The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  I was very discouraged, not the least by the fact that I couldn’t fathom the meaning of her remarks. She might just as well have been talking in Urdu. I sulked around and thought about re-enrolling in the infirmary.

  Instead I went out and bought Clem and Maxine a wedding gift — a salt shaker in the shape of a bull’s head and a pepper shaker in the shape of a cow’s head. These I mailed with a friendly note apologizing for my tardiness and wishing them many years of great happiness. In the package I included Clem’s patched windbreaker and his bracelet.

  Then I went to a beauty parlor and had my hair done. I was letting it grow out so as to wear it in a bun. In the meantime, I wanted it as flat and unobtrusive as possible. After a year and a half of hefting around a lacquered bouffant, like a plastic space helmet, a close-fitting coif was a considerable relief.

  I also bought half a dozen wool suits and some high-necked nylon blouses, an antique cameo brooch, and some low-heeled simple shoes. I now wore a size smaller than upon entering the infirmary with my broken heart. It was good to have less of me to keep track of.

  Dressed in a new outfit, I descended to Miss Head’s chambers. The Christmas vacation was ending the next day, and the other students would begin returning in early evening. I wanted to gobble up Miss Head’s undivided attention while I could.

  She opened her huge door, looked me up and down, and exclaimed, ‘Why, Miss Babcock! I scarcely recognized you. You have a new suit. It’s perfectly lovely.’ She invited me in, and I perched on the overstuffed horsehair loveseat. ‘I was just making myself some tea. Would you like some?’

  I was by now well hooked on tea. I required it, fix-like, every afternoon. ‘Thank you. Yes.’

  Miss Head performed the intricate tea rite in exactly the same way as the day of my interview. Only this time, wiser, I said, ‘With lemon, please. But no sugar.’

  Nodding with satisfaction at my acquired finesse, she handed me my cup. Then she looked at me questioningly.

  ‘I wondered,’ I explained, ‘if you could help me with my schedule for next term. I have no idea what to take.’

  She looked at me, perplexed. ‘Well, what are you interested in, Miss Babcock?’

  ‘That’s just it. I don’t know. I didn’t have enough of any one thing in high school to know what I’m interested in.’ Other than kinky sex and motorcycles and flag swinging and moonshine, which I knew I wasn’t interested in any longer. ‘There’s so much I should take that I don’t know where to start. My education is one big gap.’

  ‘Well!’ she said briskly, her Galatea sitting ready to be molded in front of her. ‘To start with, you’ll certainly want to take the last half of my philosophy course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘More Descartes and Spinoza. Some Locke and Berkeley, Hume and Hegel. It should be a most exciting spring!’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘And you’re required to finish English 102. So that leaves just three courses. Science or humanities?’

  I shrugged, indicating that I was putty in her hands.

  ‘All right I’d suggest beginning chemistry and physiology, maybe some introductory physics, to balance out the English and philosophy. Then next year perhaps you’ll have the basis for a choice between science and humanities.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, rapidly filling out my form and handing it to her to sign, as my adviser and current exemplar.

  ‘Now! What else?’ She peered at me through her lenses with her head resting back on her neck.

  “That’s all. Thank you.’ I set down my cup and prepared to leave.

  ‘Don’t rush off,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘I was just working on my book. But I’m in no great hurry to get back to it.’

  ‘What’s your book?’

  ‘I haven’t named it yet. It’s a comparison of the methods of the eighteenth-century empiricist philosophers to Newtonian mechanics.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said in a daze. ‘Sounds interesting.’

  ‘Oh, quite. I’ve been working on it for seven years.’

  I gulped. ‘And it’s almost done?’

  ‘Oh, another two years ought to do it,’ she said with satisfaction, thrusting forward her lower jaw in a friendly smile. ‘And now tell me what you’ve been engaged in, Miss Babcock?’

  ‘I’ve been catching up on my reading. And I’ve written a make-up paper for History 103 on the use of the astrolabe in fifteenth-century Portuguese exploration in the southern hemisphere.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘I’m sorry, by the way, about my Descartes paper. I did try on it.’

