“Does he love you?” I ask her.
“I don’t know.”
I laugh. “You’re not helping me, you know.”
She laughs. “I know. I’m sorry. I just, I feel like I can trust you, Hollis. You’ve got your whole life together. Why am I so messed up?”
I don’t have my whole life together. And I don’t know what she means by “messed up.” Before I can manufacture some type of response Shannon scoots over to me, wraps her arm around mine, right under my armpit her hand clasped on my bicep, and rests her head on my shoulder. She has no idea what she’s doing. Instantly those knee bending feelings return. My stomach flips over and both of my feet are shot through with pins and needles, like somebody had been sitting on them for half an hour. I exhale deeply. It’s about all I can do to bear it.
“I, you,” I start, my voice noticeably shaky. I can hear how shaky it is. This is bad. “You’re not messed up. It’s, it’s normal what you’re feeling. Everyone has these doubts, especially when it comes to… marriage. I want to get married and it still really scares me, the thought of it.”
“Really?” she asks, looking up at me.
I avoid making eye contact. “Yeah. For sure.”
Shannon relinquishes her grip and walks the few feet over to the edge of the stream. I notice that my heart is pounding. She must have noticed too.
“I don’t think I can marry him,” she says, now in the middle of the stream, ankle deep in the water.
I don’t say anything.
“No. I can’t marry him. I can’t do it. I won’t do it, Holly. I just won’t.”
Shannon looks at me. She wants me to say something, maybe anything.
“What’s he like?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Mark. What’s he like?”
Shannon stoops down and picks up a rock from the stream. She skips it on the water. She stands back up and shrugs her shoulders. She reaches in the water for another rock.
I keep silent. Shannon comes out of the water. “Can you carry me back to the house?” she asks. “My feet really hurt.”
I’m so caught off guard all I can do is laugh. Thank-fully, Shannon does too. “Just kidding.”
We head back to the house, each under our own power.
CHAPTER THREE
The one downside of my bay window is that the morning sunlight streams right through onto my face. The sun is on my face now. It’s in my eyes and I am awake.
I walk over to the coffeemaker and turn it on. Why do people shower in the morning? Why, especially if you just showered or bathed before bed? Taking a shower to “wake up” is always a euphemism for a comfort indulgence. People take morning showers and then complain about being rushed and being late and not having enough time.
I’m dressed. The coffee is done. I have a meeting with my advisor on campus today. I passed my proposal defense last spring and completed my archival research this summer. My first trip was to Charleston, South Carolina. I was there for a week.
I enjoyed Charleston. I went on a date with the archival assistant, Hannah. She was cute and I asked her out on the third day. There was no pretense to the whole thing, just right to the point. She thought I was joking at first but when I said that I wasn’t she agreed to go out with me. We walked around downtown, had dinner and some drinks, and then took the ferry out to Fort Sumter. The next day she invited me out to Folly Beach. We had fun.
I went to New Orleans next. I’ve been to New Orleans a lot since coming to Starkville. It’s probably my favorite Southern city. My Uncle Bill and Aunt Anne live in New Orleans. Bill is the baby brother of the Lawson boys. Uwe is the oldest, with my dad in the middle.
Bill is a contractor. He developed a successful business in the Boise-Nampa “Treasure Valley.” He and Anne had been living in Nampa, where my Grandpa Bernard and Grama Barbara were from, for years. After Hurricane Katrina hit, there was a big need for all kinds of help. Bill came down for what had originally been scheduled as a two-month trip. He fell in love with the city, convinced Anne to move, and they have lived in New Orleans ever since.
