by Wither
Wendy’s jaw set in an angry line. “Actually, Mom, I couldn’t care less about being ”the same“ as every other freshman. Conformity isn’t exactly a high priority in my life.”
“Maybe it should be.” Her mother said quickly. Rewind. “That’s not what I meant. I only meant to say…people notice. What the president’s daughter does. How she dresses…” Her mother’s face softened. She touched Wendy’s hair. “I always liked your long hair. Won’t you consider letting it grow out again?”
“I gotta go.” She rolled her eyes and ducked out before her mother could try to hug her.
Outside, the day was hazy and hot, Indian summer coming to a reluctant end. Wendy jogged across the rolling lawn, which was wet from the sprinkler system the college’s landscapers ran around the clock, drought-be-damned. Her car was waiting in the long gravel drive, a battered Gremlin she’d chosen over the more sensible Accords and Civics her father had offered when she turned sixteen.
As she was unlocking the hatchback, her father appeared on the front doorstep with his briefcase. “Try to keep it on the road today,” he called. “It runs better without shrubbery in the grill.”
“Okay, so I thought it was in ”Park,“” Wendy called back.
Her father crossed’the lawn toward her. His own car, a silver BMW, waited a few car-lengths—and several rungs up the automotive evolutionary ladder—away. He slipped an arm around her waist and looked at the Gremlin’s glossy black chassy. He secretly admired the battered piece of shit. Probably reminded him of some psilocybin-inspired road trip during his own college days, maybe a girl with armpit hair and a Navajo blanket in the backseat…
“How’s the paint holding up?”
“Starting to chip a little.”
He grunted, looking where she pointed. When they’d bought the Gremlin it had been a sickening bioluminescent green, the color you want to imagine for nuclear waste. Together, they’d spent the better part of a weekend and $69.99 repainting the car to its current glossy black. Where the paint sported nicks, however, its former florescence glowed through.
Wendy looked up at her father suddenly. “Would you like me better with more hair, Daddy?”
He considered a moment, smart enough to know his answer mattered. “Not if it means you’ll start spending as much time in the bathroom as your mother.” A nonanswer. He gave her a kiss and headed off for Cambridge.
She opened the Gremlin’s hatchback carefully. Beeswax candles, overdue library books, and empty Diet Coke cans spilled out at her feet. The car was a four-cylinder Dumpster. She tossed her backpack onto the heap and checked her watch. Five minutes to class.
The president’s mansion was on the college’s west side, which meant a dash across campus to student parking, out in the hinterlands with Maintenance and the tennis courts. A five-minute drive on a good day, which this wasn’t. Twice she almost hit frat boys on bikes darting out from parked cars. (One flipped her off.) Then when she yielded to pedestrians at the lone traffic light on campus the Gremlin conked out. By the time she got it started again she had an audience, including two hecklers beside her in a converted jeep/date-rape mobile. “Dyke!” one called as they sped off, leaving her in a cloud of blue exhaust.
“Thanks,” she said. “You have a good one too.” Pretending it didn’t sting. She slipped the Gremlin back into gear, and it lurched ahead.
With only three thousand students and a dozen academic departments, Danfield’s campus remained self-contained. Most of the classrooms were clustered around Parris Beach, which had been nicknamed for the central lawn with its narrow reflecting pool. In good weather, sunbathers populated the lawn. The whole place was surrounded by a low brick wall. All interconnected with cobblestone bike paths and little grassy quads. Très picturesque. But a nightmare for commuters. Scoring a campus parking permit required a Byzantine journey through the administrative netherworld, and being the president’s daughter apparently didn’t count. (“Honey, I’d help you,” her father said early in the term, “but you can bet there are a dozen little would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins on the student paper just dying to uncover evidence of presidential favoritism.”)
When she finally arrived at her freshman comparative lit class, the seats were already nearly full. Three hundred fellow frosh, gulping down breakfast lattes and Cokes from the student center, grumbling at the early hour. Wendy stood at the base of the stairs looking up the tiered ranks, scanning for an open seat. Very aware that the class bell had rung five minutes ago.
