The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “I used to have a friend who sold Tupperware,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh, then you probably have tons of it.”

  The furnace came on with a deafening whoosh. “No,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t have any.”

  “Please come,” the young woman had continued to say even on the front porch. “Not to buy anything. Just to meet everybody.”

  The rain was coming down hard again. She ran back across the lawn to her house, her arms wrapped tightly around her and her head down.

  Elizabeth went back in the house and called Paul at his office.

  “Is this really important, Elizabeth?” he said. “I’m supposed to meet with Dr. Brubaker in Admissions for lunch at noon, and I have a ton of paperwork.”

  “The girl next door invited me to a Tupperware party,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t want to say yes if you had anything planned for tonight.”

  “A Tupperware party?!” he said. “I can’t believe you called me about something like that. You know how busy I am. Did you put your application in at Carter?”

  “I’m going over there right now,” she said. “I was going to go this morning, but the…”

  “Dr. Brubaker’s here,” he said, and hung up the phone.

  Elizabeth stood by the phone a minute, thinking about Tib, and then put on her raincoat and walked over to the old campus.

  “It’s exactly the same as it was when we were freshmen,” Tib had said when Elizabeth told her about Paul’s new job. “I was up there last summer to get some transcripts, and I couldn’t believe it. It was raining, and I swear the sidewalks were covered with exactly the same worms as they always were. Do you remember that yellow slicker you bought when you were a freshman?”

  Tib had called Elizabeth from Denver when they came out to look for a house. “I read in the alumni news that Paul was the new assistant dean,” she said as if nothing had ever happened. “The article didn’t say anything about you, but I thought I’d call on the off-chance that you two were still married. I’m not.” Tib had insisted on taking her to lunch in Latimer Square. She had let her hair grow out, and she was too thin. She ordered a peach daiquiri and told Elizabeth all about her divorce. “I found out Jim was screwing some little slut at the office,” she had said, twirling the sprig of mint that had come with her drink, “and I couldn’t take it. He couldn’t see what I was upset about. ‘So I fooled around, so what?’ he told me. ‘Everybody does it. When are you going to grow up?’ I never should have married the creep, but you don’t know you’re ruining your life when you do it, do you?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said.

  “I mean, look at you and Paul,” she said. She talked faster than Elizabeth remembered, and when she called the waiter over to order another daiquiri, her voice shook a little. “Now that’s a marriage I wouldn’t have taken bets on, and you’ve been married, what? Fifteen years?”

  “Seventeen,” Elizabeth said.

  “You know, I always thought you’d patch things up with Tupper,” she said. “I wonder whatever became of him.” The waiter brought the daiquiri and took the empty one away. She took the mint sprig out and laid it carefully on the tablecloth.

  “Whatever became of Elizabeth and Tib, for that matter,” she said.

  The campus wasn’t really just the same. They had added a wing onto Frasier and cut down most of the elms. It wasn’t even really the campus anymore. The real campus was west and north of here, where there had been room for the new concrete classroom buildings and high-rise dorms. The music department was still in Frasier, and the PE department used the old gym in Gunter for women’s sports, but most of the old classroom buildings and the small dorms at the south end of the campus were offices now. The library was now the administration building and Kepner belonged to the campus housing authority, but in the rain the campus looked the same.

  The leaves were starting to fall, and the main walk was wet and covered with worms. Elizabeth picked her way among them, watching her feet and trying not to step on them. When she was a freshman, she had refused to walk on the sidewalks at all. She had ruined two pairs of flats that fall by cutting through the grass to get to her classes.

  “You’re a nut, you know that?” Tib had shouted, sprinting to catch up to her. “There are worms in the grass, too.”

  “I know, but I can’t see them.”

  When there was no grass, she had insisted on walking in the middle of the street. That was how they had met Tupper. He almost ran them down with his bike.

