“Is that legal?” Virginia asked. “Should we—”
“I’ll block the door,” Louise said. “We don’t want any men wandering in.” She sprinted to the door and stood against it, covering the door’s narrow window.
The speaker was still talking, oblivious to the undressed girls in the back. “Because after all, you are your body and you are not obscene.”
Obscene. Those girls were baring their private parts in front of each other. What if a campus policeman wandered into the room? Would they all be arrested? Virginia wasn’t brave—God, she’d never be as brave as those girls sitting in the corner, who now calmly tucked blouses back into skirts and jeans as if they hadn’t been essentially naked in a room full of strangers.
Louise signaled to Virginia to take her place guarding the door, and once Virginia got to the door, Louise hurried to the podium. “Wonderful, thank you,” Louise said. “We’re so pleased to have you here and to learn more, and we’re eager to help the Women’s Health Collective in whatever way we can.” She shook the speaker’s hand. “Let’s all get ourselves organized.” She cleared her throat, looked at the paper in her hand. “We have one more item on the agenda, so Coeducation Now, would you come forward?”
The young woman who’d been the first to take a hand mirror, but who at least had done her examining in private, marched to the table, with two others close behind her, a general with her lieutenants.
“We demand coeducation at Clarendon,” the young woman said. “We don’t ask anymore, because politeness doesn’t work. We demand it.” Her voice grew louder, higher-pitched. “We demand our fair share of what the men in this nation have always had. The best educations, the best jobs, the best memberships. We demand a decent share of that.”
“Coeducation now, equal rights now! Coeducation now! Equal rights now!” The young women, these brave, foolhardy girls, led the chant, standing up and clapping. One girl climbed up onto her chair, and the others followed. Virginia slowly stood too, clapping and chanting like the others. But she felt prickly and hot, uncomfortable with their noisy, shrill demands.
But what if this kind of chanting had taken place twenty years ago and the men’s schools had gone coed back then? She could have gone to one of the men’s schools for college, and they wouldn’t have been men’s schools, they would have just been schools. She clapped her hands together until they stung, to make up for her own discomfort.
A flashbulb popped; a Clarendon boy was in the room. He stood just inside the door, camera lifted to his eye, taking pictures of the girls standing on chairs with their arms overhead. He took shot after shot, angling himself to take in different views of the classroom. Virginia hustled back up the aisle and grabbed the boy’s arm, to try to steer him out of the room. “This isn’t a campus meeting,” she said. “This is a—”
“Let go of me, lady!” He shook off her arm, lifting his camera again.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave now.” Virginia had to yell to make herself heard over the noisy chanting and clapping. She stepped in front of the boy and his camera, waving her arms, so he couldn’t take another picture.
“Let’s go, buddy,” Louise said, next to her now.
“Your flyer didn’t say anything about no photos,” the boy said. “Your flyer made it sound like you wanted people to come. You can’t kick me out!” Still, he’d lowered his camera and now he backed out of the room, making exasperated sounds.
At the door, Louise watched to be sure that the young photographer had left, then closed it behind her, blocking it with her body as she’d done before. The exchange girls’ chanting grew raggedy. Soon the room rustled and buzzed as women bent to gather coats and umbrellas or stood to leave, talking to one another. Louise was a still point in the noisy room, her eyes on the floor, fist pressed against her mouth, thinking.
“With any luck, he didn’t get any incriminating photos,” Virginia said.
“Who even knows what’s incriminating these days,” Louise said. “And he’s right. It was a meeting on campus, he had the right to know what was going on, and maybe we should be glad of the publicity.” She nodded, as if to agree with herself, but she didn’t look glad.
As the other women filtered out of the classroom, Virginia caught only fragments of their chatter, but it sounded lively, the way people sounded when filing out of a theater after a funny movie. Still, as she watched Louise move to the front of the room, back to the two presenters, Virginia thought of Corinna, who wasn’t here, who’d made it known that she thought this kind of meeting was a bad idea. I can’t afford to rock the boat, Corinna had said during that dinner when they’d first talked about such a meeting.
At the snack table, Virginia emptied the pretzel bowl into the trash and picked up stray cups. “It was an inspiring night,” she said as she passed Helen, who stood eating a leftover cookie.
“Yes, it was,” Helen said. “I’d like to think we’re making a difference, but...” She trailed off. “Well, what’s done is done. Thanks for your help, Virginia,” she said, brisk again.
Virginia had been dismissed, but she didn’t take it personally. Helen was worried, just as Louise was. And they hadn’t even ended the meeting properly, hadn’t asked the women to set up discussion groups of their own.
Chapter Thirteen
Rebecca tried not to keep count, but Molly had ignored her for at least three days. She told herself that it was only because they weren’t in the same homeroom this year. She had Mrs. Dorfman, her favorite, favorite teacher in the world, and Molly had boring old Mr. Beasley, and kids always hung out more with the other kids in their homeroom. At midmorning break, she tried not to notice that Molly leaned against the wall between Jenny Sorenson and Sydney, whispering.
