by Robin Kirman
Afterward, she was afraid to enter the surf again, until her father took it upon himself to venture out with her. Clinging to him, she rode piggyback like a child, or else floated beside him, rising on the rollers and diving into the breakers, all the while clutching his hand.
Her father was just forty then, enjoying the first of his fame. Jethro Calvin was a name that the right people had begun to recognize. His photographs sold at shows; his presence was requested at celebrity-strewn parties in L.A. Tan and strapping, clever and handsome, hair burnished by the sun and curly like Georgia’s own, he seemed to have sprung from the pages he’d read to her out of Bulfinch’s Mythology when she was a girl: stories of gorgeous, gifted heroes desired and envied by both gods and mortals—maidens punished for their beauty, men driven by violent passions, women by consuming jealousies.
Even after her dread of the ocean had subsided, Georgia went on feigning fear to keep her father at her side; some days, she’d hold him with her for so long the tides would carry them down the beach until they’d lost sight of her mother’s red umbrella on the shore. Georgia’s mother never set foot in the water—rarely, even, into the sun, which burned her delicate skin. She preferred to sit and read in the shade of her umbrella while the salt air wrinkled the pages of her books. She read all the time then, an earnest new professor preparing her first lectures. It was clear she found these trips outdoors an inconvenience, and Georgia wondered, sometimes aloud, why she even had to come.
After that happy year in Santa Cruz, Georgia’s father was offered a teaching fellowship in South Dakota. As a family, they’d always traveled, her father moving between teaching positions, or on photo assignments, or simply chasing inspiration. Jethro Calvin—the artist and the man—had an interest in tiny towns with obsolete shops, quaint poverty, and quirky residents. He was fond (her mother claimed) of any environment where he was able to feel big. Her mother hadn’t objected to this lifestyle as long as she was still at work on her dissertation, on the anti-Romantic politics of Mary Shelley, but that fall the manuscript had been accepted for publication and, in the spring, she’d been appointed a tenure-track position at UCSC. Georgia’s father passed up South Dakota, but such compromise was not for him; halfway through their second year in that beachside yellow house, he claimed he needed new scenery and Georgia was left to choose: Santa Cruz with her mother, or her heart’s fancy, with her father.
She and her father didn’t wander far during their first year of living alone, just to a town with a jaunty name that grabbed her: Texico, New Mexico. Her parents’ separation hadn’t struck her then as either permanent or threatening. Every few weeks they’d go back to stay with her mother, or else her mother would come and stay with them. Only after Georgia and her father had moved a second time, following a teaching job at the Christian University in Windsor, Colorado, did her mother begin to ask that Georgia visit on her own. During that Thanksgiving, which she insisted Georgia spend with her, her mother introduced her to a friend named William. William was ten years older than her father; Jewish, like her mother, and a math professor. He specialized in something called “operations research,” which was described to Georgia and which she, in turn, described to her father as “the pursuit of optimal solutions.”
“Well,” her father said, “looks like your mother’s found a new one.”
Her father didn’t appear angry, nor did he think that Georgia had reason to be; her mother’s new partner would make the dissolution of the marriage painless. Life would go on even more smoothly than before.
A month after they’d moved to their cottage in Windsor, though, Georgia came home to find her father shouting her mother’s name.
“Judy Steiner, she made this complaint, didn’t she? Didn’t she?”
Her father was seated in the living room with two policemen. One had a mustache and was leaning aggressively over her father; the other, younger, looked discomfited by her entrance. A book of her father’s photographs lay open on the coffee table. Seeing her hesitating at the door, her father dropped his voice and turned to wave her in.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. Don’t be upset. I just need to speak with these men for a moment.”
“What’s this about? Mom did something?”
“Mom’s fine. Everything’s fine. I’ll explain later. Go on into your room.”
Through her bedroom door, she’d heard him defending himself to the officers. “Of course she’s wearing a bathing suit. No, I know you can’t tell. I blurred it out; the image is meant to be obscure. It’s precisely not erotic. You can’t even see what kind of body this is: male, female, child, adult.”