  She waved her hand grandly. ‘Never mind. You’ll catch on. You display a remarkable ability, Miss Babcock, to adapt yourself to your surroundings — a sort of protective coloration, as it were. I’m certain, Miss Babcock, that you’ll pick up the philosophic method in no time if you decide to.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ It seemed unlikely. I could dress like Miss Head, but thinking like her was another matter altogether.

  ‘I’m sure of it. Have you called your parents?’

  I scowled.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, come now, Miss Babcock. Must you be so insistently melodramatic?’

  ‘Yes, I called them.’

  ‘And are you on speaking terms with them now?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Good.’ She sighed and poured herself another cup of tea. I handed her my cup for a refill. ‘I remember the battles I used to have with my parents,’ she said with a smile, removing her glasses so that they dangled from their chain and knocked against her chest. She had blue eyes, weak and watery. ‘It seemed so crucial at the time. But now they’re dead.’

  My indomitable parents dead? Never! They would rust or corrode, but they would never expire. ‘What did you and your parents fight about?’

  Miss Head was staring absently out the window, where the winter sun was burning cryptic patterns into the snow. Huge gleaming icicles hung halfway down her windows. She hadn’t heard my question. I repeated it.

  She looked up, startled. ‘Oh yes, ah, let me see.’ She shifted her position and settled back in her fragile chair. I took the opportunity to shift in my unfamiliar suit to a spot where there wasn’t a spring poking insistently into my buttock.

  ‘Well, Miss Babcock, like you I grew up in a small town — Morgan, Oklahoma.’

  ‘You’re kidding? Where’s your Okie accent?’

  ‘You forget that I’ve been away from Oklahoma for many years. Anyway, my father drilled wells for people — water wells, not oil wells, alas. I went to school there — twelve grades in four rooms. And I lived a normal stifling small-town life. But for some reason, I don’t know why, I always harbored a secret ambition to go to an Ivy League women’s college. Well, even college for a girl was a difficult concept for my parents. They didn’t have much money, certainly not enough to send me to college. It was during the Depression. Nevertheless, for years I wrote off for catalogues to all the fanciest schools. I hid them in my closet and sometimes locked myself in with a flashlight and fantasized over my future as a student at one of those places.

  ‘Well, when the time came, I somehow managed to wrest a scholarship offer out of Vassar. After all, I’d been in correspondence with them for years. And then their geographical quota had a lot to do with it, no doubt.’ She said this with a wry glance at me.

  ‘But my parents wouldn’t hear of my going so far away. Why couldn’t I marry some nice Oklahoma boy and settle down and raise a family like a normal Oklahoma girl? Why did I have to go around puttin’ on airs?’ Remarkably, as she talked, her cultivated eastern accent started slipping, and the nasal Oklahoma twang appeared ever so faintly around the edges of her discourse.

  ‘So we fought and we fought and I eventually allowed them to win. I renounced my scholarship. But secretly I had applied to Emory in Atlanta, which was just barely near enough to defuse their distance argument. Emory came through with a scholarship, and I took it.

  ‘And
then they didn’t want me to go for my Ph.D., and they didn’t want me to go to New York to do it. And so it was one continuous struggle with them. Until, as I say, they died.’

  ‘But how could they possibly object to your getting a Ph.D.?’

  She shrugged and sipped her tea. ‘I dare say they wanted a son-in-law and lots of grandchildren. There was a man I was — involved with about that time. A graduate student in chemistry. He was going overseas to fight. He wanted me to marry him and to start on a baby before he was shipped out. But I had just begun my Ph.D. program at Columbia and had all these other things I wanted to do. So I turned him down. It was viewed as a very unpatriotic thing to do at the time, heartless. And especially by my parents, who had met him and were crazy about him. Well, he was killed. In Belgium. But that’s beside the point.’

  I looked at her questioningly. If the fact of her lover’s being killed in Belgium was beside the point, what was the point?

