by Liza Wieland
The question makes Elizabeth laugh harder, a completely indelicate snort, like a pig. No, no, she thinks, just the opposite. Finally I am myself. I’ve never been more myself.
Quite, she manages to whisper. The laughter has gotten completely away from her now, washing into hysteria and then a shimmering fearlessness.
Well, do share with us your . . . , Miss Lockwood begins, but she can’t seem to hold on to language.
All right, Elizabeth says.
She can hardly believe she is going to continue—if only she can stop laughing. It’s like jumping off the highest diving board: you just go. She lowers her hands. Miss Lockwood stands only a foot away, glaring, enraged. Elizabeth fixes her eyes on an imaginary, invisible object near the ceiling.
Who cares about the typical businessman? she says. In what way is he interesting? In what way is the typical anything interesting?
Miss Lockwood takes a step back, moves her body to suggest a kind of inflation. She is intrigued. She is a raft filling with air.
Good enough, she says, a different menace in her voice. Ladies? Miss Bishop has asked us all this question.
She pauses here, for effect.
A question, ladies. So how shall we answer? Why are we interested in the typical?
Elizabeth looks down at her own hands, inches apart, flat on the desk as if she were about to rise out of her seat, propel herself out the room. Then she glances lower, at Miss Lockwood’s shoes, a kind of slipper, dark blue and still buttoned up inside opaque plastic galoshes. A late snow has left a dirty line around both soles, across the toes. All the streets in Poughkeepsie look this way now, dirty, wet snow pushed up against the curbs, at the rims of sidewalks, underneath the boxwood and privet hedges.
No one speaks.
Miss Lockwood asks the question a second time. She waits. The last of the sun winks at the edge of the window frame and disappears. The classroom falls into shadow. Still Miss Lockwood waits. She does not move to turn on the lights. Elizabeth feels they have fallen out of time in some way, lost their grip on the contemporary. That would be interesting. If you fell out of the order of time, what sort of violent disorder would you fall into?
But this is a kind of power: to make a room go still this way, steal its thunder. That would be a terrific skill to have. That would be beautiful. That is beauty. Which somehow depends on the imminence or threat of violence. She will have to think more about this notion. Her breath comes easily now, like moving in an empty house, certain no one will disturb you, but knowing you can disturb if you so choose.
Miss Lockwood is looking at her. Elizabeth can feel her eyes, the blaze of her attention. That gaze is like Robert’s: the beam from a powerful flashlight. The unexpected similarity shocks her, physically. She wants to touch Miss Lockwood’s cheek, her shoulder under the plum-colored cardigan.
Clearly, Miss Lockwood says, her voice choked with emotion, you all need time to think about this. Good. So then. We will take it up again next week.
She turns her back to the class, gathers her newspapers, her copies of Life and Look and Liberty. The class shuffles notebooks, papers, handbags. Coats sigh as if with pleasure when hands and arms go into them. Miss Lockwood leaves the classroom, and the students follow. Elizabeth does not move. Footsteps recede down the hallway. No conversation. It’s a funeral procession for the typical. She hears the groan and slam of the big door. Elizabeth waits awhile longer, until the other girls are far away, back in their dormitories, and Miss Lockwood is making her way through the dirty, slushy streets of town. She imagines Miss Lockwood walking, her body moving fearsomely and beautifully beneath her clothes.
Miss Lockwood told me to find a tutor, Louise Crane says. If I don’t, I’ll be thrown out of school.
So this is the one, Elizabeth thinks. Louise. Blue eyes as deep as her pockets, that was what people said. Delightful, lovely, unruly girl. Her mother practically invented the Museum of Modern Art.
I’m in college here, she tells Elizabeth, because my grandmother said I had to go somewhere. And it’s close to New York City. And respectable. I’ve already voted myself most likely not to graduate. You’re brilliant—
No, I’m not, Elizabeth says. I work like a demon.
Just being in your room makes me feel smarter.
That’s because it’s Margaret’s room, too.