Professor Karen Glazer appeared at Wendy’s elbow, pointing up to the back of the hall. “There are a few seats left in the nosebleeds.” She gave Wendy a disapproving look. “I’m still signing drop/add slips if you’re having trouble making it to my class on time, Wendy.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled, then hurried up the stairs, receiving plenty of amused stares from her classmates.
As fate and the chaos theory of student seating would have it, she had to pass right by Jack Carter, Danfield’s blond, toothy quarterback, whose mission it was to stamp out individuality wherever he saw it.“Look, it’s the black hole of Windale,” he whispered to his mini-entourage of Jensen Hoyt and Cyndy Sellers, both of whom giggled obligingly. Wendy discreetly blew him a kiss with her middle finger.
She caught a lone smile among the sea of hostile faces: Frankie Lenard, the pudgy little blond women’s studies major from Los Angeles who had befriended Wendy at orientation. Frankie gave her a sympathetic quirk of the lips as Wendy climbed the stairs past her and slumped in the first open seat she found.
“Here, you missed this.” A voice spoke quietly beside Wendy. She turned and found the second sympathetic smile of the day, this one unexpected. Lanky guy, nice eyes—was that a scar over his right eyelid—something reluctant about his smile, like he expected to get in trouble for it. He was dressed in khakis and a loud Hawaiian shirt. Fashion throwback or…nonconformist? She liked that in a guy. Scuffed-up pair of Ray Bans on his stack of texts. Maybe he thought he was at the University of Honolulu. Boy, did he have a surprise coming in about four months.
He showed her a photocopied page. “She handed these out before you got here. You can look off mine if you want.”
“Thanks.” Wendy glanced at the page, which described the parameters for an upcoming class term paper, eight to ten pages, three cited references, yadda-yadda-yadda.
“I’m Alex,” the Good Samaritan said, and actually offered a hand to shake. She laughed, and gave his hand a squeeze. “Beat you here by about thirty seconds.”
“Wendy,” she said, introducing herself.
“Guess you wouldn’t be late if you didn’t have to park all the way over in East Lot,” Alex said, then, at her confused look: “Black Gremlin, right?”
“How…?”
“You almost ran me over the other day.” Matter-of-factly. “It’s okay, really. My fault. I was jaywalking, headphones on…”
Wendy shook her head, smiling. “Sometimes I think that car’s possessed. It’s always—”
“Wendy!” Professor Glazer interrupted, her voice sounding nearby in the acoustically sensitive lecture hall. Wendy snapped away from Alex, saw her prof glaring. She was a ferocious little woman, Professor Glazer. Even six months pregnant.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Since you’re so chatty today, why don’t you help us get started with Hawthorne…”
Karen Glazer looked up at her student at the back of the lecture hall and waited. Wendy Ward, daughter of the college president, looked embarrassed to be caught flirting with the handsome guy next to her. Mortified now to be on the spot
“Hawthorne, professor?” The poor kid’s voice came out a squeak. Karen took pity.
“Give us your impressions of Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. Go ahead, throw out anything. Help get us started on a Monday morning.”
An uncomfortable silence. Then, suddenly, the girl actually came through with a response. “Well… Hawthorne comes right out and says the mo
ral of his book in the preface. Which was kind of surprising. I mean, usually writers disguise their morals in symbolism and whatnot.”
Whatnot? Karen let it slide. “And what is Hawthorne’s moral?”
The girl was thumbing through her copy of the novel. She found the passage and read aloud: “ ”That the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones“.”
“Exactly!” Bless you, child, was what Karen really wanted to say. Bless you for actually reading my assignment. She did a quick mental shuffle, reclassifying Larry Ward’s kid from the overcrowded Space Cadet classification to the more rarified category Promising Student. An endangered species.
“And what are the ”wrongdoings’ that haunt the generations in Gabies?“ Karen prompted, building momentum now, opening the question up to the entire class.
Silence. “C’mon, guys, this is an easy one.”
Finally, an anonymous reply: “Witchcraft?”