  ‘All parents — the exceptions should be enshrined — view their offspring as reincarnations of themselves,’ she continued. ‘If those children veer too sharply in either direction from the path staked out by their parents, the parents feel rejected, become offended. But what is one to do?’ She smiled tolerantly. ‘What are they to do? What are any of us to do? We’re all trapped. However, one dies.’

  I sipped my tea thoughtfully, fondling these new insights into the character formation of my mentor. ‘But if your parents were impoverished, where did all that beautiful china and stuff they left you come from?’

  ‘It had been in my mother’s family — relics of better times. My mother doted over it. My father didn’t know the difference between Waterford crystal and Welch’s grape jelly glasses. Or care. I remember he used to sit in the kitchen in his dirty T-shirt, with the wind blowing dust through the cracks around the door; and he’d tease my mother by picking up one of those goblets in a huge grimy hand and pretending that he was going to tighten his grip and crumble it to powder. She’d sit there weeping and pleading with him to put it down, and she’d call him an ignorant clod and a crude dolt and anything else she could think of to hurt him. And it did hurt him. He was very aware of the fact that Mother had married beneath herself, as it were. Finally, as she kept needling him about what a great hulking hick he was, he’d set the goblet down and leap to his feet with his eyes bulging and his face purple; and he’d stomp over to her and slap her. She’d scream, and he’d hit her some more and start yelling things like, “Just remember, Maude, why you married a stupid ox like me! None of them fancy fellers you used to run with could put it to you like I done, and thas a fact.” And she’d hiss at him, “The child, Raymond! The child!” I’d usually be cowering behind a chair somewhere. And eventually, after he’d slapped her around some more, and she’d pounded him on his huge chest, and they’d both called each other horrible names and had tears streaming down their faces, he’d drag her off to the bedroom and lock the door. They’d reemerge several hours later — she prim and regal, and he humble and gentle.’

  I stared at Miss Head with fascination. It was as though she’d just done a psychological strip tease for me. Her Oklahoma accent was as heavy as my Tennessee one by now.

  ‘So you see,’ Miss Head concluded briskly, ‘I made it. I got away from all that nonsense. And so can you. It’s simply a matter of choosing how to parcel out your energies, as it were.’

  Suddenly I understood Miss Head’s interest in me: She identified with me. I was the daughter she’d never have. She wanted to mold me into her image every bit as much as her parents had wanted to mold her into theirs. I couldn’t decide whether I felt flattered or threatened. The key question was whether or not I wanted to be a professor at an Ivy League women’s college and spend nine years writing one book. At least it was decent of her to level with me about her intentions — if she was aware she’d done so.

  ‘Yes, but there’s a difference,’ I insisted. ‘You wanted a college in the East, and I didn’t. I had to be dragged here by my father. Though I do like it now.’ The other difference, which I decided not to mention, was the fact that the Major was filthy rich, and that presumably I would be too one day if I outlived him. I didn’t have the Dust Bowl in the Depression to escape from. Nor were my parents’ sadomasochistic tendencies quite so overt as those of her parents.

  ‘Sometimes converts make the most ardent adherents,’ she said quietly, looking into her cup as though reading my future in her tea leaves.

  Following this exchange, I devoted myself with ardor to my studies. My typical day began at seven with a breakfast of boiled eggs and orange juice and coffee at the dorm cafeteria. I had classes all morning. I returned to the cafeteria for lunch. And then I studied all afternoon at the library. Two afternoons a week I had physiology and chemistry labs. After supper, I went to my room and studied until midnight, and then I went to bed. On most weekends I allowed myself to sleep until nine, but then studied until bedtime, with time out only for dinner. I was like a nun. This was my novitiate.

  I was very strict, allowing myself few recreational lapses. One I did allow, however, was trips around Boston with Miss Head to various cultural activities. I could rationalize taking time out for this because they were didactic exercises.

  Once we went to the Museum of Fine Arts. Identical in our green loden coats and wool suits, we stood in one of the echoing marble hallways reverently inspecting some paintings.

