“Hey.” Sherrie holds up her hand. “Don’t blame me. All I did was put on some music.”
Wake me? Shake me? Are the Dixie Hummingbirds really worried about sleeping through the Last Judgment? Here on earth, Swenson and Sherrie balance on the point between hellish recriminations and the purgatorial silence that passes for friendly camaraderie.
Sherrie switches off the tape.
“I’m sorry,” Swenson says. “You can listen to it if you want.”
“That’s okay,” says Sherrie. “You’ve been through enough for one day.”
“I love you,” says Swenson. “You know that?”
“Me you too,” says Sherrie.
Swenson dreams that his daughter, Ruby, has called to say she’s thinking of him and everything’s forgiven. Struggling awake, he’s snapped into the harsh bright morning, which greets him with three unpleasant facts, more or less at once.
One: the phone is ringing.
Two: it isn’t Ruby, who hasn’t called since she went away to college. She’ll consent to talk to him if he phones her dorm at State, though talk is hardly the word for her murmurs and grunts, each one an eloquent expression of the rage that’s been brewing since she was a high school senior and Swenson—stupidly—broke up her first real infatuation with arguably the sleaziest student in Euston College history.
Three: he seems to have spent the night on the living room couch.
Why doesn’t someone answer the phone? Where the hell is Sherrie? It’s probably Sherrie calling to explain why he’s on the sofa. He’d know if they’d had an argument. Besides which, they never go to sleep without making up or at least pretending, though the embers may reignite first thing in the morning. Why didn’t Sherrie wake him and make him come to bed? It’s lucky the phone stops ringing before he’s able to move. If it is Sherrie, he just might have to ask her why the hell she left him here. Once the phone stops insisting, he eases himself off the couch. He’ll call Sherrie back when he gets a chance. But wait. She has to be in the house. He’s got the only car.
“Sherrie?” he cries. Something’s terribly wrong. Sudden death would certainly explain her leaving him on the couch. “Sherrie!” He can’t live without her!
He rushes instinctively toward the sun streaming in from the kitchen. Glowing in the center of light is a sheet of white paper. A note from Sherrie, obviously, on the kitchen table.
“You looked tired. I let you sleep in. Arlene gave me a ride. Much love, S.”
Poor Sherrie! Married to a lunatic convinced she’d abandoned him when she was only trying to let him get some shut-eye. Sherrie loves him. She signed her note: Much love.
Clutching the note, he drifts over to the window. Installing it was their second and final attempt to make the old Vermont farmhouse satisfy their needs or just acknowledge their existence. Mostly they’ve settled in and let the house do what it wants. Although (or perhaps because) they told the hippie carpenter not to make it look like a bay window in a tract home, it looks exactly like a bay window in a tract home. So what. The window does its job, lets them see Sherrie’s garden from the table.
They’d inherited the garden from the old woman who sold them the house and who’d held out for a buyer who promised to maintain her flower and vegetable beds. Sherrie would have promised anything to escape the Euston residence hall where they were living as dorm parents, an existence so public that only thanks to desire’s resourcefulness was Ruby ever conceived. But she’d kept her promise. Though almost nothing remains of Ethel Turner’s flowers—perennial is a cruel jest here in northern Vermont—everything’s been replaced with plants bought from the nursery or coaxed from seed. The garden’s flourishing, thanks to an innate gift that must have come via DNA from Sherrie’s grandparents. She’d spent her own formative years in city apartments and later, emergency rooms.
At this season, the garden looks like an archaeological tomb excavation in progress: tidy beds of clippings, thatches of straw, tender crowns tucked under layers of soggy leaves, evidence of rituals intended to ensure the dead’s rebirth. And that, precisely, is the difference between Swenson and Sherrie. Sherrie believes that spring will come, whereas Swenson’s always shocked when the snow melts and the first crocuses appear. He envies Sherrie’s optimistic faith. Well, someone has to have it.