Louise’s eyes disappear into a thin glittering when she smiles. Cheshire Cat, only not so sleepy.
But first, let’s take a walk, Louise says. I’m afraid the walls have ears.
Being near Louise is like having drunk seven cups of coffee. It’s as if she brings New York City with her wherever she goes. Like Margaret, but more emphatic. A glowing aura. Electricity. That’s it. Louise’s skin is electric. Elizabeth discovers this accidentally, in the library, early one morning, studying Baudelaire.
I can’t get it, Louise says. I have to cheat and read the translation. Come help me find it.
Poetry, the 800s, lives at the end of the third row of shelves, the west end of the stacks, the darkest row. The spines of books, gold or silver letters, dust jackets stripped off (where do they put all those dust jackets?). Elizabeth and Louise, half blind, run their fingers along the lettering, guessing the titles. Louise’s left arm winds around Elizabeth’s waist.
I like you in shadow, she says. I like darker women.
Years later, when she has become an infamous patron of the arts, she will say something very like this to Billie Holiday, the singer, and then to Victoria Kent, the Spanish lawyer.
Elizabeth is silent.
I’m sick of the library, Louise whispers. I think I need to lie down. Come with me.
On the way out, Miss Borden gives them a look. Go have breakfast, girls, she says lightly.
Louise has a single room, for which her mother (really her grandmother) pays extra.
I don’t like wasting time, she says. Do you know the girls call me “Auntie” because they think I act like an old maid?
Is that so? Elizabeth says. You could have fooled me.
I tell them to button up their blouses and wear less lipstick, Louise says. I have a large car like a tank, and I drive it very slowly and very well.
* * *
Louise is a nervous, clumsy sailor. She brings her tutor to visit Elizabeth in Wellfleet, but there are never any lessons. Together they manage to tip over the sailboat, scattering the centerboard, the oars, cigarettes, sweaters. Elizabeth swims the capsized boat to shore with Louise riding on top, then they lie flat on the dock, let the sun bake them back to a normal temperature.
Sorry about the boat, Louise says.
That’s what happens, Elizabeth tells her, when the city comes to the country.
I prefer driving a car. On a proper road. A hard surface you can’t sink into. I’m very good at that.
Louise sends the tutor back to New York, saying that she’s going to flunk out of Vassar anyway, so what’s the use. After that, they sleep and read and smoke and gorge on lobster dinners. At night they take a whiskey bottle and two juice glasses up to their bedroom. Aunt Florence and Aunt Ruby, indulgent and a little foolish, and awed by Louise, turn a blind eye.
Or would it be blind eyes? Louise says. Four blind eyes. Like the mice, plus one.
That would be seven, Elizabeth says.
You know I’m no good at math. I’m good at being the life of the party and exasperating my mother.
After three days, Louise begins to sigh and mope. When she runs out of Chesterfields and has to smoke the aunts’ Camels, she declares she must return to Manhattan.
Just wait a day. Please? Elizabeth says. Margaret will come up and bring us the news of the world.
And the Chesterfields?
Yes. And then you can go if you want to. Even though I will be lonely.
Never lonely with Florence and Ruby, Louise says. Are they sisters?
In law.
That’s a funny term, don’t you think?
It reminds me of partners in
crime, Elizabeth says. Do you think I would make a good lawyer?
About the worst I can imagine.
Why? I’m an excellent observer.
Which would make you a very good criminal.
Florence and Ruby wouldn’t like that in the house.
Louise laughs. You mean a criminal? she says. They may not have any say in the matter. It may have already happened. So much can be accomplished under the covers of darkness.
I think the phrase is cover of darkness, Elizabeth says. Singular.
How lonely, Louise says.
Isn’t it. Which is exactly what I’m going to be when you don’t come back to school next year.
I’ll still visit from New York. And you can come down and stay with Mother and me anytime you want.
What will you do if you don’t have school to keep you occupied? I can’t even imagine.
I’ll socialize. I’ll see people.
Well, don’t see too many people, please.
