by Meg Wolitzer
Decades later, Jill thought that if she could coax the same elegance and grace from her rashy, unhappy, and earthbound baby, then her future would be secured. As it would turn out, Nadia Comaneci’s future was not so perfect; it was said she had become part of Ceauşescu’s circle as a teenager, wearing garish eye makeup and hanging out in bars with the dictator’s son. Eventually, a few weeks before the revolution, Nadia Comaneci defected to the United States. Now apparently she was making a good life for herself somewhere in this huge country, an American citizen just like the little girl who had been named after her.
Jill and Donald had tried so hard to have their own baby! Even now, Jill could recall the ordeal of continual and conscripted sex. He would come home from the accounting firm, and Jill would be waiting for him. Donald would slip off his tie and shirt and trousers, and together they would try to forget anything that had happened to them that day and to focus only on themselves and their shared mission.
They would have sex on the bed or sometimes on the couch in the living room until her back became embossed with the twill of the cushions, and both her insides and Donald’s outsides pulsated in synchrony. Though there was no joy in the act by then, at least there was humor. “That was beautiful,” or “That was so moving,” they would say afterward, laughing a little. But no matter what they did, the egg and the sperm would not join together like the two halves of a necklace clasp.
Her life bore no resemblance to the way she once had imagined it. Over the years she had changed and changed again. By the time she started to try to get pregnant, she barely understood her own “goals”—that word used by guidance counselors and career planners. Jill had always been a wonderful student, handing her papers in by the deadline and receiving praise. Physically, she knew she gave off the superficial appearance of success: pretty, fair-haired, athletic, well-mannered, and very tall, though she was the kind of female tall that tends to slouch, rounding her shoulders against the assault of appearing different. She did not want to stand out; she wanted to succeed, yes, to become someone who was admired, but she wanted to do it in a quiet and modest way.
Jill’s work history hadn’t been what was expected of her. After college she’d entered a new graduate program at NYU called Studies in American Cultural Modes. This was during the late 1980s, a time when AIDS had begun to terrify everyone, everywhere, and the dreamy gauze of Reagan wealth and self-satisfaction had started to lift, and all things seemed in transition, even academia. In that moment, various indescribable and wafting departments flourished at universities, and Jill had been seduced. The description of her program seemed to suggest that she wouldn’t have to narrow herself too much, that she could remain a generalist with various pockets of knowledge.
At first the experience actually was expansive. Jill eagerly attended seminars for three years, but after the course work ended—a thick paste of history, political science, and popular culture that moved swiftly and madly through gender, race, and consequence, jumping from the Civil War to the civil rights movement; nodding briefly at the invention of music videos and the rise on campus of queer theory, black studies, and women’s studies; and incorporating the mobilization of AIDS activism, all of it part of the questing American experience—she had found herself left thunderously alone to write her dissertation.
Ever since prep school Jill had found herself in the swimmy light of academic fluorescence, wandering serenely up to the reserve room at the library to spend a few hours with the handout that the instructor had left for the students. She liked to sit and study with absolute stillness, like a dog listening for its master. Every part of her body would be attentive, even her wrists, she thought, her spleen. What always made her do well was the presence of a mentor. Since she was very young, she had been the kind of girl who latched on to a teacher and stayed there. She took page upon page of neatly written notes; she also allied herself with the brightest teacher she could find who was also very kind and seemed interested in mentorship. That way, school was never frightening, and she never felt particularly alone.
This had happened in graduate school too; like almost all the other students in the fledgling department, Jill had become enamored of Dr. Michael Dearborn, one of the younger lights there. When he spoke during seminars, the graduate students felt a mixture of awe and jealousy, for he was not that much older than they were, and yet he possessed a fluency that they couldn’t imagine ever possessing themselves. He was a handsome, black-bearded man who wore jeans and a tiny hoop earring and was said to be bisexual, the lover of a male semiotics graduate student at Brown. Jill was often among the group of acolytes who sometimes had beers with Dearborn at any number of bars along Bleecker Street. When the weather got warm they would all sit outside at night after their seminar, and he would stretch out his long legs and put his feet up on an empty metal chair, dominating conversation and talking in a ranging and free-associative way.
