by Mad Dash
“Sink-or-Swim” Flynn—they called Peter that because of his indifference to the junior faculty or anyone else struggling with advancement. The concept of mentoring was unknown to him; he never helped anyone but himself.
The cafeteria was stifling, as usual, and the noise level, always high, was deafening on Fridays, everyone revving up for the weekend. “Why don’t you take the job?” Andrew had to lean across the table to ask.
“Me.” Tim pushed back on his chair’s hind legs and burped leisurely, drumming his hands on the soft mound of his belly. “No, thanks. I fly low, low, low under the radar. I like things just the way they are.”
So did Andrew. Was he as sedentary and complacent as Tim, though, who never published, never presented a paper or went to a conference? At least Andrew still felt alive in the classroom—Tim didn’t even have that anymore. At fifty-six, he was just counting the years until retirement.
“Besides,” he went on, wiping a chocolate smear from the corner of his mustache. “They didn’t offer me the job.”
“Maybe they will. The only criterion seems to be a pulse.” Andrew laughed quickly, to show that was a joke. “I mean, if they asked me—”
“No, the criterion is somebody who doesn’t threaten anybody. A uniter instead of a divider. You’re not on anybody’s team, never have been. Nobody hates you—that’s your big advantage.”
Andrew patted his heart with his fist. “I’m…touched.”
“The more I think about it, the more I can see where Richard’s coming from. People trust you. You’re not going to walk over ’em, stab ’em in the back, you’re not so ambitious that they’re afraid of you. You don’t intimidate anybody.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said a low female voice from behind Andrew’s shoulder. He knew better, but Tim started to get up before he caught himself. “At ease,” Elizabeth O’Neal said with a twist of her villainess lips, sliding into the chair next to Andrew’s. Elizabeth never hid her disdain for the quaint, old-fashioned courtesies men of Andrew and Tim’s generation hadn’t had beaten out of them. “What are you talking about?” She opened her paper napkin with a violent flap, slammed her straw on the table to pop the wrapping.
“Nothing interesting,” Andrew said before Tim could answer. Moving his tray out of her way, angling his chair toward her, he wondered if Elizabeth was one of the colleagues Richard had talked to about who should be the new chair, and if so, if she’d supported Andrew. She was an up-and-comer, one of the young, hungry ones, so—probably not. But he couldn’t be sure. About anything where Elizabeth was concerned.
“This…is inedible.” She speared a hefty triangle of gravy-covered meat on her fork and devoured it in one bite. “Who can eat this crap?” She finished off the meat and started on a gluey pool of mashed potatoes. “What do the vegetarians do? If we have any. Probably not, this place is forty years behind the times. Nutrition being the least of it.”
No one dared to challenge Elizabeth when she got on one of her Mason-Dixon bashings, not even Richard, the college’s peppiest champion. She was too intimidating and contemptuous. She taught Middle Eastern history, the currently hot specialty, and that gave her some leverage in the department. But her preferred method of getting her way was by scaring people.
She scared Tim, who took the first opportunity to excuse himself. “’Bye, kids, gotta run. Places to go, people to see.” He scooped up his tray, snagged his jacket from the back of his chair. The buttons of his shirt strained across his middle, his tie stopped shy of his belt. The last time they’d played one-on-one in the gym, Andrew had barely worked up a sweat before Tim had his hands on his knees, shaking his shaggy head, panting, “Man, man, I gotta get in shape.” Behind Elizabeth’s back, he made a face of comical terror before shambling off.
“So…Andrew.”
“So…Elizabeth.” He shook himself. Mimicking her choppy speech patterns was a habit he’d caught from Dash.
She ate like a man, fast, businesslike. “I heard something about you,” she said, scooping up yellowish pudding in her spoon.
