But the truth is that behind the veneer of all that macho bravado, and the class-conscious sense he has underneath the surface that he has lived a failed life—he confesses to her once that his dream was to be a writer—lives a really good teacher. He knows tennis. And what starts for her as a lark quickly grows into an obsession. And long after her fellow players give up the lessons, she stays hard at them, and not because she wants to fuck the tennis pro—though sometimes, in the shower afterward, she does think about it—but rather, because for the first time in forever she is getting better at something, there is something new to learn, and her life has not yet collapsed into complete stasis at this old school, with her old husband, and her willful son fighting a war thousands of miles away.
And so once a week turns into three lessons a week. Three lessons a week turn into five days of tennis, one day of just hitting without instruction—still at fifty dollars an hour—and free time spent hitting serve after serve, the satisfying thwack of the ball leaving her strings for that square patch of real estate on the other side of the net.
The pro, Todd, spends a solid month just trying to teach her the elegance of a one-handed slice backhand, and at first it feels as impossible to her as learning to play the violin. She cannot ever imagine mastering it, but he tells her just to be patient, keep pulling the racket back and hit through the ball.
And one day they are on the court and it is like a gift, an astonishing gift, for suddenly she pulls the racket back, and the ball returns over the net with the perfect trajectory, low and spinning, skidding on the court when it hits. Then she does it again, and again, and she is no longer thinking about it, just hitting, and Todd on the other side is saying to her, “Yes, that’s it, good hit, just like that, again, oh, good job, Betsy!”
She is so elated by this small victory that she agrees with him that they should definitely celebrate, and so she sends Arthur an e-mail that she will not be at the dining hall and instead finds herself at an out-of-the-way pub with Todd drinking gin and eating burgers and talking tennis.
There is a moment, halfway through her first gin, when she suddenly becomes aware of the oddity of this situation, of Todd, across from her in a T-shirt and jeans, and she realizes it is the first time she has ever seen him in anything outside of the Head tennis sweats he always wears on the court.
She has no business being here, she thinks, for she is fifty-four years old and the wife of the headmaster, and she decides that she will finish this drink and then have Todd take her home. But then the second drink seems like a good idea, and oh, fuck it, let’s have a third, and when he takes her home it is not to the headmaster’s white Colonial, but instead through the basement of old Spencer dorm (looking both ways, hoping not to be spied by a stray student), where he has a small apartment provided by the school.
He is kind enough to keep the lights off, and when she gets over the awful feeling of being naked for the first time in more than thirty years in front of a man who is not Arthur, he fucks her athletically, as if he wants to show her that his prowess is not limited to hitting powerful forehands. She gives in and lets him flip her this way and that, and later it is this she will remember, how he tosses her around, and not how any of it felt, since she completely blanks when confronted with the awesome spectacle of his near-pornographic and quite improbable ability to work through the first fifty pages of the Kama Sutra in less than twenty minutes.
Worse than the sex itself is the fact that immediately afterward she begins to weep.
Todd at first mistakes her convulsions for laughter but then realizes quickly that she is crying and crying inconsolably. He tells her it will be okay, but it doesn’t matter. For the truth is she has no idea why she is crying.
She is not crying because she has betrayed her husband, or even because the sexual act itself has reminded her of all the things she does not like about getting older. She does not cry for her son, who worries the hell out of her with his e-mails from Mosul, saying how scared he is and not to tell anyone that. “Tell everyone I am fine and strong, Mom,” he writes, “especially Dad.”
She cries for reasons she cannot even understand, and this only makes her cry harder. She cannot stop, and Todd is freaked out and keeps asking what he did. She is sobbing too hard to tell him he has not done a damn thing. That this has nothing to do with him.
Elizabeth does not like when Arthur gets in his cups and seems fit to say to perfect strangers that she was the one who was unsure about having children. He presents this information casually, like a conversation one might have about snow tires, and it pisses her off when he does it, but she feels unable to protest. She was ambivalent about it, that part is undeniably true, and it almost killed her, this ambivalence, but it welled up from deep within her, from a place she didn’t fully understand. Of all the things to be ambivalent about! Either you want children or you don’t, she figured, and for a time she imagined that something was wrong with her, deeply wrong with her, that she could be so indecisive about something so important. It was easier, frankly, to be cavalier about God.
She had friends who said that women know when they are done having children, as if it were hardwired and beyond their control. The women who have one child and demand a second, and the women who have two children and suddenly want them to flow like rabbits.
And then there are the women, like her, who don’t know if they even want a kid at all, and with that feeling comes a weird guilt, because what could be more fucked up than not doing what your very body suggests is the one thing you were born to do? It’s like turning your back to the ocean for no other reason than that you dislike beauty.
And so she finds herself, at twenty-five, back at Lancaster, living in a small apartment in the same dorm she lived in as a student, though now with a Wellesley degree, a faculty husband, and a job assisting J.V. field hockey and working the reference desk at Gould Library. She is, in short, what she probably always secretly desired to be: a faculty wife.
