The Wrong Kind of Woman

by Sarah McCraw Crow

“But you know, I need to work, and I’d like to finish my dissertation. I have to work to support us, you get that, right?”

  “I get it, I know, I know,” Rebecca said, finally breaking her silence. “The money tree in the backyard, right?”

  Virginia laughed, and Rebecca smiled at last, and neither of them had to say any more. Oliver used to joke with Rebecca about the money tree, saying that Rebecca should go out to the money tree in the backyard to get some cash for the new record player she wanted or the new ice skates.

  After Eileen left, Virginia went to the front door to grab the newspaper. The headline at the top of the front page was twice its usual size: Clarendon College to Admit Females. Underneath, the subhead: “Series of meetings this spring led to trustees’ decision. Announcement made before night of campus chaos.”

  Mrs. Desmarais, I am trying, President Weissman had said. The young women have made their point. Maybe in some small way she’d helped to make a difference. But Louise—what about Louise? “We take this moment as an opportunity to bring new energy and a new approach to the college,” the head of the trustees said in the article. “The first class of Clarendon women will graduate in 1976.”

  Imagine that.

  1973

  Rebecca

  Westfield

  It’s been more than two years since Dad died, and lately Rebecca pictures herself on a timeline, moving forward through the months and years, as Dad slips away into the past. She wonders if Dad would recognize her these days, and what he’d think about her running, about the tricks she learned from the doctor.

  Last August, Rebecca and Mom made a summer trip to Virginia because Aunt June had bought a house at the beach, with an apartment in back for Grandmomma to live in. Rebecca’s cousin Margaret, who hadn’t given Rebecca the time of day for the last few years because Margaret was two years older, suddenly decided that Rebecca was cool and funny. Margaret was petite, with glossy dark hair and vivid blue eyes, and she tanned effortlessly—she didn’t have to put on a T-shirt to keep from burning the way Rebecca did.

  Rebecca and Margaret took long walks on the beach from the north end to the south and back again, the beach houses slowly giving way to hotels, restaurants, packs of tourists. Margaret showed her how to slip into hotel pools and swim for a few minutes, then resume their beach walk, as if the whole world belonged to them alone. Splashing through wavelets, she and Margaret talked about school and boys and college; Rebecca turned her terrible night in KA into a jokey story about two adventurous girls, leaving out everything but Molly and the beers, and the fact that Molly got in such big trouble that she got sent to a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island. Even though she couldn’t tell the truth about that night in KA, or about how much she missed Molly, Rebecca started to feel like a new person down here, an actual high school girl.

  One night Margaret asked Rebecca if she wanted to go to a party. “You can meet some of my friends.”

  “Sure, I guess,” Rebecca said. After dinner, they left Aunt June’s house—Margaret told Mom and the aunts that they were going for a walk, which Mom and the aunts seemed to believe, even though she and Margaret had gone to their bedroom to change into halter tops, and they’d put on tons of mascara, their eyes dark, their lashes spiky in the bedroom mirror. Outside, Rebecca and Margaret crossed Atlantic Avenue, the August air thick with humid breezes, the cicadas whining and buzzing around them. Once you got a block away from the beach, the temperature went up about ten degrees. After a few minutes of walking, Margaret led her around the side of a little Cape-style house to a backyard where seemingly hundreds of people had gathered, talking and yelling.

  “It’s kind of a college party, but there’s a lot of people here I know from school,” Margaret said, leading her into the crush of people. One of Margaret’s friends brought them beers from the keg, and they stood in a little circle drinking, Rebecca mostly listening to the way everyone said “Y’all” instead of “You guys.” After a while someone turned up the stereo, an Allman Brothers song that she didn’t care about but that people here seemed to love, since almost everyone had started singing along or slow dancing to it. Margaret had gone to the bathroom, and Rebecca was alone when a drunk guy in a tank top materialized next to her.