So she had talked to Richard. He waited, curious about her reaction. Politically, Elizabeth was a bit of a dark horse. If Andrew didn’t scare people because they trusted him, Elizabeth scared people because they didn’t trust her. She spooked them. Something predatory about her expressionless face, the way her eyes never seemed to blink…
Last term, over the bowed heads of 130 students taking the Western Civilization final, she’d trained that stare on Andrew. Or maybe she hadn’t. They were helping Tim proctor the exam, Elizabeth in front of the lecture hall, Andrew in back. She’d sat on the edge of the table by the lectern, slouching, both hands gripping the table edge, while she swung one crossed leg back and forth, back and forth. Surely he couldn’t hear it from that distance, but it seemed real, the soft shush of nylon on nylon. He’d heard rumors about her, that she’d slept with Richard Weldon, she slept with students, she was a lesbian, but he always dismissed school gossip; nothing was more unreliable. Still, an aura of sexual catastrophe seemed to hang over her, and Andrew surprised himself by being as attracted to it as he was repelled. She’d lifted her head from the open book on her lap and looked at him. He didn’t turn and glance behind him, but only because he was in the last row, there was no one behind him. Is she looking at me? Her heavy-lidded eyes were like eyes in a painting, omnidirectional; perhaps everyone in the room imagined she was looking at him. Or her. Andrew stared back, captured, only looking away from her eyes to look at the slow, swinging leg, the slight muscular flare of calf rubbing its twin in that agonizingly suggestive rhythm. Are you looking at me?
He never knew. After that he watched her surreptitiously, searching for a hint of interest, flirtation, awareness. But if anything she was sharper with him than before the lecture-hall incident. She’d sniff her breath out or raise one fatal eyebrow at any mild suggestion of his in a faculty meeting. She’d slump lower in her chair and cross her hands over her stomach, as if he disgusted her.
Now she pushed her tray away. “Yes, I heard something quite interesting. I heard you’re on your own these days.”
He hid his surprise by blotting a drop of spilled milk with his napkin. “Oh? Who told you that?” No one knew but Tim. No—Dash must’ve told her friend Maureen by now, and Maureen’s ex-husband taught in the English department. So everyone knew.
“Is it true?” Elizabeth folded her arms and looked directly into his eyes.
He hated exposure, his private life on display. “It’s temporary. Just a…” He coughed. “Blip.”
“Want to go to a wedding this weekend? My ex-stepfather’s marrying a teenager.”
He stared.
“Or close enough.” Her red lips curled cynically. “The flower girl’s their love child.”
“Your ex-stepfather? So—your mother…”
“She won’t be there. She’s in Seattle with her new husband. Number three. Numero tres, I should say—his name’s Carlos. So? Do you want to go?”
“Em, well, it sounds…” He assumed she was serious. Her waiting smile turned sardonic when he hesitated, but he couldn’t picture it, his mind went gray imagining himself at a family wedding with Elizabeth O’Neal. “But, em, sorry, I don’t think I can make it this weekend. Sounds interesting, though. Perhaps if you’d asked me a bit sooner—”
“I didn’t know you were available sooner.” She looked him straight in the eye again. It made him reevaluate the things she said, search for double entendres. He began to apologize again, but she cut him off. “Relax, Andrew.” Her voice dipped low with disdain. “You didn’t break my heart.” Behind the dismissal and the contempt, though, he thought he could see a much younger woman. Maybe one who’d learned how to hide hurt or neglect behind a sneer.
“Call me sometime,” she said in a kinder voice. “A sympathetic ear.” She had long, dark, wavy hair she always wore down, a style incongruous with the sober, black-wearing rest of her; too feminine, too obviously prov
ocative. She smiled, showing the small, sexy gap between her front teeth. She pushed a long tendril of hair behind her ear. To show him how sympathetic it was.
He watched her go. She had a distinctive gliding walk, as if she didn’t care to straighten her knees all the way. She was someone he thought about often, and after today he would think about her even more. He felt a need to sit her down and interrogate her, solve all her mysteries. Where were you born? How many siblings? How many sex partners? What’s your favorite food?
