by Lisa Alther
‘It’s too much at once,’ she explained mysteriously.
‘I’m the one who has to take these courses, Miss Head, and these are the ones I want to take. I can switch at mid-term if they’re not what I want And I definitely plan to take your Descartes seminar in January.’
She looked at me, at a loss. Never having been a mother, she was new to the battles of will that went on constantly between parent and child. Finally, she signed the form and handed it to me.
‘Thank you, Miss Head,’ I said, standing up.
‘You’re welcome, I’m sure, Miss Babcock,’ she replied coolly.
Panic seized me. I longed to rip up my schedule and fill out a new one entirely in keeping with her wishes. If I didn’t please this woman, she would withdraw her affection and support. On the other hand, if I didn’t please myself, I might end up like my mother, sacrificed to others’ whims for so long that I’d no longer know what I wanted. And what other message had I been deciphering from Miss Head’s example all these months: I wasn’t doomed to repeat my mother’s patterns of behavior. There were alternatives.
Struggling in the grip of this paradox, I managed to say to Miss Head with equal iciness, ‘It’s very nice seeing you again.’
She nodded her gray-bunned head slightly and offered me a pained smile. Again I wanted to embrace her, to reassure myself of her continuing affection in spite of it all. Again I stopped myself. I had to steady myself against the wall with one hand as I passed through her alcove and into the hall.
I had the same room I’d had the previous year — a small garret on the fifth floor with a windowseat overlooking the courtyard. It smelled musty. I threw open the casement windows and looked toward the lake, past the bronze cast of Artemis on whose outstretched finger someone had hung a yo-yo.
There was a crash and a clatter, and I heard a voice in the next room shout, ‘Oh fuck!’
A tin can was falling through the air. Turning slowly, end over end, it spewed a red liquid onto the gray flagstones and the Flemish sundial in the courtyard below.
There was another clatter next door, and the same coarse voice yelled, ‘Goddam it to hell!’ The can landed with a hollow crunch. As it lay there, the red liquid oozed from the holes in its top. The stones all around it and the bronze sundial were splattered with rusty red dribbles, as though some wild animal had been dismembering its prey on that very spot.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’ the voice roared.
Interested to meet my articulate new neighbor, I knocked tentatively at her door.
‘Yeah?’
I looked in. ‘Are you okay?’
The girl was wearing wheat jeans and a black turtleneck jersey, which fit snugly around her large breasts. She was tall, big, statuesque. Her thick brown hair was plaited in a single braid down her back. Her features were coarse — a wide forehead, a large nose, prominent cheekbones. They had a plasticity that gave her face a startling expressiveness. In the few seconds between my opening her door and speaking to her, a phenomenal range of emotions had flitted across her face — surprise, embarrassment, irritation, curiosity.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I didn’t know anyone but me was on the hall yet.’
‘I just got here. I guess we’re neighbors. I’m Ginny Babcock.’
‘Edna Holzer. Eddie.’
I recognized the name. She was a junior, an editor on the campus newspaper. I glanced around her room. It looked remarkably lived in to have been occupied for only a day or two. There were playbills and a Bob Dylan poster plastered across one wall, a Mexican blanket on another, a guitar propped in a corner, some small clay sculptures sitting on the college-issue desk and on the window seat.
‘What happened — the crashing and the yelling?’
‘I knocked over a can of tomato juice. I keep stuff for breakfast on my outside window ledge. For the mornings when I oversleep and miss breakfast. Which is often.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, nice to meet you. See you later, I imagine,’ I said, withdrawing from her room. ‘Glad you’re all right. That tomato juice splattering all over everything looked like blood.’
She looked at me with interest. “Did you think so?’ I felt as though I’d just unwittingly handed her the key to my character. ‘Where are you from, Ginny?’
‘Tennessee.’
The look of disgust that seemed the most natural expression in her vast repertoire, held in abeyance until now, came over her face. ‘Christ, you southerners make me sick.’
‘Why?’ I asked in amazement at this unprovoked assault.
‘Have you been reading the papers? Those civil rights workers getting murdered and buried in the levees? Jesus, are there really such morons down there?’
‘We’re not much different from people up here. We just sound different. Well, see you around, Eddie. I’ve got to get back to my unpacking.’ I stomped from her room, amazed to find myself suddenly functioning as an ambassador from the South.
The next morning I met my neighbor on the other side — a freshman from Iowa named Bev Martin. She was tall and bony and awkward, with wide panicked eyes that shifted like a frightened rabbit’s. She spoke in a near whisper. High strung, I labeled her. She and Eddie and I made good neighbors: We left each other strictly alone. Bev and I studied continuously, either in the library or in our rooms. And Eddie was always working on editorials for the newspaper — proposing trade embargoes on South Africa, demanding that the college sell its defense industry stocks, insisting that birth control pills be dispensed by the desiccated spinsters at the college infirmary. Or sculpting in a studio at the arts center. I also learned that she was on a scholarship and earned her spending money by playing her guitar in a coffee house in Cambridge. When she had time to do things like reading assignments and papers, I never found out. Perhaps she didn’t do them, and persuaded me to drop out of Worthley with her at the end of that year merely because she was going to be thrown out anyway. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
One night I was lying on my bed reading in my physics text that, due to tidal friction, the rotation of the earth was slowing down by ten to fifteen microseconds a day. On a scratch pad I was trying to estimate how long it would take for the rotation of the earth to cease altogether, for the oceans on the sun side to reach the boiling point, when my door crashed open and in strolled Eddie Holzer in her wheat jeans and turtleneck.
