Hiding Places

by Shannon Heuston

  Helmut paused with a forkful of pancake halfway to his mouth. “One day, Angela,” he said. “I’m not ready for that.”

  Ursula was watching me carefully, an unreadable expression in her eyes. Did she think I was an angel, or a devil? I didn’t dare ask.

  I declined Ursula’s offer of a ride back to campus. The roads were plowed now, and although I knew my cheap canvas sneakers would be sopping before I made it back to the dorms, I felt funny about her driving me. What if people saw us? Of course, I had an excuse for sleeping over Dr. Reiter’s house, but people had an uncanny way of sniffing out the truth.

  I needed the walk to clear my head. Did I regret making love with Dr. Reiter? If so, why did I make love with her again this morning? Even now I was aware of a sizzling heat in my groin at the thought of doing it again.

  Am I a lesbian?

  I was raised in a liberal corner of the world, the New York City metro area, where homosexuality was accepted. I had no quarrel with the gay community, I just never identified as a member. Perhaps I was in denial.

  All the gay people I’d ever known had claimed they knew they were homosexual from birth, that they always knew they were different from their heterosexual counterparts.

  I’ve always felt different, that was true, and growing up poor in a rich town, I had never questioned the source of this feeling. Although I never developed crushes on guys my age, I never crushed on girls either.

  I couldn’t even accurately describe my feelings for Ursula as a crush. It was a magnetic pull between souls. Sex was merely the only way we had of expressing this unity.

  What would my parents say if they knew what I had done? I knew Jana would say plenty, none of it good.

  I just won’t tell them. I’ll stop going home.

  I could spend vacations and holidays with the Reiters, my new family.

  I was getting ahead of myself. It was too soon to be thinking about the future. This relationship was too new and fragile.

  Back in my dorm room, I kicked off my wet sneakers and shed my clothes. I paused to look at myself in the mirror hanging above my dresser. I looked no different. Same frizzy hair and stupid, vapid expression. I reached out a hand and pressed it against the cold surface of the glass. I was still the same old Maggie, the pathetic girl who stole her cousin’s used panties. There was no before or after.

  It was almost time to get ready for Dr. Reiter’s class. It would be strange sitting in the lecture hall surrounded by people who had no idea that the professor had just made love to me, that I was someone special, that this brilliant woman thought I was worthy of her notice. Instead, I had to pretend to be just another faceless student. It was unbearable.

  Maybe I should skip it.

  I yanked on a pair of jeans and a sweater. Outside, the temperature was already rising, a steady stream of water flowing down the dirty panes of my windows from the long, sparkling icicles hanging from the ledge above my room.

  My father had always warned us to stay away from icicles. “If they fall on you, they can stab you, just like a knife.”

  I avoided icicles. I didn’t want to be needlessly hurt.

  Until now. I stood up straight, head high. Sometimes you had to take a risk. You couldn’t go through life dodging falling icicles.

  I made it to class too late to claim my usual seat. Forced to sit in the back, I wondered what Ursula would think, looking out over the room and not seeing me.

  Worrying about someone else’s feelings was a new experience. Never before had I been important enough to cause another human being pain.

  I leaned forward, raising slightly in my seat, trying to make myself more visible. All Ursula would see when she looked out over the room was a sea of faces. I couldn’t very well wave or do anything to get her attention. That would look strange. I was suddenly hyper aware of how things might look to others.

  If I thought I was anxious about the professor before, it was nothing compared to how I felt now. I was in a state of high alert, terrified of the slightest misstep. I didn’t want this amazing thing snatched away from me just when it got started.

  Ursula stalked into the lecture hall, her satchel slung over her shoulder, and unpacked her materials at the front of the room. Business as usual.

  I caught snatches of conversation as my classmates chatted amongst each other.

  “Yeah, well, he totally blew up the bathroom so then I couldn’t…”

  “We’re supposed to be meeting in the union for lunch but I’m not sure…”

  “He never takes attendance. He says he does, but it’s a lie.”

  Dr. Reiter adjusted her microphone, her way of signaling silence. She placed her glasses on the end of her pointy nose as she skimmed her presentation, then raised her head. She looked deliberately at the front seat in the middle row. Then she pressed her lips together. It was a small, subtle gesture. My heart sank.

  I picked up my cell phone and typed, “I’m here, I was just late.”

  “Today we are going to examine the underlying pathology of Kristallnacht,” Dr. Reiter said in a clear voice. She glanced down. A slight smile spasmed her features.

  I relaxed. Message received.

  I flipped to a fresh page in my spiral notebook and sat back to enjoy the lecture.

  “You and my daughter, you’re friends now, eh?” Helmut asked, as I poured hot soup into a ceramic bowl and placed it in front of him.

  I sat down beside him. “Yes,” she said. “I had a nice time last night.”

  “That’s so good,” Helmut said. “I want my girls to like each other.”

  I flushed with pleasure. “We do,” I assured him.

  “With so many rooms in this house, why don’t you live here?”

  “I have a job with the college,” I explained. “I’m a resident assistant.”

