Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  "I don't know what I think happened; I just know that all those things felt really peculiar to me and I had a hell of a time making myself think about them."

  "You were never scatterbrained in your life before, of course," said Danny.

  It was annoying to be facing somebody who had known you since you were six and remembered every stupid thing you ever did. She thought of trying to tell him about Anne and Odile and Melinda Wolfe. She knew already that he would simply accuse her of being afraid of, prejudiced against, fascinated by, the suspicion—because he couldn't for a moment think it was a fact, not with the little she could tell him—that they were all lesbians. She didn't think she was any of those things; but the problem with Danny was that he felt the entire human race was so peculiar that no single peculiarity, unless it was harmful, made any more impression on him than any other. He knew, mostly from painful experience, that other people had different reactions, and he could make you feel like a creep and a bigot in ten seconds.

  Janet wasn't up to it. "It felt different from just being scatterbrained."

  "Feelings don't—"

  "I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. I was just trying to explain that my mental state is not the very best it's ever been either. I think all freshman years are stressful.

  Remember ninth grade?"

  "Oh, God, Billy Gerstein."

  "And Stephanie Smith."

  "I never thought she was so bad."

  "All right then, Debbie Nottingham."

  "I'd forgotten her. Was she the one who forged the love letters—"

  "No, that was Janie Whatsherface—because she got to grade the spelling papers and she's the one who got a good look at everybody's handwriting. Debbie called me Horsecart and you—"

  "Okay, all right, I remember."

  Janet felt a mean satisfaction warring with guilt, and asked him if he'd read any good science fiction since he left.

  They went sledding two days later, and up to the city to browse in the used-book stores the day after that. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were family days for both of them, although Nick did come for Christmas dinner, liberally bedotted with dark green and off-white paint and looking unnaturally scrubbed in all the places between. He behaved himself very well—still not endearing himself to Janet's mother, though Janet hoped he didn't notice—but then squandered all his credit by telling Janet, when they were alone in the living room after dinner, that he was going off with Professor Ferris for a week and would see her at the beginning of term. Janet recalled, strenuously, Thomas's advice; unlike painting the theater, this was just the sort of Classics-related clannishness he had warned her to be tolerant of.

  Danny came over to dinner a few days later, and was treated to the sight of Lily being kindly, whether because she liked him better than Nick or because she felt sorry for him at having been deprived of a relationship he had no wish for, Janet was not sure and was careful not to find out. They met a few times more before the Blackstock term began again, doing the things they had always done; but Janet was half-relieved when she had to go back to college. Her mind was playing a number of nasty tricks on her: it kept looking at Danny and reflecting that now it knew what he was for—or at least something else he was for that it hadn't known before. She did not, on sober reflection, want to go to bed with Danny; but her mind kept presenting her with pictures of what would happen if she did.

  Neither of them suggested that he come visit her at Blackstock, even though Janet wanted him to meet Molly. She felt obscurely that Danny had had his chance and refused it; or maybe she just didn't want to see her past colliding with her future.

  Her relief was short-lived; her mind behaved even more badly once she was back in school. It must be a mistake, if you were going to college, to schedule your introduction to the delights of physical passion for Christmas recess. Janet had been prepared for a great deal of unpleasantness: blood, pain, and embarrassment; and during finals, when one's emotional resistance was low and cynicism and panic would come calling together like sisters, she had found herself thinking of the ordeal as a test of Nick, whether he would stay for her sake until things got better, or go find somebody more experienced. But it was not an ordeal; it was about the furthest thing from one that she had ever engaged in. Nick's only offense had been to behave as if nothing had changed.

  Molly's experience with Robin had been the same. ("I know we just say, well, you know, theater people," Molly said, "but I don't see how you can pick this sort of thing up in the theater.") But Robin, too, she said, behaved exactly as if nothing had happened.

