by Meg Wolitzer
Before Greer could even think about what had just been said, Faith reached out and took Greer’s hands, as though they were about to sing a children’s song. Greer could feel Faith’s rings, which came together like brass knuckles. Faith stood holding Greer’s hands and attentively studying her, seeing her.
“I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” Greer said. “I have a full scholarship, which I know is huge.” She began to worry about how long they would keep holding hands; was she supposed to be the one to let go?
Faith said, “Look, you’re allowed to be angry if you feel you weren’t treated fairly. I know that, believe me. But yes, a full scholarship is definitely huge. Most women graduate from college with mountains of debt, and since women earn far less than men, they end up paying it back far longer, and it’s absolutely crippling to them. You won’t have that problem. Don’t forget that, Greer.”
“I won’t,” Greer said, and as if this were the correct answer, Faith released her hands. “But this place,” Greer added, “and the way it’s run, it’s so unfair. After the hearing, the administration was like, ‘Okay, Tinzler family of Kissimmee, Florida, we’re happy to keep taking your tuition money. And we’re happy to give your son a diploma at the end just like you were expecting. No worries!’”
“So, unfairness is your theme?” asked Faith.
“Isn’t it yours too?”
Faith seemed to consider this, and she was about to answer when the stall door opened. Zee came out, smiling, and went to the sink, where she washed her hands with a surgeon’s vigor. Greer felt disappointed that her time alone with Faith Frank had now ended, but she gallantly stepped back as Zee dried her hands and then positioned herself in the middle of the bathroom.
“Ms. Frank,” said Zee. “I thought you were magnificent up there.”
“Oh, thank you. That’s very kind of you to say.”
Probably Faith Frank had some faculty reception to go to. Maybe faculty members were gathering in President Beckerling’s living room right this minute, milling around awkwardly as they waited for the guest of honor to arrive. But Faith appeared in no hurry to leave here. She turned back to her own image, scrutinizing it again briefly, without the female self-hatred that she had once warned about in an op-ed in the New York Times during Fashion Week.
“No, thank you,” Zee persisted. “You gave me so much to think about. I’ve been your super-fan always. I know that sounds semi-stalkerish, and I don’t mean it that way. When I was growing up we had to do a project for school called Women Who Made a Difference. I really wanted to pick you. But Rachel Cardozo got there first, alphabetically, and that was that.”
“Ah. Sorry. So who did you end up choosing?” asked Faith.
“The Spice Girls,” Zee said. “They were great too, in their own way.”
“They certainly were,” said Faith, amused.
“I’ve always related to you,” Zee went on easily, “because I think being an activist is just part of me. I’m gay, which is also just part of me, and hearing you speak tonight about all the work you’ve done with women, and how inspiring they’ve been to you,” Zee said, “I had a new thought, which is: Well, no wonder I like women. They’re wonderful.” She thrust out her hand for a shake, and Faith shook it.
“Good luck to you,” Faith said. Then she looked at Greer. “Actually, I don’t have only one theme,” Faith said to her, returning to the exact place she and Greer had left off in their conversation. “And neither should you,” Faith continued. “The thing that happened with your parents—whatever it was, Greer, it wasn’t fatal. You should use that experience and find a way to be bigger than it. And the thing that happened here, the sexual assault case—”
“You think we should be bigger than that too?” Greer asked, surprised. She thought about what Faith had said in the chapel about how they might play a role in the great cause of women’s equality. Because of that, she’d expected Faith to say to her now: Keep going, Greer Kadetsky. Never stop fighting. Punch your way through this. You can do it.
“No,” Faith said. “It sounds like you already did what you could. You made your point. If you seem to be hounding this person, then sympathy will redound to him. It’s too much of a risk to take.” She took a second. “And also, what about the other women who are involved? Do they want this revisited?”
“Two of them said they definitely don’t,” Greer admitted. She hadn’t thought about this much, but now she remembered what Ariel Diski had said. “They just want to forget about it and move on.”
“Well, they get a say, don’t they? Look, there’s a whole world out there. Lots to see, lots to be angry about and cry about and do something about, well beyond the bounds of this campus. Other cities and communities. Go have a look.” Faith appeared to be about to say something else, but then someone entered the bathroom—the provost, maddeningly interrupting for a second time, calling out, “Whenever you’re ready, they’re waiting for us at the reception.”
“One sec, Suki,” said Faith, and the provost withdrew.
Greer remembered how Faith had sighed at the mirror. Now, without thinking it through, Greer said to her, “I bet you wish you could go back to your hotel right now instead of to a faculty reception.”
Faith said to Greer, “Is it obvious?” Greer thought: No, it’s not obvious, but I saw it. “When you give lectures,” Faith went on, “the receptions are part of it. Do you know how many turkey pinwheel sandwiches I’ve eaten in recent years?”
“How many?” Greer asked, then immediately felt like an idiot. It hadn’t been a question.