And in some ways she has never been happier. It is like reliving the best part of her life, though with money and a car and the freedom to play adults. At night the girls in the dorm check into their apartment—so young, the lot of them; is it possible she was ever that young?—and then she makes martinis for herself and Arthur, and she reads books on the couch while he meticulously grades essays, writing in the margins of the little blue exam books all the students still use.
The campus feels like theirs finally, not like when she was a student and somehow understood she was just a visitor. There is something wonderful, she decides, in the certainty that they will most likely never live anywhere else. Arthur has his sights clearly set on the house where his parents live, and like the scion who goes to work in the mail room, teaching is part of the apprenticeship, though he will not admit this to anyone outside the two of them, not even to his father.
She loves the structure of the school year, how it mirrors the seasons. She loves her job in the library, dressing in pencil skirts and cardigan sweaters and sitting behind the desk, helping the young people carve their way through the voluminous amounts of knowledge in the stacks behind her.
She loves not having to worry about any of the concerns of other newlyweds, cooking and keeping house and paying bills—all of that is taken care of for you at Lancaster. It is as if you had all the trappings of adulthood with none of the responsibility.
And perhaps, deep down, this is why she is resistant to the idea of children. It is a fundamental selfishness, maybe, a realization that a child will change everything, and this state of suspended adolescent animation they are living in will vanish forever.
But around her—all around her, pressing in—one by one the other young faculty wives begin to get pregnant. They are almost biblical in their pregnancies, babies begetting babies, all this fertility like the advent of spring in the verdant hills that rise up and away from the floodplain and the small town with its small school.
At faculty parties on weekends, after
the students have gone to bed (or pretend to have gone to bed, more likely), she sits on couches with the women while the men smoke in another room. Other women, she realizes, have this incessant need to put their babies in her arms. And when she looks down at those shriveled little faces, those hooded eyes, she says all the right things, oh, how beautiful and so on, and she coos appropriately and knows her social role, but she can’t help but wish that she were a man—not literally, of course, for she cannot imagine that, but conceptually, certainly, the freedom not to have this responsibility, other than in the most general sense; the freedom to stand around with other men and smoke and drink and talk about politics and sports and not hold a baby, whose weight is pleasant enough, she supposes, but whose visage she finds not beautiful but rather odd, old manish and sad.
What could be wrong with her?
Though part of her knows that her reluctance is ultimately futile. On nights when Arthur rolls into her and wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her to him (his signal that he wants to make love), she still has him put on a condom. Though, afterward, when they lie in the dark and look out the window to the stars above the river, he often says, “When are you going to give me a baby?”
And while this provides the opening for her to tell him about her ambivalence, to try to give it words beyond the nagging thoughts in her head, she does not.
“Soon,” she whispers back, and then after he falls asleep, she considers all the happenstance that led her to this point, back at school, next to her sleeping husband, already a revered teacher of English and destined one day to fill his father’s shoes and become the living embodiment of Lancaster itself.
Maybe, she thinks, it all goes back to 1954, when a boy, a sophomore named Augustus Holt, drowned on a warm spring day when the runoff from the hills swelled the river to twice its normal size.
No one should have been swimming that day, least of all Augustus Holt, who could barely tread water. His father was a wealthy industrialist, the owner of Holt Industries of Pittsburgh, and after Augustus’s death his significant gift to the school in the boy’s name came with a catch: Every Lancaster student would now have to pass a swimming test to graduate.
Growing up in Craftsbury, Elizabeth never became much of a swimmer. There were no pools, only the short season at Caspian Lake, ten miles to the south. Saturdays when they had a family picnic, she was not one of those who swam out to the raft and jumped off it.
She was afraid of water. She had always been afraid of water. It was not a rational fear, she knew, and maybe it was no more her dislike of that murky lake with its reeds that slid against her legs like damp noodles. Maybe it was that her hippie parents never pushed her to do anything she did not want to do, some kind of Waldorf nonsense where you figure it out on your own and decide you want to learn something when it is time.
Regardless, she made it all the way to Lancaster managing to hide this fundamental fact about herself, and even though they explain the swimming requirement to her when she is admitted, and later when she first enrolls, she never for a moment considers they are really serious about it. What? She won’t graduate because she can’t swim the length of a pool? Really? Is this a serious academic position for a serious academic place?
It turns out, of course, that it is.
And so she puts it off. And a week before graduation she gets a note in her mailbox from the registrar that she needs to report to the pool at 4:00 P.M. on Friday and pass the test or not walk in the commencement ceremony.
Coming into the steaming warmth and chlorine-soaked air of the Olympic-size swimming pool, she thinks for a moment she might pass out. This feeling only grows when, approaching the pool, she sees that the only other person in the entire domed space is none other than Arthur, sitting on the lifeguard stand with a clipboard in his hand. He is proctoring this. She considers turning and leaving, as he has not seen her yet, but then he looks up and his eyes pass coldly over her standing there in her black one-piece bathing suit.