“When I was a precocious young thug at Yale, no more than nineteen, I went to hear Susan Sontag give a lecture about French theater,” he said one night. “And afterward, at the little reception, I went up to her and said, ‘Excuse me, Ms. Sontag,’ or, no, worse, I think I said, ‘Excuse me, Susan,’ though I’d never met her before in my life. And then I said I thought that maybe there was a link between her remarks on Sartre and a certain feeling of dread and emptiness that I had noticed in 1970s popular culture, particularly television, which I’d grown up watching plenty of. I explained to her about the flatness of set on certain TV shows, the ugly burnt-orange color scheme, the use of the ‘intrusive neighbor’ to provide camaraderie—but really, inadvertently, to highlight the notion of the nuclear family’s aloneness—and the generic and nightmarish dullness of the family construct that was always insisted upon in American television sitcoms of that period, like Count Me In, or Back to Back. And how the whole aesthetic seemed, in its own way, to reference the ugly entrapment that Sartre had depicted in No Exit and elsewhere.”
The students around him sat in anticipation, excited, waiting to see where this would go. “So what did she say?” Jill had asked.
“Sontag? She said, ‘Oh.’ And then she said, ‘Excuse me, I’m going to get some more cheese,’ and she walked away.”
“Did she actually get some more cheese?” another student thought to ask.
“No,” said Dr. Dearborn after a moment, perplexed, as if just realizing this for the first time, though he’d told the story numerous times already. “She didn’t, actually. She just started talking to someone else.”
They shook their heads sympathetically, and they put their beers to their lips in the half-dark outside the bar. He, like Susan Sontag, was both high and low, serious and frivolous, dark and beautiful and intelligent, and just beyond their reach.
“Should I be jealous of this Dearborn?” Donald asked that night when Jill came home to the apartment they were now able to live in on West Eleventh Street, primarily because of Jill’s trust fund. Her family had founded the successful company Benecraft, which manufactured shellac. “You are a shellac heiress,” Amy had once marveled. Donald Hamlin was on the way toward double degrees: an MBA as well as a Ph.D. in accounting, “which is not the way it looks,” he had assured her at the very beginning, when they had met at another graduate student’s potluck dinner. Jill had convinced herself during that evening, before they’d had a chance to really speak, that Donald was a student either of history or philosophy; she had been a little disappointed when she learned the truth about his two fields of study. Donald was serious, observant, prematurely bald, slender in a pale blue Brooks Brothers shirt and pressed pants, his napkin opened on his lap. He resembled a polite greyhound as he sat on the floor by the coffee table, eating. He went on to prove to her that though he was cultivating “a somewhat wonkish persona,” he would not become dull. “I am still going to be sarcastic and dry. I won’t be like Dr. Michael Dearborn, of course,” he said, “but I will try to be very piquant.”
Jill saw that Dona
ld didn’t really understand exactly what she was studying; that the high-low, smorgasbord quality of her class work made no organic sense to him. Donald imagined that her doctoral program was beyond him intellectually, and he seemed to like to think this, so she let him. But it wasn’t really true, for he was extremely bright, and even she wasn’t exactly sure of all the connections behind what she was studying, either, though she was generically excited by ideas—by the idea of ideas. Her powerful transference toward Michael Dearborn wasn’t sexual. He had a seraphic face that was set into relief by his thick black beard, but she didn’t want him to touch her. She wanted Donald, whom she now loved, to touch her; she wanted Michael Dearborn to love her academic work.
As long as Dearborn approved of her short papers and encouraged the direction of her thinking about the doctoral dissertation that lay ahead, she didn’t falter. “Sometimes,” Jill would tell Amy, who was then in law school in Michigan, “I have an uneasy sensation about staying in school so long.”
“Oh, you mean because it’s like never growing up?” said Amy.
