The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  When Miss Head saw me in her doorway, she eyed me uneasily, as though expecting to be mugged among her eighteenth-century antiques. She had wavy gray hair pulled back in a severe bun. The stubborn crimp of her hair made her head look like a plastic model of the human cerebrum that sat in the Hullsport High biology lab. Her coloring was ashen. She wore Ben Franklin horn-rim glasses with a chain attached to either earpiece; they bounced precariously on her nose as she talked. Her beige nylon blouse was high-necked and firmly secured at the throat by a rose-tinted cameo brooch; the brooch featured chaste maidens in diaphanous gowns who were wafting around a tumbled Grecian pillar. On the jacket of her burnt orange tweed suit, over her left breast, hung a small round watch, suspended from a tiny bow fashioned of gold.

  As we talked, the corners of her mouth soon began twitching. She was trying not to smile at my answers. In short, she liked me. I was appalled. I had been doing my Hullsport best to wreck my chances of ever obtaining a spot on the Worthley roster. Her office was furnished in Sheraton pieces and Oriental carpets and elaborately engraved copper trays. One wall was of hand-hewn stone. I had found this place only after wandering lost through miles of twisting stone corridors. Everywhere I went, medieval gargoyles and portraits of Renaissance ladies in gilded frames stared down at me, judging. Was I Worthley material, they seemed to demand of each other. I sincerely hoped not. The odor was of moldy stone and desiccated woodwork. The din of pealing carillon bells, echoing and reechoing through the hollow deserted stone hallways, filled my ears as I walked faster and faster, and finally ran — a Rapunzel from Hullsport, held captive in this castle keep of academe.

  “There seems to be some kind of mistake,’ I was explaining to this nice lady, Miss Head. ‘As you can probably see from my transcript, I don’t begin to have grades or test scores to come to Worthley. I’d be lost here. It would be such a waste when there are so many well-prepared girls in Westchester who’d love to come.’

  ‘Oh well, grades. What are a few…’ Leaning her head back on her neck and looking down through her half-lenses at my transcript, she blanched. ‘Indeed,’ she said, sobered.

  ‘So you see,’ I continued eagerly, ‘it would probably be just as well if I withdrew my application right now, and saved you the trouble of having to mail me a rejection letter.’ I lunged for my application, which Miss Head deftly whisked out of my reach. I looked up at her from where I lay sprawled across her antique desktop.

  ‘Yes, but you see, we’ve never had a girl here from, ah…Hullsport, as it were.’

  ‘Yes, I can appreciate that,’ I said reasonably, plopping back into my comb-back Windsor chair.

  ‘And you see, this year, ah…perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, as it were. But just between the two of us, this year at Worthley we do have a geographical quota to fill, ah, in order to qualify, as it were, for a sizable bequest from an alumna. And we do have to have’ — she was beaming and pointing at me with her index finger — ‘one more Tennessean. And I’m sure you can appreciate the fact, Miss Babcock, that Tennesseans aren’t exactly beating down our doors here at Worthley. So I’m afraid, young lady, that it has to be you.’ She was like an obstetrician notifying me that I was premaritally pregnant. She lifted the small clock hanging over her breast and glanced at it. ‘So could you just run and call in that nice father of yours, so that we can share with him your exciting news?’

  ‘He’s not out there,’ I said glumly.

  ‘Indeed,’ she intoned with evident displeasure, accustomed to having anxious parents hovering in her foyer awaiting her pleasure. ‘Well, then, we’ll just sit and get acquainted until he comes, shall we?’ She whisked out of the office.

  If I could somehow get out of this stone fortress, I could get a message to Clem and we could flee somewhere together…I hunted through my pocket book and discovered twenty-three cents, not even enough for a phone call to Clem. I leapt up and felt along the cold damp stone wall in hopes of finding a secret doorway into another world.

  Miss Head returned, carrying a silver tray with a silver tea service and cups and saucers on it. She looked at me strangely as I stood propped against her wall.

  ‘Just admiring your lovely stone wall,’ I explained feebly, patting one of the boulders with affection.

  ‘It is lovely, isn’t it? But there are lots of stone walls around campus. Oh, I’m sure you’ll come to love Worthley just as we all do.’

