A Watershed Year

by Susan Schoenberger

  “She doesn’t despise you, and you didn’t cause the entire country’s economic downturn.”

  “You don’t see her face before she’s had coffee in the morning. But I have to tell her about the job before someone rats me out. Sean’s lacrosse coach came in yesterday, and I had to hide in the bathroom.”

  “If you need a little money, I could come up with something.”

  “Absolutely not. I know you need it for the adoption. And this will tide us over for a little while. I just don’t want to lose the house.”

  “What about Mom and Dad?”

  “You didn’t tell them, did you?”

  “No, but…”

  “I can’t have them finding out. They’ll be driving over with casseroles every day like somebody died.”

  Lucy saw his point. Their parents had been nervous about Paul starting his own company. Their sympathy, in lasagna form, could be too much to bear. Paul tore the paper off a roll of wintergreen Life Savers and stuck three in his mouth, crunching them with his back teeth.

  “I can’t take the food here; it’s killing me,” he said, burping. “Thanks for coming up.”

  “It’ll all work out, Paul,” she said, though she sounded unconvincing even to herself. “This is temporary.”

  “It better be, or Cokie will wring my neck. Luckily,” he said, looking around, “our friends wouldn’t be caught dead in this place.”

  She gave Paul a hug and paid her bill, stopping on the way out to examine an old-fashioned bicycle hung on the wall. It had an enormous front wheel with a tiny one in back and appeared physically impossible to ride.

  Wow, she thought. What a long way down.

  LUCY GRABBED THE STACK of graded essays on the dining-room table and brought them to her Friday-morning philosophy class, during which twelve of her best students sat around a table arguing in voices made thin by sucking in too much stale library air. She wasn’t trained as a philosopher, but few universities had need for a full-time hagiographer. She had developed a course based on the teachings of some of the greats—Aristotle, Socrates, Sartre, Nietzsche, Kant—and threw out ethical dilemmas the class had to solve using one or several of their arguments.

  “I don’t get all this ‘God is dead’ stuff,” said her youngest student, a nineteen-year-old from St. Louis. “I mean, who or what killed him off?”

  A senior girl with a nose ring and greasy hair spoke up. “Nietzsche said, ‘God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.’” She was scribbling stars on her notebook. “I think that says it all right there.”

  Lucy intervened. “You don’t need to agree with it, Peter; you just have to remember it. Maybe you’ll like Euripides better. He said, ‘The way of God is complex, He is hard for us to predict. He moves the pieces and they come somehow into a kind of order.’”

  Peter wrote down the Euripides quote, nodding. Nietzsche never appealed to the Midwestern students, Lucy thought. They hated to think that God was dead or even under the weather.

  After class, she saw Angela walking down the hallway from the admissions office. She had an enviable walk, a way of holding her shoulders that implied confidence and training in dance.

  “You’re all scrunched up,” Angela said. “You look like a hobbit.”

  “Thanks, and yes, I’m fine,” Lucy said, pulling her shoulders down and back. “I’m actually feeling marginally good today.”

  “How’s the adoption going?”

  “A few bumps in the road, but it’s progressing. Did I tell you I picked out some wallpaper for Mat’s bathroom?”

  “Yuh-huh, some kind of fish,” Angela said, looking at her nails. “Why don’t you start coming to the single mothers’ group? I try to go once a month before we get into the admissions crush. Lets out all those toxins.”

  Lucy imagined the single mothers in a circle around a life-size voodoo doll in the shape of an ex-husband. Each had a frozen daiquiri in one hand and a large pin in the other.

  “I’m not even a mother yet,” Lucy said. “I’ve still got forms to fill out.”

  “We’ll be there when you need us. And you will need us,” Angela said, continuing down the hall. “Good luck with that wallpaper.”

  As Angela left, Lucy suddenly remembered Louis’s Aquinas lecture. She had never gotten back to him. The class had started at noon, so she knew she could probably get there in time to hear the second half of the lecture and provide a friendly face. She hurried across the quad, dodging clumps of students, her book bag walloping her thighs with every stride. She burst through the double doors of Wyman Hall and ran down the main corridor to the lecture room on the first floor, sliding a bit along the high-schoolish gray and white floor tiles before taking a breath and opening the door. Louis’s voice emerged, then surrounded her.

