“Well, who said anything about your daddy’s church? I thought we were talkin’ about your mama, about her not being right in the head, in your words! Isn’t that what you just—”
“She has tried to kill herself. For all I know, she’s just tried again. My daddy says she’s in the hospital, and he didn’t say why. But I can guess. He says I can’t visit her till I come home for Christmas break and she’s out of the hospital again. He says it’s her ‘woman troubles.’ But that’s what he’s always told me.”
She was weeping now—big, fat tears, snot running from her nose. Maze tried to reach for her, but she pulled away and got up from the rock.
God, she thought. Not right in the head? Whose words were those? But how else could she say it?
Maze was talking again, she would never stop talking, but it came out a whisper now. “You reckon she was tryin’ to make those fits go away when she tried to kill herself?”
Mary Elizabeth felt exhausted suddenly, afraid she might not make it back down the trail. She looked over at the buildings she could see, the late-afternoon sun hitting the roofs and making them gleam. “I don’t know, Maze,” she said, wiping her wet eyes and face with the back of her hand. “I’m tired. Let’s go back.”
“All right, M. E.,” Maze said, but she didn’t move from the rock.
Mary Elizabeth started down the trail on her own, and before she’d gone far she heard Maze behind her. She felt a hand on her shoulder, and when she turned around, Maze was there with a handkerchief. She wiped Mary Elizabeth’s eyes and cheeks tenderly, then smoothed her hair away from her face and behind her ears.
“I imagine there’s more goin’ on with your mama than ‘woman troubles,’ whatever that is,” she said. “Probably more than you’ll ever know. I don’t know why they think they can’t tell us who they are, but it seems like that must be what they think.” She put the handkerchief in Mary Elizabeth’s hand.
Mary Elizabeth nodded, not really hearing. When they got back to campus, they went straight to the cafeteria for supper, and Mary Elizabeth was glad to stay on after to work, washing piles of dishes in a fog of exhaustion. She was glad to be away from Maze and all her questions, all her theories. Glad just not to think about it anymore.
Mary Elizabeth wouldn’t go with her because, she said, while she did like the old hymns, she didn’t have much use for hillbilly music—the term everyone seemed to use for the music Maze had learned to love as a child. Some of Maze’s earliest memories were of Vista playing songs like “Cripple Creek” and “Single Girl, Married Girl” on an old wind-up Victrola in her Mamaw Marthie’s cabin.
She certainly wasn’t going to ask any of the other girls on their hall, so Maze went to her first Berea Country Dancers square dance in the school gymnasium on her own, on the Saturday night before Thanksgiving. It wasn’t just the music, she knew. Mary Elizabeth had seemed far away from Maze since the day she’d talked about her mama. She claimed it was because she was so busy, because she needed to practice every minute she wasn’t studying or working, to get ready for her recital in a few weeks. But Maze felt like Mary Elizabeth was avoiding her, and she found it hurtful. And that made her restless.
Even weaving didn’t help. She felt fidgety, itching for something to happen, forced indoors by the cold and damp of late fall. She’d seen posters for the Saturday-night dances and longed to go, but she feared she’d be lost without a partner. At home you needed a partner for the barn dances she’d gone to outside Harrodsburg, and she always went with her sometimes boyfriend Darrell. Since coming to Berea, those were the only times she’d really missed Darrell: Saturday nights, when she felt like dancing.
Finally, on that unusually warm November night, Maze decided just to walk to the school gymnasium on her own. And that was how she met Harris Whitman.
She watched him dancing for a while at first. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen him. He was tall and thin, with curly dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard; he lived in town, and Fern and Dare and some of the other girls on Maze and Mary Elizabeth’s hall, who found him handsome and mysterious, had learned all they could about him. He wasn’t a student at Berea, though he had been a year or two before; he’d stayed on in town, working as a woodworker, selling the furniture he made through a couple of the local stores. He was also a rabble-rouser, the owner of one of the stores had told Fern. Involved with unions and the like, noisy about state politics. Because he was so handsome, that kind of activity only added to his allure. Had he been a different man, homely or even just regular-looking, interests like those would have made him a pariah in those girls’ eyes, Maze knew.