“No. It’s just that, as you know, I’m someone who always did well in school, and that’s my primary strength, and one day it’s going to catch up with me.”
“I don’t think so. You have to keep moving forward, that’s all. School will end eventually, and then you’re going to have to do something with all of it.”
So on Jill went through the course work and the office hours with her advisor and mentor Michael Dearborn, and then she began the development of her thesis. After much embattled thinking and many long conversations in Dearborn’s little office, she had chosen to write about “Women’s Unheard Voices in Antebellum America,” which would allow her to combine a particular Civil War interest with a twist of femaleness, “thus marrying history and politics,” as she wrote in her proposal. The component of popular culture—always Dearborn’s favorite part—would have no place here; there was no way she could sensibly draw it into her topic, though he was clearly a little disappointed. He wanted the students in the department to cast as wide a cultural net as possible in everything they studied, and he wanted them to trawl at the bottom of the culture for meaning too.
Then the actual writing began. She barely saw Dearborn anymore. He had sent her off with kind words and a distant glance toward the next student waiting outside in the hallway during office hours. Yes, he was her mentor, but he insisted that she would do just fine on her own during this protracted period. Jill, who was used to completing short papers and receiving compliments for them, now found herself stalling when she had to write something long all by herself. She sat in her apartment at times when she was meant to be working, and actually watched a string of the crummy old American television shows that Dearborn was so interested in.
Amy and Donald both told her that she should try to focus and “just get through it.” She ought to write her thesis in one long burst, they said, and then go defend it and be done with it. Then she could start the search for an academic position somewhere in America. So she did what she was told, and artlessly she wrote her dissertation, feeling the loss of her mentor, picturing him in the classroom lecturing to a group of prethesis graduate students who lapped up the sweet wine of his intelligence. Lucky them; they weren’t on their own yet.
“I should make an effigy of him,” Donald said one afternoon upon coming home from work to find Jill slumped sadly at the desk she had set up in their bedroom. “Or I should pretend to be him. ‘Look at me, I’m Dr. Dearborn. I once met Susan Sontag, and she gave me the brush-off. I like to groom my handsome beard.’” Jill stopped crying and began to laugh. “‘Would you like to groom my handsome beard?’” Donald asked, and she moved into her husband’s arms, telling him that he was the best, that he was as piquant as he’d said he would be, and that he was wonderful. She was fortunate, she knew, to have a husband who amused her and worked double-time to keep her buoyant. But regardless of her strong marriage, she still couldn’t write her thesis well outside of the big shadow of a person more powerful than she was.
Eventually the writing got finished; she did her footnotes and she went through the motions of all that had to be accomplished: the acknowledgments page, the attention that had to be paid to the binding. But even as she did this, she knew, oh she knew. Dearborn had spoken to her in recent weeks about his worries about her dissertation, and when she walked into the seminar room late on a Friday afternoon in order to defend her thesis, the first face she saw was his. He sat at the far end of the table, looked up only briefly, then looked back down at the hard black-grained cover of her dissertation. He squeaked his fingers along the table and seemed to be trying to let her know that she had let him down. Of course she had. A mentor, she knew, took pleasure from the achievements of the mentored. In their absence the mentor was personally insulted. Truly, Michael Dearborn looked angry. He barely spoke at all.
“Your writing seems diffuse to me,” one of the others said in an irritated voice. “You don’t seem sure enough of yourself. You’ve got the facts under your belt, but we get the sense that you don’t trust your own instincts enough. You suggest very well, but then nothing is entirely brought to fruition. Did you and Dr. Dearborn discuss your central argument in depth? It doesn’t seem as if you did.”
The rejection left her gasping on the shallow front steps of the building afterward; a woman locking up a bicycle finally came over to her and asked if she needed help, because apparently Jill had been doubled over, her eyes shut against the pain of her own failure. She hadn’t been able to tell the committee that in order for her thesis to have come out well she would have needed a mentor to sit beside her every single day while she formulated her ideas and then wrote them out.