  I smiled weakly and returned to my chair. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the ritual I was watching was to be the one skill I salvaged from my Worthley experience. Miss Head performed it slowly, repeating for me to watch the especially intricate steps, like a master craftswoman coaching her apprentice. She picked up a flowered bone china saucer and gently but firmly placed a matching cup on it. Holding the saucer rim between thumb and forefinger, with the remaining fingers of that hand stretched out gracefully, she moved the cup below and in front of the ornate silver tea pot, which was encrusted with stylized vines and leaves. I expected her to pick up the teapot with her free hand. But no! Instead she deftly tilted the trick pot on its hinged base. Just so, so that a steady, but not gushing, stream of reddish brown tea poured into the cup, the cup being held close enough to the spout so as not to splash out the tea, but far enough away so as not to look too easy. When the cup was half full, she returned the pot to its base. Then she moved the cup underneath the tap on the other silver urn, turned the handle forty-five degrees and no more, and finished filling the cup with water until it was three-quarters of an inch from the top. Looking up with the confident smile of experts who know they’re good, she inquired, ‘Milk or lemon?’

  ‘Both, please.’

  She frowned slightly, so that I knew I’d done something gauche. But she could afford to be generous, from her perch at the pinnacle of world tea service, so she laughed merrily, her glasses bouncing on her nose and said, ‘But of course! One teaspoon of sugar or two?’

  ‘Three?’

  Grimacing, she ladled three spoonfuls of sugar into my tea, added the optimum amount of milk, and placed a thin lemon slice on my saucer. Then, with a flourish, she handed me the chef d’oeuvre.

  Miss Head clutched the edge of her desk and leaned forward aggressively, staring at me over the top of her glasses, and said through clenched teeth, ‘And now tell me about yourself, Miss Babcock. Now that that nasty business of my having to pass judgment on you no longer stands between us. Who is Virginia Babcock from Hullsport, Tennessee? What books does she read? What kinds of activities are most meaningful to her self-concept?’

  ‘Which self-concept? I’ve had several.’ I speculated as to whether or not I could admit that my reading list over the past year had mostly consisted of such old favorites from Clem Cloyd’s bookshelves as Hard Bargain and Tongue Power, with their blacked-out cover illustrations and their vast vocabulary of words never tested for on the SAT exams.

  ‘Oh ho ho. That’s what attracted me to your application, Miss Babcock. Among other things. I can be quite honest with you now. “Being held prisoner in a hospital bed,” indeed!’

  ‘But I was.’

  ‘A delicious wit you displayed, Miss Babcock, in your handling of the questions. Most refreshing. I’m sure you can appreciate how tedious it becomes for those of us who have to read these endless applications. “I desire to attain a Worthley education in order more fully to appreciate the world around me.” But your answers, Miss Babcock, well, they betrayed you as being true Worthley material, as it were. What field do you plan to pursue?’ She consulted her watch quickly.

  ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Miss Head, I hadn’t planned to pursue much of anything. I hadn’t expected to be accepted. I guess I’ll have to get busy and think of something.’ I was becoming somewhat reconciled to the concept of spending four years of my life at this place. Miss Head wasn’t a bad sort — for a jailer.

  Miss Head, staring at me through her half-lenses, asked, “What had you planned to do, dear?’

 
‘Get married, I guess. Mess around.’ If I had denounced football to Joe Bob Sparks, my remark couldn’t have been more poorly received. Miss Head sat back in her chair and closed her eyes and massaged her temples with her fingertips.

  ‘Do you teach, too?’ I asked, to shift her attention from her horrible realization that she’d just admitted the village idiot of Hullsport, Tennessee, to Worthley College, alma mater of vast battalions of female overachievers.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do indeed. Philosophy. The Descartes seminar.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I guess I probably won’t be seeing you in the classroom then.’ I had in mind a physical education major.

  Miss Head sat up straight in her chair, a potential convert before her. ‘Whatever you do,’ she pleaded, ‘don’t write off philosophy without even trying it. It could be the mistake of your life, Miss Babcock!’