  It had been a Friday night. Elizabeth remembered that, because Tib was in her ROTC Angel Flight uniform, and after Tupper had swerved wildly to miss them, sending up great sprays of water and knocking his bike over, the first thing he said was, “Cripes! She’s a cop!”

  They had helped him pick up the plastic bags strewn all over the street. “What are these?” Tib had said, stooping because she couldn’t bend over in her straight blue skirt and high heels.

  “Tupperware,” he said. “The latest thing. You girls wouldn’t need a lettuce crisper, would you? They’re great for keeping worms in.”

  Carter Hall looked just the same from the outside, ugly beige stone and glass brick. It had been the student union, but now it housed Financial Aid and Personnel. Inside it had been completely remodeled. Elizabeth couldn’t even tell where the cafeteria had been.

  “You can fill it out here if you want,” the girl who gave her the application said, and gave her a pen. Elizabeth hung her coat over the back of a chair and sat down at a desk by a window. It felt chilly, though the window was steamy.

  They had all gone to the student union for pizza. Elizabeth had hung her yellow slicker over the back of the booth. Tupper had pretended to wring out his jean jacket and draped it over the radiator. The window by the booth was so steamed up, they couldn’t see out. Tib had written “I hate rain” on the window with her finger, and Tupper had told them how he was putting himself through college selling Tupperware.

  “They’re great for keeping cookies in,” he said, hauling up a big pink box he called a cereal keeper. He put a piece of pizza inside and showed them how to put the lid on and burp. it. “There. It’ll keep for weeks. Years. Come on. You need one. I’ll bet your mothers send you cookies all the time.”

  He was a junior. He was tall and skinny, and when he put his damp jean jacket back on, the sleeves were too short, and his wrists stuck out. He had sat next to Tib on one side of the booth and Elizabeth had sat on the other. He had talked to Tib most of the evening, and when he was paying the check, he had bent toward Tib and whispered something to her. Elizabeth was sure he was asking her out on a date, but on the way home Tib had said, “You know what he wanted, don’t you? Your telephone number.”

  Elizabeth stood up and put her coat back on. She gave the girl in the sweater and skirt back her pen. “I think I’ll fill this out at home and bring it back.”

  “Sure,” the girl said.

  When Elizabeth went back outside, the rain had stopped. The trees were still dripping, big drops that splattered onto the wet walk. She walked up the wide center walk toward her old dorm, looking at her feet so she wouldn’t step on any worms. The dorm had been converted into the university’s infirmary. She stopped and stood a minute under the center window, looking up at the room that had been hers and Tib’s.

  Tupper had stood under the window and thrown pebbles up at it. Tib had opened the window and yelled, “You’d better stop throwing rocks, you…” Something hit her in the chest. “Oh, hi, Tupper,” she said, and picked it up off the floor and handed it to Elizabeth. “It’s for you,” she said. It wasn’t a pebble. It was a pink plastic gadget, one of the favors he passed out at his Tupperware parties.

  “What’s this supposed to be?” Elizabeth had said, leaning out of the window and waving it at him. It was raining. Tupper had the collar of his jean jacket turned up and he looked cold. The sidewalk around him was covered with pink plastic favors.

  “A present,” he said. “It
’s an egg separator.”

  “I don’t have any eggs.”

  “Wear it around your neck then. We’ll be officially scrambled.”

  “Or separated.”

  He grabbed at his chest with his free hand. “Never!” he said. “Want to come out in the worms with me? I’ve got some deliveries to make.” He held up a clutch of plastic bags full of bowls and cereal keepers.

  “I’ll be right down,” she had said, but she had stopped and found a ribbon to string the egg separator on before she went downstairs.

  Elizabeth looked down at the sidewalk, but there were no plastic favors on the wet cement. There was a big puddle out by the curb, and a worm lay at the edge of it. It moved a little as she watched, in that horrid boneless way that she had always hated, and then lay still.

