecca went early to Mexican night at Mo’s, their first time back since Oliver, though neither mentioned this milestone. Virginia told Rebecca about the library job.
“Okay.” Rebecca poked at her enchiladas. “That sounds like fun.” She told Virginia about the time when she was younger and had gone with Dad to the English department’s cute little library and had tea and she’d wished that she could work or even live in that library. “So you won’t be in there, but close enough.”
“I might not always be home when you get home from school,” Virginia said.
“Mom. It’s no big deal.”
“Right, no big deal,” Virginia repeated.
* * *
In the front room of Topos, a guy and a girl, both of them in overalls, sat on the couch—the same couch where Sam had sat next to Elodie on that eventful night. They were studying, and they looked up from their books and regarded Sam, their faces blank. He had no idea what to say. “Hey, I, uh, I’m looking for Jerry?” he said. Plausible, sort of. Better than Can you guys take me in? or Can you help me find Elodie?
“Jerry’s not around, he went to the tractor place with Cyril,” the guy said.
“Oil and transmission fluid and a new hitch for the brush hog,” the girl added.
“Right,” Sam said, as if he knew what a brush hog was. “I’ll just—”
“You can leave a note,” the girl said, pointing at the doorway. “In the kitchen.”
“Thanks.” Sam retreated through the mudroom and then another door to the big kitchen. On the nearest wall hung two bulletin boards. On one, a sheet listed chore assignments at Topos—daily, weekly, monthly chores. On another, scraps of paper described jobs around Westfield. Maybe he could take the pen hanging from the board and sign up: “Rebuild porch steps, Enfield” or “Assist in cow barn for three days, Thetford,” although he’d probably fuck up those jobs, not that he wanted to milk cows at some Thetford farm. He found more scrap paper in a basket and tried to think what to put in his note to Jerry, but there was nothing he could say without sounding like a putz. He should have thought this through before coming here.
The kitchen door swung open and two girls came through it, talking. One of them was Elodie. He was too surprised to say anything; it felt like a dream, when someone materialized next to you without warning.
“Hey, Sam,” Elodie said, as if she ran into him every day. She wore a man’s wool coat and a woolly hat. She shrugged out of both, then raked her fingers through her hair, twisting it up and into a knot.
“Hey, Elodie,” Sam said, trying to stay cool, as if this weren’t a momentous occasion. “What were you doing out there?”
“Pruning the apple trees, picking up the branches. This is Shelly,” Elodie said about the other girl, who was taking off her coat.
“We’re pruning the old trees so they’ll give more fruit next fall,” Shelly said instead of hello, as she passed through the kitchen.
“What are you—” Elodie began.
“Can I stay here?” Sam said, at the same time. “I mean, hang out for a while? I have to get the car back to someone, so not that long, but...”
“You can help me with the cooking, if you want,” Elodie said. “Hey, Brennan,” she shouted into the front room. “You’re off kitchen duty. I got a volunteer here.”
“Cool,” Brennan called, from the front room.
“So give me a job and I’ll do it,” Sam said.
“Let me think for a second.” She crossed the kitchen and poked her head into the fridge, then crossed the other way, out a side door to a shed. “Okay,” she said, a minute later. “Carrots, parsnips, potatoes, onions. Beans.” She pulled carrots and some other things out of the fridge and with her elbow she directed him to the shed for potatoes and onions. “Use the basket over there. Two onions and maybe fifteen potatoes.”
Vegetables covered the counter when he returned; he’d never seen so many carrots at once. “How many people are part of this dinner?” he asked.
“Sixteen or seventeen,” she said. He must have made a face, because she laughed and said that it wasn’t hard, just a lot of peeling and chopping. He could hear Pete Seeger’s banjo coming from the hi-fi in the front room now, and he suppressed a laugh—could you get any more cliché than peeling these grubby misshapen vegetables for a communal stew, with old protest music in the background? Elodie added vegetables to the pot in a mysterious order, and then spices from big jars on the counter. The kitchen started to smell warm and a little exotic with all the onions and mingled spices, as she talked about the Nearings’ book Living The Good Life. Had he read it? He should read it. “Just think what the world would be like if we all went back to the land. Grew our own food, milked our own cows, a whole new society.”
He didn’t say that not everyone could go back to the land—like the millions of people crammed into New York City. Instead he made a joke about his mom, what she’d do if she couldn’t get to Bergdorf’s once a week.
“You might be surprised,” she said. “Now for the bread. Martha makes the best bread.” She directed him to two bowls covered with tea towels. Underneath the towels, mounds of bread dough lay shiny, puffed and warm to the touch.