“The accusation of witchcraft,” Karen corrected. “Colonel Pyncheon falsely accuses his enemy Matthew Maule of witchcraft—and Maule is hanged! What do you think of that? Kinda appropriate this time of year, don’t you think?” She looked out at the gallery of blank faces, searching for some glimmer. Nada. If anything, they seemed embarrassed for her and her enthusiasm for this 150-year-old book. Karen felt herself deflate a little before their critical gaze. An unpleasant feeling. She was losing them.
She felt a sudden sharp kick from the baby, and put a hand to her belly. Thanks, kid. Her own daughter joining the chorus of disapproval. She felt the gap between generations yawning suddenly wider before her. Felt a vertiginous lurch, toes at the precipice. Looking across the chasm at those blank, dispassionate faces on the other side of youth. Her students. Somebody’s children. Each year she felt the distance from them growing. Was it simply a matter of age? At thirty-eight, Karen didn’t feel old, exactly, at least not physically. In fact she felt for the first time her right age: she’d been thirty-eight for the last two decades. Back in college in Boston, then grad school, she’d always been a little out of sync with her classmates. Even from her friends, whose companionship felt more like a coincidence of common sensibilities, interdepartmental alliances, than true kinship. Would her daughter’s love be similarly coincidental? A matter of convenience, of cohabitation? Would they grow apart, like roommates who drift out of touch because they were never really friends? Would her own daughter someday give her the same glazed-over look of incomprehension as this gallery of strangers?
“Professor?” A girl’s voice. Karen snapped back into focus. Saw a raised hand—Wendy again.
“Yes?”
“Did you assign this book to hint that we shouldn’t celebrate witch killing?”
Karen smiled. “Not exactly the best reason to have a parade, is it? But no, I don’t have a secret political agenda in assigning Hawthorne. That’s later in the term, when we read The Scarlet Letter” She perched herself on the edge of her desk and looked up at Wendy, grateful to the girl for helping get her back on track.
“I picked Gables as our first novel because it’s fun—if you bother to read it—and because it takes place in a New England town similar to our own beloved Windale. And because it’s a big ripe American novel by a guy who wasn’t afraid of literary special effects.”—a few smiles now among the crowd, when she picked out individual faces—“So there’s plenty for us to chew on together.” Karen opened her edition to the first passage she planned to talk about. “Shall we?”
Forty minutes later, Karen popped a cough drop into her mouth and watched her students filing out. She’d left them the assignment of reading the next three chapters of Gables; a few had looked at her like she’d asked them to transcribe the text into ancient Greek.
Eva Hartman slipped into the lecture hall from her own classroom next door, where her contemporary German lit (conducted entirely in the original tongue) was just letting out. “You want to catch lunch later?” she asked Karen.
“Rain check. I’ve got my monthly with the obstetrician.”
“How are you feeling?” Eva was a vet when it came to pregnancies, with two startlingly blond, bilingual children in the Friends Select school favored by faculty parents.
“Not bad,” Karen said. “She kicks a little more vigorously than I expected.”
“Keeping you awake at night?” Eva asked, then explained her concern: “You’ve been looking tired.”
“Bad dreams, actually.” She flashed a smile to show she wasn’t crazy. “Last night was this incredibly vivid tour of colonial Windale. Quite spooky.”
“Too much Hawthorne before bed,” Eva said, nodding with a smile toward the copy of Gables in Karen’s arms. “You better take care of yourself, Karen. The last trimester can really suck the life out of you. Don’t think you’ll catch up on missed sleep after the baby’s born.”
“Don’t worry,” Karen said with a little laugh, “I’m not that naive.”
Wendy casually gathered her books and notebooks into a manageable pile as Frankie came up the steps toward her. Most of the other students had rushed by—including Jack “Quarterback” Carter, who shook his head and gave her a thumb’s down followed by a finger up—how original—when she realized Alex was hesitating over his own pile of academia. Waiting for her?
“Alex, thanks again….”
“No problem,” he said, propping his sunglasses in his hair.