“Maybe when you’re feeling better, you could try to rewrite it, and publish it for a general audience. It’s got a lot of interesting material,” Donald said kindly that night. His own dissertation had been successful. It was larded with graphs and charts, and he’d gained mastery of all the necessary accounting and business concepts. The writing itself hadn’t been an agony for him; he didn’t still need a mentor at that point, he said. What Jill didn’t understand, Donald explained when she questioned him, was that men eventually must kill their mentors. But Jill told him he just didn’t understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end.
But of course it wasn’t the end; it couldn’t possibly be. Jill was still young, and there were all those decades ahead to fill. This was the point at which her passion for her work dimmed into a new desire just for movement of some kind. She wouldn’t be a graduate student anymore or eventually a college professor, and at the moment she couldn’t imagine trying to rewrite her dissertation. She never wanted to look at it again; she was done.
“So what do you think you’ll do?” Donald asked. Back then everybody did something.
Soon it had gotten around her group of friends that Jill, the perennial best student among them, had left graduate school. The news came to the attention of a college acquaintance, Claire Madding, who had been successful in film development, first at a major studio in L.A. and now, in recent days, in the New York office of a production company. Tilt-a-Whirl Productions had gotten attention for its small, prestigious films; when Claire first called to discuss the possibility of a job, Jill was surprised and pleased and didn’t know what to do.
At lunch, Claire Madding said, “It’s actually a good thing that you’re getting out of academia. It’s such a surreal place; it has no real relevance to the outside world.” The two of them ate seared tuna salad in a minimalist SoHo restaurant near the Tilt-a-Whirl offices. Everyone at the tables in the room seemed as if they too worked in film or its less glamorous stepsister, book publishing. The young women were leggy and intense, and the men sweetly good-looking, in their soft baggy shirts and scatter of stubble. “There are quite a few refugees from academia in Hollywood; you’d be surprised,” Claire said. “All of them were
stopped in their tracks at one point or another in their academic careers. They were relieved to get into film. The guy who wrote the screenplay to The Healing House? Until recently he was in the doctoral program in linguistics at Harvard. Now he gets high six figures. I considered grad school too,” she went on, “but these days you end up having to fight for a tenure-track job at some second-rate Mennonite college. Not that I even know of any first-rate Mennonite college,” she added with a chirping laugh. “And then you spend the rest of your life living somewhere you would never have chosen to live.”
“I don’t know anything about film,” Jill said. “I only know about school. I’ve been in school forever.”
“Then you would be so great in film, Jill. You’re smart and serious. And of course it doesn’t hurt that you’re this tall, blonde person. Tilt-a-Whirl is in an exciting place right now. But we’re still in our infancy, and we’re trying to bring in a select group of smarty-pants types. And I know Selby will really get you.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been called a smarty-pants type before,” Jill said. But she was flattered, flushed. This was the temporary antidote to having had her dissertation rejected. She wanted to telephone Amy immediately in Michigan and ask her whether she was absolutely sure it was all right for Jill to exchange all that graduate school for this. Was education meaningless if you didn’t do something with it, or was it justifiable in and of itself, bolstering you for the world that lay ahead, whatever it turned out to be?
At first, being part of the development group at Tilt-a-Whirl felt like being on the ride itself; Jill was off-balance, disoriented. The staff slouched on low couches and free-associated aloud about the films that they wanted the company to produce. Everyone had high-flown, dreamy ideas, which were encouraged. They agreed that they hoped to develop a really beautiful biopic; the name Willa Cather was mentioned longingly more than once. The head of Tilt-a-Whirl was Selby Rothberg, forty-three, based in L.A., tall and thin, her shock-white hair gelled and chaotic. She used lip balm obsessively, swiping it from its little pot while she was thinking, and during meetings. She was known to have no real personal life—no friends, no lovers, no children—to be only about work, to be difficult, people in the office said with a tinge of admiration, for they knew how rough it was for a woman trying to gain credibility and traction in Hollywood—or, really, anywhere.