“Looks like a young girl to me,” said one officer, the one with the moustache, Georgia was sure.
“All right, enough.” Her father seemed to be struggling to keep his tone light. “Now why don’t we acknowledge what’s really going on here. Even my own students don’t follow my work—I should believe the Windsor Police Department does? Clearly my ex-wife called you. You’ve got to see why she’s doing this. Neither of you has an ex?”
“I think I do see. I see a young girl without clothes.”
“Maybe we should move this to the kitchen,” the younger officer suggested.
Georgia couldn’t hear what happened next; after what seemed like ages, she caught the sound of footsteps approaching, and then a knock. When she opened her door she saw her father slouched between the officers, abject, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, baby; they just need to ask you one small question.”
The elder policeman turned to address her: “Has your father taken any photographs of you recently?”
“He’s a photographer; he takes pictures all the time.”
“Has he taken any inappropriate photographs of you?”
“Inappropriate how?”
“You don’t need to upset her, please,” her father said, but the officer ignored him.
“Has he taken any nude photographs of you? Pornographic pictures.”
“Who gave you that idea? I was wearing a bathing suit, for God’s sake.” She knew to act shocked and was pleased to see the younger officer grow nervous and mumble something to his partner.
Her father’s confidence returned; he came to her side and put an arm around her. “You want to know what child abuse is? This is child abuse. Right here. My wife is the abuser. And if you don’t leave my daughter alone, I’m going to the station and file a charge against you.”
The officers left soon after that and the visit marked the end of the harassment from police. It was not, however, the end of the trouble. Word got around of the accusation and, after his first semester, Georgia’s father was relieved of his position at Christian University. Again he and Georgia packed their things and started out on the road, bound next for Balfour, North Carolina. This time they seemed to be moving on less by choice than by necessity, though her father would have denied there was much difference. Behind every action there was will: nothing so rational as choice, and nothing as helpless as need. In general, he believed most language was used to escape accountability or soften reality. That was the way with most people, though he and Georgia weren’t the kind for such evasions. If they lied, it wasn’t to fool themselves, but to elude the narrow-minded judgments of others.
Facing the world beside her father, Georgia came to share his cautious view of strangers. Teenage girls, especially, must be approached with care—not only because they envied her looks and her talent as a student, but because none of them had been permitted to see as much as she had—they hadn’t vacationed in Europe or been to gallery openings in New York; their fathers weren’t friendly with Rod Stewart or Julian Schnabel or Susan Sontag. Though Georgia kept such details to herself, her classmates felt the difference in her outlook: that the places and lives they took to be significant, were for her, merely stops along her way.
By the time Georgia arrived in Balfour, halfway through her junior year, she’d entered four schools in four years and had devised a survival strat
egy. Boys were to be avoided, so as not to inspire competition from the girls, whose allegiance, such as it was, could best be earned by joining whichever team would have her. In Balfour, swimming was in season when Georgia started school that winter, and so she’d joined the team and made special efforts to befriend its captain, Mindy Mayhew.
Each Saturday, Mindy invited the varsity swimmers to her house for lazy afternoons around the Mayhews’ overchlorinated backyard pool. Mindy’s was the first local family that Georgia had been invited to meet: Mrs. Mayhew, blond with black roots, smoking on the deck and palling with the girls, Mindy’s younger brother finding excuses to wander out to the back deck. Mr. Mayhew was the only one who maintained distance; he rarely loitered at the house, preferring to set off alone by bike, escaping for hours. Georgia had caught sight of him a few times, wheeling down the driveway. The sort of man her father might have photographed: handsome in an authentic way, something arrogant and stubborn in his eyes, the set of his jaw.
One afternoon in March, just after the successful close of the swimming season, the team gathered to celebrate. They blasted the usual crap music—Tiffany, Taylor Dayne—and downed spiked Mountain Dew, which made Georgia’s head hurt. Several of the girls were drunk enough to lie topless, provoking Mindy’s little brother to stand gaping out the window.