* * *
At the long table, made of two picnic tables pushed together, they passed their plates to be filled, eating once everyone had been served.
“What are you doing here, Manhattan?” Jerry asked, back from errands with Cyril and seated across from him and Elodie.
“Oh, I uh, I had a question about math,” Sam said. A lame and unbelievable reason to come out here, and as Jerry scratched his head, no doubt not buying his answer, Sam quickly made up some
thing about their program meshing, using some computer jargon that he figured Jerry wouldn’t question.
“Okay,” Jerry said.
Elodie wanted to know what Sam had meant about computer programs, and they took turns describing their project.
“Wow,” Elodie said. “That’s something I’d love to know more about.”
Sam wasn’t the only nonmember at the table. Two vets had come in late with Martha and Cyril, and Sam noticed that one of the vets had just put a dollar into the basket under the bulletin board. He swung a leg over the picnic bench, and started for the basket.
“No, you cooked, Sam. You already contributed,” Elodie said.
“Cheers to the cooks.” Martha raised her water glass, and the others saluted him and Elodie. Warmth and well-being flooded through him. Something about this dinner reminded him of Seders when he was little; they used to go to Aunt Ella’s house in Long Island City, with cousins and grandparents and great uncles and random strays, and he’d loved that sense of belonging to a big, noisy family.
“Okay, math time,” Jerry said, once they’d cleared and scraped their plates into bins for compost and the chickens. Jerry believed Sam’s stupid ruse. But he hadn’t thought to bring his notebook out here, and now Jerry would know he’d invented a reason to come.
“Oh, right. So I think I figured it out while we were eating.” Sam made up something inane about the fourth level and how they should just run the program a few more times, maybe tomorrow?
“That’s cool, what you guys are doing,” Elodie said. “I wish that I’d—can you teach me how it works?”
The three of them were back at the kitchen table, everyone else having dispersed, and Jerry lit a cigarette. “I guess,” Jerry said. “Why do you want to know?” He squinted at Elodie.
“Love of learning, Jerry,” Elodie said. “That’s all.” She held his gaze a little longer than necessary, and Sam wondered if Jerry was angry that Sam had showed up here, angry that Sam might be pursuing Elodie. But no girl would choose him over Jerry. Jerry’s head was a little too big, and he had kind of a shambling way about him, but he also had all that wavy hair, and that too-cool-for-Clarendon thing. Jerry had charisma, which Sam sorely lacked.
“It’s not rocket science,” Jerry said to Elodie. Then, to Sam he added, “I can meet you at the computer center tomorrow after my two o’clock.”
“Great,” Sam said. But now he had no reason to stay, to get a little more time with Elodie, and he pushed back from the table. “Thanks for the dinner. I liked it a lot.”
“Thanks for cooking, Sam,” Elodie said.
Sam moved slowly through the house, lingered in the mudroom where he’d hung his jacket. He took his time making his way out to the porch, but he couldn’t come up with a single reason to hang around without sounding desperate, like some kind of loser with no real friends.
As he picked his way across the driveway’s ruts, he heard Elodie calling to him.
“Hey, can I grab a ride into town?” she yelled, from the porch.
“Sure, of course,” he said. Like another scene from a miraculous dream: Elodie wanted a ride, she wanted to drive somewhere. With him.
Sam lurched into first gear and the car leaped forward out of the driveway. He wanted to know whether she had something going on with Jerry, whether she had a boyfriend elsewhere. “How do you keep up with classes when you’re away from Wellesley?” he asked instead.
“I’m taking a break from school right now,” she said. “I’m not sure about the meaning of a Wellesley degree these days anyway.”
“Ah.” He shifted up to third, pressing too hard on the clutch so the car roared and clanked. Focus. Focus on driving.
“You’re a good guy, Sam.” Elodie gave his hand, on the stick shift, a squeeze, and he had to give all his concentration to not crashing the car. He felt heat rising everywhere on his body, and dared to glance over at her. She was smiling out the windshield at the road as the farms on either side shrank to houses with small front yards, which in turn gave over to campus buildings. She was the kind of girl who was up for an adventure, he guessed. To calm himself, he took a long breath, let it out. As they drew closer to campus and passed the library, he dared to ask, “Do you want to stop in my room for a drink?”
She said nothing, which meant she was about to decline politely. “Okay, why not,” she said at last.
He said a silent thank-you to God, to the Clarendon housing office and to Lambda Chi that he had his single in Fisher instead of a frat double this year. Elodie gazed up at the dorm as they rolled in to the back entrance. He slid the keys under the floor mat, where Dougie kept them, and hustled around the car to open her door.