At the soda machine, Rebecca worked to strike up a conversation with Beth Karpas, who was a so-so friend, but Beth was only interested in Ben, who stood nearby in his group of goofball followers, talking about the grossest things they would eat or drink. Beth paid too much attention to that clump of stupid boys, laughing at whatever they were saying. Ben wasn’t even cute, not like Todd, Molly’s boyfriend. But maybe Todd wasn’t Molly’s boyfriend anymore. She didn’t know what was up with Molly these days.
At the end of seventh period she hurried out of the school building and then hung around by the bike rack, examining her fingernails and watching for Molly.
“Hey,” she said, when Molly came through the door by herself, thank God. Rebecca started to walk, hoping it looked like she’d been doing something, not just hanging around like a fool, waiting for Molly.
“Hey.” Molly looked straight ahead toward the Clarendon football stadium in the distance, as if she had to think about where they were headed.
“So how was Todd’s—”
“My mom says your mom is a bad influence and I might need to find some new friends.”
“What?” Bad influence? Mom? What the hell.
“Your mom had this meeting that she invited my mom to, and it turned out to be a bunch of radicals. Communists, my mom says.”
“Communists? My mom’s not a Communist. She’s just a mom.” This made no sense. Mom had gone to a meeting the other night, but it was something at the college, something academic. Mom had gone to it with Louise and her other new professor friends.
“It’s all this women’s lib stuff, you know?” Molly looked at her sidewise for a second, then looked away. “They don’t want anyone to have a family. They want to make it harder for families to survive.”
Rebecca had only a rough idea of what women’s lib was, or what it had to do with families, but she knew better than to ask why Molly cared. “Maybe your mom got the wrong idea.”
Molly closed her eyes, probably exasperated at Rebecca’s obtuseness. “My mom was there. At the meeting. It was a bunch of radicals, and your mom is one of them.”
Such a hot, stinging mess of fee
lings and questions. If it was such a radical meeting, why was Mrs. Koslowski there? None of this made any sense. Still, Rebecca had been mad at Mom for so long, had felt deeply that so many things were Mom’s fault, that Mom had been doing just about everything badly since Dad died, embarrassing Rebecca over and over. But now she got an image of herself next to Mom during the jazz band’s concert, how she’d felt that night in her velvet dress, as if she’d already moved on to high school. And then that surprisingly interesting conversation she’d had with Corinna, who’d asked her about her hopes and dreams as if she were a college student, not some eighth-grade kid. Also, Mom was just Mom, someone who made Brunswick stew and pudding cake, and Corinna was an interesting person and a professor, who thought Rebecca was someone worth listening to.
Molly shrugged. “Anyway, we have to stick to good Catholic values.”
Rebecca stopped, but Molly kept walking. “I don’t even know what that means,” Rebecca said to Molly’s back. “I’m not Catholic. My mom isn’t, either, but she’s not a radical. She’s a—she’s a good person. See you later.” She started walking again, angling away from Molly. It wasn’t like Molly was an angel. She knew that Molly had drunk beers with Kathleen and Lacey one weekend when their parents were away and Kath and Lacey had had a bunch of friends over, and that Molly had puked. Rebecca turned left at the corner, as if she’d been meaning all this time to go downtown after school, instead of back to their neighborhood. All she wanted was to go home, but she didn’t want Molly to see that she was upset.
A few minutes later, she found herself on Main Street, the wind blowing hard down the street so her hair went flying up around her head. To get out of the wind she turned into the stationery store where she and Molly used to go because the front section had bins full of funny cute things, wind-up toys and tiny stuffed animals, weird dice with too many sides, pencils that wrote in four colors at once. She had a dollar, maybe she’d buy something. But the grouchy owner watched her, frowning as if she were about to steal from him. She wished he’d go back to the register, or go sort the birthday cards. How could someone so grouchy have such a great supply of toys? She bought a mini yo-yo for thirty cents, even though she didn’t need a yo-yo and it probably wouldn’t work because it was too small, but she was a good person and she would never steal anything, not even a stupid thirty-cent yo-yo.
* * *
Helen called to tell Virginia about the front-page article in the college newspaper, with the headline Girls Go Berserk! The article had gotten a lot of the details wrong, Helen said. The reporter had called their meeting “a strident, shrieky push for coeducation,” and it made no mention of NOW, the Boston Women’s Health Collective or the self-examinations (thank God). But the second paragraph noted Louise’s presence, calling Louise the leader of the meeting. “Not even correctly reported,” Helen said. “But I have a feeling there are going to be some repercussions.”
“You mean Louise? But she has tenure.”
“We’re all women, Virginia. It doesn’t take much. And to be seen running an unsanctioned meeting with so-called berserk exchange students who aren’t welcome here in the first place, that’s more than enough.”
Maybe Corinna had been right, Virginia thought now. Better to keep one’s head down and work, work harder than the men, but keep quiet. Still, no one had gone berserk, and the idea of repercussions for a mere meeting seemed terribly out of balance. She wanted to act, to do something, but she didn’t know how. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Helen said. “For now, wait and see, I guess.”