  A girl brushed past her, walking fast. She stepped in the puddle, and Elizabeth took a half step back to avoid being splashed. The water in the puddle rippled and moved out in a wave. The worm went over the edge of the sidewalk and into the gutter.

  Elizabeth looked up. The girl was already halfway down the center walk, late for class or angry or both. She was wearing an Angel Flight uniform and high heels, and her short blond hair was brushed back in wings along the sides of her garrison cap.

  Elizabeth stepped off the curb into the street. The gutter was clogged with dead leaves and full of water. The worm lay at the bottom. She sat down on her heels, holding the application form in her right hand. The worm would drown, wouldn’t it? That was what Tupper had told her. The reason they came out on the sidewalks when it rained was that their tunnels filled up with water, and they would drown if they didn’t.

  She stood up and looked down the central walk again, but the girl was gone, and there was nobody else on the campus. She stooped again and transferred the application to her other hand, and then reached in the icy water, and scooped up the worm in her cupped hand, thinking that as long as it didn’t move she would be able to stand it, but as soon as her fingers touched the soft pink flesh, she dropped it and clenched her fist.

  “I can’t,” Elizabeth said, rubbing her wet hand along the side of her raincoat, as if she could wipe off the memory of the worm’s touch.

  She took the application in both hands and dipped it into the water like a scoop. The paper went a little limp in the water, but she pushed it into the dirty, wet leaves and scooped the worm up and put it back on the sidewalk. It didn’t move.

  “And thank God they do come out on the sidewalks!” Tupper had said, walking her home in the middle of the street from his Tupperware deliveries. “You think they’re disgusting lying there! What if they didn’t come out on the sidewalks? What if they all stayed in their holes and drowned? Have you ever had to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a worm?”

  Elizabeth straightened up. The job application was wet and dirty. There was a brown smear where the worm had lain, and a dirty line across the top. She should throw it away and go back to Carter to get another one. She unfolded it and carefully separated the wet pages so they wouldn’t stick together as they dried.

  “I had first aid last semester, and we had to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in there,” Tupper had said, standing in the middle of the street in front of her dorm. “What a great class! I sold twenty-two square rounds for snake-bite kits. Do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

  “No.”

  “It’s easy,” Tupper had said, and put his hand on the back of her neck under her hair and kissed her, in the middle of the street in the rain.

  The worm still hadn’t moved. Elizabeth stood and watched it a little longer, feeling cold, and then went out in the middle of the street and walked home.

  Paul didn’t come home until after seven. Elizabeth had kept a casserole warm in the oven.

  “I ate,” he said. “I thought you’d be at your Tupperware party.”

  “I don’t want to go,” she said, reaching into the hot oven to get the casserole out. It was the first time she had felt warm all day.

  “Brubaker’s wife is going. I told him you’d be there, too. I want you to get to know her. Brubaker’s got a lot of influence around here about who gets tenure.”

  She put the casserole on top of the stove and then stood there with the oven door half-open. “I went over to apply for a job today,” she said, “and I saw this worm. It had fallen in the gutter and it was drowning and I picked it up and put it back on the sidewalk.”

  “And did you apply for the job or do you think you can make any money picking up worms?”

  She had turned up the furnace when she got home and put the application on the vent, but it had wrinkled as it dried, and there was a big smear down the middle where the worm had lain. “No,” she said. “I was going to; but when I was over on the campus, there was this worm lying on the sidewalk. A girl walked by and stepped in a puddle, and that was all it took. The worm was right on the edge, and when she stepped in the puddle, it made a kind of wave that pushed it over the edge. She didn’t even know she’d done it.”

  “Is there a point to this story, or have you decided to stand here and talk until you’ve completely ruined my chance at tenure?” He shut off the oven and went into the living room. She followed him.

  “All it took was somebody walking past and stepping in a puddle, and the worm’s whole life was changed. Do you think things happen like that? That one little action can change your whole life forever?”