  Helmut dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “You won’t need a job if you move in with us,” he argued. “I think it would be good for you. You could get a lot more studying done without all the noise they have in those places.”

  I had to laugh. In such a short time, Helmut had gotten to know me well. The noise in the dorm drove me nuts. The Reiter house was peaceful in comparison.

  This afternoon there was no hiding. Helmut had been doing it less and less. I was proud of this, wanted to point it out to Ursula, but I was afraid it would come across as bragging. Maybe I should mention it next time I saw her. Plant the seed. I was good for them. They needed me.

  I remained in the sitting room, beside Helmut, until I heard the crunch of Ursula’s SUV on the driveway.

  The clicking sound of Ursula’s high heels on the hardwood floor echoed through the empty rooms at the front of the house. “Hello?” she called.

  “In here,” I replied.

  A moment later she appeared in the doorway. Her hands were clasped in front of her. I noticed she was wringing them slightly.

  “Maggie, can I talk to you alone in the kitchen?” she asked.

  My heart sank. I was about to be fired. My blood turned to ice.

  The kitchen was cold. I wrapped my arms around myself as I stood before Ursula, thinking of icicles, the way they sparkled with cold beauty in the winter sun, but were deadly. They could deliver a killing blow.

  “Maggie, I just want to say…” Ursula began. She pressed her colorless lips together. “I don’t think that…” Her words trailed off again.

  She was trembling.

  I stepped forward and slid my arms around her, soothing her, drawing the woman’s head down onto my breast. “It’s okay,” I whispered in her ear. “We don’t have to decide anything today. We can just be here, in this moment.”

  Chapter Ten

  Ursula

  My life had divided into two halves, before and after. Before was like trudging through a frozen landscape, never reaching a destination. Filled only with duties and responsibilities, my burdens. My world was colored gray, like the January sky in northern New York, when the sun never shined.
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br />   Then Maggie came, and the sun burst through the clouds. The world was suddenly a beautiful place. I had been blind, and now I could see. It was like someone handed me a pair of much needed glasses and the world snapped into vivid clarity.

  It was almost enough to make me believe in God.

  I had been raised without religion. Papa was Jewish, but experience had destroyed his faith. It was hard to fathom a benevolent, supernatural being allowing such atrocities without sending an avenging thunderbolt to earth.

  “God is dead,” was all my father would ever say on the subject.

  Baylor wasn’t a Christian college, but most of its students hailed from the surrounding communities, which tended to be conservative. It had an extremely active Christian community, one of the features that increased my feeling of alienation. I regarded their beliefs as innocent bordering on childish, especially their assertion that if you trust in God, all your problems would be solved.

  Yeah, how’d that work out for the twelve million people murdered during the Holocaust?

  Tell that to the Jews exterminated in the camps, I would think, whenever I encountered yet another Christian fundamentalist student parroting this ideal. Tell that to my father. You think they didn’t pray for deliverance?

  Of course, they thought God ignored the Jews for not accepting Christ as their lord and savior, although no one had the nerve to admit it. As if the powerful entity that created human beings in His image and allegedly loved them all unconditionally would consent to their torture and murder for not believing the right thing. Sure. That made perfect sense.

  I always thought that if God existed, He either didn’t pay much attention to the world He created or long ago ceased giving a shit. Like a child abandoning his toys.

  But now it was like God had sensed my profound loneliness and sent an angel.

  There was no other explanation for Maggie. She was so beautiful and innocent that she seemed supernatural, an angelic creature sent to prove there was still goodness in the world.

  I had trouble accepting that Maggie really wanted to be with me, that it wasn’t some passing childish fancy, a ten second fad. I made her tell me how she’d stalked me for months again and again, trying to convince myself to believe it.

  “Why me?” I whispered in the girl’s ear for the hundredth time, as we lay naked together with our limbs entwined, two goddesses cast down to earth. “There are so many women closer to your age on campus. And men. What made you set your heart on me, a shriveled up old maid?”

  “I knew I wanted you the minute I first saw you, buying your coffee in the union,” Maggie would recite. “I was never interested in anyone else. Never. Only you.”

  She couldn’t be real. I worried that I would awaken one day and find myself alone, Maggie having vanished in a puff of smoke, a sign that I’d inherited my father’s insanity.

  This secret fear compelled me to unearth Maggie’s transcript from the bowels of the Baylor file system, for tangible proof that she’d existed before drifting into my life like a fairy from a magical land.

  This was Margaret Dunlap’s fifth semester on campus. She was an early childhood education major minoring in Women’s Studies. Her GPA was 3.6, respectable but not extraordinary. She attended Mount Holland High School in Mount Holland, New York, a small town in Westchester County. She graduated with a weighted average of 88.8 and had run cross country and played the clarinet in the school band. Her parents were Jana and Gordon Dunlap.

  Maggie was real.

  I had to make sure. “Are you sure you’re real?” I asked, snuggling against her. “Are you sure you’re not a figment of my imagination?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she whispered back. “Do you think I would have stretchmarks if I was fake? Trust me, you’re the only one who thinks I’m anything special.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I told her fiercely. “Maybe that’s how you see yourself, but I assure you, everyone else sees something far different.”

