by Alix Ohlin
I called home as soon as I got the postcard, but no one answered for hours. Finally Robin picked up at ten p.m., sounding forlorn.
“Should I come home? Are you okay?”
I could hear her crying, then a long, mucusy sniffle. “No, I’m all right,” she said.
Silence between us on the line, but a known one. The rhythm of my sister’s breath.
“She was so nice,” I said.
“She was really nice.”
“Did she still have that cat? Marcel?”
“No,” Robin said. “The cat died a while ago.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I hadn’t seen her in months. I’ve been practicing at my other teacher’s house because the piano is better. She never told me she was sick.”
“She probably didn’t want you to worry.”
“The last time I saw her she said I needed to read Proust. That it would help my playing. I was like, what? I just shrugged and ignored her.”
“She loved you,” I said.
“Don’t you think I know that?” my sister said, her voice squeaking with distress.
10.
I regret that I didn’t take the bus home for the funeral. But I had my first exams coming up, and I had only just integrated myself into college life; I was worried that if I left it, the place might seal up against me and not let me back in. Robin wrote me a postcard about the service later. She said Mrs. Gasparian’s students were there—she had no family—and that Robin had played a sonata, and then everyone drank coffee and ate poppy seed cake.
At the edge of the Worthen campus, up the steep side of a hill, was a stand of large trees that students used at night for drug trips or sex. During the day it was empty, and I often took refuge there when I needed time alone. I’d sit on a fallen log and listen to the uneasy swish of branches, the occasional bell of the campus chapel, and the trucks grinding in the industrial park below. On the morning after I spoke to Robin about Mrs. Gasparian, I was startled by a man who entered the woods walking fast and panting hard, punctuating every step by stabbing a walking stick into the forest floor. Crashing along the path, his eyes on the ground, he didn’t see me until he almost sat down on my lap.
“Oh!” he said. “I usually sit here.”
I stood up, flustered and a little annoyed. “I usually sit here too,” I said.
He was wearing khaki shorts, though the weather was cold, and a heavy knit sweater flecked with pine needles and bits of leaves, as if he’d been sleeping outside. He was round and stout, with a reddish beard, and he could have been twenty or forty or anywhere in between. His legs were furry with light orange hair, and I found myself staring at them, wanting to run my hands over them; it was less a sexual attraction than whatever impulse leads a person to stroke an animal’s fur.
“I’ve seen you before,” he said, his voice changing. “You live in Marston, right? Your roommate is the Running Girl.”
“My roommate is Helen,” I said stiffly. “She’s on the track team.”
“We just call her the Running Girl, because she always jogs past our window in her sweats. We’ve never seen her in normal clothes.”
“She wears them,” I said, compelled to defend her. I could sense him staring at me, and it made me more self-conscious than I’d felt since arriving at Worthen. I focused lower down, on his feet, which were encased in old-fashioned leather boots. He was outfitted as if for a days-long hike, though our campus was steps away.
“We call you Looks Down at the Ground,” he said cheerfully. “You never make eye contact with anybody.”
“Yes, I do,” I said, meeting his eyes, which were green and not as confrontational as I’d imagined. Somehow this made me even more uncomfortable, and I sought safety in his shoes again. He leaned against his walking stick and laughed at me—for confirming the nickname, I suppose.
“I’m Gordon,” he said.
“Are you Canadian?”
“No! I’m from Jamaica Plain. Why, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a lot of Gordons in Canada?”
“Yes,” I said. “There were three in my graduating class. We called them Big Gordon, Little Gordon, and one was just Gord.”
“Huh,” he said, uninterested in this trivia. “My parents are ridiculous Anglophiles. They drink pots of tea all day long and say WC instead of bathroom. God knows why. Their people are from Rhode Island, probably expelled by the very royalty they now worship.”
“Expelled for what?”
“Being thugs,” he said airily. “In an early-eighteenth-century kind of way.”
I would have liked to hear more about this, but his attention wandered. He gestured toward the trail with his stick and began walking, and I followed him. As he huffed and puffed up the hill—he was not fit—he explained that he was a senior at Worthen, studying history, and he was getting in shape because after graduation he planned to spend six months hiking the Appalachian Trail. “You know, going to the woods to live deliberately and all that jazz,” he said, summarizing the jazz with a wave of his hand. He seemed a long way off being able to accomplish a six-month hike, because we stopped every couple minutes for him to catch his breath. Part of the problem, though, was that he was talking so much. Another person might have relieved him of the conversational burden, but it didn’t occur to me. I stopped and paused with him and waited for him to continue. He told me about the thesis he was writing about the history of religious violence in the nineteenth century—“People always talk about the separation of church and state,” he said, “but this is a country founded by religious extremists and that informs our national character as much as anything”—and about walks he used to take as a child with his dog Coconut, giving each subject equal weight and attention. He talked about music he liked and why David Bowie was better than Bob Dylan (“there’s the same degree of musicianship but more intellectually rigorous, you know what I mean?”—I did not) and about how hip-hop was the metaphysical poetry of our time. When, half an hour later, we reached the far end of the forest, we turned around and walked back to campus together as if this had been our plan all along.