I’ll make friends for you, so you don’t have to work so hard at it. Mother is training me to be what she is, a patron of the arts, and have salons and run the museum when she’s done inventing it. I’ll make absolutely the right friends. Think of it. All of us together: Mother and me, Margaret and her mother, Miss Marianne Moore and her mother. You can stay with a different pair of us every night.
Elizabeth and Robert drive out to western Massachusetts, a place called Sunk Pond, to sail.
Robert is fascinated and horrified by the four towns nearby, Prescott, Enfield, Dana, and Greenwich, which may be flooded to make a reservoir, as if this would be some kind of live burial. He talks about cellar holes and what might be found in them, what clues about people’s lives, what mysteries that could now be solved if you knew where to look. He has very specific ideas: jam jars, pet interments, sodden manuscripts, the water causing them to dance to and fro, caressing these things in its cold embrace. His hand on the tiller seems to turn pale—paler—as he speaks.
Elizabeth doesn’t even know she’s seeing this transformation until later, until Normandy, another man’s hand on a tiller, and her strange errand there. And much later, Lota’s hands will remind her of Robert’s.
They climb to the top of a small mountain and stare out over the site of the future reservoir. Robert makes the grueling hike without complaint. Now he finds it difficult to stand. Elizabeth sees this and feels distressed and angry. Why does he do this to himself? she wonders. Why does he do it for her?
These towns, Robert begins. But it is hard for him to speak. Elizabeth helps him to sit down beside the path. He shakes his head, disgusted by his own frailty and the future he sees.
What about the towns? Elizabeth says.
People will have to leave, he says finally. Move everything. Even graveyards. Four towns’ worth of bodies.
That’s progress, Elizabeth says.
Is it? I don’t know if I want that kind of progress.
Isn’t it inevitable? Elizabeth says. That things fall apart? That Boston would need more water?
I hope not, Robert says.
He’s quiet for a moment.
I find myself interested, he says, in what will be left behind. What will never be retrieved. What secrets people have buried below their houses that they will forget to rescue or what they won’t want to save.
Elizabeth stares at the top of Robert’s head. This would be my life, she thinks. Looking down would be my life. It seems an awful way to begin, a terrible promise. She can imagine it, this whole valley filled with water. She can imagine the loss, but also the beauty of it, a sheet of gleaming water stretched between the hills. And the art. All the broken bits of lives buried under some civil engineer’s creation.
But Robert can’t. For him, it’s all ugliness and disaster.
I’m losing you, Elizabeth, he says. I can tell. I won’t be able to bear it.
The green on the scalloped hill is acrocarpous moss, Elizabeth says. It can absorb twenty times its own weight. So maybe the reservoir will take a long time to fill.
But even so, everything will be drowned. The church steeple. Underwater, its bells will become a message to ships. Weightless cars and buses will drift from the road. Just above the surface of the reservoir, weathervanes can still track the wind, but there won’t be anyone left to care.
Miss Moore and Elizabeth ride the train to the Ringling Bros. Circus in Queens. They have come to see the elephants, to feed them. Miss Moore hopes there is a snake charmer.
All reptiles fascinate me, Miss Moore says, but snakes especially. The fanged variety. I find I appreciate the sort of thing that makes one shudder. Tattoos, another instance. Though I can see no reason to have my own person permanently marked.
If you are lost at sea? Elizabeth says.
I don’t think a tattoo would be much help at that point.
That’s true. It wouldn’t save your life.
I am curious about tattooed ladies, Miss Moore says. There’s a famous photograph from 1907. A circus woman, of course. Against all ideas of female beauty. The very question of what is beautiful.
Miss Moore chuckles, a low rolling sound, like the laughing falcon she has described to Elizabeth. She digs into the satchel for more bread crusts.
The elephants crowd at the fence, ignoring everyone else, the other dozen women and children marveling at the great height, the wholly unexpected beauty. Elizabeth finds this somewhat embarrassing, that they are adults, hauling the two satchels stuffed full of bread. The elephants are massive, great walls of gray flesh, their eyes unblinking, wet, and full of want. The trunks and ears seem to belong on another kind of creature, they are so graceful and responsive, the trunks especially, the pink nostrils sweeping the bread away, prehensile fingers folding the soft slices into their mouths. This spectacle of slow feeding is better than men on trapezes, men subduing lions, tattooed men lifting thousand-pound weights.