Bill and Anne live on Magazine Street. Anne is a bohemian type. She divides her time between selling candles and lotions (which she makes herself; soaps too), working as a massage therapist, and doing anything for the Church. Bill and Anne, like my mom and dad, are practicing Catholics. Bill is a stereotypical Catholic in some ways. He’s solid on doctrine and fasts during Lent. He also likes to party a lot and drinks beer like it’s water. Come Ash Wednesday, he transforms into a tee tolling, no profanity, daily Mass going penitent unto Easter. Bills prays the Stations of the Cross every day in Lent. But in order to have the stamina for the forty days in the desert, he always begins Mardi Gras two weeks early. “The Fat Fortnight,” he calls it. Bill’s done the Fat Fortnight for seven years running now. He keeps a tally of total Tecate’s drunk and last year he set his current record: 154. He even beat Uwe who had to quit at 147. I think the Fat Fortnight is the most Catholic thing about Uwe; he observes it religiously. Anne hates the Fat Fortnight.
My trip to Notre Dame was financed by a grant I received from the school’s Cushwa Center. It was a good trip. The archives have everything. Is Notre Dame’s name just one more example of man’s unawares-blindness? “Our Lady;” a school—one of the most famous in America, with one of the most polarizing equal parts hated and beloved football teams—called The Blessed Virgin Mary’s Fighting Irish. How many people know what Notre Dame means? I think it’s less than people think it is. How many people care?
I drove up from Starkville through Nashville, Louisville and Indianapolis. When I had gotten past Indianapolis, and was about two hours from South Bend, it struck me how Notre Dame is this oasis in the middle of nothing. You arrive out of a desert of farmland.
It took me driving through all of Indiana, all of it looking like this, to realize that this is the basic topographical characteristic of the Midwest. And it took me a little while longer (I was about ten minutes outside South Bend when this dawned on me) to think that the Midwest’s farmland deserts are no less beautiful, nor any less American, than Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, Florida’s Everglades, and the high, windswept plains in western Nebraska that quickly spill over the border into Wyoming. I saw a sign outside of Indianapolis—Champaign-Urbana 107 mi.—and thought what a great hyphenated name, and isn’t that where the University of Illinois is located? I thought about turning left. Now I have to visit.
I’m going to ride my bike onto campus today. It’s the morning but already plenty hot. It’s got to be over eighty degrees already. The air is heavy. I leave my house, turn right onto University drive and cross over the small bridge that separates the city of Starkville from the Mississippi State campus proper. It’s hot outside and I’m starting to sweat.
Mississippi State has a beautiful campus. The violent thunderstorms that spawn torrential rain, the kind of rainfall that makes a dry front yard five inches flooded in half an hour, is like a great natural sculptor that produces an enchanted landscape of morning fog as thick as buttermilk, bright orange sunsets against royal purple skies, deeply green trees and grass. The climate in the fall and late fall is ideal. The humidity falls away. The temperatures hold steady in the 60s and 70s. Rain is infrequent.
Mississippi is intolerable during the summer. Temperatures can be in the 110s all on their own, even before calculating the heat index. That’s kind of like where it looks this day is headed. You can feel it.
The campus is dotted with trees. The quad, between the library and the student union, in indeed quite quad; handsomely quadly in its essential quadification. The sports buildings, the classrooms, the administrative buildings mix well in a successful example of some type of integrated design. And lest one forget that Mississippi State is an agriculturally-oriented land grant school, a main road from the center of campus leads out to South Farm, slowing changing from smooth paved road to dirt and gravel, the snap crackle popping sound crunching beneath
the tires making you hanker for a bowl of fresh from the pouch Rice Krispies with just the right amount of milk and an impossibly attractive woman next to you enjoying the same; she, unlike you, eating with reserve, eschewing your opened mouthed frenzy, one which can hardly be classified socially acceptable let alone ladylike.
The denizens of Oxford, MS look at Mississippi State, self proclaimed “People’s University,” as a bunch of half farmer, half redneck pseudo-intellectual common folk pretenders to the corncobbed throne. I’m not saying this stereotype is completely false. The other day I was running out at South Farm and a pick-up truck drove by. It was extremely beat up, red, originally, but you could hardly tell because of the thick film of dirt covering it. The windshield sported two large cracks giving the impression that it could break at anytime. A dislocated back bumper hung inches above the ground, almost scraping along. The guy driving the truck was shirtless. He was wearing a straw hat and sunglasses but no shirt.