He peers into the refrigerator, less hungry than eager for clues about last night’s dinner: leftover fettucine, sticky with butter and cheese. Sherrie tries to watch their diet but knows that there are times when nothing will do but big globs of cholesterol. They’d eaten on the living room couch, in front of the evening news, both of them so grateful for not having to talk that the low-level edginess of their car ride home from the meeting was smoothed out of existence, replaced by pure animal comfort.
As he reaches for the phone, he’s thinking of how to tell Sherrie how much he loves her, treasures their life together. The phone rings, preemptively, startling him. His telepathic wife!
“Sweetheart!” he says.
“Er…um,” says a female voice.
Oops. A student. Clearly. She doesn’t know what to call him. Mr. Swenson. Professor. Ted. Definitely not sweetheart. Students never phone him at home, though he gives them his number at the start of each semester. He pretends he’s joking when he tells them to feel free to call if their problem is life-threatening. A student with a life-threatening problem at…nine-twenty in the morning?
“It’s Angela Argo?” the voice says. “We were supposed to have a conference at nine? I’ve been waiting outside your office? I thought I had the wrong day or…the wrong time? But we talked about it yesterday…?”
Finally Swenson remembers. He was so grateful for getting through class, he would have promised anyone anything.
“You’re right,” says Swenson. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she says. “Did I wake you? I’m totally totally sorry.”
“I was awake.”
“Oh my God. Were you writing? Did I disturb you from writing?”
“I wasn’t writing,” Swenson says, more harshly than he intends.
“I’m really sorry,” Angela says.
“Stop apologizing. Stay where you are. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Okay,” she says. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” he says.
For a moment he stalls by the phone. He should have taken early retirement. In one of the college’s failed attempts to stave off financial ruin, the tenured faculty was offered a year’s salary to get out. But like convicts who love their shackles, nearly all chose not to escape. He could be staying home, writing, reading, watching TV, instead of wasting yet another day of his one and only life.
Meanwhile he’s got fifteen minutes to shower, shave, dress, drive to school, which itself takes fifteen minutes—an obvious impossibility. Forget the personal grooming. So this chick wants to write? Let her see how a writer looks at nine-thirty in the morning.
Swenson continues down the hall, slowing reflexively at the steps up and down between rooms. Each room was built as needed, in good harvest years. The earth settled before each addition as the segmented structure grew, perpendicular to the road. The front parlor faces on the nonexistent traffic, offering the world a buffer zone of the least inhabited room so as to protect the inner life of its bedrooms and kitchen. Farthest back is the attached dairy barn, reborn as Swenson’s study.
Their other home improvement: Swenson’s shrinelike office, skylit, soaring, unheatable, the sacrificial altar on which they pulped the whole advance for his unwritten novel. Half the time he worries that his publishers will ask for the money back. Half the time he worries because no one seems to have noticed. His working title is The Black and the Black, though he doubts he’ll use it. His impulse—impossible to recall—was to recast Stendhal’s Julien Sorel as a young sculptor, the son of a martyred Black Panther dad and a Social Register mom, a charming, amoral striver who uses everyone he meets in his ferocious scramble up the ar
t world ladder. Race. Art. Ambition. Bullshit ideas. He doubts he’ll ever finish. What a huge mistake to think he could write about single-minded ambition when all he can imagine, these days, is indolence and self-doubt.
He should be glad for his teaching job, not simply for providing income but for removing him from the dismal spectacle of the ministack of typescript dwarfed by his giant desk, an oak monstrosity he bought twenty years ago from a failing law firm. It cost Euston a fortune to ship it from New York, but they were happy to pay his moving costs and let Sherrie write her own ticket at the clinic. The desk is his sole reminder of how much he was wanted.
Where’s his briefcase? He’s always sure he’s lost it, left it somewhere. There’s never anything important in it, but usually several items, student manuscripts and so forth, that would be a time-consuming nightmare to replace. That’s enough to make him panic, and he begins to shovel paper and books around, increasingly agitated until he finds the briefcase under a stack of yesterday’s mail. A short stack: two magazine subscription offers, a begging letter from Greenpeace, an invitation to purchase travel insurance so like a real invitation he’d thought—before he opened it last night—that it might be to a party. He’s still invited sometimes. He and Sherrie could go down to New York, stay with Sherrie’s sister…. He throws the junk mail in the trash. Why would he need flight insurance? He never travels, never gets mail. He’s dropped off the edge of the planet.