  Tina, on the other hand, had had a sufficiently bad time that she required three or four sessions with Nora and several boxes of Kleenex to get over it; but Thomas was still around. Tina could not be gotten to say how he was behaving, but from all appearances (which were much more abundant with him than with the other two) he had not changed, either.

  Janet found herself wishing, as the sparkling winter of 1972 settled down on all the buildings of Blackstock, that she had had a bad enough time to make her devote herself to a celibate life. It was maddening to be sitting in the vast auditorium devoted to Greek Literature in Translation, watching Professor Ferris with his young angelic face and his straight dark hair, more unruly than Nick's, as he told you in his deep swift voice about the glory that was Greece, and suddenly find yourself back in your bed in Ericson, a week before Christmas, with every tactile memory utterly intact. It was infuriating to be sitting in the equally vast science laboratory given over to the introductory Shakespeare course, looking at little Professor Davison, her undistinguished face and childish voice transformed by her love for what she was telling you, discourse on the genius and humanity of Shakespeare, and suddenly find oneself reliving a particular incident of the sort Shakespeare would always treat as either howlingly funny or bitterly obscene. It was disgusting to be learning to focus the telescope and find one's hand trembling. And it was hideous that the act of taking a shower and putting on one's swimming suit should create a wish to go find Nick, right now, and put all the foregoing recollections and imaginations into instant practice.

  Molly did not suffer from these difficulties; neither did Tina. Janet, venting a furious indignation at the notion of being at the mercy of chemicals, for God's sake, was simply ganged up on by those two damnable biologists and explained to that she had been at the mercy of chemicals all her life, and these were just a little more potent at the moment.

  Before she either killed them or said something unforgivable, however, they sprang on her a scheme whereby each of them could have the room for three hours once a week. It was clear that they had been working on this plan for some time, everybody's schedules being what they were. Janet decided they were in straits every bit as desperate as hers, and just refused to admit it. In any case, having Thursday afternoon from one to four to concentrate on made it easier to shove aside the delectable concoctions of her treacherous imagination, and concentrate on what she was, after all, here for.

  What she was here for immediately, in the usual manner of the universe, tried to divide itself like an amoeba and swim off in several directions. Greek Literature in Translation was every bit as seductive and insidious as its reputation. Janet became aware, in the fourth week of the term, that she had decided to take Greek 1 next term, if somebody decent was teaching it. She pinned the decision to their reading of Euripides' The Bacchae.

  Ferris had showered them with photocopies of six different translations of the most important chorus; and then, to show the futility of all of them, had read to them from the original. She could hear his beautiful voice in her mind weeks later, rolling the gorgeous polysyllables with their intricate repeating rhythms and buried rhymes out over the class like cloud shadows and sun crossing a meadow.

  Nick and Robin and Anne Beauvais had put together a musical group: guitar, recorder, three voices, to do Nick's songs, and some Dylan and some Simon and Garfunkel and some Grateful Dead (not, however, "Box of Rain"
) and a few of the Elizabethan rounds. They did not seem to spend much time practicing, which was more a relief to Janet than otherwise; but they did play from time to time in the Cave, a dark room under the Eliot dining hall, where you could get three-two beer if you were old enough, and flat reconstituted cheeseburgers and frozen French fries and an assortment of packaged cookies and actual fresh fruit regardless of your age.

  They played one Saturday night in the sixth week of term, and Janet went to hear them. Molly and Tina, who shared a biology class this time around, were greatly agitated over the next day's assignment; Peg had been walking in her sleep again and was being kept in bed and fed herb tea by Sharon; Nora was out with her mysterious boyfriend; and Diane Zimmerman disliked music played at less than ear-shattering volume. Janet thought of Susan and Rebecca at the last moment, but they were not in their room when she called on them.

  So she went by herself, and sat with a glass of orange soda and a bag of potato chips.