His passenger was wearing a suit. His black hair was slicked back and matched his black skinny tie. Both were eating ice cream from the MAFES store. Ice cream made from Mississippi State cows, right on campus. To me, this was the microcosm of everything good about Mississippi State. There are no separate spheres. A (here I was guessing, purely speculating) Berkeley grad, second year on the tenure track astrophysicist and his backwoods, sunbeat, barely literate and completely unintelligible uncle riding in the same dilapidated truck enjoying one of man’s greatest pleasures; together.
I have made it to my destination, Allen Hall, and with time to spare. My meeting doesn’t start for five minutes.
Allen Hall is where the history department is housed, on the second floor. Unfortunately, Allen Hall has six floors. Unfortunately, Allen Hall is located near the middle of campus. It is big, ugly and conspicuous and also butt-ugly repugnant to an unprepossessing level of yuck. Everyone I know hates it. I am expecting Gaudí any day now to rise, like the Queen of the South, and (architecturally) condemn the builders of this monstrosity. I’m not saying Allen Hall has to compare to the Sagrada Familia. Maybe it could fit the campus though? That’s the problem: Allen Hall doesn’t fit the campus. In a pretty landscape of red brick, brown and green, Allen Hall is a white concrete eyesore uglier on the inside. Well, at least the second floor history quarters.
One of the first things I learned when I arrived at MSU— and this was really a first first thing, told to me before the mandatory incoming graduate student orientation began—was that the grad student offices on Allen Hall’s second floor are called “the cellblock.” It is a very accurate nickname. The rooms are small and bleak and cold. Two people make them cramped. There are no windows.
My advisor is Doctor Molly Weathers. (She has an office with windows, a couple of them). I’ve heard other professors call her Molls but I don’t call her that. The History department holds to some vestiges of tradition. Maybe when I graduate and have my PhD she’ll want me to consider her a “colleague” or something and I’ll call her Molly, or Molls. Now I call her Dr. Weathers. She is young et, simplement, trop belle pour les mots standard; mots descriptifs normaux. I’ve haven’t asked her her age, of course. She completed her PhD five years ago, from William & Mary, after doing her undergraduate work at the University of San Diego. She looks to be in her mid-thirties. I’d be shocked if she was 37. She has red hair and blue eyes. She wears glasses.
It is true that Doctor Molly Weathers is an attractive woman, much too attractive to be a history professor. A few times during a meeting in her office her beauty has made me zone out and think of other things. Rhett, can you look into that? Rhett? She was asking me about some book. Rhett? I finally came to. Yes, that’s great. I will get it from the library. I was really out of it, imagining us on the beach in Ostia, walking hand in hand in our matching American flag themed swimsuits (because we’re patriots) and dipping our feet into the Mediterranean while she read aloud to me from the Aeneid. Afterwards we would head back into Rome to grab gelato, eating it by the Trevi fountain as we laughed heartily about what a funny thing life is. This is my second favorite Dr. Weathers daydream.
My ultimate is this: A chauffer named Bonhomme Neige picks me up in a limousine on a dark and stormy, properly windswept and downpoured-torrential night with “she’s waiting” his only words before slamming me shut in the back. We drive for a long time up a winding mountain road getting closer and closer to the dark castle perched on top. We arrive at the castle. Neige leads me to the front door, packs me on the back and leaves. I go inside. It’s dark. I can hardly see a thing. And then from a balcony inside Dr. Molls—dressed in a full length shimmering white gown—beckons me to her. I climb a spiral staircase, all the while feeling her sapphire eyes burning a hole through me. I am with her. She instructs me to sit down in a plush chair right at the edge of the balcony. With a soft whisper, and breath smelling of the finest, sweetest mint she whispers in my left ear: “Are you ready?” I nod, silently, and together we enter into the realm of endless interpersonal ecstasy: together we sing, at the very top of our lungs, the Canadian National Anthem—me the English parts, Molls (because it’s my fantasy! She’s just Molls here!) the French—with each delectable note floating in the open caverns of the empty castle, floating out, basting the moist air, and returning to our ears in an auditory syrup sweeter than can be imagined. This is all we do, and we do it forever. Des plus brillants exploits, Et ta valeur, de foi…
Rhett, is that making sense to you?-her usual break my trance question. Yes, I will get it; even if I have to use inter-library loan.-my go-to standard response.