He’d just as soon not dwell on this as he runs off to meet some student. It’s hard enough to leave the house, what with his obsessive-compulsive need to make sure all the lights are off, even in Ruby’s room, which no one’s used for ages. After her freshman year at State, Ruby got a summer job waitressing so she wouldn’t have to come home.
He stands in Ruby’s doorway and tries without success to remember its previous incarnations, how it changed from a nursery into a little girl’s room and then froze forever, a teenage Miss Havisham’s attic, plastered with the faces of actors, rock musicians, and athletes, whose stars have probably faded since Ruby put up their photos. The room had a living, evolving smell—first milk and talcum, then sneakers, nail polish, incense. But the dust and stale air have chased those poltergeist odors out.
Grabbing his corduroy jacket from a hook on the mudroom wall, he’s snagged by the oversized mirror that decides at this most inopportune moment to show him his shocking face, the deep Buster Keaton furrows, the stubble, the messy graying hair, a guy who looks more like a divorced cop in a TV series than a well-respected middle-aged but still vital and attractive writer, teacher, husband, and father. Nasty white specks on his glasses, pouches under his eyes. Swenson scrapes something suspicious off his front tooth, then checks the troublesome molar.
Ugh. No time to think about that. It’s off to work we go.
Running up the four flights to his office comprises Swenson’s entire exercise program, but this morning the aerobic benefits are undermined by the stress of being late. By the third floor, he’s panting. Chest pains? Possibly. Probably. Is this his fate—to collapse and die at the Doc Martened feet of this…leather-jacketed toothpick? Angela’s sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, balancing an open book on the milky knobs peeking through the ripped knees of her jeans.
A few steps from the top, Swenson’s able to read the title of her paperback, which is not, as he expected, the work of some trendy child author, but rather, Jane Eyre. She grasps the novel with talons lacquered eggplant purple, curling from fingerless black leather gloves studded with silver grommets. Her tiny hands—or perhaps their proximity to Charlotte Brontë’s novel—give the gloves a prim Victorian decorousness. Otherwise her outfit is pure sci-fi unisex shitkicker. A streaked green and orange ponytail, spraying straight up from the top of her head, makes her look like a garish tasseled party favor.
“Good morning,” calls Swenson, overheartily.
Glancing up from her book, Angela considers the bizarre coincidence that seems to have brought the two of them to this landing at the same moment.
“Oh, hi,” she says, uncertainly.
“Sorry I’m late,” Swenson says. “I lost track.”
“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
Swenson grabs the banister, partly to steady his breathing and partly to keep from strangling this thankless brat who’s dragged him out of bed—well, off the couch—practically at dawn and sent him racing here, risking his life…. That’s okay. Oh, is it? Hisoptions are limited but clear. A stern, unpleasant lecture on manners and the value of thank you, or he can bite the bullet and get through fifteen minutes of her mumbling about her work or, more likely, about the reasons she hasn’t done any work, and then he can mumble something back, and everyone will be happy.
He says, “Should we reschedule?”
“Oh, no no no. Please, no. I need to talk to you. Really. I was kind of liking it. Sitting here. Hiding out. It’s like when I was a kid. I’d crawl under the porch and read when I was supposed to be at school.”
“A reader,” says Swenson. “Excellent.”
“Yeah. I guess,” she says. She leans on one arm to push off from the floor. Swenson reaches out to help her. She seems to think he’s asking for her book, which she obediently hands over. While she stands, they negotiate the awkward exchange by pretending it was intended. As she gathers up her backpack, he leafs through the book, in which she’s underlined passages. So. She’s reading it for a course.
“How do you like Jane Eyre?”
“It’s practically my favorite novel. I’ve read it seven times.”