  “What I think,” he said, “is that you didn’t want to move here in the first place, and so you are determined to sabotage my chances. You know what this move is costing us, but you won’t go apply for a job. You know how important my getting tenure is, but you won’t do anything to help. You won’t even go to a goddamn Tupperware party!” He turned the thermostat down. “It’s like an oven in here. You’ve got the heat turned up to seventy-five. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I was cold,” Elizabeth said.

  She was late to the Tupperware party. They were in the middle of a game where they told their name and something they liked that began with the same letter.

  “My name’s Sandy,” an overweight woman in brown polyester pants and a rust print blouse was saying, “and I like sundaes.” She pointed at Elizabeth’s neighbor. “And you’re Meg, and you like marshmallows, and you’re Janice,” she said, glaring at a woman in a pink suit with her hair teased and sprayed the way girls had worn it when Elizabeth was in college. “You’re Janice and you like Jesus,” she said, and moved rapidly on to the next person. “And you’re Barbara and you like bananas.”

  She went all the way around the circle until she came to Elizabeth. She looked puzzled for a moment, and then said. “And you’re Elizabeth, and you went to college here, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That doesn’t begin with an E,” the woman in the center said. Everyone laughed. “I’m Terry, and I like Tupperware,” she said, and there was more laughter. “You got here late. Stand up and tell us your name and something you like.”

  “I’m Elizabeth,” she said, still trying to place the woman in the brown slacks. Sandy. “And I like…” She couldn’t think of anything with an E.

  “Eggs,” Sandy whispered loudly.

  “And I like eggs,” Elizabeth said, and sat back down.

  “Great,” Terry said. “Everybody else got a favor, so you get one, too.” She handed Elizabeth a pink plastic egg separator.

  “Somebody gave me one of those,” she said.

  “No problem,” Terry said. She held out a shallow plastic box full of plastic toothbrush holders and grapefruit slicers. “You can put it back and take something else if you’ve already got one.”

  “No. I’ll keep this.” She knew she should say something good-natured and funny, in the spirit of things, but all she could think of was what she had said to Tupper when he gave it to her. “I’ll treasure this always,” she had told him. A month later she had thrown it away.

  “I’ll t
reasure it always,” Elizabeth said, and everyone laughed.

  They played another game, unscrambling words like “autumn” and “schooldays” and “leaf,” and then Terry passed out order forms and pencils and showed them Tupperware.

  It was cold in the house, even though Elizabeth’s neighbor had a fire going in the fireplace, and after she had filled out her order form, Elizabeth went over and sat in front of the fire, looking at the plastic egg separator.

  The woman in the brown pants came over, holding a coffee cup and a brownie on a napkin. “Hi, I’m Sandy Konkel. You don’t remember me, do you?” she said. “I was an Alpha Phi. I pledged the year after you did.”

  Elizabeth looked earnestly at her, trying to remember her. She did not look like she had ever been an Alpha Phi. Her mustard-colored hair looked as if she had cut it herself. “I’m sorry, I…,” Elizabeth said.

  “That’s okay,” Sandy said. She sat down next to her. “I’ve changed a lot. I used to be skinny before I went to all these Tupperware parties and ate brownies. And I used to be a lot blonder. Well, actually, I never was any blonder, but I looked blonder, if you know what I mean. You look just the same. You were Elizabeth Wilson, right?”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “I’m not really a whiz at remembering names,” she said cheerfully, “but they stuck me with being alum rep this year. Could I come over tomorrow and get some info from you on what you’re doing, who you’re married to? Is your husband an alum, too?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said. She stretched her hands out over the fire, trying to warm them. “Do they still have Angel Flight at the college?”

  “At the university, you mean,” Sandy said, grinning. “It used to be a college. Gee, I don’t know. They dropped the whole ROTC thing back in sixty-eight. I don’t know if they ever reinstated it. I can find out. Were you in Angel Flight?”