  “That brings us to Aquinas’s fourth way to prove the existence of God, the argument from degrees and perfection,” Louis said. “Aquinas argued that two objects may be compared in terms of beauty; for example, two paintings. One can be said to be more beautiful than the other, possessing, then, a greater degree of beauty. Aquinas reasoned that there must be a standard of perfection from which we measure degrees of beauty or goodness or kindness. And that standard, that perfection, he said, is contained in God.”

  About thirty students sat in the middle of the sloping lecture hall. Some scribbled down every word or typed on laptops; others nodded along as though they knew where to find the information online. Louis was standing at a lectern to the left of a broad screen, which, at the moment, showed a Renaissance painting of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

  Lucy entered the room and sat down in the back, though Louis didn’t appear to see her. She noticed that he was wearing a shirt and tie with khaki pants and a leather belt, which she would have assumed he didn’t own. He looked quite comfortable up there, changing slides with a remote control.

  “The fifth, and final, way to prove the existence of God, Aquinas said, was the argument from intelligent design. It’s just common sense, according to Aquinas, to believe that the universe was created by an ‘intelligent designer’; in other words, God. The order of nature, the beauty of the stars, the clever way it all fits together had to be arranged by such a designer and not by chance. Just look around you, Aquinas was saying; examine the perfection of a tree or an insect or a child and tell me there isn’t a God.”

  As Louis continued, Lucy directed her attention to Ellen Frist, who sat off to one side in a chair, watching Louis give his lecture. Lucy noted that Ellen was wearing a shortish skirt and high heels, not her usual teaching attire.

  When Louis finished, the class applauded as Ellen took the lectern to remind them of their reading assignments. Lucy waved her hand to catch Louis’s eye as the students gathered their things to leave. Her cheeks felt slightly warm. She was forced to admit, if only to her most inner self, that it made her happy just to see him. He smiled and motioned for her to wait.

  “No one applauded my first lecture,” she said as he came up the aisle. “You’re surprisingly good.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, tugging on his tie. “Wait a minute. Why ‘surprisingly’?”

  “Because you’re what, twenty-nine, thirty? Most people need a few years to get the hang of it. You looked like an old pro up there,” Lucy said.

  “I had a tree stump in my backyard growing up. I practiced by lecturing to squirrels.”

  “Which have notoriously short attention spans,” Lucy said.

  “Not if you talk about acorns… I’m almost thirty-two, by the way.”

  She smiled and shouldered her book bag. Louis stepped aside to let her pass in front of him, and they both walked out through the doors of the lecture hall.

  “I’m so sorry I was late,” she said. “This week turned out to be insane, and then I completely forgot until…”

  A student came up to Louis and stood nearby, waiting for her to finish. She was about twenty, evenly browned as though just back from a week in Cancún, with buoyant breast
s that couldn’t be ignored. Lucy stopped talking and pretended to look for something in her book bag.

  “Professor Beauchamp?” the student said, with a distinctly Maryland accent that flattened the long “o” sound. “I just wanted to ask a quick question.”

  “I’m not really a professor yet, so it’s just Louis. What can I do for you?” Louis said, his voice rising slightly.

  Lucy waved and slipped out the front door of Wyman Hall. She started back across the quad, deciding to pick up a sandwich in the faculty cafeteria and eat it at her desk. But a minute into her walk, Louis came running up behind her.

  “I thought…” he said, panting slightly. “Maybe lunch?”

  “What did she want?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “Oh,” Louis said, flushing. “She just wanted to know if I taught any courses she could take.”

  “Your first devoted follower.”

  “Right,” he said. “Hey, let’s go to the grill. I’m starving. I was too nervous to eat breakfast.”

  “Sorry, I can’t,” she said, running ahead, her book bag hitting her thighs for the second time that day. “I’ve got too much work. And Mat’s wallpaper is coming in today.”