He wasn’t married, they reported, though he did go out from time to time with Miss Perrin, the new art teacher at Berea, who was from Pennsylvania and, the girls claimed, looked down her nose at everyone else in town. Except Harris Whitman, apparently.
Maze found their interest in him ridiculous, and she told them so. He was nice enough to look at, yes, but they didn’t know one meaningful thing about him, she said, only further confirming their sense of Maze’s peculiarity, with her funny name and her wild gold hair that she refused to straighten or tease. Not to mention the way she spent all her time at her work assignment or with her roommate, that colored girl.
“Well, like you said, M. E., I am one odd girl,” Maze would say when the two of them walked by a cluster of blond Berea girls and heard them snicker. Somewhere along the line, Maze had stopped caring about the fact that those girls felt that way. By now, she knew that Mary Elizabeth didn’t find her all that strange. Or maybe she still did, but she didn’t care. When Maze reminded her of the night she’d called her “odd,” Mary Elizabeth only laughed and rolled her eyes, nodding at the memory of her first response to Maze.
Maze hadn’t cared one way or another about Harris Whitman before that night, when she walked into the gym to the sound of the musicians playing “Sally Goodin” and saw him dancing. Even with a fast tune like that, there was a softness in the way he moved, and an effortlessness; he’d guide his partner with the gentlest touch at the small of her back as they promenaded down a row, then spin her and catch her up, his long fingers at her waist.
He danced with a number of different partners, and Maze saw no sign of Miss Perrin, who probably didn’t care for hillbilly music, either, Maze supposed. From the first dance she watched, Maze knew she had to dance with him, had to feel that hand on her back, her arm, her waist. When Dr. Wendt, her philosophy professor, saw her and walked over to ask her to dance with him when they called the next reel, she was happy enough to walk out with him. But the whole time she kept one eye on Harris Whitman, who was sitting that one out, standing and talking by a table near the back of the gym and drinking a Coke.
“Nice that you came, Miss Jansen,” Dr. Wendt was saying to her across the row as they waited their turn. “Not many students come out for the country dances.”
Maze looked around the gym and realized it was true; most of the other dancers were older or else much younger, kids, really, probably the children of some of the older dancers. Still another thing to make her odd, Maze thought, imagining Fern and Dare’s reaction to seeing her dance with Dr. Wendt. But so be it. She loved a good country dance. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed it.
Dr. Wendt was a pleasant if rather wooden dancer, which somehow didn’t surprise her. Before the reel quite ended, she curtsied in his direction and thanked him, claiming to need a bottle of pop. Before she got to the tables in the back, there was Harris Whitman, walking right toward her, back to the dance floor.
He smiled at her like he knew her, and she felt a funny kind of shiver from her stomach up to her chest. Before she had time to think about it, she said to him, “I was wondering if you’d mind dancin’ one with me.”
He smiled again, a different way somehow. Maybe a little sly, she thought, then sweet. How many different kinds of smiles could a man have? And then he said, “I don’t believe I’d mind at all,” and he reached fo
r her hand and led her out to the middle of the floor.
But what in God’s name had she done? she suddenly thought as the music reached her ears and struck her heart cold. This was a waltz! Then “Oh, I’m sorry,” she mumbled, letting go of his hand. “I don’t know how to dance a waltz.”
He took her hand again and pulled her close, whispering as he placed his other hand on her back, just where she’d longed to have him put it, at that sweet, warm place below her waist where the heat rose up from below.
“Just relax and follow me,” he said. And she let her arms and legs go soft, almost limp, leaning into him, into his own heat and the way he smelled, like the woods after a spring rain. And she did relax and follow him. She let him lead. Through that song, and through all the rest of them that evening.