A day later, the Westfield News-Ledger had it too: At College Meeting, Speakers Advocate for Women’s Rights, Demand Coeducation at Clarendon, the big headline on the front of the paper’s local section blared.
“Ugh, they made us sound like a coven of witches,” Virginia said, and Rebecca leaned across the table to see.
“Molly said that you’re a radical, and you’ve gotten mixed up with the wrong kind of people,” Rebecca said. “I told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. Her mom is all upset about families or something.”
“Eileen? She was at the meeting too.” Virginia tried to recall whether Eileen had left the meeting early, before the shock of the girls viewing their own private parts in public. She hoped so, but the sound of the exchange girls’ noisy demands and the flash of the student’s camera, and his rudeness, had taken over her memory. She’d been a little brave in jumping up to stop the student photographer, she thought. Or maybe she’d been too careful, merely fearful that the meeting, and her own small efforts, would be made public, and ridiculed or shamed. All that energy she and Louise and Helen and Lily had felt at the start of the meeting, when the room had filled up with so many women, and when the NOW woman spoke so persuasively—all that wonderful energy had dissipated once they’d shooed the Clarendon boy out. She’d seen the resignation and worry on her new friends’ faces.
“None of this would have happened if Daddy were still alive.” Rebecca slapped the paper down.
“What does that have to do with it?” Virginia let out a breath as she waited for Rebecca to plunge into another hormone-fueled tirade. But Rebecca said nothing more, just took her dishes to the sink, where she rinsed them quietly, then left the kitchen to finish getting ready for school.
Virginia stayed at the table, the offending article staring up at her. None of this would have happened if Oliver were still alive. She felt her breath catch in her throat, at the surprise that she could hold this thought and not break into sobs. She was moving on, a little, and this new knowledge made her feel strangely despondent.
After Rebecca left for school, Virginia read the article again. The only women quoted were a student, who was identified as one of the Coeducation Now leaders, and the representative from the National Organization for Women; the article said that female faculty at Clarendon had organized the meeting, but it gave no names. No mention of the exchange girls taking off their clothes to examine themselves.
Maybe it was strange that Virginia hadn’t thought to examine her own self, that the idea of it had sounded silly to her. You are not obscene, the speaker had said.
In the downstairs bathroom, she found an old powder compact in the medicine cabinet. She sat on the closed lid of the toilet, slipped off her underwear and opened her robe. She angled the tiny mirror, but could only see a sliver at a time: her pubic hair, coarse, dark and vaguely shameful; a slice of her vulva, pink and glistening. She touched herself experimentally, leaning back against the hard, cold top of the toilet. She tried to tune in to what felt good, as the booklet from the Women’s Health Collective had advised, and felt her breath moving in and out faster. The phone rang, and she leaped to her feet, pulling her robe tight around her, and she ran to pick it up, face burning as if the caller had seen what she’d been doing.
“Professor Desmarais?” a familiar voice said. “This is Sam Waxman.” She managed to greet him normally, her underarms prickling with sweat. “I’m sorry to call so early,” Sam said. “I have kind of a weird request, and feel free to say no.” He was talking about a campus musical competition, asking her to help out. “Anyway, it would take about an hour, hour and a half,” he was saying. “For some of the guys it’s a big deal. It’s one of those dumb Greek traditions and every year I end up getting—”
“Sure.” She’d been holding her breath; she let it out. “I’d be happy to do that. It sounds like fun. I’m surprised Oliver never judged this competition.”
“Oh, God no,” he said. “I never would have asked Ol—Professor Desmarais—sorry, that came out all wrong. It’s just not the world’s greatest competition, that’s all. It can be a little dumb. Do you want some time to think about it?”
“No, I’d be happy to help judge. Thanks, Sam.”
The thanks were all on his side, he said. He told her the time and place, and said he had to run to history class.
Chapter Fourteen
Sam Never Should Have agreed to help Dougie Perkins recruit judges for Spring Sing—that was his first mistake. He owed Dougie for borrowing his car, and he figured he’d want to borrow Dougie’s car again, to get to Topos and to find Elodie whenever she came back. If she ever came back. But as usual Dougie demanded more, asking Sam to emcee the competition.
“No,” Sam said. “Ask Stephen. Ask one of the deans.”
“Come on, Sam, all the old traditions are dying, no one wants to emcee, I’m out of ideas here. We can’t just let Spring Sing die, can we?”
“We can,” Sam said. “It’s always terrible. It should be put out of its misery.”
“But you know what to do on the stage, you can keep things moving and it’s hardly any work. Come on, man!”
And now here Sam was on the Sunday afternoon of Spring Sing, running the whole damn competition, and doing the stupid master of ceremonies thing. Even after he’d said no. He was the worst kind of pushover.
Professor Desmarais and her daughter stood in the aisle, Professor Desmarais smiling up at him, and her daughter with her arms crossed, hugging herself, probably wishing she was somewhere else. He hopped down from the stage to show them to the judges’ seats, front row, marked with Reserved signs, as if anyone cared about getting a front-row seat to this stupid event. Professor Desmarais introduced her daughter, Rebecca, and they all talked for a second about skiing.
The Wrong Kind of Woman Page 16