  “Okay,” he yelled toward her. “Maybe some other—”

  She looked back as a student trying to catch a Frisbee ran between the two of them and hit Louis in the shoulder. But she turned away again. She didn’t want to see Louis’s face because it might confirm that she, Lucy McVie—scholar of useless information, unmarried thirty-something, failed vegetarian, pseudo-Catholic—embodied the standard by which disappointment was measured.

  HARLAN OPENS his second beer and drains half of it. He doesn’t usually drink much. He told her once that alcohol makes him feel disoriented, bringing back memories of a childhood bout with vertigo. Her worry multiplies.

  “I still need to ask you a question.”

  She nods, but he remains silent. She tries to wait as he finishes the beer, but she’s compelled to fill the void.

  “I fainted once. In high school. I was giving blood for the first time. When they brought me over to the cookie table, I slipped out of the chair and slid right underneath the feet of my trigonometry teacher.”

  She smiles at the memory, though she suddenly wonders if it ever happened. It sounds like the story of a friend or something she saw on an after-school TV special. She doesn’t like to doubt her own recollections. It makes her feel old and unsafe.

  For unknown reasons, her story brings Harlan back to the planes.

  “Have you noticed, with the planes,” he says, “how quickly the disbelief evaporates? Just a few weeks later, and now it seems ridiculous that we never anticipated this—”

  “I know,” she says, nodding.

  “Because we should have seen it coming. Why didn’t we understand the threat?”

  “Fanaticism is a great motivator,” Lucy says. Harlan looks restless, as though this can’t be the answer.

  “I’m sick,” he says. “The doctor says I’m sick.”

  “DID YOU CHECK OUT the agency?” Rosalee asked over the phone, which had been ringing when Lucy walked into her office back in the Arts and Humanities building. “I’ve been waiting to hear.”

  “I did, and it’s all fine,” Lucy said as she unpacked her book bag and cradled the phone with her shoulder. She had, in fact, made sure no complaints had been filed against Yulia’s agency, though she knew her mother would have been appalled to hear how Yulia had lied to her.

  “You’re absolutely sure?” her mother said.

  “How’re Cokie and Paul?” Lucy asked, willing to go into uncharted territory to avoid talking about the adoption.

  “Well, now that you bring it up,” Rosalee said. “I’m very concerned. Paul’s acting strangely, and Cokie won’t even talk to me on the phone anymore. She just covers the mouthpiece and gets Paul.”

  Lucy murmured her sympathy, expecting her mother to continue. Instead, she heard a long pause.

  “You were there not too long ago,” her mother said. “What’s your take on it?”

  “I have no take on it,” she said, finding it surprisingly easy to avoid the truth. “I’m sure they’re just going through a rough patch.”

  “Well, I hope that’s all it is.”

  “Me, too. Nice talking to you…”

  “Lucy,” her mother said. “You’d tell me if you thought something was wrong, wouldn’t you?”

  “You mean like you always do for me?”

  “I see your point,” Rosalee said. “Good-bye, honey.”

  “Bye, Ma.”

  IT WAS LUCY’S BELIEF that chocolate-covered peanuts were a gift from a higher power. She might even have to tell Louis to include it in his presentation as the sixth way to prove the existence of God. Arnold’s, a drugstore just down the street from the campus, had bins of loose candy that could be scooped into little white paper bags for the purpose of spiritual renewal. She hadn’t visited this altar of comfort since Harlan died, but the bruises of the week—and the fact that she had never managed to eat lunch—put her in the mood for the walk. She left her office and strode down the hill toward the small strip of commercial businesses that catered mainly to students and college employees.