What did she want from him? Did they have things in common, perhaps because of their shared experiences with difficult stepparents, that he couldn’t see but she had somehow intuited? He was used to that dynamic, God knew, living with Dash. Which was like living with a psychic. Like being autistic and living with a psychic. It was hard to imagine how strange, fascinating Elizabeth could have much on Dash in the intuition department.
dash
five
The cabin isn’t much to look at, even with the new coat of white paint we put over the peeling clapboard, or the red shutters that match the tin roof. Technically it’s two stories tall, although Andrew has to slouch in the two upstairs rooms or his head brushes the ceiling, with a chimney in the middle and another one on the left. The comfortable but sort of slatternly porch sits low to the ground, only a half step up from the yard. The cabin’s not ugly, just unprepossessing, nothing out of the ordinary—which was a blessing for us, because otherwise we couldn’t have afforded it. The pond is what makes it special.
It’s behind the cabin at the bottom of a long, low slope: half an acre of fresh springwater in a bowl so pleasingly shoe-shaped we were sure it was man-made. But the fellow who dug out the runoff channel for us the first year, eliminating the scum problem, said no, it’s natural and has probably been here as long as the mountain. (Mountain is an exaggeration, but it’s what people around here call this Blue Ridge foothill two miles west of the town of Dolley, population 649.) The water drains into a creek that gradually widens as it trickles downhill, till at the bottom you have to cross it over a wooden bridge. I love the sound of my car tires on the bridge, that low, rickety rumble. It means I’m almost home.
When we first bought the property, I’d walk around pointing at trees and saying, “That’s mine, that one’s mine, that maple is mine, that’s my oak tree, I own that little sassafras.” I had no idea I was so possessive. Or what a difference private property ownership makes. Rock Creek Park is wonderful, I used to go there all the time, especially when Chloe was little, and then later to jog or walk or just bask in nature. But it’s nothing like having your very own 5.2 acres of mountain to roam around on whenever you like, naked if you like, confident you won’t be observed by another soul.
The first thing we did, even before painting, was hire Mr. Bender to build a pier across two points of land that jut out at the “shoelace” part of the pond. It’s only eight feet long, no handrails, nothing fancy, but all summer it’s my main vantage point, my throne. Andrew prefers the deck off the living room, but I sit on the little wooden dock, sometimes on a pillow if my rear end’s sore from a long spell of gazing, and observe the many wonders and changes of pond life.
It’s December, so there’s not much pond life going on, not to my amateur eye. The bullfrogs have stopped galumphing at night, which I miss, and the gray, shadowy fish are swimming so deeply now, they look like ghosts. Our wood duck couple flew away in October. But the water won’t freeze till February, and in the meantime I can watch cloud reflections or trace the direction of the wind from the way it pleats and ripples the surface. The tans and grays and russets of winter are only drab until you give up expecting more. Then they’re gorgeous, infinitely varied, just across a smaller color spectrum.
I’m coming back from a misty early morning stroll, carrying my empty coffee cup and thinking about Mr. Bender—as I always do when I pass the soft, squishy part in the path around the pond caused by the tunneling of muskrats; Mr. Bender wants to exterminate them (he considers them rats, I consider them proud cousins of the beaver)—when I see a flash of dented red metal through the nude tree branches between the pond and the driveway. Mr. Bender’s pickup truck. Did I conjure him?
“Hi!” I call out, hurrying up the hill. He touches the bill of the green cap I’ve never known him to take off, but doesn’t call back. A man of few words is Mr. Bender. Sock runs ahead, tail spinning, thrilled we have a visitor. She loves everybody. I told Andrew she’s a great watchdog so he wouldn’t worry about me being here on my own. That was a fib.
“Morning, Mr. Bender, how are you today? Think it’s going to rain? Or snow again, I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s unusual around here, isn’t it, snow this early?” His taciturnity always makes me chatty.
He mutters something vague about the weather, rubbing a work-rough hand across the denim chest of his overalls, then gets down to business. “Can’t change that kitchen faucet for you like I said. Got some business at home needs tending. Take at least a week.”
“Oh, well, that’s okay.”
“Won’t be able to get to any o’ those other chores either, the stuck door and whatnot. I’m outta commission.”
“You are? I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“Not me. Wife.” He scratches his whiskery chin, a nervous habit. He’s a small, intense man, narrow-shouldered, slightly bowlegged, with black, piercing eyes. “She’s just outta the hospital.”
