Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  Professor O’Neill was as dull as a donkey. His classes were torture.

  After a month, Stephanie came to her senses and tried to switch out—but by then the other stats course was full. She was stuck.

  At the end of the next class, Professor O’Neill motioned her to the front.

  “I understand you were trying to get out of my class,” said Professor O’Neill.

  Stephanie froze. Her heart began to pound.

  “I’m allergic to cats,” she said.

  It was patently untrue.

  She was petting the cat as she said it.

  Professor O’Neill gave her a venomous look.

  The very next class he began calling on her—always, it seemed, with the most difficult questions, chuckling when she got them wrong.

  “I hate Professor O’Neill,” she said to Tommy.

  She wasn’t the only one. As the weeks marched on, it became clear that statistics was an ordeal for everyone.

  The schedule didn’t help.

  Nor did the hall, which always seemed mysteriously warmer for statistics than for any other class held there. Suffocating, in fact.

  The students all sat rows away from the lectern—in random pairings around the huge room, as if they’d been flicked in place by a fountain pen.

  The combination of the heat, the time, and Professor O’Neill’s tedious presentation made staying awake impossible.

  One day, Scott Abbott fell asleep and dropped his pen. He was sitting on the aisle, so the pen clattered down the stairs toward the lectern, step after echoey step. Professor O’Neill stopped talking. He glared at the pen as it rolled toward him like a windup toy; when it stopped at his feet, he glared up at Scott.

  And at that exact moment, with complete silence in the hall and everyone staring at him, Scott’s head snapped backward and he began snoring loudly.

  Scott wasn’t the first, or the last, to fall asleep during class. Just the most obvious.

  As the term wore on, people began nodding off with regularity. So much so that many began class by setting the alarms on their phones to ring a few minutes before the scheduled end. By February each class concluded with a symphony of beeps and buzzes.

  Stephanie’s strategy was to bring a thermos of coffee and a large chocolate bar to every class. She rewarded herself with a piece of chocolate for every fifteen minutes she stayed awake. By reading week, she was the only one who hadn’t nodded off.

  It was a triumph, albeit a small one, but there wasn’t much else to cling to. So she clung to it. The course, which had begun with such lofty aspiration, had turned into a disaster. It seemed as if everything about it was cursed.

  One Thursday, for instance, Stephanie finished an assignment on frequency distribution. Before she printed it out, she took her laptop to a party so that they could use her playlist. Someone spilled a beer on it, and it was fried. She lost her assignment, not to mention her laptop.

  She knew Professor O’Neill wouldn’t give her an extension without a thorough grilling, and she wasn’t about to tell him about the party, so she redid the assignment from scratch and resigned herself to the inevitable deduction for tardiness.

  Then there was the midterm. She slept in. Through three alarms. She ran into the class in her pyjamas, well, her pyjama pants and one of Tommy’s hoodies, her hair mussed and sticking out in patches as if it were trying to escape her head.

  “I used to dream about that,” she said later.

  As she ran across campus she kept thinking she’d wake up and find herself in bed.

  She didn’t.

  She was crying when she got to the exam room. Professor O’Neill took pity on her and let her in. And somehow, though half the class failed, she passed. Barely. But she passed. After that Professor O’Neill stopped picking on her in class. As the second term began, she actually allowed herself the indulgence of hope. Maybe she would get through statistics after all.

  Then came April. The oppression of final exams settled over Stephanie, and indeed over the entire campus, like the Black Death.

  This wasn’t Stephanie’s first April at university. She knew the drill. She’d started rationing money in February. And food. So when classes ended, she had both funds and sustenance. But not a lot of either: Cheerios and peanut butter, tuna fish and crackers—unlike the April before, when she’d survived on Mr. Noodles and the occasional foray to a local box store, where she pushed an empty cart up and down the aisles, assembling meals from the free samples.

  It was April again. You could feel desperation everywhere on campus.

  Student loans, summer cash, cafeteria cards. All used up. All spent. And, all around, the sourness of looming exams and late papers.

  Stephanie wasn’t broke, though she might as well have been. Her steady diet of cold tuna and milk wasn’t making things easier.

  And through all this, she had to prepare for Professor O’Neill’s final.

  Everyone said that thirty percent of those who took the course failed. He bell-curves for failure, they said. Whatever he did, Stephanie needed to be sure she wouldn’t have to take it again. Once the exam schedule was posted, she triaged each course. She set some of them aside. Maybe she was sacrificing an A for a B, but it beat having a fail on her transcript. And having to do O’Neill over again.

  To make everything worse, statistics was, of course, scheduled for the very last day. The weather turned warm and everyone else was finishing. She kept getting texts. Come to the beach. Come to the bar. Come play tennis.

  With seven days to go, she mapped out a plan that had her studying ten hours a day.

  After a few days she had fallen a day and a half behind.

  The Saturday before the exam, she decided to pull an all-nighter and see if she could catch up.

  “I’ll do your laundry,” said Becky.

  “I’ll bring supper,” said Janice.

  Janice brought two Red Bulls with supper.

  “I don’t know,” said Stephanie.

