The Wrong Kind of Woman

by Sarah McCraw Crow

  * * *

  Outside, the afternoon had grown mild, too warm for March. The grass on the museum’s little curve of lawn was already greening up. She paused on the top step to take in the springlike day and the people below who were using the museum steps as lounge chairs, enjoying the sun and the mild weather. Halfway down, a young man sat writing in a notebook and eating potato chips from the bag. Dark hair, duffel coat, backpack; she felt a surge inside, felt herself smiling. Sam hadn’t gone to New York. She’d have someone to ride back to New Hampshire with. Maybe he could have dinner with her and Rebecca, or they could go out to Mo’s. She could ask him if he—

  But it wasn’t Sam. It was just another dark-haired college student, awkward long legs thrown out in front of him. Her chest and neck prickled with heat—she’d wanted his company too much. She’d been too happy to see him.

  She wondered what Oliver would think. She was only trying to help—Oliver would have done the same thing, wouldn’t he? He had done the same thing. He’d taken plenty of students out for a coffee or a beer over the years, had called her to say he and a couple others had to stay late, an emergency meeting about this student or that student. Still, her cheeks burned with the realization that she’d been thinking about a college boy.

  She took two wrong turns getting back to Storrow Drive, where the Friday-afternoon traffic crept along. To her left, across the filthy but glinting Charles River, the outer buildings of Harvard asserted their quiet brick majesty: Cambridge, where she’d been a whole other person. She imagined an alternate self, still dressed in her grad-school black turtleneck, black skirt, black tights, even now striding from point to point in Cambridge, unencumbered by a failed dissertation, by pregnancy, birth, miscarriages, an unhappy untenured husband, a dead husband.

  On the radio, a single muted trumpet coaxed Dionne Warwick to sing about love. “What the world needs now,” Dionne sang, her voice lifting with the melody. Oliver had made fun of Burt Bacharach; he thought Bacharach’s tunes were treacly, but Virginia loved this song.

  When she’d first met Oliver—Houghton Library, they’d first encountered one another there—and they’d gone on a few dates, she’d made a list of the things that weren’t right about Oliver, to talk herself out of him.

  —He didn’t like dogs. Okay, he sort of liked dogs, but he didn’t love them.

  —Or cats.

  —He lectured—he got going on something, started discoursing on the Wars of the Roses, the Spanish Civil War—and he couldn’t stop himself.

  —He had way too many opinions about music. Like her, he was the youngest in his family, and he had three older brothers who’d taught him about early jazz and the big-band greats. Chick Webb, Stompin’ at the Savoy. Louis Prima. Benny Goodman. Ella Fitzgerald singing with Dizzy Gillsepie. She liked all that stuff too, she just didn’t want to talk about it, or listen to Oliver go on and on about it.

  On the other hand:

  —He was smart. Sharp. And funny.

  —He was optimistic and idealistic. He believed in progress. He’d believed in Stevenson, had campaigned for him, even though it drove his brothers and his mother crazy. Oliver, you used to work in banking, they’d said, accusingly, as if that meant everything. Not anymore, he’d answered.

  —He was cute. Blue eyes and freckles and red-gold hair. He would always look young, or at least youthful.

  —He loved her. He thought she was the most beautiful thing.

  * * *

  As she crossed the border into New Hampshire, the traffic thinned to nothing. On the radio, the hourly news report led with the Capitol bombing, noting that a guard had gone to the hospital suffering from smoke inhalation. An expert speculated that the Weather Underground would strike again, since that was the way these organizations worked. “Terrorizing people in waves of attacks,” he said.

  She snapped the radio off. Insulated in the museum, she hadn’t given a thought to this bombing; it was remote, nothing to do with her. But she felt herself standing again in the MFA, imagined a bomb going off in the Rotunda, the old Copleys and Sargents, Miss Peale’s portraits of the young husband and wife, ruined by fire and smoke, the building crumbling around her. She pressed hard on the accelerator, to get home faster.

  * * *

  Pushing open the door of the apartment, Sam yelled that he was home. He’d asked the doorman to call up to his mom before he got into the elevator, to give her a little warning.

  “What’s wrong, Sam?” Mom asked. He hadn’t come home to New York for a random weekend since freshman spring, had he, so why now, she wanted to know. Her eyes were big and fearful, ready to exclaim about whatever his reason for coming home might be.

  “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong, I just wanted a weekend away.”

  “Okay. That’s fine,” she said. “I’m glad to see you, just surprised. I’ll make spaghetti for dinner, won’t that be nice?”

  “Sure, Mom.” Should he tell her he was probably going to meet Elodie? But he didn’t know when or where, or even if it would happen. He’d brought Elodie’s letter home in his jacket pocket, touching the thin paper, ragged where she’d torn it out of a notebook, every time he slid a hand into the pocket.

  “Umm, there’s this girl—” But he realized as the words popped out that he should have said nothing. His mom’s eyes grew even bigger, and she hugged him and said how wonderful, and that she was so happy for him, as if he’d just said he was going to graduate Phi Beta Kappa.