In front of my dorm, he asked me if I’d like to have dinner that night, and I said yes, assuming he meant in the cafeteria. But when I came outside at six he was wearing khaki pants, a blue collared shirt, and a corduroy blazer, and we walked ten minutes to a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall on the other side of the industrial park. In contrast to the morning, he spoke little, and silence gaped between us. When we sat down, a waiter brought us a pot of tea, and we each guzzled three or four tiny cups of it, as if slaking desperate thirst.
“Your parents would like this, I guess,” I said.
“What? Chinese food?”
“The tea,” I said. “You said they drink a lot of it.”
“Oh right. I can’t believe you remember that. You’re a good listener.”
“It was only this morning,” I said.
He fidgeted in his dress-up clothes like a kid at a wedding. “So, Lark,” he said. “Lark, Lark, Lark. Did your parents name you for a joke?”
“What?” I said.
“I don’t mean, did they name you that to tease you. I mean, a lark can be a bird or it can be an amusing escapade. Are you an amusing escapade?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I was fidgeting myself; due to nerves and copious tea drinking I needed to visit the washroom but was too shy to excuse myself from the table before we had even ordered. I was afraid of how it might look. I had no experience with boys, and Gordon, three years my senior, seemed a man.
“So your parents were neither ornithologists nor British roustabouts,” he said.
“Not really,” I said.
He nodded, the teacup miniscule in his large hands. They were furry too, I not
iced. It was pleasant, his hairiness; once again I imagined stroking them. He reminded me of an orangutan, and I almost told him so, before realizing this might not be received as a compliment.
“My sister’s name is Robin,” I told him, “so that probably tips the scales toward bird-loving.” Robin had in fact been a compromise between Marianne and Bob, who wanted to call her Roberta after himself, a name that my mother declared was only suited for ugly girls.
“Lark and Robin, are you serious?” he said. “Who are your brothers, Duck and Goose? Sorry, that was a stupid joke.”
“It was pretty dumb,” I agreed.
“Man, you don’t make things easy, you know that, Looks Down at the Ground?”
I glanced at him. His face was flushed with anger, or so I thought, but the tone was closer to admiration. Warming to the subject of birds, he told me how a German man brought European starlings to the US because he wanted to introduce to North America every bird mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare. Now starlings outnumbered and outcompeted many native birds; they even stole grain from dairy farms, reducing milk production. “They’re invasive pests,” he said, folding his palms together on the table. “And that’s why literature is dangerous.”
“I see,” I said. I was happy to meet someone whose enthusiasm for stray bits of information matched my own: another collector, another magpie.
He was more relaxed now, and his opinions on Shakespeare (“the history plays are so much better than romantic schlock like Romeo and Juliet, but that’s not what goes over in Peoria”) and Unitarianism (“I mean, is it even religion, or is it community theatre?”) kept us going through egg rolls and chicken fried rice. After dinner, we walked slowly back to campus, along the industrial park. A pack of cyclists passed us, a pizza-delivery car. There was no sidewalk and we kept jostling elbows and shoulders. On campus, I could see other students heading to and from the library and evening classes.
Gordon said, “My roommate is performing at this concert thing on Friday night. His band is frankly terrible, it’s supposed to be Buddhist synth-pop, whatever that is, but I should go. To support him.”
“I see,” I said. I thought it was just more information.
“It’s at eight,” he said, persisting.
“Sounds interesting.”
At the entrance to my dorm he lunged forward and kissed me, wetly, on my cheek; having turned toward him too early, I forced him to make contact just below my ear, and I felt the trail of his saliva there.
“I’ll see you?” he said, and I said, “Yes.”
* * *
—
It took a conversation with Helen for me to interpret everything that had happened, as she patiently listened to my account of the evening and made sense of it for me. I didn’t tell her that she was known to Gordon and his friends as the Running Girl, but she knew who he was as soon as I described him. “He’s that burly guy,” she said, which was so appropriate that I thought of him that way for weeks afterward. The burly guy is kissing me, I would think. The burly guy is in my bed. “He lives with skinny Mike, the bass player for Smiling Avatar.” This, I guessed, was the Buddhist synth-pop band. I waited for Helen to say more about either of them, passing judgment, but she was too sensitive to do so.
“Are you into him?” she asked instead.
I’d never been into anybody. “I’m not sure,” I told her.
“I know the feeling,” she said dryly, then went out for a run.
On Friday she agreed to go to the concert with me. It was in the basement of the college chapel, which, being godless, I’d never visited before. We entered a dark, cramped hallway and then filed downstairs into a surprisingly large room. At the far end, the band was tuning up, and continued to do so for at least half an hour. Near us, people were helping themselves to punch from a bowl into which Gordon, the burly guy, was pouring a bottle of Everclear. We joined the queue, and Gordon smiled widely when he saw us.