Finally Georgia went into the house to grab some quiet shade and a cold glass of water. She was in the kitchen, at the sink, when Mr. Mayhew stepped in to empty a bottle he’d just filled up for his ride.
“Tire’s busted.” He pointed out the kitchen window: the bike lay, dejected, against a tree. “Guess I’m grounded.”
He stared at her, looking just about the way she felt: utterly remote from everything around, bristling with energy, and bored.
“Where do you go?” she asked him.
“I try to do it different each time; my goal is to get lost.”
“Pretty hard to manage that if you’re from here.”
“Like most things, if you’re from here, it’s pretty hard to manage unless you’re a fucking moron.” He splashed cold water on his face, then headed out through the side door.
Later that week, she was going for a run, out about a mile from her house, when Mr. Mayhew pulled up in his car: “I can take you to a better spot. A place I like to bike.”
He dropped her about three miles out, giving her instructions on how to make it back.
“You’re just going to drive off?” she asked him. “You’re not worried I’ll get lost?”
“There’s a motel along this road if you have trouble; anyone can point you to it.”
“A motel, huh?”
“I’ll come and check there in an hour, just in case you need a ride.”
She hadn’t waited for him at the motel that day. She hadn’t dared meet the man again, in fact, until she had just one month left in Balfour. That was all, if the worst happened, she believed she could endure.
It was a warm day in early June. Mayhew had come by bike and arrived sweating, insisting on a shower as soon as they’d entered the motel room. He’d run the water, pulled off her dress, and coaxed her into the hot stream.
Not the scene she’d had in mind for her first time: she hadn’t imagined standing, or clutching a rusting spigot for balance; she hadn’t imagined the squeakiness of wet skin, or the numbness that set in from the heat, the blurriness of feeling—if there was pain, she didn’t know it; if there was blood, the water washed all traces away. The next time she and Mayhew met, opting for the bed, there were no stains on the sheets, nothing to force any admissions—and by the third time, she’d been able to appreciate his steady, precise touch and deft avoidance of burdensome emotion—gifts she wasn’t going to encounter again, certainly not among boys her own age. With Mayhew, there was no need to mull over lost youth or innocence, or address the fact that what went on in that hotel room was technically a crime; no need to discuss the fact of Mayhew’s marriage, or of his being the father of her schoolmate. That motel shower had been her baptism into sin, a secret pleasure that endured three weeks, exactly, before news spread of their affair.
When she and her father picked up and switched towns again, Georgia still hadn’t learned how she and Mayhew were discovered, whether someone had spotted her in his car, or an employee at the motel had spoken up. All she knew was that she, unlike Mayhew, was blessed with the ability to disappear, and that she’d come to share with her father—who’d borne the news and its consequences without judgment or resentment—the elation of such departures. Her father’s philosophy had become hers, too: the perspective from a rearview mirror was the freest, the most enlightened.
Throughout these years, as Georgia moved from one high school to the next, her mother voiced complaints that her father wasn’t allowing her to develop stable relationships with anyone but him: “if any relationship with that man could conceivably be thought of as stable.” Georgia defended her father, insisting she was doing fine, socially and academically, too: notwithstanding the many upsets in her studies, she was graduating as the valedictorian of Oregon’s Oceanside high school and had been accepted into Harvard.
At the graduation ceremony, Georgia’s mother and father appeared together for the first time in years. That afternoon, after three glasses of white wine, her mother took her aside. She’d worn a dress with roses on it, completely out of keeping with her usual no-nonsense style. Wobbling on heels, she’d held Georgia by the arms, which was also out of character, her mother never much given to touching. There were tears in her eyes and she was agitated. She’d been working herself up to this moment; there was something she felt the need to say.
“I owe you a tremendous apology for what I’ve done to you. I was angry and I was selfish—every bit as selfish as your father. I should have protected you from him.”