“Too many,” Faith said. “Too many damp little sandwiches in mid-decomposition, and too much sherry served in cut-glass goblets like something from a Renaissance Faire. But when you’re on the academic lecture circuit it comes with the territory. Anyway,” she added, “this’ll be fine. Your provost is a friend of mine from the early days. So it’ll be good to catch up.”
“She’s your friend? Oh, I see. I wondered why you came to Ryland,” said Greer, but it had begun to feel as if Faith had come here just so Greer could meet her.
“And as for this young man,” said Faith, and for a horrified moment Greer thought she meant Zee, and that all this time tonight Faith had somehow thought that androgynous Zee was male, an interloper in the bathroom. But Faith did not mean Zee. She was pointing at Darren Tinzler’s face on Greer’s T-shirt, and she said, “Just forget him. There’s plenty more for you to do.”
“I agree,” put in Zee.
“Throw yourself into new experiences,” Faith went on. “Why not try to use your ‘outside voice’? You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.”
Then, as if remembering something, Faith reached into her large, soft shoulder bag and took out a brick of a wallet, from which she withdrew a business card. In raised letters on heavy, cream-colored stock it read:
Faith Frank
Below it was the title “Editor,” and then all her contact information at Bloomer. Greer took the card from her and held it as though it were a winning lottery ticket. What could it be redeemed for? Probably nothing. But just having been given the card was a reward unto itself, and a kind of small shock. Faith had taken an interest in her. She had even said she admired her. And now Faith was giving her permission. But permission to do what? The answer wasn’t at all obvious.
Twelve years later, when Greer Kadetsky herself became famous, the first chapter of the book she wrote would describe this long-ago ladies’ room scene. She would playfully tease her very immature younger self for having gotten so worked up during the moment she’d had with Faith Frank, and for feeling so excited when Faith had given her the card.
In itself, that card was a kind of abstract prize, a reminder not to stay hot-faced and tiny-voiced. Faith, who a little while earlier had stood and held Greer’
s hands, was offering her nothing but permission and kindness and advice and an expensive-looking business card. She hadn’t come out and said, “Be in touch, Greer,” but it felt like more than anyone had ever given her except for Cory.
Probably, Greer thought, Faith was now going to give a business card to Zee as well, which would have made sense, since Zee was the authentically political one, the picketer and leafleter and longtime fan, at which point the two friends would be even. They could walk back to Woolley together and eat their pizza from Graziano’s and sit talking about the evening and admiring the matching business cards they’d been handed.
But instead of giving Zee a card, Faith closed her wallet and returned it to her bag. Greer suddenly wished that she could peer inside. Some childlike instinct made her wonder what was in there. Thunderbolts? Gold leaf? Cinnamon? The tears of a thousand women, collected in a small blue bottle?
Faith said, “Well, the provost awaits. And you know the old saying: ‘One must never keep the provost waiting.’”
“Lao-Tzu,” said Zee.
Faith Frank didn’t appear to hear. She opened the door and gestured toward the stenciled letters of the sign. “Good night, ladies,” she said.
TWO
The Eisenstat family car was a genteel, boxy Volvo, scented lightly with machine oil. As if to further fortify that this was a car belonging to someone’s parents, on the backseat was a splayed-open, wavy, crisp old copy of Scientific American and a chunky purple folding umbrella still in its sleeve. Zee’s mother and father, both judges in the ninth judicial district in Westchester County, New York, had apparently told their daughter that the Volvo was absolutely not to be driven by her friends. “No one else is on our insurance,” they had said. “The only driver can be you.” Yet Zee had ignored this warning, lending the car to Greer, who had become her closest friend at college, and who was now driving it southward this Friday afternoon in February, as she had driven it twice before, both times to see Cory at Princeton.
Soon Greer was walking purposefully across the hand-polished campus. She carried a backpack with schoolwork in it, and as a result she looked like someone who went to Princeton, a thought that struck her with a complicated charge. Moments later there was Cory, leaning out the window and waving as if he were a trapped prince. He clattered down the stairs and opened the front door, and Greer pressed herself into the middle of his overly tall, thin tree of a body.
When they reached his room, the door opened upon a mess even more extravagantly chaotic than usual. Clothes, books, DVDs, empty beer bottles, hockey sticks, audio equipment, all of it massed in piles, indefensibly. “Were you guys burglarized?” she asked.
“If we were, the burglar missed a lot of Steers’s expensive shit.” He gestured to the Klipsch speakers, one of which was a surface for a few beer bottles. Nearby lay a lone Air Jordan 4 Thunder, too small to be Cory’s. They lay together on his bed, on top of some unfolded laundry from this morning’s load, which strangely still held a little vestigial warmth from the industrial dryer all these hours later. “Steers is always lending me things to wear to parties,” Cory said. “Of course nothing fits. I’m way too tall for anything.”
“You still feel self-conscious?” Greer asked.
“About being tall?”
“No. At Princeton.”
“Well, I’m always going to be the kid with the housecleaner mom and the upholsterer dad.”
“There have to be other people here like that,” she said.