Until that night, her only partners had been country boys, barn-dance stompers. At other dances, at her high school, she’d backed away from slow dances, even with Darrell, who only saw a slow dance as a chance to sneak both hands onto her behind and try to kiss her neck.
It didn’t help that she was almost always taller than the boys in high school, Darrell included. Why, she often wondered, couldn’t she have been raven-haired and dimpled and small as a bird, like her mother? Apparently she favored her father, a man she’d never seen. “You got the Swedish half, I reckon,” Vista had told her once. “They grow them big and blond, like you.”
But Harris Whitman was a good three inches taller than Maze, who was five foot nine in the flats she wore that night. She’d never known what it felt like to fit together with a man like that.
She’d worn her best dress, even though it wasn’t the season for it—a lilac-colored organdy that had once belonged to another of Vista’s employers, Nora Taylor, who’d been tall and thin and broad-shouldered like Maze. It had a fitted bodice and a pretty scooped neck, and Maze had always loved the way the thin, silky layers of its skirt moved against her thighs as she danced. Lucky—maybe even a little strange, she thought—that it was such a warm night for November.
That night, dancing with Harris, the soft touch of those layers, and then his leg between hers as he turned her, pressing her back with his palm and cupped fingers, was almost too much; at times, when they waltzed, she nearly cried out from the pleasure of it all. He seemed to know when she was feeling this way, and to pull her closer then. She could feel his lips on her hair, which was loose and falling in wild curls down her back.
They made a striking pair, she knew, two willowy dancers, even during the fast reels. Maze could feel the appreciative eyes of the other dancers, watching as they moved together. Harris wore black trousers and a starched white shirt that was open at the neck, and he never took his eyes off Maze. No one dared to cut in and ask her to dance, and none of the women she’d watched him dance with earlier came looking for him. Apparently, Maze thought at some point, during the last slow waltz of the night, nearly bursting with happiness, it had been just fine for her to come to one of the Berea Country Dances alone.
Mary Elizabeth didn’t notice how late it was when Maze got back to the room that night. Her concert was scheduled for the following week, on Wednesday, the last day of the term. She had practiced until ten o’clock that night, then returned to their empty room. Probably Maze had gone from the dance to the Weaving Cabin, she thought as she collapsed on her bed, still in her clothes.
The next morning, Maze was sound asleep in her bed, snoring lightly, her organdy dress draped over a chair. She must have pulled the covers up over her and turned off her lamp, Mary Elizabeth realized when she was fully awake. She dressed for church in the dim morning light and tried to decide whether to wake her roommate. Maze had missed many church and midweek chapel services by now, and this didn’t go unnoticed at Berea. And her grades were none too stellar, either, with all the classes she’d missed and the little studying she’d managed to do.
But then, Mary Elizabeth thought, her own grades were slipping, too, what with all the time she was spending at the piano. Why she was doing it she couldn’t exactly say. Mr. Roth was pushing her, certainly, but there was something else, too, some ineffable thing. Some sort of longing, some sense of possibilities she hadn’t thought of before. These days when she finished playing the “Étude,” (polished now beyond her wildest imagining when she’d begun working on it last September) and closed her eyes, she saw the fingers of that pianist she’d seen as a child at Music Hall in Cincinnati. She imagined Vladimir Horowitz’s fingers—like the legs of a racehorse. That strong, that rapid. When she opened her eyes and looked at her own long, slim fingers, she saw something else, though. What, exactly? Who or what was she becoming? How could she imagine herself in this way?
These days her fingers alternately ached and tingled, all day long. Mr. Roth had long ago petitioned for a change in her work assignment when he’d seen what all that dishwashing was doing to her hands. Now she cataloged books in the back rooms of the library. She was still hidden but less able to relax, with all the librarians bustling around, watching her.
For the concert, she would play on the grand piano in the alumni lounge, the same piano she and Maze had stumbled on their second night on campus, in a room with portraits of past presidents and board chairmen hung on the walls. (How had they managed not to notice these? How had they felt free to settle in there that evening?) When she thought of the upcoming concert, now less than a week away, she felt a team of horses racing through her gut. But no racehorse fingers. Unless the legs of horses ached and tingled the way her fingers did now.
