by Amanda Cross
I approached Ted, and Ted’s wife, with care. My greatest hurdle, I knew, was that they would think me mad, not worth chancing, probably devoted to secret vices. My strength was that I provided the kind of help almost wholly unavailable to farmers. I had to make the hope outweigh the fear. And I had to be certain to make my own claims clear from the beginning. I worked it all out as though I were infiltrating their lives, as the FBI does. I was canny and patient.
Ted had put up for rent a house on his land. It was too close to the farm, and too lacking in amenities, to be rented for long, but hunters took it in November to slaughter deer, and skiers took it sometimes when they could get nothing better. It was an A-frame, built for some family reason, when Ted’s grandfather still ran the farm. A-frames were a big thing in the late ‘60’s. They were easily put up, had high “cathedral” ceilings, a bath and kitchen. The sleeping area was a loft built over the back half of the main room, and this detracted from the appeal of the place for all but the young and active. One had to climb a rather tall ladder to go to bed, or else sleep in the living/dining area. I like heights and space; I liked the pointed ceiling, though because of it, the house cost more to heat than anyone could have foreseen when it was designed. Big trees stood near it, shading it: I liked the fact that Ted’s grandfather had preserved them, not just bulldozed the site, as most did. The cabin I had been occupying was cramped, and cheap, and its paint was peeling. I had begun to dream of Ted’s A-frame house, and to plan my life in it. I visited Ted and his wife (which is how I thought of her then, an appendage to him but one with power, one to be assuaged and reassured) one evening after their dinner. I had telephoned first. Evening is the only time you can have a conversation with a farmer, unless you follow him, or her, into the barn or onto a field. They are tired; they won’t stay up late with you, but their attention is available. I had said on the telephone only that I wanted to talk to them about something; I intended, I succeeded, in taking them wholly by surprise.
Ted’s wife was named Jean; I had seen her once or twice in the supermarket, moving with ease, rangy, comfortable in her farm clothes, not done up. I liked that. She and I understood each other in an instinctive way from the first. I’ve tried to describe this to myself, but like most intuitive perceptions, it evades description. I shall get it down one day. We did not fear one another, we did not need to protect our masks from one another: that’s as close as I can come. I think it turned the balance in favor of my proposition; anyway, it helped.
I had worked my plan out carefully, on paper, which impressed them, and frightened them a little, as I meant it to. I wanted them to be, and to remain, a bit in awe of me.
“It’s not a legal contract,” I said. “I just wanted to list my demands, and offerings, and let you respond with yours. There will have to be a trial period. I may tell you I am strong and efficient and reliable, but you’ll have to find that out for yourselves. What I will offer to do is this: I’ll take total charge of the milking every morning. I’ll do the afternoon milking also, or, if you prefer, I’ll do whatever has to be done in the fields during the time I would be milking. I can run machinery: I can harrow, plant, spray, cut corn, cut grass for daily feedings. That’s all I shall work: three hours in the morning, three hours in the late afternoon. I don’t want to be asked to take on any extra work. If you want to go away for a day, a week, and leave me with both milkings, you’ll have to find someone else to do the rest of the work. I want that to be clear. I shall work only the time both milkings take.
“In exchange, I want to live in your A-frame; it shall be my home, I shall care for it, and you will not enter it when I am there. In addition, you’ll pay me fifty dollars a week.” I had thought this amount out with great care. It would, together with my small income, keep me. I hoped it would leave me below the income-tax line. I wanted to keep what I got, and to count on it. Those were my terms, neither more nor less on either side.
“I don’t expect you to decide now,” I told them. “Perhaps we should say, if you agree to try, that either of us can end it on a week’s notice anytime in the first three months. I may be awkward at the milking at first, but I shall improve fast. It gives you a certain freedom you wouldn’t otherwise have. It gives me hard work each day, a good place to live, and time between the work for writing, which is what I do.” I didn’t want them to wonder about me too much.
I finished the coffee they had offered me and left. I walked home down the road, hoping, even expecting that the bargain would go through. I had presented them with a very great temptation, and I thought I had picked the right farmer. He was not uneducated, which meant he was not irrationally suspicious. The idea of a woman no longer young taking on hard, physical work was certainly unusual, but his wife would counter any fear of that. She, as I had guessed and was to learn for certain, detested “woman’s work.” When the children were young she would hire someone, if need be, to leave them with, and herself drive the tractor. Now the children were often with her in the summers as she worked in the fields, a boy and girl the same size, close in age. They, too, had been part of my reckoning. I do not like children, but allowed to retain my dignity, I can deal with them on equal terms. The night had been dark as I left their bright parlor, but soon my eyes grew attuned to the gentler night light; there was a moon, in the cool March evening. I was joyful with one of those surges of happiness that mark the beginning of an enterprise, when we believe we have got our life into some kind of order, and have the guts to see it through, even the hard times.
I moved into the A-frame a week later.