  Arnold’s was a throwback, probably one of the few drugstores in Baltimore still owned by a family instead of a corporation. Lucy appreciated the meticulously organized shelves rising from pine floorboards worn thin and soft, their grains compressed by eighty years of foot traffic. She passed through the air-freshener and cleaning-fluid section, getting a whiff of Mr. Clean before entering the candy aisle, which smelled of chocolate and salt and sugar, with overtones of Maalox. She stood in front of the chocolate-covered-peanuts bin, which was nearly full, but she scanned the other choices, as always: Gummi Worms, chocolate raisins, Red Hots, M&M’s, Gummi Sharks, chocolate caramel peanut clusters, and the dietetic candy, which no one ever seemed to touch.

  She took the metal scoop and filled half of a tiny white bag with chocolate-covered peanuts. Angela came up behind her as she was paying for them.

  “Candy is not a substitute for a man,” Angela said, eyeing the bag.

  “Thanks for the advice,” Lucy said.

  “You think that sugar and fat and salt is just as good?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  Lucy opened the bag, and Angela grabbed a handful of chocolate-covered peanuts with her right hand. She picked out two with her left hand, ate them delicately, then threw the rest into her mouth.

  “These are evil,” she said.

  “Get your own bag,” Lucy said.

  Angela paid for her sugar-free gum and took another handful of peanuts from Lucy as they walked back to campus.

  “You know what I hate most about being single?” Angela said. “Kix cereal.”

  Lucy said nothing, knowing Angela needed to talk.

  “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right? But I cannot be bothered to cook an egg for just one person, and Vern won’t touch anything but Kix. So that’s what I eat, too. Kix. These bland little corn balls. And I’m a vegetarian, so I could use the protein.”

  “So get over it and make yourself some eggs.”

  “The loneliest sight in the world—the whole entire world—is just one egg in the frying pan.”

  “So make two.”

  “Too much cholesterol.”

  They walked the rest of the way up the hill, discussing cholesterol and how you couldn’t eat anymore without wondering if the food would kill you. Lucy briefly thought about Harlan’s cancer, the cause of which would never be known. Memories of Harlan had become less painful, she noticed, since she had started receiving his e-mails. He hovered now, returning to her thoughts sometimes in vivid flashes, but more often just coloring the air, resting on her skin, infiltrating her hair. As Angela explained the philosophy behind her new obsession with protein, Lucy wondered if Harlan perceived being there at
the same time, and in the same way, that she sensed it.

  She left Angela at the administration building on her way to Arts and Humanities to collect some papers to grade, work she would fit around decorating Mat’s room. In her mind, the room had to represent all she could offer to a small child; it had to convey, the first time he saw it, that he would be cared for, comforted, loved, even spoiled to a degree. Even in its strangeness, it had to communicate that a place had been saved just for him. It had to be a room he couldn’t imagine ever wanting to leave. It had to be perfect.

  THE PACKAGE CONTAINING Mat’s wallpaper was on her porch when Lucy got home. She opened it and stretched out several feet of the roll, admiring the glossy, sparkling fish on the deep blue background. She had never tried wallpapering before, but it was a small bathroom, and she had purchased a book at Home Depot promising step-by-step instructions.

  The next morning, she had a quick cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, thinking of Angela’s Kix, and then started in on the bathroom, spreading her supplies across Mat’s bedroom floor: tape measure, yardstick, pencil, paste, brush, wallpaper, X-Acto knife. She saw that she could fit two full sheets of paper from floor to ceiling on the wall opposite the door. Then she would have to piece the rest together around the toilet and the mirror and sink. She scanned the first page of the book and then stretched out her roll, piling books on one end to prevent the paper from curling.

  She brushed the back of the first long piece with paste. But when she stood up, she realized that she wasn’t tall enough to reach the top of the wall. She stepped on the edge of the tub and tried to paste it up from a slight angle. The top was more or less straight, but a large bubble appeared in the middle, and she couldn’t seem to smooth it out. She pulled that piece off the wall and wadded it up, tossing it in the corner.

  An hour and a half later, she realized that she couldn’t do this by herself. Not only was she apparently incapable of cutting a straight line, but she couldn’t hold both ends of the paper and smooth it at the same time.

  “They should have a label on the front of the book: two people required,” Lucy told Angela on the phone. “I ruined so much of the paper, I’m not sure I have enough to finish.”