She decided to let Maze sleep. One more missed church service could hardly make a difference. Closing their door quietly and walking down the hall with the other girls, all of them dressed for church, all sleepy and quiet, she wondered idly, in the back of her mind, if those could have been actual grass stains she’d seen on the back of Maze’s discarded dress.
Maze longed to tell Mary Elizabeth. She imagined when, and how, to say it; she practiced. A knock on the door of the practice room in the Music Building, maybe, and then “I have fallen in love!” Or she might take her a sandwich. When, in God’s name, was the girl eating? It seemed that all Maze saw her roommate do was sleep. And Mary Elizabeth did precious little sleeping, too. When she did, she was restless, fitful, grinding her teeth.
So a knock on the door of the practice room, and then a sandwich. Then, casually, “Remember how I decided to go to that dance last Saturday on my own?” Or “You know that fellow Harris Whitman all the girls talk about? Well, guess who he kissed. And, well, did more than that with.”
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell Mary Elizabeth what she had done with him. Though she was nearly bursting with it, with the joy of it, the feel of him, his skin, his mouth. Him inside her! Lord! The mystery of that, the complete mystery, and the surprise of it. The way she couldn’t not find out what that would be like. “We should stop,” he’d said; “I’ll walk you back.” And “No!” she’d tried to shout, though her voice had come out like a sob, like she was almost choking, and she’d pulled him back to her and said, “No!” again. “Please, no.” She couldn’t stop, couldn’t let him stop, she wanted that night to go on forever, wanted his hands on her forever, would have swallowed him whole if she could have.
They were on a hill behind the gymnasium, above a little patch of woods. Far too late for a harvest moon like that night’s, for the strangely warm air. Like Indian summer, but it was nearly Thanksgiving. All of it seemed not quite real. Like she was dreaming, and she couldn’t let it end.
He kissed her again, and she pulled him toward her, on top of her, she pressed herself against him and felt him there, hard—so different from feeling Darrell hard against her, when she’d only wanted to pull away. Now she arched her back and pulled him tighter. He kissed her neck, he lifted up her skirt and pulled down her panties and touched her there, and it was agony while he did but more agony if he stopped, and she let herself moan and call out his name in a voice she didn’t recognize.
From a land of fairies, she might have said. I do not remember, she might have said, right now I cannot recall. What she did say, as she reached to unbutton his trousers, was “From deep in a mountain holler.”
Of course, she knew, there was no way to tell Mary Elizabeth any of this.
The concert was fine. Hadn’t it been fine? Everyone said so. Everyone was smiling afterward, drinking their punch and nibbling on cookies and smiling at her—the president and his wife, three members of the board and their wives. Her father stood in a corner and beamed, one eye always on her mother, held together somehow, maybe with glue. But not smiling. Maze was there, too, with someone she didn’t know—tall, bearded; who was he? Mr. Roth floating around the room, making introductions, also beaming, constantly pointing at her, smiling over at her, nodding. Saying something about her that she couldn’t understand, couldn’t hear, for some reason.
She couldn’t hear what any of them were saying. Were they speaking to her, or about her? There were sounds, muffled sounds, getting through somehow, but when she lifted her hands after the final chord she had somehow stopped being able to hear. She had played not with her ears or her mind but with her body, as Aunt Paulie had taught her; by that evening, the Chopin “Étude,” like the “Image,” was a physical memory for her. Girl and machine, together, one. She was exhausted now. That had to be it. She believed she had played well. Everyone was smiling, saying she had.
Then her father looked at her across the room, and she knew it was time to walk with him and her mother to their car. She said good-bye to Mr. Roth. “Practice, practice! And Merry Christmas!” She nodded; she had read his lips. Her bag was already packed and in the trunk of her father’s car.
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