  The drunk guy threw an arm around her shoulder. “Dance with me,” he said, his words slurred. The feeling of his arm, the weight of it, and the way he looked at her set her heart pounding, her chest constricting, and she knew that she was about to die. She had to get out of there, and she wiggled away from him, turned around and then pushed her way out of the crowded backyard. She ran, flip-flops smacking the sidewalk, down Atlantic Avenue. She ran past houses and spicy-blooming crape myrtle trees, then apartment buildings, motels and a fancy hotel. When her breath overtook her, she slowed to a walk. She didn’t know how much time had passed—twenty minutes? two hours?—since she’d left the party, but sweat dripped from her temples and between her breasts.

  Rebecca turned around to run back toward Aunt June’s house. The panicky about-to-die feeling had faded, but she couldn’t remember Aunt June’s street number or phone number, only the area code 804, which was of no use. She traced each cross street, looking for the house and her aunts’ cars, the streetlights illuminating her search. By now most of the houses were dark, the people inside them asleep in their air-conditioned bedrooms.

  She saw the police car’s lights before she realized she’d reached Aunt June’s. The worst had happened, she thought, and she sprinted into the house, where a policeman sat at the kitchen table—Aunt June had called the police when Margaret came home without Rebecca. Mom started to cry, and Rebecca felt time collapsing: losing Dad all over again, and the night in the frat, and Mom coming to get her at the police station in Westfield.

  Later, after everyone else had gone to bed, she told Mom what had happened in the frat.

  Back at home, Rebecca went with Mom to see a doctor. A psychiatrist. This doctor turned out to be a woman who kept toys—stuffed animals, Legos, puzzles, hand puppets—on shelves in her office. She and Mom talked to the doctor, Rebecca telling the story of going to KA, and Teddy, and then the party in Virginia Beach and the guy’s arm on her shoulder. Then the doctor asked Mom to come back in an hour.

  “Eventually, you’re going to rewrite your story,” the doctor said, after Mom left. “You can tell it to me however you want. You can use these props—” she picked up a Fisher-Price farmer from the coffee table “—or you can draw it.”

  This whole endeavor seemed stupid and pointless, the toys childish and wrong. “That’s not going to work,” Rebecca said. “I can’t rewrite it so that my dad is alive. I can’t change what happened.”

  “You can’t change what happened,” the doctor said. “That’s right.” But then they spent the rest of the hour sitting on the floor cross-legged, eyes closed, just breathing. This seemed stupid too, until Rebecca noticed that she’d started to feel the way she sometimes felt in the ocean, just floating, being buffeted here and there by the gentle waves, or the way she felt near the end of a ski trail, when she pulled her body into a tuck to glide the rest of the way down, all movement, no thought.

  * * *

  She’s fine, she guesses, but she’s still lonely. Molly wrote a ton of letters when she first started at her boarding school, asking about the kids at home and telling about the girls from New York who had so many dresses and skirts and boots you wouldn’t believe it, and Rebecca always wrote back, filling her in on what Todd and Josh and Sydney and Beth Karpas were doing, what the teachers at the high school were like. This year, the letters don’t come very often. “That means Molly’s settled in,” Mom said. “I hope she’s doing okay there.” Mom’s expression, eyebrows lifted, mouth pulled to the side, said she thought it was a dumb idea that Molly got sent off to boarding school.

  * * *

  Last spring, Rebecca rode down to Cambridge with Mom, where they stayed in a h
otel for a couple of nights, and Mom had to stand up in front of all these frowning men and answer their questions designed to trip Mom up instead of being actual questions that needed answers. But after all the questions, those serious men turned friendly, shaking Mom’s hand and congratulating her, calling her Dr. Desmarais. Rebecca sat in the back of the classroom with Louise and Corinna and Helen and Lily and Jeannette, who’d come down for the day, and they went out for Indian food afterward.

  Next to her at dinner, Corinna asked Rebecca about high school, and Rebecca told her about track. One thing she’d learned that panicky night in Virginia Beach was that she could run a long distance without stopping; she could run and run and run. So now she has her track friends, and she’s learned that she’s a pretty good distance runner. She runs the longer relays and the 3k. She likes the long practice runs, the way once a week the distance-running group will leave the track to head uphill and out of town, where little farms spread out on one side of the road and woods cover the other, with the Green Mountains off in the west. She can see spring arriving on those mountains, a shy pale green frilled with pink; it’s the maples’ buds that glow pink in the spring, Dad once told her. She likes the moment her team turns around, looping back like one long organism, and then the easy downhill run to the high school. She likes the way she can think about nothing and everything during those runs.