Since coming to school I hadn’t drunk much, less out of prudence than pre-emptive embarrassment; I didn’t know how to drink or how to behave while doing it. Everyone else, even the bookish introverts, seemed to know how to banter and flirt, how to rehash their adventures the next morning while moaning about their hangovers. It was mysterious to me. But now I gulped down half a cup of punch that tasted angrily medicinal. Gordon was busy with other customers, so I followed Helen around as she chatted with people from our dorm or her classes. I envied her ease. As she spoke, nodding and laughing, she kept lifting her long hair into a ponytail, smoothing it, letting it go, over and over.
“You keep staring at her like that and I’m going to be jealous,” said a voice in my ear. I turned to see Gordon with two cups in his hands. He held one out to me and went on, “Do you think there’s any slower process than the tuning of a college band? I’ve seen elephants gestate babies in less time than this.”
“Almost two years,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “I knew I liked you.”
I smiled at him, waiting for him to segue into another of his monologues, but instead he rattled off a series of questions—what was my major going to be, how were my classes—as if completing a questionnaire.
“Mike says I talk too much,” he confessed after a few of my one-sentence responses. “He says girls like it when you ask questions.”
I was touched that he was concerned about what I’d like. “I’m happier when other people talk.”
“Well, I can’t shut up, so that works out perfectly,” he said.
At last the band began to play, jangling music with no lyrics and strummed chords that, for all the preparations, sounded out of tune. Gordon kept muttering, “Christ, this is terrible.” He circled his arm around my waist, and after a while I realized he was slowly edging me across the room. By the third song we were in the stairwell, my back against the wall, his palms braced on either side. I felt trapped and contained, as if in a cozy coffin.
“Your eyes look bloodshot,” he said. “Are you stoned? Which, it’s fine if you are.”
“No,” I said. “A little drunk, I think.”
“Too drunk to be a consenting adult?”
I considered. “No.”
His ample stomach pressed against me, an insistent pillow. If I fell down, his weight would prop me up.
“So are you consenting?”
“Yes,” I said. Then came a hairy flurry of lips and chin against mine. Around my ears he made little snorting sounds, like a pig seeking a truffle. Or how I imagined a pig would seek a truffle. I was enjoying myself enormously. I didn’t have to worry about not knowing what to do. His certainty, I thought, would protect us both.
11.
Gordon and I saw each other nearly every day after that, coordinating our schedules with our roommates, so we could be alone in his dorm bed or mine. Sometimes we borrowed a car from his friend Mike and explored local trails. Although he always talked about how busy he was and how much pressure he was under, there seemed to be plenty of time in the days for hiking, talking, and sex. Many of our dates had a scholarly cast. We met in the library to study side by side, reading each other’s papers, with Gordon scrawling all over mine in large blue exclamations. EXPAND THIS THOUGHT!! WHERE IS YOUR SUPPORT FOR THIS ARGUMENT??? Gordon was my first exposure to a certain type of intellectual male—brashly confident, endlessly opinionated—and I was too young to see him as a type at all. I thought his genius was unique. I wrote to please him as much as my professors, and fortunately for me their standards weren’t at odds. My grades were high, and so was my confidence; I began speaking up in class and sometimes lingering afterward to continue talking with one or two others. It’s hard to explain how much this meant to me, how giddying it was: the sensation of tasting food after years of hunger, of eating freely and knowing there would be more.
I was happy; I was
also busy. My scholarship covered room, board, and tuition, but I hadn’t understood that a student’s life might include further expenses. I needed money for books, laundry, snacks, and contributions to the punch fund at parties. Having told Marianne when I left that everything would be covered, I refused to ask for help, and instead found a job in the college’s computer lab, in the basement of the student union building. It was 1994, and although some students at Worthen owned computers, I couldn’t afford one, so I outlined my papers longhand, on yellow legal pads, then typed them at the lab, squinting at my own handwriting. One evening while I was working, the attendant there—so far as I could tell, his only duty was to sit at a desk by the front and help people when the printer jammed—opened a bottle of Coke that he must have been carrying around for a while because it sprayed wildly, covering his keyboard with brown foam.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he said. “Richard’s going to kill me.” He made a few half-hearted stabs at mopping up the Coke, then gathered up his stuff and left, the desk still puddled with liquid. I wasn’t the neatest person, but I’d always found the lab’s quiet sterility soothing and hated to see it disturbed. I went to the washroom for some paper towels and cleaned up the mess, then returned to my work.
A few days later, I went back to finish another assignment, and there was no student at the front. Instead, a very tall man who barely fit at the desk glanced at me, then glanced again. He had big, pale, watery blue eyes made even bigger by thick-lensed glasses, and he moved and spoke slowly, with a strangely weightless grace, like an underwater mammal.