‘You might at least knock,’ I said sourly, irritated at being interrupted in my calculation of the apocalypse.
‘Oh, excuse me, were you masturbating?’
I flushed scarlet.
‘You do masturbate, don’t you? No? You really should try it. I recommend it highly. It relieves all sorts of tensions. Or do you have a regular man?’
I pulled myself together and notified her primly, ‘I’m not interested in that sort of thing.’
‘You’re not? What are you interested in?’ she asked, flopping down familiarly on the foot of my bed.
‘Knowledge, truth, stuff like that.’
‘You say that as though it’s something you can go out and buy in a package.’
“Well, you can, in a way. You can buy books that contain it.’
‘So that it’s just a question of transferring information from the pages of a book into your head?’
‘More or less.’
‘How quaint!’
‘I don’t see what’s quaint about it. It’s just a question of being able to find enough uninterrupted time to be able to absorb it all.’
‘Yeah. All right. I get you,’ she snapped, standing up. ‘I just wanted to ask if you’d take part in a Fast for Freedom tomorrow night. For each student who skips supper, Worthley will give fifty cents to the fund to bus black children out of Roxbury to white schools.’
‘Do I have any choice?’
‘Of course you have a choice. You either go to dinner or you don’t. I’m just asking you not to.’
‘Actually, I think I’ll go to dinner. You see, I’m apolitical
. I agree with Descartes when he says his maxim is “to try always to conquer [himself] rather than fortune, and to alter [his] desires rather than change the order of the world, and generally accustom [himself] to believe that there is nothing entirely within [his] power but [his] own thoughts.” I had memorized word for word the quote first presented to me by Miss Head.
‘Descartes! Do you think I give a shit what Descartes says? If my eyes were rotting in my skull from disuse, I wouldn’t read Descartes. That fascist son of a bitch!’
‘Politics is nothing but personal opinion,’ I replied disdainfully. ‘For every person who agrees with your editorials about busing children out of Roxbury, you’ll find an equal number who disagree. And for equally logical reasons. Maybe not here at Worthley, where it’s high fashion to be liberal, but certainly in the outside world.’
‘I never said the world isn’t full of fascists. That’s why those of us who aren’t have to speak out.’
“What makes you so sure your opinions are correct? That’s why I’m apolitical. I’m not interested in opinions. I’m interested in Truth!’
‘Truth! Truth! Ginny, you’re priceless, just priceless. Really you are. And Descartes is Truth?’
‘Descartes at least has the intellectual humility to limit his pronouncements to areas in which he can discern the truth, rather than mouthing off irresponsible opinions about every topic under the sun.’
‘That I-think-therefore-I-am crap?’
‘I don’t see that it’s “crap,” as you so inelegantly call it. It happens to be as verifiable as a mathematical proof.’
‘Have you read any Nietzsche yet?’
‘I’m reading him this term.’
‘Read what Nietzsche has to say about your precious Descartes. You’ve been hanging out with that Head chick, haven’t you?’ She shook her braided head sadly.
‘Miss Head is a friend of mine. What of it?’
Eddie sighed with pity. ‘You’re hopeless. I bet you even go for that Hegelian thesis-antithesis garbage in a big way? You southerners are so predictably reactionary.’
‘Who asked you?’ I shot back as she vanished out my door.
Never did I enjoy a Worthley meal more than supper the next night — me and Miss Head and half a dozen insistently apolitical others, all alone in the vast echoing dining hall under the gaze of the medieval gargoyles that ringed the pillars. At one point Eddie appeared in the doorway and rapidly jotted down all our names.
However, after dinner, I did hesitantly look up in Beyond Good and Evil what Nietzsche had to say about Descartes:
‘There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are ‘‘immediate certainties” ; for instance, “I think.”…They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic…whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or “suggestion,” which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event…When I analyze the process that is experienced “I think,” I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an “ego,” and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking — that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps “willing” or “feeling” ?’
I leapt up enraged at (although unable to refute) this attack on the noble Descartes. I threw open my door and stalked to Eddie’s and hurled it open with a crash. Peter, Paul, and Mary’s ‘Blowing in the Wind’ blared out from her record player. She looked up from her desk with alarm, then smiled when she saw me and said in a fair imitation of a southern drawl, ‘Way-ell, if hit in’nt mah l’il southern buddy!’ When I didn’t smile, and when my face remained contorted with rage, she added with concern, ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Yes! Something very definitely is wrong. I just read what that bastard Nietzsche has to say about Descartes.’
She grinned knowingly. ‘What do you think about it?’