  Yesterday, Josh talked to her after track practice—at the high school, kids mill around after practices, hanging out or waiting for the late bus. She hasn’t said more than “hey” to him in a year—she doesn’t know what he knows about what happened in the frat, and she doesn’t want to find out. She asked him about baseball, and he said it was okay. “I don’t get much playing time, and I’m always outfield,” he said.

  “You could come run track, there’s a whole bunch of things you could try. High jump, hurdles, javelin—” She told him about throwing the javelin, how she was terrible at it, but throwing the spear-like thing into the air and watching it land with a thud was fun. A lot of times practice was just funny, everybody laughing, since most people were pretty bad at it. “You have to stay out of the way, especially with the bad throwers.”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t want to get hit in the head by a javelin,” he said. “It sounds like medieval warfare.”

  “Kind of,” she said. “Mostly track is just running.”

  “Okay, maybe I’ll try it next year,” he said. “If I do, can you give me some pointers on running?”

  “Sure,” she said. Maybe next spring she’ll be running and Josh will too, and they’ll have one of those conversations you have with people when you run. You talk a little bit, first a joke, and then if something’s bothering you it’s okay to let it out. Or if you’re thinking about your big plans for the future you can talk about that too. And then after a while you’re just running, and the other person is still with you. Not talking, just running.

  Sam

  New York

  Whenever Sam has to get Dad to agree to spend a little money on computer stuff, he waits until the moment after Rich, Red Wagon’s A and R guy, has lost an argument with Dad, which happens a couple times a week. This morning, Dad and Rich are back to their most frequent argument; Sam can hear them clearly from his own desk at the other end of Red Wagon’s narrow Herald Square office.

  “That’s not us, Richie,” Dad says. “Jazz fusion has no meaning, it isn’t jazz. It’s a big barrel of other crap trying to glom onto jazz.” Sam knows this exchange well enough that he could carry on Dad’s bluster for him—Dad’s about to tell Rich what jazz is, what bebop was, who the real jazz guys are.

  “Come on, Harry. Chick Corea, Carlos Santana, those guys are where it’s at,” Rich says. “We’ve got to take a more modern approach, add some prog rock—”

  “Prog rock, my ass,” Dad says. “I don’t want to know what that is. And no more telling me jazz is dead,” Dad says. “We have a mission here, and we’re going to fulfill that mission. That’s all.”

  Sam jumps up from his desk to tell Dad about a new data module he wants to buy. “So good news, IBM says there’s a new kind of disk drive for—”

  “Sure Sam,” Dad says, refreshed after his righteous declarations. “Just don’t go too crazy.”

  Dad never used to talk about having a mission. Maybe it’s Patty’s influence. Patty’s gone back to school at Hunter College, and she’s always reading some fat book. When Sam goes to the West Side to take his little brother, Adam, to the Museum of Natural History or a coffee shop for ice cream, Patty stops him before he and Adam head out. She wants his opinion on Margaret Mead’s book about adolescents in New Guinea, or some philosopher he’s never heard of.

  Most likely Patty is responsible for Sam having this job at Red Wagon. He was pretty sure neither of his parents would ever speak to him again after he got kicked out of Clarendon, much less the criminal mischief and attempted arson conviction. In exchange for his suspended sentence, Sam spent six months tutoring inmates in math at the New Hampshire state prison in Concord—only three hours a day, but he wasn’t very good at it, and he was scared most of the time. He rented a room from the widow of a Clarendon alum who wanted to hear exciting stories about his radical activism. But he had no stories, other than the story of Elodie.

  He knows that President Weissman had something to do with his work at the prison, along with the suspended sentence and the fact that he was convicted of misdemeanors rather than felonies. He knows he’s lucky. He figures he’ll write to President Weissman after he finishes his degree. He’s part-time at City College (NYU and Columbia wouldn’t take him, not after the expulsion), where he neither stands out nor blends in, because there’s every kind of person you can think of. Mom is beside herself about having to say the dreaded phrase “City College” to her friends instead of “Clarendon,” but math is math, and the teachers are okay.