  He’d given too much thought to Elodie’s secret code. A simple shift cipher, he’d decided, but maybe he could add another level to it, complicate it. Elodie herself was a cipher, he thought. He might not be able to understand her, but he’d enchant her with his cipher, he’d show her how to use it to encrypt and decode messages, and they’d send secret messages to one another. He’d worked on it in a corner of the library’s basement study room, scratching away in his notebook. He stayed up late after house meeting, copying the encryption keys onto clean paper in neat block letters and numbers, and at last, he held the papers up, pressed his lips to them. His first gift to her. He slid the cipher into an envelope, wrote her name on the front and his name on the back, and kissed the envelope too.

  He’d borrowed Dougie’s car the next morning to take his code to Topos, where he found Cyril, the commune’s dad, at the long kitchen table, inscribing numbers into two big ledgers. “She’s on her way to New York,” Cyril said about Elodie, pulling off his reading glasses and gazing up at him.

  “Right,” Sam said.

  “With Hank and Shelly,” Cyril said. “Elodie’s got an aunt down there, a town house or something that they think I don’t know about.”

  Sam nodded as if he already knew that.

  “Anything else?” Cyril didn’t say, Join us, Sam, you belong here with us, or Why don’t you come along with me to the tractor place? He slipped his reading glasses back on—he just wanted to finish his bookkeeping, the gesture said; all these young people were getting on his nerves.

  “Nope,” Sam said. “I better get back, I have class.”

  Elodie’s letter had arrived the day of the jazz band concert. Sorry, she’d been back to Topos for only a day and a half, and now she was planning to stay in New York for another week or two. Thanks for the cipher, and was he heading to New York anytime soon? Let her know, okay? Maybe she could help him get involved in the Movement. Movement with a capital M, she’d written. She’d scrawled a New York phone number at the bottom of the letter.

  On Saturday morning, he sat in the coffee shop on Waverly Place where he and Tommy always went. Except now Elodie sat across from him as they waited for their food. Last night, when he’d called the number Elodie had given him, he’d had to leave a message. And then it wasn’t Elodie who’d called him back but some other guy, who said that Elodie had to go out but she would meet him in the morning, that he should just name a place downtown. He trie
d not to think about these other guys and what Elodie might feel about them.

  Elodie was dressed wrongly for the blustery weather, a T-shirt and jeans, and a sweater that didn’t look all that warm. She’d wound her long hair up into a topknot. He wanted to say something about her hair, how it was subtly beautiful, even when it was tucked away into a knot, but he was afraid he’d accidentally insult her, and she’d say beauty was a capitalist construct, or something.

  She was talking about some new project for the Movement. “I can’t tell you all the details, not yet, but it’ll definitely make a difference. So are you with us? Do you want to help?”

  “Uh—I—”

  “We’ve got to act big, to make people notice.”

  “In New York?” he asked.

  She did that head-tilt thing, yes, no, maybe.

  “Is it—is this anything like the Capitol bombing?” He didn’t know why he’d just said that. She wasn’t in the Weather Underground. She was just an activist, and also a person who liked to cook. A person who liked to talk about love.

  She gazed at him. “There are people who need your help, Sam.”

  “Someone could get hurt, or killed,” he said, testing. She didn’t contradict him; she waited, hands folded under her chin, elbows resting on the table. If only they could talk about her remarkable eyes. If only they could walk around the Village holding hands—he’d put his arm around her to keep her warm, and she’d lean into him.

  “What kind of help?” he finally asked.

  She pressed her knuckles against her lips, thinking. “Just some technical things, things you’re probably an expert at.”

  She was about to ask him to do something dangerous, something dumb or criminal. He didn’t know how to answer her.

  “You’re not with us, are you?”

  “We’re college students, Elodie. And I don’t know who ‘us’ is.”

  She laughed. “‘Us’ is all of us, if you think about it. I just want things to be better. I want people to stop getting killed. People are dying every minute. The world is more fucked up than it’s ever been.”

  He wanted to laugh at her hypocrisy—whatever group she was involved with was planning something violent. Was it Weatherman? Their food arrived, and he took a quick bite of eggs. This morning he’d passed a vet who sat on the sidewalk outside the West Fourth Street station, silently panhandling, and he wondered for a second if the guy had ever encountered Jerry. It had been a stupid thought, and he’d dismissed it. The image of the panhandling vet returned to him now, and he wondered what the guy would say to Elodie.

  She picked up a triangle of toast and used it to gesture at him. “There isn’t a lot of time, you know.”

  “Maybe I could, I mean, there’s tons of stuff to do at Clarendon, maybe I could organize something—” But the guys at Lambda Chi would only laugh and say, Yeah, right, Sam. No can do. Go back to being chaplain, that’s what you’re good at. And the ROTC guys would beat him up. Elodie didn’t understand Clarendon at all. Still, he wanted her passion, her certainty. He wanted her to love him, or at least to admire him a little. He took a breath, let it out. “Yeah, I could do something at Clarendon,” he said.

  She smiled. “Shake up that patriarchal, military-industrial-trainee cocoon. It needs some shaking up, doesn’t it?”