  The songs were all very familiar to her by now, but she could have watched the faces forever. Anne was so beautiful that you could almost forgive her her sister; she had moreover a wholly remarkable voice with a range that was almost the despair of the Music Department. She was not animated; it might have been a statue singing; but she made her defects virtues. By her very stillness she made the songs live, as if she were only the window one saw them through.

  Nick and Robin, as always, were having the time of their lives. Janet had never figured out their musical jokes, which seemed to be two parts telepathy and one part knowledge so esoteric that it, too, was probably the despair of the Music Department, but she could by now tell when they were making one. Nick had a flick of the eyebrow and Robin a quirk of the mouth that spoke volumes. Janet remember ed Thomas's sour remark that they had known one another before they were born. It did look like that.

  Despite the dark and the uncomfortable chairs and the bad food, the Cave always had trouble clearing its customers out by one A.M. At twelve-thirty, Robin went into the back room and returned with his pipes. The audience, which was fairly large for this late in the term, made a noise divided about equally between dismay and anticipation. Ten or twelve people did leave. Janet looked at the door, and then got up and went to the very back of the room, disposing of her trash along the way. There was a cushioned bench along the cold outside wall, and she sat down on it, hoping this was far enough away. At least she could tell Diane what she had missed.

  Robin made a couple of gusty, querulous hoots, and then, with an expression of diabolical glee visible even in the dim lighting, launched into the most awful noise she had ever heard him make. It had no pattern that she could distinguish, it simply wandered among the nine notes available to a player of bagpipes in a manner so random it had to be deliberate. Every time she thought it might be settling to a tune, or even repeating its last series of random notes, it did something vile. It was like music turned inside-out.

  The audience, which had suffered here, in its time at Blackstock, more threats than Darius hurled at Alexander, rose up and fled. Some of them were laughing; the rest, Janet was sorry to see, wore the expressions of people plotting revenge. Robin would be lucky not to find all his belongings taken out and installed charmingly in one of the bathrooms; or that stuff that exploded when you stepped on it scattered all over his floor; or the door to his room removed and the opening plastered and painted over.

  Robin divested himself of his hellish instrument and came wandering among the tables to make sure everybody was gone. Janet, being an attachment of one of the musicians, was allowed to stay so long as she did not clamor for beer, which she had no intention of doing. She grinned at him as he came by her bench. "What on earth was that?"

  she said.

  He smiled back. He had dimples just above the line of his beard; they were shallow, and visible only in odd light like this. They were probably the reason Molly put up with him. He said, "That is the Ceol Mohr, that the MacCrimmons invented for the pipers. That other music you've heard me play, they play for common folk, and this is noble; but the Ceol Mohr, they play for themselves."

  "Why do you say they, and not we?"

  "For fear of my immortal soul," said Robin, smiling again. "I'm not a Scotsman." He glanced to his left, and said, "Nick and Anne and I will be some little time; there was something amiss with 'All Along the Watchtower.' Do you go and cheer up Thomas, who's trying to get drunk on this goose-piss, the pitiful soul."

  He went away. Janet found Thomas in a dark corner, with five large, empty, clear plastic cups in front of him. "What on earth's the matter?" she said.

  "Hello, Jenny," said Thomas with great gravity. "It's this beer. It runs out as fast as you put it in, and leaves nothing of itself in the passing."

  "It does too," said Janet, sitting down resignedly. "You're talking like Robin. And my name's not Jenny."

  "It was the piping put me in mind of it," said Thomas. "That's the Scottish nickname.

  Is there Scots blood in you?"

  "Scots-Irish, I think," said Janet. "The most disreputable kind. Why are you drinking this stuff; what's the matter?"

  "I don't know what to do about Tina," said Thomas. "How do you and Molly manage?"

  "Molly manages," said Janet. "I behave myself so she won't murder me. But look, nobody made you take up with Tina. What's the matter with her?"

  "I'm not sure," said Thomas. "She isn't stupid, and she isn't insensitive, and she's very obliging. She's lovely in bed," he added with the utmost gloom.