In his room, Elodie sat cross-legged on the bed while he went to pick an album. Van Morrison, Marvin Gaye? No, too obvious. Maybe Déjà Vu—not make-out music, per se. As Crosby, Stills Nash & Young broke into their harmonies, he handed her a dining-hall mug of bourbon (thank God the bottle, a gift from Tommy, was still a quarter full) and then sat on the crummy easy chair that he’d covered with an ugly orange afghan.
“Tell me something you love, Sam.”
He was dazzled with her ease, her beauty, her impossible presence in his dorm room. “You’re always talking about love,” he said, unable to think of a single witty comment.
She laughed. “Not always, just sometimes.”
He was pretty sure he loved her, but he knew better than to say that. “Well, music.” He mentioned jazz band and Granitetones. “And math.”
“Math! You love math? Like that class you’re taking with Jerry, the computer project and all that?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Tell me what you love about it.” She patted the bed, inviting him to sit next to her, so he did, both of them sitting crosswise on the bed with a view out the window of Barrett dorm across the way and the library in the distance. He wondered what she thought about Clarendon—from this angle, the college looked solid, all brick and ivy, with the library’s clapboard bell tower marking the time and the setting. It looked like a college that meant something.
He told her how ciphers, secret codes to encrypt messages, had been around forever, in every culture. He told her about the ciphers of the Great War, and of Germany’s Enigma code that the Allies had cracked with the help of a computing machine. He told her about the eeriness of the Clarendon computer that never stopped working, and how new and modern the whole setup was. And how computer languages were getting better and better. “So last week we learned this new one, called BASIC. Beginner’s all-purpose symbolic instruction code.”
“Wait, say that again?”
“Beginner’s all-purpose symbolic instruction code,” he repeated. “It’s this simple, plain language that anyone can learn, and then talk to a computer and tell it what to do.”
“Beginner’s all-purpose symbolic instruction code,” she said. “I like it. It sounds like something that all humans could use. We’re all beginners, right? And symbolic instruction code. Like, a code for love, a code for leadership, a code for peace that all us beginners should know.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “It’s just a way to use a computer without having to know higher math.”
“Uh-huh.” She laughed. “I see it as something else too. It’s a beautiful phrase, Sam.” She leaned closer, an invitation.
“Thank you.” He leaned closer too, and kissed her, the briefest brush of lips.
“You’re definitely not like the standard Clarendon assholes,” she said.
“Thanks, I guess.” He dared to kiss her again, letting his hand rest on her shoulder, and she kissed him back. He could do this forever, sitting here with this strange girl kissing him. He could tell her anything because she was different. Everything in the world felt different now. He let his hand drift toward her breast—she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath her sweater—but the
n pulled his hand back, in case that was standard-Clarendon-asshole behavior. He was too hard already and no doubt she’d be gone from his room in a minute.
“It’s okay,” she said. After a while his shirt and sweater came off, and miraculously hers. He got up to make sure his door was locked, then leaped back onto the bed, where they lay side by side, mostly just kissing. When she pulled off her jeans and underwear, he did the same. The feel of her belly and breasts and legs against him was too much, he had no idea what to do, he was going to fail, God he was going to fail—but after another minute, she was half on top of him and he was somehow inside her. He came way too soon, after only seconds, and tears spurted out of his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said into her shoulder, humiliated. “I didn’t mean to, I mean—”
“Shh.” She took his hand in hers and held on to it. After another minute she moved it slowly across her breasts, one then the other. Down her belly, her smooth skin, her remarkable skin, and down to her tangle of hair. His hand skimmed her private parts, too delicate for him to touch. She led his hand, his fingers, into them, showing him what to do. He found a rhythm that she seemed okay with. After a few minutes she rose up to meet his hand, her pelvis rocking gently, as if the two of them were one creature. She lifted her chin, and she let out a long, soft “ahhh.” He could feel her pulsing into him and he watched her face, her eyes as they closed and then opened, taking him in.
He hadn’t had any idea he could do that. He wasn’t a virgin anymore, and now this, more than he’d imagined. She liked him, and he liked her. He was a normal guy. She smiled over at him and he was hard again.
* * *
“Now you tell me something.” He’d pulled his comforter over them; she was still here, she hadn’t left him yet.
She turned away, smiling. “There’s so much that needs to change. Desperately needs it,” she said. “Do you want to help?”
“Help? You mean a protest march, against ROTC or something?”
The Wrong Kind of Woman Page 12