by Glenda Adams
“Can she talk?” F.X. called.
“I heard her say two words,” said someone else.
Lark looked at her knees. She did not belong with this illustrious group. She had nothing of importance to say and nothing to contribute. Tom had even said so. Henry Watter had always said so. She knew nothing.
“Say something, Larkie,” said Tom. He leant back and waved both his arms, like a conductor trying to get more sound from a floundering section of his orchestra. “You can do it. Lesson number two, taking a stand in public.”
She could just leap down from the stone wall and rush from the scene, across the quad, down the stairs, and onto Parramatta Road and maybe get hit by a car. She knocked her heels against the stone. Tom put a finger under her chin and lifted her face to look at him. “Larkie, show them,” he said to her, and Lark, looking back down at her knees, said, “One must remember that the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence in their bombproof, shockproof, fireproof, helium-filled vault, make it clear that America is a complex country, with valid and serious traditions, and remind one that America is more than a huge imperialist financial machine and the home of the Midwest, and the bomb, and the hotdog and, and Bermuda shorts.”
“Good grief,” said Perce.
“That’s poetry,” said F.X. “Pure poetry.”
“Listen, I’ve got an idea,” said Perce, and everyone turned to him. He was addressing Lark. “Why don’t you just hang your hymen on the wall and have done with it?”
Lark tried to laugh along with everyone. Tom put his arm around her shoulder. “She’s okay. She’s my friend. Deep down she’s a critic of society, a rebel.” He stood up. “Back to the books,” he said. “Come to the library with me, keep me company.”
“’Attaboy, you can get her in the stacks,” cried Perce after them. “Let me know if I can be of help.”
“He’s alluding to an assault on virtue,” said the student who was named End of Tether, after a race horse. “Dearie me.”
Gratefully Lark followed Tom up the stairs to the library.
“Don’t take any notice of them, they’re just boys,” said Tom. “You’d know that if you had traveled and met other kinds of men. And Tether just imitates them. That’s what women tend to do, imitate men, when they think they’re breaking away from old molds. It’s the drive to reattain the single cell state.”
“They don’t worry me,” said Lark, which was not true. But she thought that Tom was very wise.
Tom led Lark along the aisles of the stacks to the table where his work was spread out. The floors, of translucent glass panels, made them sound like tap dancers. “Onward and upward,” he said and threw himself sideways into the chair, his legs sticking out across the narrow aisle. “I have to put in a couple of hours, then I’ll take you to coffee.” He flexed his fingers and arms as if he were about to play the piano.
Lark was standing next to the Bs in the anthropology section and found Manfred Bird’s volumes before her eyes. “Where’s Donna Bird today?” Lark asked. She needed to know why Tom was asking her and not the Illustrious Donna to coffee.
“She’s a busy woman,” said Tom. “She has deadlines.”
Lark wandered along the aisle of Bs. She searched for Blank, Charles, Solomon’s ancestor. Among the books written by various Blanks, she found My Life in the Service of God in the South Pacific by Charles, and next to it a book by a Frederick Blank, who was the first man to ride a single horse across the North American continent, from Catalina Island in California to Coney Island in New York.
She heard Tom groaning and stretching, and then she heard the murmuring. Lark had not heard any footsteps on the glass, but then Donna Bird moved by creeping, sidling. Lark walked back toward Tom’s corner, letting her shoes clatter as much as possible, both confirming her substance and warning the murmurer and the groaner of her approach. Donna Bird was bent over Tom’s table, her hand resting on his shoulder. Their heads were close together. She was wearing another of her scarves wrapped around her neck, and the sun visor across her eyebrows. Around her neck she wore Tom’s camera, which dangled onto Tom’s thigh as she leant over him. Tom let out a long bray of laughter. “That’s really brilliant,” he said, patting Donna on the hip and leaving his hand there.
Lark’s footsteps made them both look around, but Tom’s hand did not drop from Donna’s hip, and she did not step away from him. “I have to go,” said Lark.