I had not, of course, really been inside of it before, only peeked through the windows when I knew the farm was deserted. The Labradors they kept as pets and watchdogs barked furiously at me, but I had walked by so often, and showed so little fear of them, that in time they accepted me as having a right to be around the place. Inside, the A-frame looked even better: its walls were stained wood; no peeling paint. I liked the darkness; there was sun enough outside. Someone had added a porch I did not like to the front, but I learned to pile wood there; also, it was a place to leave my muddy farm boots, so even that worked out. The bathroom, Ted told me with pride, had ceramic tile. He had had to dig a well for the A-frame, having hoped that the spring would be sufficient, but in dry summers, the water ran out. The well diggers had gone down three hundred feet before they found water, and then only on the second time, a dowser having been called in. It amused me that they trusted dowsers too little to use them the first time, but they always called them in when the first time failed, and then the diggers found water. I was amused, but I agreed: one does not call on magic too soon, or carelessly, nor on hidden powers.
“Perhaps I better milk with you the first two times,” Ted said, challenging me.
I did not take up the challenge, being too old to play the fool. “I would be grateful,” I said. “I have studied the milking-parlor process”—I saw him smile at the verb—“and I know I can do it in time. The weight of the machines is not the problem. But if you can help me get into the routine, I shall be better at it sooner.”
Ted shrugged. I’m sure he figured this wouldn’t work out, but he had little to lose (no one was then renting the A-frame) and though I was a long shot, if I did work out. . . . We began the day after I moved in. It didn’t take us long to see that we had, they on their part and I on mine, found a human wonder; our culture can speak of it only in terms of heterosexual love, romance, marriage, but friendship too has its miracles, and the companionship of work perhaps more. I freed them from that essential bit of a hard life perhaps too demanding, allowing them a life with just enough maneuver room to allow them to dream. I was thorough in my work and, after a short enough time, efficient. They left me alone. They never tried to enter my home, or to look at it when I was not there. I know that, because I had rigged up devices to tell. They won my trust slowly, more slowly than I won theirs. When the visitors came, Ted was as much on my s
ide as a schoolboy in an English story. We were buddies, we were allied against the others. I had found a friend.
Chapter Four
Winifred’s Journal
The first time I found a friend I was eight years old, and in England on what was to be an annual visit. I was sent to Oxford to stay with an aunt—I understood from the beginning that the title was honorific—for all of my American school vacation. Why this began when I was eight, and not before, I was not told. My aunt was a tutor at an Oxford college for women; the English long vacation does not coincide with the American one, which was based, originally, on agricultural needs that freed American students in time for work on the farm. So that when I arrived at Oxford, the Trinity term was still under way. I had been delivered there by a kindly gentleman who had kept an eye on me on the ship, and completed the kindness (for which I now realize he was paid, but his kindness was no less for that) by accompanying me first to London and then moving me and my several bags from Waterloo to Paddington and onto the Oxford train; when we arrived, finally, at the Oxford station, he delivered me, by bus, to a house on the Woodstock Road.
My aunt was not at home, but the owner of the house, from whom my aunt rented a self-contained apartment, expected me. It was with her and her husband and son I was actually to stay. She greeted me with a casual understanding of a child’s need to be attended to with care and yet offhandedly. (I realize now that it is the manner I assume with Ted and Jean’s children, with what success I do not know: different times, different children, different place. I have often heard it said that the one mistake parents never make with their own children is the mistake their parents made with them. Perhaps those of us who are childless treat children in the light of gifts of love we received when young.) She told me about herself, and her husband—a don at Oxford, and rarely home—and her son, a boy my age. He was a day boy at the Dragon School, a preparatory school in Oxford, and as I ate my bread and jam, perched on a stool, he came in. Were I given to the language, the one most ready to our use, of romantic love, I would say I fell in love with him at that first moment. But this would not be true. Often we women (and the opposite, for all I know, may be true of men) think we have fallen in love with men when we have only fallen in love with the experience of being male in our world. I am certain that a large part of Rochester’s attraction for Jane was the experience he had had of the world, sexual and other. What he had to offer her was an account of that experience. Which was what Cyril offered me.
I remember best of all how he was dressed, and the longing born in me at that moment for clothes like that. Many years later I read of a famous woman writer who had had, through the loss of a trunk, to wear her brother’s clothes, and that the freedom of that time lived with her always. It was not just the freedom of the clothes, but their style: they combined, to my envious eye, comfort and evidence of community. He wore short gray flannel trousers, with knee socks, a shirt and tie, and a jacket with his school’s emblem on the pocket. I took this in all at once, as one is said to do in the lyrics of popular songs of the twenties and thirties: “I took one look at you,” and so on. It seemed to me in an instant that to be a boy like that, in such a school in England, was to be the most fortunate creature on earth.
I have since pondered the lot of the upper classes, and the ghost of ancient customs that still remained for certain privileged boys after World War II. I am, I daresay, as widely read as most on the Orwell generation and those that followed. I understand the outrageous privilege, the unquestioned right—the arrogance, if you will—of such boys, following their inevitable path from preparatory school to public school to University, living a life on ancient turf, to the sound of cricket balls smacked in long summer afternoons, and bells, and the rooks circling around the spires. This was my romance, formed, no doubt, from readings about Edwardian England and the golden summer afternoons; it was all embodied for me in a single moment by the entrance of Cyril that day in June.