  One of these days he’ll be sorry he took the job working for Dad, but for now it’s going okay. Most days, he has to explain so many things to Dad that Dad doesn’t have time to yell, and Sam’s the one everyone comes to with a question about the new computer. Now they can keep track of sales, ad buys, radio contacts and billing receipts a lot more easily. Sam is his own little department, and some days it’s like being back in the math building at Clarendon, trying something weird that turns out to work. And the guys at IBM are helpful—they don’t mind his phone calls about whatever jam he’s gotten the computer into.

  Tommy helped out last summer with Red Wagon’s accounting before he started law school. The law school was for Tommy’s girlfriend’s sake; Tommy said he wanted to live up to Jane’s expectations and now Tommy’s at NYU Law. Jerry’s in law school too, Brooklyn Law School. Sam hasn’t seen Jerry since last summer, when they met up for the John Lennon benefit concert. Sam didn’t mention Elodie that night, and neither did Jerry.

  He wonders if he’ll ever see Elodie again. She’s gone—she disappeared after she was released on bail. The people she’d gotten involved with were planning to bomb police stations in New York and other cities, but they’d blown up Elodie’s aunt’s town house by mistake, badly injuring two men. Were they the men who’d picked up the phone when Sam had called Elodie? he wonders. It took him a long time to get up the courage to go downtown and look at the destroyed town house, and by the time he did, the remains had been walled off with plywood, just another sad graffiti-and poster-covered space that people walked past without seeing. Still, as he stood across the street on a clear June day, trying to see what was no longer there, he shivered. His own actions had touched this larger destructive force that might still be at work.

  He’s written a few letters to Elodie. He hasn’t mailed them—he’s not that stupid, Elodie’s a fugitive and Sam doesn’t need the hassle of being questioned—and knowing that his letters are going nowhere, he’s said more than he would in person. He wrote that he still feels confused and different, that
sometimes he doesn’t know who he is. That he misses Clarendon a lot more than he would have guessed, and he wishes he could see what Clarendon’s like with girls on campus all the time. If he were writing her today, he might say that there’s a guy at City College, a graduate assistant in his American history class. Last Tuesday they met for beers at one of the student bars near Columbia, before some other grad guys and girls joined them. They’re maybe going to get together this weekend. But he might not say any of that to her, not yet.

  Virginia

  Clarendon College

  On this late-March evening, as wet flakes of spring snow fling themselves against the classroom window, the students have all taken turns introducing themselves, and Virginia has just finished her own introductory words to the group. It’s the beginning of spring term, and some of the young women sit cross-legged on the hard chairs, willing this overheated, echoing classroom into a more comfortable space. Two sit on the wide windowsill, smoking, one with her hand up, eager to speak. Connie, a sophomore transfer student.

  Virginia calls on Connie, who unwraps her legs, sets both feet on the floor and leans forward, her long hair swinging forward like a punctuation mark. “So I signed up for a class with Professor Parker because I’d heard good things about him. I mean, he’s pretty famous, right?”

  Virginia and Helen exchange glances—Elgin Parker is old-school in the worst way. Long ago, he made a name for himself in the English department at Columbia, one of the celebrated brash young critics of the ’30s. But he’s been coasting ever since.

  “And so last week Professor Parker said to the whole class, ‘This is Restoration drama and poetry, and some of the texts may be a little too much for feminine sensibilities.’” Connie is an excellent mimic—she’s captured Elgin Parker’s wavery voice and plummy faux-English accent. “Then he read some dumb ancient sex jokes from this dumb play The Country Wife, as if we’ve never heard this kind of thing before.” Connie stops for a breath, keeps going. “And then. And then! He just stared at me and Jenny for a whole minute, or maybe longer. Long enough that all the other guys turned around to look at us too, like it was their God-given right to do that. Jenny dropped out of the class and now I’m the only girl, I mean woman.”