“Don’t leave me,” cried Tom and held out his other arm, which suggested that she should go and stand on his other side so that he could put his free hand on her hip, a pretty tableau. Lark hesitated, then walked toward them. He seemed to like her, want her around. Donna tapped his shoulder and pointed back at the paper on his table. “This is how we’ll do it.”
Lark stood beside Tom, and indeed his arm did go around her waist. “This is a great idea,” he said to Donna, and to Lark he said, “Just give me another five minutes or so with Donna to get this thing straightened out. Then we can have coffee.”
Lark went back to Frederick Blank’s book and copied the information about the horse ride across the North American continent. Then she wrote a letter to Solomon, at that very moment in the middle of that very continent, no doubt eating tomatoes with an American girl in Bermuda shorts. “Why don’t we do something inventive like your namesake?” she wrote. “We could go from island to island. Together.” Than she moved along the aisle looking for Robert Brown, the Scottish botanist who had discovered the nucleus of the cell, observed the zigzag movement of particles suspended in a fluid, and was responsible for producing, ultimately, Tom Brown.
The student notables were still sitting on the stone wall when Tom led Lark out of the library. Donna Bird followed at her own pace.
Perce let out a howl when he saw them, lifting his chin and drawing out the sound: “Ooooooooo.” Then he stopped his noise and asked Lark, “Well, was it as good as it’s cracked up to be?” He danced up to Lark, his bare feet making a swishing, shuffling sound, and examined her face. “Personally, I’d rather have a nice cup of tea, wouldn’t you, when you come right down to it?”
Lark hoped that Tom would pass right by them, without stopping to resume his sitting and bantering and endless talking. Lark willed him to keep moving, to proceed to the cafeteria so that they could have coffee, together, alone. “So what’s happening?” Tom asked and stopped in the middle of the group.
“We’re going to Dixon Street for some tucker,” said Perce. He patted the knot of his rope belt, then, since Lark was watching him, he pointed at the rope knot and said, “My do-it-yourself tummy button.”
Lark looked away.
“Sounds good to me,” said Tom.
Donna Bird had slid up beside them.
“Let’s go, then?” she said, and taking Tom’s arm led the ramshackle little band across the quad.
Lark, while considering extricating herself and just going home, found that Tom had caught her arm and was pulling her along. “It’s called educating Lark,” he said to her. “You’re my current project. Lesson number three is about to begin.”
Lark had never been to Dixon Street, had never eaten a Chinese meal. The only rice she had eaten was boiled with milk and sugar for breakfast or baked along with the roast on Sunday. She gladly would have confessed this to Tom, since her ignorance seemed to increase his enthusiasm for educating her, but she would have died before she confessed in the presence of the cosmopolitan Donna Bird. She sat between Tom and Perce. Donna was on the other side of Tom. Lark watched while Tom and Donna reached out with their chopsticks and selected pieces from the many dishes on the table, then she took up her own chopsticks. She hesitated. Donna Bird, expertly conveying her food to her mouth, was watching her. The others had already drunk a lot of beer and were shouting at one another about Freud and Marx.
“It all has to do with the transfer of materials across cell boundaries,” Tom said to the table at large. “The urge for
all matter to merge through diffusion and osmosis—rather like pressing the ‘liquefy’ button on the blender.”
Perce lifted his beer high into the air and began to pour it in a long stream into his mouth.
“That’s disgusting,” said Tether languidly.
The Chinese waiters were hovering about, smiling, expecting trouble.
“When molecules collide and become uniformly distributed, that’s diffusion,” Tom continued. “Water passes without interruption into and out of cells through their plasma membranes—that’s osmosis. Then there’s active transport, of course.”
Perce gulped and paused for a moment in his beer-pouring and swallowing. “You want water passing into and out of, without interruption? I’ll give it to you.” Perce stood on his chair. “I am the cell. Water passes into,” and he poured the beer into his mouth. “Water passes out of,” and he went to untie the rope around his waist.