  ‘Why’d that guy paint so many pictures of the exact same haystack?’ I asked indignantly.

  Miss Head looked at me with reproof, to indicate that I was once again displaying my hillbilly origins. ‘You must try not to look at them as “haystacks.” Regard them as studies in the relationship between form and light, as it were.’

  I nodded and studied the paintings again. I squinted and turned my head back and forth, but try as I might, I still saw them as haystacks.

  ‘What a wild jug!’ I laughed, pointing to a glass case that contained an earthenware pitcher with intertwined serpents for handles — ‘606 B.C.,’ the tag said.

  Miss Head sighed wearily. ‘My dear Miss Babcock,’ she intoned, looking out at me over her glasses with her eyebrows raised in disbelief, ‘try not to think of it as a “jug.” Regard it as symbolic of a lost civilization. Think of it as — ah — a Rosetta stone to the soul of a vanished race, as it were. Read its form and lines as a template, so to speak, to the minds of an alien species.’

  I shook my head doubtfully.

  ‘Shall we have a bite to eat?’ Miss Head suggested in an exhausted voice.

  ‘Sure. I saw a hamburg place one block over — Steer Haven or something.’

  She lowered her head and looked at me over the top of her glasses again and shook her head sadly. ‘Steer Haven indeed.’

  ‘No?’ What did people in Boston eat then?

  There was room for only eight Formica tables inside the Acropolis Grill. We took the last empty one.

  ‘Good evening, Demetrius,’ Miss Head said, nodding her gray-bunned head to the corpulent waiter who handed us our menus.

  I scanned mine, looking for the hamburger and hot dog section.

  ‘Shall I order for you?’ Miss Head offered.

  I nodded numbly.

  Without enthusiasm, I scooped up mashed eggplant and chickpeas on unleavened bread. I gritted my teeth and dug into sauteed squid, washing it down with a strong wine that smelled and tasted like the creosote Clem used on fence posts.

  ‘Delicious,’ Miss Head notified me.

  ‘Yes.’ In fact, it was pretty good, but when your heart is set on French fries, carp roe salad won’t do.

  We wound up this gastronomic exploration, undertaken for my edification (because surely Miss Head didn’t eat here because she actually enjoyed it?), with a licorice liqueur.

  Another time Miss Head took me to hear the Boston Symphony play Beethoven’s Second. I settled back for a relaxing evening with this middle-aged woman, my teacher and my friend — even if she did persis
t in calling me Miss Babcock. My only friend at Worthley, in fact, since I’d been too busy studying to make more than passing acquaintance with anyone my own age.

  The director strode out and we all applauded, for reasons that were unclear to me since he hadn’t done anything applause-worthy yet. He raised his arms, and I snuggled down in my seat.

  Miss Head gouged me with her elbow and whispered sternly, ‘Concentrate, Miss Babcock. Notice how Beethoven will transform and reintroduce themes throughout the first movement in a standard sonata form.’

  I sat straight up and stared at the orchestra, my ears straining like an awakened housewife listening for burglars. I wasn’t sure that I’d caught the themes, that I’d know a theme if it were served to me on a platter. Aha! There was one. I was sure of it. No. That tune? Yes! No? The orchestra hurtled along, unsympathetic. I glanced at Miss Head in agony. She was nodding in time, serenely, and was shifting her focus from one part of the orchestra to another.

  As the expansive second movement swept in, I settled back with a sigh of relief.

  Miss Head leaned over and hissed, ‘Be alert, Miss Babcock! Notice the devices Beethoven employs to achieve this illusion of peace, hedged in by the intricate construction of the first movement and the lively pace of the third.’

  I shot back up in my seat and concentrated on the concept of repose, how one achieved it in melodic form without violating the rules of symphonic construction.

  I was exhausted by the time the scherzo lurched in, but its lively rhythm soon had me perched on the edge of my seat. I leaned over and said to Miss Head, ‘Kind of makes you want to leap up there and dance, doesn’t it?’

  She looked at me with a frown, to indicate that nothing could have been further from her mind.