Why should she require protection from her father? “Please don’t start on Dad. Not today.”
“He hijacked you and I let him.”
“Well, I don’t see it that way.”
“That you can’t see it is the worst part, and it’s my fault. It’s the regret of my life—letting that man take you.”
Jealousy, that was all this was: how else to explain her mother’s choice to insult both her father and her on this day when they had every reason to be proud? Who could fault her father for the woman she’d become?
It was thanks to him that she’d grown up to be energetic and curious and strong; thanks to him that she’d been saved from being confined within one town or school or one idea about learning or living. Her father’s lesson was to fear only safety and stasis; ever since those days out by the ocean, he’d taught her to crave more from experience than an even surf.
—
At Harvard, Alice Kovac was hard to miss: six feet tall and rail thin with short black hair and clever, dark-rimmed eyes. Though she looked older, Alice turned out to be a sophomore like Georgia, which left Georgia to wonder if this wasn’t the same Alice who’d called her room her freshman year, in connection with a story for the Crimson: I’d like to learn more about you, Georgia. But if this were the same girl, she’d either lost interest in Georgia or kept it well hidden: she sat on the opposite end of the room, at a desk pulled by the window, exuding such sly confidence that even the TA seemed to seek her approval, directing his various asides and jokes her way.
Lambert was the one to suggest that Georgia speak with Alice. Georgia’s final paper was on a Sarajevan artist, and Alice, who’d been born there, might offer unique insights on the work. In fact, Alice expressed no reaction to the photographs Georgia had shown her—just what felt like a visceral antipathy toward her. An unusual beginning for a friendship, but Georgia supposed it was Alice’s unorthodoxy, in general, that attracted her. Alice was never boring, and there was no false courtesy with her, nothing hesitant to slow the progress of affection once it started.
Alice’s childhood offered a partial explanation for her bluntness: her mother was a miserable lunatic, to h
ear Alice tell it, and her father hadn’t lived past forty.
Georgia’s father, then forty-seven, was still completely vital, without a wrinkle or gray hair. “Forty’s so young,” she’d remarked.
But Alice was without pity: for her father or for herself. “I think it’s old enough. I don’t plan on lasting too much longer.”
A comment intended to provoke, as so many of Alice’s remarks were, and yet there were times when Georgia really could see Alice driving herself to an early grave; there were full days she spent in Alice’s company without seeing a morsel of food pass her friend’s lips. Meanwhile, Georgia never felt more likely to drop dead than during their runs, despite her strong heart and lungs from swimming. Alice always had to stay a step or two ahead; she grinned each time Georgia was compelled to stop and catch her breath, and she wouldn’t quit until Georgia announced she was exhausted. Once, Georgia noticed blood on the back of Alice’s sneaker. A blister must have popped or a scab opened; the cut was deep and Alice had run their seven-mile loop without a word of complaint.
Not even among the most ambitious athletes she’d known had Georgia encountered a girl as fiercely competitive as Alice, and soon this quality infected other facets of their lives. Georgia would catch Alice peeking at her papers when they studied, silently comparing marks; when they dressed to go out, Alice would ask to try on Georgia’s clothes, never to wear them, in the end, just to be certain that they fit her more loosely. When they walked down the street, Alice noted each gaze that trailed them and seemed to count out which of the two girls attracted more. If a man showed interest in Georgia at a party, by the end of the evening, she would be sure to find Alice speaking with him, her head tilted back, her shirt slipped over her shoulder.
Such displays were nothing new to Georgia; in high school she’d developed tricks for managing envy: putting herself down, offering compliments and the occasional gift. “Take this,” she’d tell Alice, handing off a new skirt, a tight pair of pants. “It doesn’t fit me anymore.” If such acts of generosity didn’t dispense with Alice’s accumulated irritations, then Georgia would vanish for a few days, let Alice work them off herself, until they could greet each other with fresh enthusiasm once again.