What his loneliness was that made him willing to be my friend I never asked, even of myself, not then. Had I been a boy, I would have been a threat; as a girl, I was none. Even if, as it turned out, I did most things better than he, even boyish, athletic, daring things, his being a boy made him naturally superior; he could allow me that satisfaction. And since I was there only for the summer—we did not, that first time, know that it would be every summer, but even when we did, summers are not years—I did not challenge his place in the family, with his parents, even with my “aunt.” She, for example, though she had been taught Latin as a child, accepted his drilling in that honored language, and simply scoffed at my ignorance of such things. Like so many women I was to meet in future years, she did not expect for other females the privileges she had earned as an exception to women’s inadequate destiny. But I determined at that moment that she could expect them of me. Cyril was willing enough to “teach” me—which is to say he lent me his Latin book and himself read the Boys’ Own paper. (Once back in the States, I did, in fact, find a Latin teacher, and pursued my studies as far as Virgil, whom I can still read; more, I can recite—at least the passage where the Trojans leave the horse. My anger at Dido is such that I have never been able to memorize that passage, and even my aunt, flippantly assigning other women to the domestic sphere she despised, thought Dido a fool, I suppose because Dido’s job was to rule a kingdom.) I did not yet know how many heroines there were, from Maggie Tulliver to Ursula Brangwen, who would think that a knowledge of the classics would bring them into the mysterious male realm of power; if one learns the priestly language, may one not have access to the priestly mysteries?
Latin, however, mattered less than clothes. Even today, old as I am, if challenged to name the perfect moment of my life, the clearest in its passionate intensity, I would name the moment when Cyril let me wear his school clothes—the long leave had begun—and go about with him all day dressed as a boy, taken everywhere for a boy. (Cyril’s hair was, in the English fashion, as long as mine.) His pockets were deep, and held more than I had thought of carrying. To plunge my hands into them was ecstasy. I could move in any way I wanted; sit with my legs apart. We went, I remember, to Blenheim, taking the bus—it was a favorite journey of ours—and scooted in and out of the buildings and gardens. I have never known such pure happiness.
He did not let me wear his clothes again; indeed, had his mother found out, eventually his father, there would have been the devil to pay for both of us. And I had had to promise to serve him as his vassal all summer in payment of his great daring. But perhaps because I had worn the clothes that day—passed, one might say, as a boy—he allowed me to join with his group of friends when, upon occasions that were rare enough, they played some game over the summer. I pleaded with my aunt to buy me a boy’s outfit to wear; she could not fail to see that my clothes were unsuitable to my life. We went, I remember, to an outfitters, and I got an English girl’s school uniform: like Cyril’s, except for the skirt and hat. It was far better than nothing; I should never have found the courage to ask in the store for the trousers I wanted, even short trousers like Cyril’s, even if I had not known such a request would have profoundly shocked my aunt. (There is a portrait of her in the College where she was Principal, wearing her academic gown and a tie. But the tie is knotted just above her breasts, as though in acknowledged compromise, just below the collar of her low-cut blouse.)
It seems to me sometimes wonderful how little I questioned the life of Cyril’s parents, or even noticed much about them. I came once on his mother weeping, and stood awkwardly in the doorway as she wiped her tears and tried to laugh away the situation. “I’m just a silly woman,” she said, “pay no attention. You won’t mention it to Cyril, will you?”
I shook my head. The terrible pity and scorn I felt for her (not, notice, terror: it never occurred to me that I could end like her, and I did not) are palpable to me still. That first summer, unlike the later ones, which melted together in memory, seems to me to have t
he clarity still of one of those movies, popular when I was a young woman, where memory is created before our eyes as though we had returned there in a time machine, able to see it all.
“I had a little girl once, for a few hours,” Cyril’s mother said to me. “I would have liked to have a daughter. But we are lucky to have Cyril, and must not ask God for more.” I think I knew that she wanted to take me in her arms, that if I had rushed to her we would have embraced with a passion that would later have embarrassed us both. But I did not move; I stood, mute and powerless. She was lonely, of course; I understood that. Her husband dined in hall every night; when he took her to some rare occasion that included wives, she felt inadequate, felt she had failed him in some unspoken way. Did I know all that? Yes. But I blamed her for being a fool, forgave him for finding her a bore. One might have thought that, motherless, I would welcome this candidate for the position; the truth was, I had had enough of mothers—at any rate, enough of substitutes. Did I believe that one day I would awaken a boy, and take my place in the male world, treating women with the scorn they deserved, and, of course, the paternal kindness? Did my aunt not suggest this view was possible even to one who did not change gender?
Eventually, that afternoon, Cyril’s mother returned to the kitchen, where she seemed always to be struggling with food or damp clothes, and I wandered out toward the Oxford Colleges, which I had taken as my special subject. I was fast becoming an authority on them. Cyril did not welcome me into his life every afternoon. That day, I walked to Wadham College, to the great copper beech, which is, I believe, still there: I sat beneath it in my schoolgirl outfit, and, as I had learned to do in that place, indulged in fantasies. An American couple accosted me.