Dr. Weathers is not married. She is currently single. How do I know this? Brent told me that she was dating one of his friends in the English department. They recently broke up. She’s originally from the Pacific Northwest, somewhere in Oregon. When I first met her a couple of years ago, our Idaho-Oregon connection was a nice ice breaker.
I asked her to be my advisor for a couple of reasons. She’s the only historian at Mississippi State who does History of Medicine. Additionally, her specialization is Colonial Era America. I also like her teaching style. I was her TA one semester and took a couple seminars with her while still completing coursework. She is already an acclaimed scholar. Her first book, on small pox, was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize. I know, through the Allen Hall cellblock grapevine, that Dr. Weathers is widely acknowledged as the department’s most talented historian, a future president of the OAH or the AHA, that kind of thing.
Dr. Weathers is a Christian. I’m not sure of which denomination, but she shared that with me once.
I admire her balance and professionalism. I know next to nothing about her personal views. I have no idea if she is a Democrat or a Republican. I don’t know if she is political at all. I don’t know what she thinks about welfare, immigration, gun rights, anything really. Her focus when her focus is on me is on my work, on helping me become a better historian.
She is a consummate professional unlike another, now former, good-riddance-don’t-let-the door-pop’ya-on the bee-hind, member of the department, an adjunct (from Mount Holyoke, I think) who has since moved on who told us on the first day of class, immediately after giving us a little personal mini-bio, “While I identify as straight and cis-gender, I want to declare that I am an ally! Loud and proud, I am as pro-gay as possible. We need to accord the Stonewall riots their proper place in history! It is a disgrace that I even need to say this! You should all be ashamed.”
The class was “Agriculture in Antiquity.” Its chronology began in Mesopotamia and ran through the Egyptians to the Greeks and Romans. MSU’s history department really hits the ARE—Agricultural, Rural and Environmental History— node. Stonewall in a Modern U.S. course, in a lecture on the social movements of the 1960s? How could you leave it out? But I’m not seeing the connection to ancient farming. Maybe it’s just me.
But then I started thinking maybe it’s not just me, that maybe I was right in my initial WTF reaction, a matching WTF rea
ction to the near unanimous WTF reactions of my classmates who all, looking around, were like, WTF? Even uber-brownnoser Alice, someone I’ve had the debatable pleasure/displeasure of taking many classes with, scanned her syllabus furiously hoping to find a way to come to the instructor’s defense, that maybe this was somehow connected to something in the course description. But Alice found, in the immortal words of Louis XVI’s diary entry, dated July 14, 1789: Rien.
The instructor, immediately after making her declaration, added, “I just want to make something perfectly clear before we begin. In this classroom, tolerance is not enough. Everyone needs to be aware that just about any-thing you say, at any time, to anyone, can be taken as offensive, deeply offensive, and can micro-trigger a wave of internal personality crises that lead to questioning the very superstructure of our open and hyper-inclusive societal paradigm. Therefore, I am asking you, no, pleading with you, to please never bring up issues in this class that can in anyway be classified as ‘controversial.’ If you follow the basic rule of thumb that there will be no discussion of religion, politics, sexuality, the environment, labor unions, climate change, the welfare state, the moon landing, sports, stay at home mothers, white privilege, western patriarchal paternalism, school vouchers, Area 51, Mel Gibson and endangered species, I’m sure all will be fine. And for those of you who still don’t catch my drift, read the course title; read the syllabus. Let’s stay on topic, okay?…so, who’s ready for a rocke’em, sock’em robots semester, gang!!?!...[throat cleared over crickets] …If you’ll open your books to page 47…”
The Holdout Page 4