Swenson should have known. Under all that crusty leather beats the tender heart of a governess pining for Mr. Rochester.
“What I like,” says Angela, “is how pissed off Jane Eyre is. She’s in a rage for the whole novel, and the payoff is she gets to marry this blind guy who’s toasted his wife in the attic.”
“Come in,” says Swenson. “Sit down.”
As Swenson unlocks his office, Angela’s still talking. “The trouble is, I’m reading it for Lauren Healy’s class? Text Studies in Gender Warfare? And everything we read turns out to be the same story, you know, the dominant male patriarchy sticking it to women. Which I guess is sort of true, I mean, I understand how you could say that, except that everything isn’t the same.”
Dealing with the lock and key spares him the always problematic dilemma of whether or not to agree when a student trashes one of his colleagues. Also, it’s disconcerting that this sullen near-mute from class has turned into a chatterbox. He’d planned on one of those meetings in which the students chew their nails while he extracts ten minutes worth of conversation-like noise.
Swenson’s study has the yeasty smell of sweaters left in a drawer. How long since he’s been here? He honestly can’t remember. He throws open a window. Air rushes in. He lowers the window.
“Is this too cold for you?” he says. “Yesterday was tropical. Today is freezing. The planet’s out of control.”
Angela doesn’t answer. It’s taking all her concentration to walk across the room. Even so, she trips on the rug and nearly falls as she bends to straighten the carpet. All of which moves Swenson to prayer. God, don’t let her be on drugs.
“Oh, man,” she says. “I’m always falling over shit.”
“Try not to hurt yourself,” advises kindly, paternal Swenson.
“I’ll try not to. Thanks.” Is Angela being sarcastic?
“Perhaps you’d be safer if you sat down,” he says.
“Is it okay if I stand for a while?” She bounces from foot to foot.
“However you’re comfortable,” Swenson says.
“Comfortable. Ha. I wish,” she says.
Oh, please, Swenson thinks.
Sliding into his desk chair, he plays with a stack of old mail, very official, tidying up. The doctor will see you now.
“So how’s your semester going?” Swenson’s on automatic.
“Mostly straight down the toilet.” An
gela gazes out the window.
“Sorry to hear that.” Swenson’s reply is more sincere than she knows. The answer to his question is supposed to be: fine. Students don’t confide in him. He doesn’t encourage them to. Their lives may be disintegrating, but they don’t tell him. The poetry students confide in Magda Moynahan, who teaches the poetry workshop. But he never hears classroom gossip. Years after the fact, he’s learned that a student was coming unglued and he never noticed. Well, he’s got his own problems. He certainly doesn’t need theirs, though from time to time he does feel a little…left out, worried by his obliviousness to the dramas around him. He lacks the most basic observational skills. No wonder he can’t write.
Angela says, “I think I’ll sit down now.”
“Sure,” says Swenson. “Go ahead.”
Angela flops backward into the leather armchair across from his desk. First she crosses her legs on the seat in a failed attempt at a half lotus, then scoots down and pulls her knees up to her chest, then moves back and puts her feet on the ground and taps her ring on the chair arm. Swenson’s never seen anyone have so much trouble sitting. What’s she on? He doesn’t think drugs. Protracted adolescence. Her leather jacket keeps making the sound of someone tearing off a Band-Aid.
She makes one last try at pretzeling her legs into some sort of yogic twist, then sits up straight and stares at him, a quivering punk Chihuahua. She’s gone easy on the facial jewelry—only a silver coil snaking though the rim of one ear and a thin nose ring studded with a tiny green star that glitters under her nostril like a dab of emerald snot. She’s left off the eyebrow ring and the upper-lip ring, so it’s slightly less upsetting to look at her pale triangular face. Her eyes don’t have a color, exactly: a newborn’s gunmetal gray.
“So. What’s the matter with school?” he says.
“My classes suck,” she says.
“All of them?” he asks neutrally.
“Not yours!” Angela says. He didn’t think she was including him, though now he wonders why he didn’t. “Your class is the only one I go to. The only one I like.”
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