  Just like Tina, thought Janet, not to tell them that things had gotten better. She supposed one could have deduced it from Tina's willingness to take her three hours of privacy a week.

  Thomas sighed heavily. "But she doesn't—she hasn't—she doesn't read. Well, she will, if I ask her to; but it doesn't take, somehow. She hasn't any imaginative life."

  "Sure she does," Janet said. "It's just not literary."

  "Well, what is it, then?"

  "Either musical or scientific, I guess. I'd bet on musical."

  "I wouldn't," said Thomas. "She likes music; she knows a hell of a lot more about it than I do. But she doesn't love it. She's just dutiful. She gets a mild pleasure out of it, that's all."

  "Well, science, then. Psychology, maybe; that's the only thing I've found her reading for the fun of it."

  "Oh, God," said Thomas. "While it would reassure me for Tina's sake, it wouldn't help my case much." He dropped his face into his hands, knocking two of the empty cups to the floor. When Janet emerged from under the table with them, he was staring at her with an expression of consternation. "I do beg your pardon," he said. "It was unconscionable to talk to you like that about a friend of yours—especially somebody you've got to live with. I'm not going to break up with her, don't worry about it. I just have a difficulty, that's all."

  "Well," said Janet, abandoning caution, "I have exactly the same difficulty. Only I'm not sleeping with her. Why don't you talk to Molly? She truly appreciates Tina; she really likes her without having to work at it. You ask her what to do."

  "She's so damned romantic," said Thomas.

  "Molly?"

  "No, idiot—Tina. Romantic in the most prosaic way imaginable. I don't know what to make of it."

  "Talk to Molly," said Janet firmly. "Here. They're coming to throw us out. Put your coat on. Haven't you got a hat, for pity's sake? It's ten below out there."

  "What a nice motherly type you are," said Thomas, vaguely.

  "A lot you know," said Janet, but she said it under her breath. She turned him over to Anne and Robin with considerable relief, and let Nick walk her back to Ericson. They discoursed amiably of winter-inspired poetry, and said nothing of Thomas or Tina, or of romance at all. The whole business was far, far easier when Nick was present: the person who lived in that body was of far more account than the body was, and required a more

  concentrated and diligent attention, leaving much less room for mere mortal longings.

 
; CHAPTER 12

  Janet wrote her first poem at Blackstock in the sixth week of the term, which fell in the middle of February. She had assumed that if she ever got around to writing it at all, this poem would be for Nick. But it was not, probably because his own poems were so much better.

  It was the February thaw that inspired her, if indeed you could call such a mood inspiration. This was a time of year that she usually looked forward to, mostly because it was an almost annual occurrence and so allowed recollection of other Februaries, including those few when no thaw came; and partly because it was reassuring to see that the ground was still there, pleasant to run from one class to another sans hat and gloves but without risk of frostbite, and comforting to consider that the hounds of spring were as usual on winter's traces.

  But this year it depressed her unutterably. The sky grew warm but stayed cloudy. The snow did not melt altogether, but shrank back in filthy ridges of gray and black, from which protruded lost mittens, paper cups, cigarette butts, and leaves neither raked up by human agency nor decently decayed by nature. The trees, which in November had seemed merely free of mortal trappings, were now indubitably dead. In the warm spots where the snow did melt all the way, it revealed merely a waste of black mud and brown grass.

  Most maddening of all, this bleak landscape conspired with some mental difficulties of her own and produced a crisis. The mental difficulties arose from the fact that no good teacher would let you read all the way through Milton and Chaucer without making certain you had a clear idea of how they viewed the world; and in Evans's case, without making very certain that you understood their stories in their own terms before you were allowed to apply your own. Janet's father was an atheist and her mother a lapsed Catholic turned Unitarian, which meant that she knew a lot of Christmas carols in Latin and refused to let her husband make fun of religion no matter how silly it sounded.