  I thought it over and concluded that I really might as well take philosophy as physical education or domestic science. I didn’t much care. I told Miss Head I’d take introductory philosophy. She was thrilled. Clem Cloyd suddenly seemed very far away from Kant and Hegel and all the other Teutonic-sounding names Miss Head was reeling off as subjects of my freshman scrutiny.

  When I got back to Hullsport, I sneaked up through the woods late one afternoon to the springhouse. I was limping slightly from the accident, due to an improperly healed break. But the plan was to rebreak and reset the bone that summer so as to eliminate the limp before I left for Boston in the fall. Had I not been going to Boston, I’m sure I’d still be limping today as punishment from the Major. Clem and I were officially prohibited by both sets of parents from ever seeing each other again. Needless to say, that prohibition exercised about as much influence over me as did a papal bull over a medieval monk.

  I knocked, not really expecting Clem to be there. But he was. He stepped back in surprise when he saw me, saying nothing. I limped past him. The crude furniture was still there, but the pornographic pictures were down off the walls, and the paperbacks were gone from the shelves. Lying on the table was an open Bible. And a crucifix hung where the poster of the rats gnawing the woman’s breasts had been.

  Clem stared at me, cringing almost, as though afraid I was going to hit him.

  ‘Hi,’ I said at last.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘You took the pictures down,’ I improvised.

  ‘Yeah, I ain’t got no use for ‘em now.’

  ‘There must be other girls,’ I suggested bravely.

  ‘I ain’t interested in stuff like that no more.’

  ‘Really? No?’

  ‘Sold the Harley too.’

  “You’re kidding? That’s awful. Did your parents make you?’

  ‘Didn’t have to. I done hit mysef. Listen, Ginny, I’m so sorry. Dear God, I’m sorry.’ His dark face was twisted with remorse.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault that I fell off the Harley.’

  “Hit was my fault that we was going so fast when you did. I don’t know what I can say to you, Ginny — just that I’m sorry. I like to killed you. And you’re the only person, ‘ceptin Ma and Pa, I’ve ever cared about.’

  ‘Please. It’s all right. It wasn’t your fault.’ I was getting embarrassed.

  ‘I done thought about you a lot, Ginny. I tried all sorts of ways to get in to see you. I put on an orderly uniform and got as far as the nurses’ desk on your floor.’

  I smiled. He was starting to sound more like himself. ‘I’ve thought about you, too. Did you know I’ve been in Boston?’

  ‘Pa mentioned hit.’

  ‘I’m going to college there in the fall.’ I was gratified that his face, which I was watching closely, fell. ‘I didn’t want to at first. My father made me go up for the interview. But it’s not such a bad place. If you like tea.’

  Clem limped over and sat down on the bench he’d made when we were eight and had mingled our blood. I limped over and sat down beside him, on the table next to the Bible.

  ‘Maybe you could come up and see me there?’

  His glum face brightened, then darkened again. ‘We’re not even allowed to see each other here. Hit ain’t likely that I could come a thousand miles without nobody knowin’ hit.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll change their minds. It might work out. Wait and see.’

  ‘You’d better go. I got to hep with milkin’. Is there any way for us to get together again?’

  I explained that I’d be in the hospital for a while with my leg, and that I’d be doing make-up work to prepare for my courses all summer. ‘Maybe we could set a time to meet here every week. Like we used to for our Floyd drills. Do you remember? We’d gather up all our stuff and lock ourselves in here for practice? Then whichever of us could get away would come here, and if the other wasn’t here, could go on back home until the next week.’

  ‘If we get caught, we’re dead.’

  I was surprised. I’d never heard Clem worry about getting caught on anything, ever. ‘Then maybe we’d better just forget about it.’ My sense of loss was getting less acute all the time. Maybe a fast clean break would be kindest to us both.

  ‘No, let’s at least try hit. I’ll have keys made for you the next time you come. Let’s make hit Fridays at two.’