“Oh, I see.” I’ve never met Mrs. Bender, but I’ve seen her in her yard, a tall, rangy woman hanging laundry or bending over the plants in her amazing garden. Once, driving by, I saw the two of them in the window of the Velvet Cafe in Dolley, having lunch together. He still had his hat on.
“You got enough wood to last till next week?”
“I think so. And if not—”
“If not, I can get somebody, prob’ly get my son-in-law, drop off a load.”
“That’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me,” I say, although he doesn’t look worried. “I hope it’s nothing too serious with your wife.”
“Heart. Be laid up a while.”
“Oh my. Mr. Bender, if there’s anything I can do, please just let me know.”
“Church ladies got it covered.”
He starts around to the driver’s side of the truck, but then he stops. “Thank you for offering,” he says with formal politeness. For a second, before he tips his cap again and climbs in the pickup, I think I see something in his eyes, a shadow of fear or helplessness. As if he’s holding back an emotion that would be too much for him if he let it go.
The look haunts me; I think of him off and on all morning while I strip sixty years of paint from another kitchen cabinet door. One a day, that’s my goal. It’s too chilly to work outside, though, and here in the kitchen the paint-remover fumes are making my head ache.
That’s my excuse to stop in the middle of the job and stare into my doorless cabinets, mulling what I could make the Benders out of the limited ingredients I have on hand…something the church ladies won’t have covered. I’ve got soba noodles, got anchovies…here’s coconut, I make a very good Indian tomato soup with coconut. Nothing seems right. If Mr. Bender isn’t a meat-and-potatoes man, I’ll eat this jar of kimchi. There are chicken breasts in the freezer. I could thaw them in the microwave and make some kind of casserole.
The phone rings while I’m sautéing onions in olive oil. The real phone, not my cell, so I know it’s not a client; also, the first thing the voice on the other end says is “I just had sex with Viagra.”
“Maureen, hi. You took Viagra?”
“No, I didn’t, Charles did.”
Charles, Charles…Mo’s boyfriends are starting to overwhelm my memory bank. “The real-estate appraiser? That young guy?”
“He’s forty,” she says with a tiny bit of frost. “Not that young.”
“I didn’t mean young for you, I meant young for Viagra.” I’m not sure what I meant. Maureen is forty-eight. “So? How was it?”
“Weird at first. You know, the waiting. We listened to music, drank some wine. Necked. Then…well, then it was just normal. Only longer.”
“Huh. That’s good. I guess.” Depending on how much longer.
“I still don’t know why he needs it. He never said, so I didn’t ask. But he wasn’t embarrassed at all, he was very matter-of-fact.”
“He made no bones about it?”
Mo cackles. “I don’t think I’m going to go out with him again, though.”
“Welll…I guess it isn’t very romantic.”
“Oh, I don’t care about that. I don’t care about romantic. Charles is all right, but I’m not ready to give up the process.”
“What process?” I hold the phone with my shoulder while I slide the chicken breasts into the pan. Maureen of all people has become a serial dater. I would never have predicted it, she was such a homebody before, a mother hen perfectly happy making the nest cozy for her rooster and chick.
“It’s completely different, Dash, the whole dating scene, when you’re not looking for Mr. Right. There’s no pressure, everything’s just for fun. A man isn’t going to save me, I’ve evolved enough to realize that, so now I can just enjoy myself.”
“The way men do.”
“Precisely.”
I’m not sure I buy this, it’s so antithetical to the Mo I used to know. The predivorce Mo, who wasn’t bitter, who couldn’t have imagined sleeping with a man one time and then casually deciding not to see him again.
“Men are right about monogamy,” she says, “it’s not natural. Romance is a female construct, and it’s very seductive, but it’s a conspiracy. We foist it on them to keep them at home, and they pretend it’s working to keep the peace.”
“God, Maureen, you are so depressing.”
“That’s because you’re a romantic. Phil’s got a new girlfriend, by the way.”
Aha. No wonder; that explains this uncharacteristic cynicism, which doesn’t sit well on my sweet-natured friend. “Of course he does,” I say. “I hope she’s older than the last one.”