Deciding that creeps like Eddie had to be dealt with on their own terms, I snarled, ‘I think it sucks.’
Eddie positively beamed. ‘It sucks, huh? Do you know what that means — “to suck” ?’
I glared at her. ‘I don’t know why you’re always so goddam patronizing to me. You seem to think I’m some kind of naive belle or something. Yes, I know what “to suck” means.’ Presumably, that was what I had failed to do to Clem the night he beat me up in the bomb shelter.
‘What do you think of it?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of sucking.’
‘What does that have to do with Descartes?’
‘Absolutely nothing!’ she declared triumphantly. ‘That’s my whole point. I suck, therefore I am. What do you think?’
‘Man happens to be more than…’
‘Man — shit! I don’t even talk to people who try to tell me what “man” is or isn’t. If you want to talk about some one particular action of one particular person, okay. But don’t hand me any of this pompous “Mankind is this or that” garbage because I’m not interested. Go see your Miss Head.’ She turned back to her desk.
I skulked to my room and brooded on into the night. The citadels constructed by Miss Head were clearly under attack.
Miss Head left a note in my mailbox inviting me to a production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. I hadn’t seen her very much since the term began because I wasn’t taking one of her courses, and because we were both so busy otherwise. So I accepted with delight.
We met in the downstairs hall. She looked almost pretty, despite her gray bun and her shapeless loden coat. In my pleasure at seeing her, I reached out and hugged her with one arm. She stiffened and drew back, blushing and searching for her watch underneath her coat. ‘My car’s outside. We’re late. We’d better rush.’
Even being late didn’t prevent my inspecting the back floor of her car for hidden murderers, as the Major had always advised. On the way to the opera, we took a wrong turn. As we wound through strange streets, the neighborhood got more and more seedy. Trash filled the gutters, and the shop fronts needed painting. The MTA rumbled past on grimy overhead tracks, and the people on the streets were mostly black. I realized that we were in Roxbury. The fast that Eddie had organized had been for the purpose of busing schoolchildren out of here.
‘I don’t know,’ I said hesitantly. ‘Maybe we should have fasted that night. This is a pretty grim setting for children, don’t you think?’
Miss Head glanced at me impatiently. ‘Please spare me your sentimentalizing, Miss Babcock. You’ve clearly been reading too many editorials by that Holzer girl.’
‘Well, but don’t you find it a little depressing?’ We were driving down a block of crumbling row houses, where a group of black children were poking with sticks at candy wrappers and newspapers that floated sluggishly in the murky water around a clogged gutter drain.
‘You can’t generalize. Squalid circumstances can sometimes produce outstanding achievers.’
She was clearly referring to herself and her Dust Bowl origins. “Well, you got out of Morgan. But what about those who didn’t?’
‘My childhood friends aren’t unhappy with their lives. Or not any more so than anyone else. After all, they have nothing to compare Morgan with.’
‘But isn’t that in itself a shame? That they were never exposed to any other possibilities for themselves?’
‘What makes you so sure that Worthley beats Morgan?’ she asked with a faint ironic smile. ‘It is so condescending of you, Miss Babcock. It shows a basic lack of respect for the dignity of people different from yourself. That’s what irritates me s
o much about Miss Holzer’s half-baked editorials. It never occurs to her that there might be anything in Roxbury for the children of value equivalent to a white middle-class education.’
‘But I haven’t said that Worthley beats Morgan. Or Hullsport. If you’ll recall, I didn’t even want to leave Hullsport. I had to be dragged up here by my father. But you, Miss Head, have said that Worthley beats Morgan.’
‘For me, as I am now, it does,’ she said patiently. ‘But if I had stayed in Morgan, I’d have been a different person than I am now, and Morgan would suit me better.’
‘A better person than you are now?’
‘I didn’t say better or worse, I said different. Really, Miss Babcock, you must work on your objectivity. It’s nonsense using words like “good” and “bad.” What happens happens. That’s not your concern.’
‘You mean no one course of action is any better or worse than another?’ I demanded, scandalized to see where Miss Head’s line of thought — and mine insofar as I had taken her as my mentor — was leading.
‘Courses of action aren’t your concern, Miss Babcock. Your concern is to understand, to locate the Truth in a situation. Which is done, as Spinoza told you last year if you were paying attention, by stilling your emotions, your passions, and functioning as an instrument of pure thought. Detachment is everything, Miss Babcock, believe me. Evil is always with us, Spinoza says. “Things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind…Matter was not lacking to God for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest. The laws of His nature are so vast as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intelligence.”’
‘But Miss Head, I don’t know if I agree with that. I mean, look what Nietzsche says about the possibility of there even being such a thing as detachment or “pure thought.”’
She blanched in the dim streetlight through the car window. ‘Well, course, if you’re going to fall under the spell of that miserable neurotic mystic, there’s not a great deal that Descartes can do for you, Miss Babcock. Do you know that Mussolini adored Nietzsche? No, of course you don’t. I’d look into Nietzsche’s pedigree before enrolling myself under his banner if I were you, Miss Babcock.’