Could we teach ourselves to think of beauty another way? Miss Moore says. Anyhow, tattooing interests me as much as handwriting does. It is, if you think about it, another kind of handwriting.
Elizabeth can barely breathe. Miss Moore, her conversation, the elephants, the other pairs of women who seem to be mothers and daughters. Finally, they run out of bread. The elephants are sorry to see them go. Ears droop. Trunks explore the empty air, same as a human hand grasping.
Miss Moore understands the animals. Elizabeth has seen this kind of understanding in some men who farm and fish, her uncle and grandfather, but never in a woman. Miss Moore looks not at the girl in the pink tutu standing on the back of the horse, but at the horse.
The horse is smarter, Miss Moore says, the horse is keeping the girl aloft.
Elizabeth can see that now. The girl has only to hold still while the horse balances her. The girl’s eyes are half closed, but the horse’s eyes are wide open, wild, searching ahead.
Because balance is all about knowing what is going to happen, Miss Moore says. Or trying to find out. Balance is about knowing the unknowable. Simple as that.
The horse slows, and the girl leaps off, into the center of the ring, raises her arms, and bows low. The horse, unburdened, slows to a trot, then a walk, turns, moves back toward the girl. From out of her pink skirt, the girl draws an apple, which she polishes with elaborate anticipation. She holds the apple before her, pretending to appreciate its perfection. Her gestures are large enough to be understood from where Elizabeth and Miss Moore sit, very high up under the circus tent. The girl opens her mouth and brings the apple closer. Now the horse is directly behind her, and in one swift movement, he reaches over her shoulder and takes the apple, delicately, as the elephants took the bread. The girl mimes surprise, then a flash of anger. The horse chews calmly, carelessly, dropping bits of fruit at the girl’s feet. The audience laughs and applauds.
Interesting, Miss Moore says. An apple, a woman, an animal. A new version of the old story.
The unfall. What if it had happened this way, that the serpent wante
d the apple more than the temptation?
You’ll be traveling next year, Miss Moore says. Mother and I envy your leisurely habits.
Would you and Mrs. Moore think of traveling as far as Coney Island? Elizabeth asks. My friend Louise has a large, safe car, and she’s an awfully good driver.
Vassar in the spring is Sleeping Beauty just before the prince arrives to kiss the maiden awake. Childish and false. Everyone is fooled, though, and overjoyed by the stone chapel that green willows weep over and the crenellated gates twined nearly shut with roses. Honeysuckle grows up over the chapel windows, and the gardeners look the other way. The sleeping beauties shrug off their camel-hair coats, rub their eyes, lift their chins, and purse their lips, waiting.
Miss Peebles wants to give us what my father calls an exit interview, Hallie says. You know: What we’ve learned. What we’ll do next.
I haven’t a clue, Elizabeth says. If it’s an interview, I won’t get the job.
Yes, you will, Hallie says. Everybody gets this job.
I keep thinking about mercury, Elizabeth says to her literature professor, Miss Rose Peebles. The way a drop of it will join smaller drops to it. The drop grows larger, but it keeps its original form and quality. Like the past. I don’t think you can understand the past in the order things happened. That’s the mistake most people make. It’s not what happened in the past that matters, it’s the present circumstance in which one’s consciousness admits that event. You have to have a great deal of patience. You have to trust in the chaos of things. You have to let your senses be reordered. Causality doesn’t matter. The plodding ahead of time is the least useful way of understanding what’s happened to you. As if the past lives right here inside the present, not behind it. As if the present makes the past real.
I don’t know, Hallie says. I think the past politely stays out of sight. The present is noisy but a bit dim.
Slow, you mean, Elizabeth says.
That’s what you learned from Proust? Miss Peebles asks.