It has been more than a year since Russell Hurley was kicked out of Lancaster, and she has not been alone with Arthur since. The times she has been at parties and he walked in, she left. The school is small enough that they cannot avoid each other entirely, though they have not spoken in that amount of time. She has not dated since Russell, and while Arthur has—some bubbly, curly-haired sophomore she has seen him with—she doesn’t think it was serious. A few times she found herself confronted with him coming down the stairs in one of the academic buildings, and they did not acknowledge each other. Her heart beat fast as she looked away until he clattered past her.
But now there is nowhere to go. She breathes deep—all that hot chemical air—and walks toward him. He does not climb down off the stand. She speaks first.
She says, “I need to do the swim test.”
He looks again at his clipboard. All business. “Yes, I see your name here,” he says.
“So what do I do?”
“You need to go from one end of the pool to the other. You cannot stop or hang on to the side until you get to the other end. Then you can take a break. There is no time limit.”
At the shallow end, she climbs into the pool. She is almost dizzy from the heat and the silly fear she has of water, and the stress of looking over at Arthur, smug on the lifeguard stand, looking down at her, at the water rising up around her and soaking her bathing suit.
She stands for a moment and looks down the length of the pool. It feels like a great distance, a near-impossible task. It is also humiliating, the fact that she isn’t a good swimmer, can’t swim, and that Arthur is here to witness it. She takes one last look up at him. One last glance to the other side. Then she takes a deep breath and goes for it.
She does a modified doggie paddle, her arms and legs flailing under the water, propelling her forward, her head barely above the water, like a retriever cutting through a pond.
It is beyond humiliating, and she tells herself just to keep moving, push and kick, push and kick, over and over, and finally she looks up, thinking she must be nearing the end, only to realize she has not traveled more than a third of the way. She puts her head down and presses on, and a moment later, she is in trouble.
Her legs, which had been behind her, are now surprisingly below her, as if she has lost her natural buoyancy. The water is in her nose, and she tries to compensate by whirling her arms faster, but this seems to make it worse, and now she is under, closing her eyes and trying to push toward the top.
She doesn’t so much hear Arthur, other than as some distant swoosh, as feel him, his arm around her waist, his hands up over her breasts, her neck, pulling her up and sputtering out of the water.
“Easy now,” he says in her ear. “Easy now.”
At the pool’s wall she hangs on to the edge, and he is behind her, saying, “You okay, Betsy? You okay?”
She pulls herself up and out of the water. On her knees, she completes the humiliation by throwing up.
And Arthur is there, whispering to her kindly, sliding her hair away from her face. She turns toward him, and the nausea has passed, and now she starts to laugh, uncontrollably, some great release of tension, and Arthur laughs, too, and when she says, “Oh, fuck, now I’m not going to graduate,” he says, “Not to worry. I mean, you went back and forth the whole length from what I could see,” and they laugh even harder now, and she is grateful to him.
Time is stripped away. They are back where they were more than a year ago, sitting on the dewy fall grass and watching the stars together. For a moment it as if nothing happened. Time is malleable. Memory fails. Memory changes.
Graduation day comes, and the day, as it should be, is bright and beautiful, and one by one the newly minted Lancaster graduates fulfill the tradition by ringing the bell that sits on top of the small hill behind the main quad. The girls wear all-white knee-length dresses, while the boys wear navy blazers, tan khakis, and Lancaster ties. They are a sea of sameness, and when Arthur rings the bell, Betsy watches as
he steps through this window in time like Winthrops have always done and she thinks that the uniform and the moment seem to suit him better than most, and then she washes it out of her head, since she figures she will never see him again. Over the past couple of days since her swim test they have talked a few times, but nothing significant. She has forgiven him for what she believes he did to Russell, and part of her feels tremendously guilty about this, as if she is giving in to the larger forces that are this old school, but she also knows that Lancaster moves forward with the force of a river and that once someone is gone it’s as if he were never there. Lancaster has a way of dealing only with the living.
In the fall Arthur goes to Yale, and she goes to Wellesley. That first year, there are a few boys, one-night stands, really, but nothing that ever evolves into a relationship. Boys who tell her all kinds of things to get her into bed—like the long-haired Harvard student who tells her after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms that he wants to fuck her through rainbows.
She doesn’t know if he means it literally, and he cannot explain it when she presses him, but it turns out that, naturally, he is so high that the point is moot.
One January night Betsy rides a chartered bus from Wellesley to New Haven with a group of other girls. They are expected at a mixer at Scroll and Key, a prominent secret society, and when they arrive a soft snow is falling on the trees in front of a magnificent granite building that looks more like a monument or a tomb than a place you would actually enter. Betsy files off the bus with all the other Wellesley girls. It is her first time at Yale, and she wonders if she will see Arthur, but she assumes she will not, since after all it is a big school. There are some other Lancaster boys at Yale but none that she was close to, and that is not why she is here, anyway. Coming off the bus, she thinks maybe she has made a mistake. She has been to only one of these before, at Harvard, when she first got to college, and that feeling she had then comes back now, the feeling of being on parade for privileged boys, their eyes on her, sizing her up in the narrowest of ways, as if they, these Wellesley women, are little more than what they suggest in their blouses and skirts, when around them they face a rapidly changing world where every facet of their education speaks to another truth.
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