You can do better than that, Wendy. She smiled, “So, what’s your short and sweet here at Danfield?”
“My ”short and sweet“?”
“You know, your bio, personal sound bite, facts and figs,” she said. “Look, I’ll go first. Wendy Ward, freshman, biology major, dabbler in the arcane and, sadly, a townie.” She left off the “college president’s daughter” section of her résumé. “Favorite color? Much too obvious.”
Alex laughed. “Let’s see…Alex Dunkirk, freshman, finance major, dabbler in the track and field here at Danfield, Minneapolis born and raised. Favorite color? Paisley.”
Now Wendy laughed. “Paisley? Really?”
“Just kidding.”
Frankie had sidled up next to Wendy, all smiles and ears.
“Athletic scholarship, right?” Wendy asked Alex.
“Walk-on, actually.”
Something unrelated clicked for her. “You know, I think you’re in my astronomy class.”
“That would probably be me.”
Frankie had been looking back and forth between them. “Fine, if you guys are gonna ignore me anyway, I’ll go chat with the prof.”
Wendy snagged her sleeve.
“That’s okay,” Alex said, scooping up his books and backing away. “I’m about to be late for macroeconomics anyway. Nice meeting you, Wendy,” he said, again offering his hand. She shook it, couldn’t help grinning like a….like a schoolgirl. “And you…?” Alex said, looking at Frankie.
“Frankie,” she said with a cursory smile.
“Nice meeting you too, Alex,” Wendy called after him, with a halfhearted wave after he’d already turned his back to her. She looked at Frankie and headed off the avalanche of questions by saying, “If you want to talk to Professor Glazer, you’d better hurry. Think she’s about to leave.”
“Professor Glazer?” Karen looked at the girl before her and struggled for a name to match the round little face, the tight blond curls. Blank. But she was with Wendy, so Karen gave her points for keeping good company.
“I just wanted to say, professor, that I really think it’s great, what you’re doing.” Behind her (Frankie! That was it!) Wendy looked embarrassed for her friend.
“What exactly am I’m doing?”
“Having a child. On your own, I mean. As a single parent,” Frankie said, putting a hand on Karen’s arm. “I think it’s a really strong thing for a woman to do. We talked about it for, like, an hour the other day in class.”
“You talked about my pregnancy in a class?!”
“Freshman seminar, actually. Con
temporary women’s issues. Professor Bennett.”
Ah, Jessica Bennett. Danfield’s own home-grown Camille Paglia. Very vocal in her support of Karen’s pregnancy…though Karen secretly suspected Bennett was Patient Zero in the epidemic of interdepartmental speculation about the identity of the father of Karen’s child. Karen was tempted simply to quash the gossip by announcing that she’d gone to a sperm bank. Tempted, in other words, to lie.
“Tell Professor Bennett I’m honored to make her syllabus,” Karen said to Frankie. Wendy tugged her friend away by the arm before she could bury her Birkenstock any farther in her mouth. She flashed Karen an apologetic look. Karen was liking her more and more.
“What?” Frankie said as she walked double-time to keep up with Wendy, her sandals slap-slapping in the hallway.
“I cannot believe you just said that!” Wendy rolled her eyes heavenward.
“Why? I think it’s very strong of her. I wanted her to know I support her decision.”
“I’m sure she’s grateful, Frankie.”
As they exited Pearson and began to power walk back in the direction of student parking, Frankie asked, “So who’s the guy you were flirting with?”
“That wasn’t flirting. It was fraternizing.”
“With the enemy.”
“What, you don’t like guys now that you’re a women’s studies major?”
“I’m physically attracted to them, yes. But that’s just biology. I have no control over that.” Getting out of breath now.
“Let me guess, that love charm I gave you didn’t work.”
“Great big round zero,” Frankie said. “Besides, intellectually, I disapprove of everything men stand for.”
“Which would be?”
“Aggression. Warfare. Organized sports.”
“Then you definitely wouldn’t like Alex. He’s on the track team.” She flashed a wicked little smile. “Track guys have great legs.” , “And just where exactly is this going?”