  Clem and I managed to meet half a dozen times before I left for Boston. I was amazed that our plan worked. Never before had Clem been within an hour of being on time anyplace. But he was invariably at the springhouse Fridays at two. Mostly we chatted companionably about the farm. Clem was working full time for his father, having graduated from Hullsport High with our class. (I was given special dispensation, considering ‘who I was,’ and finished up my senior year during that summer.) We gossiped about friends — the people at the Bloody Bucket whom I never saw anymore. Maxine’s name came up a lot. I wondered with sharp pangs of jealousy if he was dating her. He never said, and I was too envious to ask.

  We never touched each other. It was no great sacrifice. Our efforts along that line hadn’t been too inspiring.

  Two days before I was to leave for Boston, we met and agreed that I would come home at Thanksgiving. Perhaps by then, if we proved ourselves mature and cooperative in our newly responsible circumstances, our parents would relent and permit us to meet out in the open as consenting adults. I walked up the path behind the springhouse that led to my house. In our childhood it had been a muddy rut worn a foot below the level of the ground from overuse. Now it was nearly undetectable, snarled with wild raspberry canes and wild grape vines. I turned around at the top of the hill. The farmland spread out below me, the fields starting to yellow into fall. The Holsteins were lined up at the milking parlor, waiting for Clem to relieve them. Clem, however, was standing, dark and slight and twisted, in the doorway of his sagging springhouse looking at me. He raised a hand slowly. I raised my hand in reply. Then I turned around and limped home.

  My room at Worthley was high atop a crenelated stone neo-Gothic dormitory that looked like a stage set for a Walt Disney filming of Sleeping Beauty. I picked my particular room because it was located next to a fire escape. I overlooked a flagstone courtyard, which opened onto a small lake on which the college Brunnhildes rowed in their galleys at six every morning. In the middle of the courtyard on a sandstone stand sat a huge bronze sundial decorated with scrolled metal leaves. At the far end of the courtyard, overlooking the lake, was a bronze cast of Artemis, virgin huntress. The bathroom for my hall was located opposite my room. My first intimation of an order in the universe was when I made the discovery that bathrooms in multi-storied buildings are located directly above each other on every floor.

  My room made up in charm for what it lacked in size. It had dormer windows and a window seat. It was an authentic garret, I spent most of my first couple of months in there and in the library. I had no social life and wanted none. I’d had my fill in high school. Besides, every available nerve impulse at my disposal was required for my course work, which was going poorly in spite of my devotion to my summer reading list. My history
professor called me a ‘bigoted materialist,’ and my English professor returned my autobiography marked in red ‘trite.’ The problem wasn’t primarily the many books I hadn’t read, the course work I hadn’t had at Hullsport High; it was my mental habits, or lack of them. In short, I was incapable of sustained thought. After all I’d never had to practice it before. Suddenly, after an adolescence characterized by relative competence, I was a bumbling idiot.

  I wrote Clem lots of lonely letters. He wrote me lots of identical lonely letters. We could have saved enough money in postage to have financed an elopement by writing lonely letters to ourselves. Their essence was that we wanted to be married and living happily ever after, rather than each struggling away in chaste isolation. When Thanksgiving came, I was definitely ready to go home for some southern solace. I phoned the Major to announce my plans.

  ‘Not on your life!’ he informed me. ‘It’s too soon. You just left. Anyway, I know from Clem’s father that he’s been getting letters from you.’

  ‘So what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing, but you sure as hell aren’t coming home.’ We hung up on each other, me thinking that he’d better not come to my doorstep when he was old and sick and impoverished. I wrote Clem an airmail letter asking him to come to Boston over Thanksgiving and enclosing a check for his fare. He wrote to thank me anyway and notify me that the check had bounced, the Major having stopped payment, he being a director of the bank in Hullsport where my account was.

  With hatred in my heart, I ate my Thanksgiving turkey in the company of solitary derelicts at Waldorf’s Cafeteria in Harvard Square. Then I encouraged an acned bespectacled Harvard sophomore from Birmingham, Alabama, to pick me up. He was as miserable as I was to be alone in a strange land on Thanksgiving. He took me back to his rooms (in Babcock Hall, which gave me malicious satisfaction), plied me with Southern Comfort, and led me to his unmade come-stained bed, where he screwed me halfheartedly and without finesse among the stacks of notes for his term paper on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death.