“That’s not actually funny,” said Donna Bird.
“I thought you liked jokes,” said Perce, pouting. “I was being funny.” He sat down on his chair, sulking.
“Perce is more like the primitive heterotroph than most of us,” said Tom. “And that’s why, in the end, we will blow ourselves up, the whole planet. It will give us a deep satisfaction, returning us to our origins. Here,” and with his chopsticks he chose several morsels of chicken and pork and placed them on top of Lark’s rice. “This is the way they do it in Singapore.” He smiled in a fatherly way, then he turned toward Donna and began talking quietly about the implications of the White Australia policy in the context of the independence movements and decolonization going on in the developing world. But his arm rested along the back of Lark’s chair and his fingers were tapping on her shoulder as he spoke.
Tether stood on her chair and tried to climb onto the table. Lark tweezered a piece of chicken with her chopsticks. Another young woman spun the Lazy Susan in the middle of the table. Lark got the chicken to her mouth. The Lazy Susan spun faster, sending soy sauce and mustard and hot sauce and chopsticks flying. A glass broke. Lark quickly took a mouthful of rice, using her spoon. The men continued to drink their beer and shout. “For God’s sake, Tether,” Perce said, “why don’t you just hang your hymen on the wall, yet again, and have done with it?” The waiters moved in quietly, deftly, smiling. They removed the Lazy Susan, flicked the broken glass into a dustpan, and mopped up the spilled sauces. They had done this many times before. This was how things were.
Emboldened by Tom’s fingers on her shoulder, Lark said, as he paused in order to eat, “I have been assessing the impact of de Gaulle on France and of Sukarno on Indonesia, and I think they are very alike.”
“What do you mean, alike?” Tom said slowly, smiling. “Explain.”
“Well,” Lark said, searching for an explanation and wishing she had said nothing, “I just think de Gaulle and Sukarno are alike, that’s all.”
“My advice is,” said Tom softly, giving Lark’s shoulder a squeeze, drawing her a fraction closer to him, inclining his head toward her so that his curly hair touched her cheek, “if you don’t know what you are talking about, say nothing.”
Lark decided to cut down on speaking and to listen all the time. She had so much to learn. She leant back so that she could feel Tom’s arm across her shoulder.
Tom straightened up and took his arm away. He adjusted Lark’s fingers on her chopsticks. He rumpled her hair. “But I liked that letter you sent to the editor about American imperialism in the developing world,” Tom said. “Good job.” Then he flicked at her short hair, to make it stand up in spikes.
Donna Bird, her sun visor pulled down to her eyebrows, took out her diary and her fountain pen and started writing down her thoughts. She was smiling a little, as usual.
Tether, standing on the chair again, yelled, “You must never ask a Chinese person where the lavatory is,” and she knocked over several chairs as she jumped down and lurched toward the rest rooms.
Lark knew she was very lucky to be sitting in this restaurant with uninhibited, politically aware students. Seminal, she guessed they were.
Perce suddenly was shouting at her, pointing at her with his glass of beer. “Perhaps she irons shirts,” he said, waving his glass. He took a gulp. “Perhaps she irons a good shirt. That must be it. As long as her virtue remains unassailed, she’ll iron good shirts.”
Lark looked in dismay at Tom, waiting for him to do something to save her from Perce, who was now putting his arm around her and breathing his beery breath all over her.
“I think you’ve got a fan,” said Tom. “He likes you.”
Donna leant close to Tom. “Sometimes I think they are no different from every other Tom, Dick, and Harry—sorry, Tom, I don’t mean you, of course—nothing to do but talk about sex and get drunk?”
“Have to go to the bog,” said Perce, standing up, leaning on Lark’s shoulder, then lurching off. “The constant flow of molecules and matter.”