  The girl was so ethereally lovely, I wondered why everyone didn’t gape when she passed. That glorious wild mane of hair, that porcelain face, those ruby red lips and bright blue eyes, I wanted to write sonnets to her like Shakespeare. She not only walked in beauty like the night, she walked in it during the day, too.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” Maggie would plead. “What was it like for you, growing up?”

  “Confusing,” I mused, thinking. “Strange. Our home was so different. All my classmates’ mothers stayed home, and their fathers worked. It was the opposite in my family.”

  “Didn’t your mother ever get fed up?”

  “Never,” I said. “She was always patient, always understanding, always loving. A saint. She loved Papa dearly. She would have done anything to heal him. So much so that she had no more children after me, even though she wanted a big family. She was afraid what a second child would do to him. Having me made him unhinged.” I paused. “Of course, she never blamed me. I guess I blamed myself, though. I always felt Papa was my responsibility. I won’t ever leave him, not while he’s alive.”

  “You’re a good daughter. I’m not. I would never sacrifice everything for my parents. I’m too selfish.”

  “You remind me of my mother,” I said. “I have a hard time believing you’re a bad daughter.”

  “My mother and father were awful parents,” Maggie confessed. “They don’t give two shits about me. I’m dead last on their list of priorities. If they had their way, I’d still be checking groceries in our local supermarket and surrendering my paycheck to them every week. They were actually mad when they found out I was going to college.” She rolled onto her side to face me. “My mother resented me, because she didn’t get to go to college.”

  “Her life didn’t turn out the way she planned,” I said. “She had no right to take that out on you, though. There were things she could have done to turn her life around. She could have gone back to school.”

  “She said it was our fault,” Maggie said. “That without kids to drag her down, she would have made a difference in the world.”

  “She did make a difference in the world,” I said, dropping kisses in the sweet curve of her neck. “She gave the world you.”

  I had never been in love before, so I was disturbed by the roller coaster of irrational feelings. I had always been the objective, distant observer of human emotion, never a participant. Now all my psychological training deserted me.

  I couldn’t get Maggie out of my mind. I would be giving a lecture and abruptly fall silent in the middle of sentence when an image of the girl intruded, naked and lovely. The brief pause gave students an opening to start asking questions, ruining my personal policy of zero interaction. I instructed, they took notes, then we all left. No questions, no discussions, nothing. I didn’t want to hear their idealistic voices. I didn’t want to know them.

  That abruptly changed, and it was because of Maggie. I would hesitate and lose my train of thought and before I knew it there were questions, the curiosity of my students finding chinks in my carefully erected wall. Then what was I to do? I couldn’t ignore them. That might get back to Dr. Heinrich, the chair, and then I’d be in trouble.

  I never had any use for texting. I occasionally received texts from colleagues, but there had never been anyone I checked in with every day. That was another change. Before my phone had been a necessary evil, used as little as possible. I often forgot it on the charger at home.

  Now it was my connection to Maggie, my lifeline. I would no more forget it at home then I would forget my arm.

  My heart leaped every time my screen lit up with a text from Maggie. It came second only to being in the girl’s physical presence.

  It scared me how quickly she became the focus of my life. Before she came, I had no real reason to live, except to take care of Papa. There was no center to my life, no axis around which it revolved. I had just been going through the motions of living. I wasn’t alive.

  Sometimes I would look up fro
m my notes during a boring departmental meeting and study my colleagues. What would they say if they knew?

  How long would we be able to keep this a secret?

  Baylor University had no stated policy regarding professors dating students, not like other institutions in more dignified corners of the world. No surprise, given that Baylor was stuck in 1950. If some aging, fiftyish professor wanted to date his nineteen-year-old student and give her an A, all the stuffed shirts that ran the college in their blazers with patches on the elbows would slap him on the back.

  I had no such illusions about myself, however. A male professor could do what he liked. Female professors were held to a higher standard.

  Adding to my apprehension, Baylor was probably the only college in the United States without an active gay and lesbian association. Colleges were notorious for being hot spots of all manners of sexual activity, but not this one. Sex took place behind closed doors, was heterosexual, and only in the missionary position. None of that dirty stuff. That was for deviants.

  A white male professor having sex with a teenager was acceptable; a white female professor having sex with her twenty-two-year-old student was a deviant. I already knew the score.

  Viewing the situation objectively, I was ashamed. I was a caricature, the skinny old maid professor seducing a vulnerable, naïve girl of aching beauty. A professor of psychology, no less. It would be easy for me to trick a young girl into my bed.

  I knew the homophobic doctrine, having made a lifelong study of the various ways society has of dehumanizing other human beings. The gay community was degraded and marginalized in a manner reminiscent of the Jews prior to the Holocaust.

  My stuffy, hypocritical colleagues would view my miraculous relationship through the distorted lens of homophobia and misogyny. They would see ugliness instead of beauty. All the minor details that Maggie and I ceased thinking about, such as our age difference, would be magnified. The things that didn’t matter to us would be the only things that mattered to everyone else.