  He nodded, arranging his face into a smile too, trying to imagine what she meant by shaking up, and an electric thrill of desire and fear ran through him.

  “Something symbolic,” she said. “Something that stands for tradition, for Clarendon’s role in the military-industrial complex.” She’d ordered only toast and coffee, and she ate another toast triangle as she mused on what Sam could do at Clarendon.

  A bizarre image of Clarendon’s computer on fire settled in his head. Computers were a force for good, just think of all the things you could do with them, all the things Weissman wanted them to learn about programs and languages. But Weissman had gone to Los Alamos with Feynman during the war and had worked on the bomb. Although that was just the lore around campus, maybe it wasn’t even true. The atom bomb had ended the war; it was justifiable use of a terrible weapon against a nation that refused to quit fighting. But now the bomb was part of the Cold War. And by extension the war in Vietnam. His head hurt with this spiral of competing thoughts, and his bacon was undercooked and flabby. He’d just wanted to see Elodie, to touch her, to sleep with her. That wasn’t going to happen. She was different down here.

  He wanted to tell her all that was good about Clarendon. There had to be plenty of other guys like him, wandering around on their college campuses and not quite fitting in. They just wanted to find their place. They wanted to figure themselves out, as they waited out the draft. As much as he didn’t fit in, as much as he got teased and made fun of, he kind of loved Clarendon. If only Elodie were a plain old Clarendon student—if Clarendon had magically turned coed—maybe she’d have more normal-size goals. Maybe she’d be as apathetic as the rest of them. And Sam wouldn’t have to go to such extremes to sit across a table from her and lay eyes on her.

  “I can see you’ve got some doubts, Sam.” Elodie rested her head on her hand. There was her beautiful smile again. “But I’m glad you’re thinking about it. We’ll give it some thought too. Something a little different.”

  Who was this “we” she kept talking about? But he only nodded, as if he thought it was a good idea too.

  She slid out of the booth, pulling two dollar bills out of her pocket and pushing them across the table. “I’ve gotta run.” She stood up, then leaned down to hug him. As she did so, he moved a little to the left so he could kiss her. His mouth connected with hers, but she was businesslike, pulling away and straightening up too quickly. She slipped away, back through the narrow coffee shop, and she didn’t turn and wave as she went out the door. She’d never answered him about the Capitol bombing, hadn’t said that whatever she was working on, it was nothing like that.

  At the pay phone in back, he called his dad’s apartment and said he wanted to come by.

  Chapter Twelve

  Dad had moved to the West Side after the divorce, to the Apthorp, one of those rambling old buildings on upper Broadway. Sam needed to bring them something, but what did you bring a baby? Baby Adam. He didn’t know if Adam had had a bris; if he had, Sam should have been there. He had no idea what baby Adam might want. A blanket? One of those red-and-blue shape-sorter toys, like he’d had when he was little? He should have thought to ask Elodie for some ideas. But she’d probably say that baby toys should be banned, since they were part of the military-industrial complex. He climbed out of the subway at Seventy-Second Street, the West Side smelling of garlic and bagels. He spotted a bookstore across the street—a book. No one could argue with that.

  The children’s section was upstairs. He circled the little room, all bright colors and posters, with colorful rugs on the floor, not sure where to begin. Two girls sat cross-legged against a wall, reading, and a plump older woman asked if he needed help. After he managed to say that he was looking for a book for a baby, she steered him to the babies and little-kid section. He let his eyes adjust to the colors and shapes of all these books for tiny children, and then he spied the pink-and-pale-blue Pat the Bunny—he remembered this one, how he’d loved the soft powdery smell of this book. He lifted it to his face, and the smell took him right back to childhood. Yes, he’d get Pat the Bunny for baby Adam. Adam would have the exact same experience Sam had had as a little kid looking at this book, doing all the little activities, smelling it over and over. At the register, the woman slid the book into a shopping bag. “Boy or girl?” she said, and when he answered “boy,” she cut long strands of blue ribbon, curled them with the blade of a scissor and tied the curls onto the bag’s handle. She smiled as she handed the bag to him. “What a thoughtful young man you are,” she said. “Have a wonderful day.”

  Yes. Yes, he would. He st
ill felt off-balance from the morning, from his weird breakfast with Elodie, as if he were walking sideways, but maybe the rest of today would be wonderful.

  * * *

  By the time he got to Dad’s building, he’d lost that feeling. His gift was stupid, it was just a little papery book. Dad clearly didn’t want him to visit, or he’d have invited Sam sooner—the baby was more than three weeks old. He started to turn away, to head back across the park to his own apartment. No, he wouldn’t chicken out. He’d just drop off the book and say he couldn’t stay. He owed at least that to Adam, his little brother.

  Dad’s apartment building had one of those interior courtyards; you went through a gate and under an arch, and there you stood in this spacious garden, big patch of grass in the middle, trees and flowerpots and benches along the edges. God, he would have loved this courtyard if he’d lived here when he was a kid. Little signs marked the edges, Keep off the Grass, Stay on the Sidewalk. He imagined his childhood self running and jumping on the grass, and the doormen yelling at him, Hey, kid, get off the grass.