“I simply can’t wait to get out of this decadent, corrupt, bourgeois, mediocre, boring country,” said Donna Bird, holding onto Tom’s sleeve and drawing him away from Lark and back to her. “I’ve been back too long. It’s time to go again. Soonissimo. And Manfred wants me to come. I haven’t seen Portia for several years, or their new baby. Portia and Daddy now have four boys. And he says one of his friends—they met during the war—will be bringing his ship here soon. A freighter. The passage is cheap.”
“You want to leave, too?” Lark asked. She was hoping that Perce would die in the lavatory.
Donna kept her eyes on Tom for a second or two before answering Lark. “Of course,” she said. “I’ve never been able to stand it here for very long? Manfred, that’s my father, got away just as soon as he could and wouldn’t dream of coming back unless it can be added to his ticket at no extra cost on his way to or from one of his islands, and even then only for a week or two. One of his European friends had a daughter born here, and he called her Barbara, for being born in the land of the Barbarians.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to some island,” said Lark.
“Did I tell you, Tom, that Manfred has decided that travel is narrowing, rather than broadening? He now advocates that everyone stay put?”
“It’s easy for him,” said Lark. “He’s traveled already. I’ve been saving for years, everything I’ve earned during the holidays and from part-time jobs.”
“Hey,” said Tom to Donna. “We could give her a job, couldn’t we?”
Donna Bird frowned.
“We need someone to photograph the kidnapping.”
“Kidnapping?” Lark breathed.
“Shhh,” said Donna Bird. “We still have to plan it.”
“Plan?”
“Not here,” Donna Bird hissed.
“Empirical pedagogy,” Tom mouthed at Lark in an exaggerated way. Donna smiled, making clear that she and Tom were partners in this undertaking. “We need someone to photograph it, for the press.”
“I don’t know how to take photographs,” said Lark.
“We’ll teach you,” said Tom. “I have my camera. And if you’re any good, you can work with us on Strange but True.”
“Strange but true?” Lark asked. Tom always began at the end, and Lark had to ask question after question to get to the beginning. It was what she had hated about “No News.” The servant should have told the master straight off about his wife running away with another man.
Donna considered Tom’s suggestion about giving Lark a job. She did not look overjoyed at the idea.
“It’s a rag, a scandal sheet, American, of course. We could do with help,” Tom explained.
“What kind of help?”
“We write stories, fillers for them. With photos. You know, mother eats babies, that kind of thing. The pay is good. They like weird news from down under.”
“It’s something we do on the side,” said Donna. “I am primarily interested in changing the world, educating the masses, empirically? Being involve
d? I would like to make the world a stage on which I direct a mighty piece of theater, beyond street theater, global theater, watched by everyone in the world. A mighty, pedagogical practical joke, with the impact of a hydrogen bomb.”
Perce returned from the men’s room, pretending to cry. “My shirt got wet,” he said, bending down to Lark. “Would you wash it for me, please? And iron it?”
“Leave me alone,” said Lark quietly, angrily, pushing him away.
“Aw, hey, be a sport,” said one of the others. “He’s only drunk. He can’t help it.”
Donna Bird was still talking to Tom. “People would be participants without knowing it, a bit like the people who get together to form, say, a living flag, or the members of a band who form numbers on a football field. They can’t see the flag or the numbers, although they are part of it, but it couldn’t exist without them. I would have people taking actions they never knew they were capable of.” She looked around the table. “What’s the thing you are least likely ever to do?” she called to Perce, who was sitting at a slant on his chair.
“Me?” he replied drunkenly. “Wear a dress and fuck a man.”
“Then,” said Donna to Tom and Lark, “in my scheme, Perce would find himself willingly putting on a dress and doing just that, but he would also be part of some larger drama. If you are afraid of the sun, like me, you would find yourself immersed in the sun and loving it.”
“You’re afraid of the sun?” Lark asked. “I thought you were allergic.”
“It has been suggested that they’re the same thing?” said Donna. “And what do you fear?”
Lark thought for a moment. She sometimes thought she was afraid of everything.
“She would never break the law or destroy property,” said Tom. “She’d be afraid to do that, right, Lark?”