  She drank one at ten p.m.

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said.

  Janice handed her the other.

  Tommy came over at two in the morning. Stephanie had moved all the furniture to the centre of her room. She was down on her hands and knees scrubbing the baseboards with a toothbrush.

  On Monday, with four days before the exam, she felt as if she was going crazy. She had to get out of her place. She went to the library. There was one empty chair. At a table with six other people. She sat down.

  The girl opposite Stephanie was chewing her hair. The boy to her right was biting his nails. The guy at the far end, the guy with the blue hoodie, was highlighting every single line in his textbook with a yellow marker. Every. Single. One.

  How could anyone concentrate with that going on?

  She got up and left.

  She wandered around the campus. There had to be a quiet spot somewhere. She tried the cafeteria, but it was full too. She went to the fitness centre and sat in the gym, in the top row of the bleachers. That worked for an hour, until three boys came in and started shooting baskets. She gave up. On her way home, she wandered into the science building.

  She took the elevator up to the top floor and walked down a long corridor, past a number of faculty offices and into a big room, some sort of research greenhouse. She found a desk by a bunch of weird plants and sat down.

  She opened her backpack. The first thing she pulled out was a roll of toilet paper. She knew enough to carry a roll with her at this time of year. All the stalls were inevitably empty, the rolls pilfered and taken back to some poverty-wrecked apartment. She set the toilet paper down and pulled out her laptop.

  She stayed at the little desk until after ten. And went back to it over the next three days. No one ever asked her who she was or what she was doing there. She was making headway is what she was doing. She had never studied for anything as hard as she was studying for this. As the days passed, she began to feel she might pass. She began to feel ho
peful.

  On Thursday night, the night before the exam, she vowed she wouldn’t drink anything to stay awake. Not even coffee. She wanted to be rested. She wanted to make sure she got a good night’s sleep.

  When Tommy came over around midnight she was still up.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table in her pyjamas. Her skin was pale and her eyes were dark.

  She had papers and textbooks spread out all around her. There was also a jar of instant coffee. And a spoon.

  There were little flecks of coffee dust on her lips.

  “I’m almost finished,” she said.

  “I see that,” said Tommy, looking at the almost empty jar. He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the top of her head.

  She went to bed at four-twenty. When her alarm went off four hours later she sat bolt upright in bed, her heart pounding. This was it.

  Professor O’Neill proctored the exam himself. He brought his cat, of course.

  Stephanie sat down at the folding table in the cavernous exam room. She stared at the exam when the student helper placed it on her desk upside down. Three pages, stapled. When Professor O’Neill said “You can begin,” she took a deep breath and turned it over.

  The first thing she felt was a flush of panic.

  The numbers looked like a maze on the page, the formulas seeming only vaguely familiar, like half-forgotten nursery rhymes from long ago.

  Her heart started to pound. She made herself read the whole thing from start to finish. She wrote her name and student number on the top of the exam booklet and began question one.

  She had no idea how long she was out, but Professor O’Neill was standing beside her desk, glaring down at her, when she woke. She sat up quickly.

  “I was just thinking,” she said.

  They both looked down at her exam book. There was a big drool across the cover.

  Professor O’Neill didn’t say anything. He shook his head and walked away.

  She still had time to complete the exam, but she finished with a sense of gloom.

  Stephanie stood up, walked to the front, and handed in her booklet. She was the last to leave. When she did, Professor O’Neill’s cat hissed at her. It felt like an omen.

  Her fate was sealed. What had she been thinking? No amount of studying would have gotten her through that course.

  And here she was, all these weeks later, sitting in her kitchen, staring at her laptop screen.

  She took a sip of her tea, shrugged, and typed in her password.

  She sat perfectly motionless, staring at the little wheel as it spun around and around.

  All those days and all those nights, all the work, all the angst, had come down to this.

  Her student page snapped up.

  English Rhetoric, Public and Community: A

  Revolutionary Aesthetics: A–

  The Sociology of Gender: B+

  Islam and the West: A

  And there, at the very bottom …

  Introduction to Statistics—Advanced …

  She felt like a marathoner staggering over the finish line.

  Introduction to Statistics?

  C.

  She had passed. She would graduate.

  But with a completely undistinguished and forgettable grade. Neither a shame nor a triumph. Neither a short story nor a novel. A novella. She had written a novella.

  “A waste,” she said to herself as she flicked her computer off. “I might as well not have taken it.”

  What she doesn’t know now, of course, and what she will come to know in the fullness of time, is that it did matter. It does matter. And it matters a lot.

  These things come up all the time in life. Over and over, we’re faced with situations beyond our control. Disasters and frustrations, little and big. The clerk on the phone who won’t do our bidding. The car that comes out of nowhere, the slowmotion sound of crumpling metal.

  And when they come like that, loud and out of nowhere, it is always our choice how we react. Whether we choose to keep moving, head down, steadfast, and do what has to be done, one foot in front of the other, or whether we choose to disassemble.

  Soon enough, Stephanie will forget all the formulas she memorized. She has already forgotten most of them. And all the essays and all the seminars she sweated over. Soon they will be gone, too.