“Yeah. There’s a girl from Harlem who lived in a shelter. Another kid grew up on a houseboat in China, and now he’s TA’ing multivariable calculus. But it still gets awkward sometimes. My Secret Santa, Clove Wilberson?”
“Who is named that?”
“Well, she is. She couldn’t believe I’d never worn tails. It’s tricky here. Everyone’s nice, but it’s always possible to seem socially ignorant. In that way, you’re pretty lucky being at Ryland.”
She looked at him. “You’re really saying that to me?”
It was still a sensitive topic, his being at Princeton and her being at Ryland. And she was still so angry with her parents, who had caused this to happen. But lately the environment felt different—both at school and inside her, that little province you carried around throughout your life, and which you were unable to leave, so you had to make the best of it. Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. Once she realized this it began to trouble her. Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world. Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.
At the beginning of college, she had felt lonely and furious and aimless. But lately the Ryland campus was brighter and more welcoming. Sometimes conversations and events and classes and even just walks to town with a friend were exciting to her. Greer wondered what she was missing being here at Princeton this weekend; she was sure she was missing something. She didn’t seethe and stew anymore. No more sitting in the Woolley lounge in despair. Even the boy from Iran had found his way by joining the Model Rocketry Club; the other members, a cheerful, eclectic group, often stopped by Woolley with their motors and their plywood, and yanked him from his room. He spent less time mourning his faraway family, and more time in this dynamic world.
You needed to find a way to make your world dynamic, Greer knew. Sometimes you couldn’t do it yourself. Someone had to see something in you and speak to you in a way that no one else ever had. Faith Frank had swept in and had that effect on Greer, though of course Faith had no idea that she had done anything like that. It seemed unfair now that she didn’t know. It seemed wrong not to tell her.
Greer often thought about how Faith had paid attention and been patient and kind and interested and inspiring that night. She had a frequent, grandiose fantasy of writing to Faith and saying:
I want you to know that after you came here, things changed for me. I can’t really explain it, but it’s true. I’m different. I’m involved. I’m more open, less resentful. I’m actually (to use the technical term) happy.
“Why not write her?” Zee had asked recently. “She gave you her business card. It has her email on it. Just send her a little note saying whatever.”
“Oh yes, that’s what Faith Frank really wants and needs. To be pen pals with a freshman at a shitty college that she has no memory of visiting.”
“She might like to hear that things are good with you.”
“No, I can’t write her,” said Greer. “She wouldn’t remember me, and anyway it would be abusing the privilege of having her email.”
“‘The privilege of having her email,’” said Zee. “Listen to you. It’s not a privilege, Greer. She gave you the card, and I think that’s great. You should use it.”
But Greer never wrote. Occasionally, professors paid attention to her, but it wasn’t the same. One of them, Donald Malick, taught her freshman English colloquium, and he put a “See me” note on the last page of the paper she wrote about Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as anti-heroine. The syllabus had taken the class headlong through very different kinds of novels, but Greer had particularly loved this one. Becky Sharp was awful in her naked ambition, and yet you also had to give her credit for being single-minded. So many people seemed muddled in their desires. They didn’t know what they wanted. Becky Sharp knew. After the paper was returned to her, Greer went to Professor Malick’s office, which was a ruckus of slanting books.
“You did a fine job with this,” he said. “The concept of the anti-hero, or in your case anti-heroine, isn’t something that everyone intuitively understands.”
“I think what’s interesting is that we like reading about her. Despite the fact that she’s unlikable,” said Greer. “Likability has become an issue for women lately,” she added self-importantly. She had read an
article about this in Bloomer, to which she now subscribed. She wished the magazine were more consistently interesting to her; she wanted to love it, because of Faith.
“You know, I’ve written a whole book on the anti-hero,” Professor Malick explained, “and I’d like to lend it to you.” He reached out and ran a finger along the spines; it made a clickety sound like a quiet xylophone. “Where are you, anti-hero?” he asked. “Come out and show your anti-heroic face. Ah! There you are.” Then he yanked out the book and pressed it on Greer, saying, “I can see from your papers, which apparently you actually write yourself—will wonders never cease—that you have a good mind. So I thought you might want a little extra reading.”
But he was a sour man with breath like scallions, his teaching and writing style difficult and self-referential, and no, never really likable. And though sometimes in class she let images from novels carry her away, soon she had been carried too far away, out of literature entirely and into something unrelated. Being with Cory in bed, or whatever she, Chloe, and Zee were doing on campus that night.
Later, Greer read her professor’s book, because she was the kind of person who felt she had to read it because he had given it to her. Unfortunately it was resistantly academic, and, flipping through to the page of acknowledgments, she saw with some irritation that he had thanked his wife, Melanie, “for being willing to type my long manuscript for her hopelessly ‘butterfingers’ husband, never once complaining.” He added, “Melanie, you are a saint, and I am humbled by the gift of your love.” Greer thundered through the book as she’d said she would, bored by the maddening text that refused to yield. She didn’t know what to say to him about it, so she said nothing, and in any case it wasn’t a problem because he never asked for it back.