  But one thing won’t.

  It is an hour later. It is noon. Her phone is ringing. It is Tommy.

  “I got your text,” he said.

  “I passed,” said Stephanie.

  “I knew you would,” said Tommy. “I’m proud of you.”

  That was pretty good.

  Not that he could say it.

  But that she could.

  It wasn’t what she’d learned about statistics that mattered.

  It was what she had learned about herself.

  That night, her last night in that apartment, she had two things left in her pantry.

  “I’m down to the least common denominator,” she told Tommy on the phone. “A pack of Jell-O and a can of sardines.”

  “What flavour is the Jell-O?” asked Tommy.

  “Berry Blue,” said Stephanie.

  “Perfect,” said Tommy. “I’m coming over.”

  When Tommy appeared, he pulled a Jell-O mould out of his backpack—who knows where he finds these things.

  “I’ll make supper,” he said.

  Stephanie said, “Fine. Thanks. Whatever.” She was putting on her jacket, about to lug a load of stuff to the laundromat.

  When she came home, Tommy met her at the door.

  He led her into the kitchen and pointed proudly at a blue mound.

  He said, “Sardines in Jell-O.”

  She said, “My favourite.”

  “It’s perfect,” he said as he picked it up. “The sardines look as if they’re swimming in water. Especially when you jiggle them.”

  Stephanie smiled. She took him by the elbows and spun him around, looked right into his eyes, and said, “Did I tell you I passed statistics?”

  Tommy said, “Did I tell you that I knew you would?” And then he reached into his backpack and pulled out a bottle.

  “I asked the man at the store what would go well with this,” he said. “The man suggested aftershave. I chose this instead.”

  He set the bottle of wine on the table, and then reached into his backpack again and pulled out a takeout roast chicken.

  The night was chilly, but not cold. Not yet summer, but no longer spring.

  Tommy poured them each a glass of wine.

  They held them up.

  “You made it,” said Tommy. “You did it.”

  She smiled. And put her glass down.

  All was well.

  STAMPS

  Choosing a hero is a delicate business—one that shouldn’t be undertaken frivolously. For the heroes we choose, whether real or imagined, whether from the world of fact or from the pages of fiction, will determine, to a greater or lesser degree, the things that we do, and if we allow them the privilege, the lives that we lead.

  Sam and his friend Murphy, not boys anymore but not yet men either, not even young men really, are both of the dangerous age of heroes —old enough to recognize a heroic feat when they see one, and young enough to answer the call of who knows what trumpet should it stir them to action.

  They are, this day, sitting at one of the little tables in the corner, by the olives, at the back of Harmon’s Fine Foods. It is a Saturday. Almost eleven. Sam has been at the little boutique grocery since seven a.m., stocking shelves and making coffees. He is on break. Murphy, who knows Sam’s schedule almost better than Sam knows it himself, has, as is his habit of a Saturday morning, dropped in for a visit. The two boys are drinking espresso that Sam made. Mr. Harmon taught him how. But to the old man’s horror, Sam has added milk and caramel sauce, vanilla and salt, chocolate shavings and sugar—and run it all through the blender with ice. He has topped the whole sorry mess with whipped cream and cinnamon.

 
; “An abomination,” said the greengrocer, shaking his head. “A befoulment.”

  “It’s a frozen caramel latte, Mr. Harmon!”

  “An atrocity!” said Mr. Harmon. “If you can use a straw, it is not coffee.”

  “It is delicious, Mr. Harmon. You should let me make you one.”

  “I would rather drink Kool-Aid,” said Mr. Harmon.

  That was ten minutes ago. Mr. Harmon is downstairs in his basement office now, sitting at his invoice-strewn desk, enjoying his habitual mid-morning indulgence—a café correcto—and gossiping with a man from Modena who supplies him with a sticky, private-stock, twenty-five-year-old balsamic.

  “What’s the matter?” says the man from Modena.

  Mr. Harmon is frowning at his little coffee cup. It has just occurred to him that the literal translation for his grappa-laced espresso is corrected coffee.

  “I think I put in too much grappa,” he says. “It’s tasting … too sweet this morning.”

  The man from Modena reaches for the bottle of fragrant brandy and tops up his cup.

  “Too much grappa,” he says, “is not enough.”

  Directly above them, at the little table by the cooler with the olives and the feta, the boys are still hunched over their drinks. They are talking about Murphy’s new hero.

  “I thought Ferrari was a car,” says Sam.

  “Philipp von Ferrary,” says Murphy. “With a y. We are talking stamps, not cars.”

  The man Murphy was so excited about, born Philipp Ferrari de La Renotière, was recognized around the world, by people who know these things, as the greatest stamp collector who has ever lived.

  “Ever,” says Murphy. “Ever. His father was a financier—the Rothschilds’ arch-rival. He built the Suez Canal. And then one day he locked himself in one of his huge safes.”

  “On purpose?” said Sam.

  “By accident,” said Murphy. “It was an accident. He suffocated in there. He literally drowned in his money.”

  “And he’s your new hero?” said Sam.