Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  “Oh, yes. The novel with the horrible father, the one who tells his daughter she’s not a person.”

  “Yeah. She wrote a truly brilliant paper. I’m no therapist, but I think that’s Sophia’s battle. She wants to become a person, an American person. But she’s so loyal to her family.” He shrugged. “It’s not a new problem.”

  As he talked about Sophia, Greg began to work his way through his half of the omelet, and then finished up what I had left of mine. “Maybe I could help,” he said when he was done. “Could I come with you to the hospital?”

  “Sure.” I began to feel more hopeful. Perhaps I’d pulled Greg out of his slump, for now, anyhow. Maybe I wouldn’t have to play Miss Lonelyhearts any longer. And maybe I’d enlisted someone to help me out with Sophia.

  When the waitress reappeared to refill our coffee cups, she winked at me. The big man with the dark beard was displaying feeling. Way to go, girl. And another guy waiting in the wings.

  I glanced over Greg’s shoulder. Avery was evidently laying out a plan to his companions. With his right hand he was outlining details, some on the tabletop, some in the air. It was like a ballet, I thought; his hand moved so elegantly. When he saw me looking in his direction, he gave me a barely perceptible nod. I immediately dropped my gaze. My face grew hot.

  No matter how it may have appeared to our waitress,I am no sophisticate as far as men are concerned. Listen, when you come from where I came from, men are a luxury. For most of my adult life, I have been working much too hard to have any time for them. I started out way behind everyone else, and I’ve had a hell of a time catching up.

  Since my disastrous marriage I’d really only had one long-term relationship. Tony and I had been together for over six years but, when I insisted on taking the Enfield job and moving more than four hours away from where he works as a state police narcotics investigator in Manhattan, we had separated. He couldn’t live like that, he said. He needed someone to commit to him, marry him, start a family. He needed that, he said, and I believed him. But, after fifteen years of combining full-time mothering with full-time studying, balancing poorly paid adjunct teaching jobs with enough part-time waitressing to keep food on the table, and then laboring anonymously in a factorylike city university, it was no contest. I wouldn’t, even for Tony, contemplate turning my back on an offer from Enfield College.

  Separating from Tony was a little like ripping out my heart, to borrow a simile from one of my romance novels. But his conditions were absolute: If I went away from him, that was it. No retreat, baby, no surrender.

  He has another girlfriend now. They’re engaged. The wedding is next summer.

  Amanda, who still sees Tony, the only father she wants to remember, insists his fiancée looks like me.

  She teaches nursery school.

  So there I sat with my good job and my slowly mending heart, sneaking peeks over Greg’s shoulder at the eloquent hands of a man who was in a position to pulverize me completely, good job, healing heart, and all.

  Someone should tell me to wise up.

  When we got up to leave the diner, Avery was still deeply engaged with his trustees. I inadvertently brushed his arm as I put on my coat in the narrow aisle. He looked up at me and smiled.

  I left the waitress a ridiculously large tip.

  Seven

  MY FEET swooshed with almost reverential silence over the deep pile of the burgundy carpeting in the main corridor of Emerson Hall, Enfield’s administration building. Emerson’s oak wainscoting and paneled doors with their elaborately ornamented brass knobs had presided with somber elegance over the education of generations of elite New England youths while my illiterate ancestors were hoeing potatoes in the rocky fields of eastern Canada. I never entered this building without the sense that someone might well hand me a soft cloth and a bottle of brass polish and tell me to get to work. That I was actually a professor on my way to submit grade sheets to the Enfield registrar seemed to me to be nothing short of miraculous. The ghosts of the college’s former presidents obviously agreed. They frowned down on me from massive gilt-framed portraits lining the high walls of the corridor.

  Monday, long before dawn, as I finished calculating my students’ final grades and was about to enter them on the registrar’s grade sheets, I realized Sophia was not the only student whose work was incomplete: Bonnie Winner’s—excuse me, Weimer’s—final exam was also missing. Sophia’s crisis had driven Bonnie from my mind.

  At nine A.M., when no one answered my calls to Bonnie’s dorm room, I loaded all the papers and exams in the car along with my grade sheets. I couldn’t wait to be rid of the detritus of this semester, and it annoyed me to have to deal with loose ends. In Emerson Hall I stopped at the Dean of Students’ office to inquire about Bonnie. I wasn’t the first. Her roommate had just come by, uneasy because she hadn’t seen Bonnie all weekend. And Bonnie’s parents, unable to reach her, had called Earlene first thing this morning.

  When I reported Bonnie’s missing exam, Earlene’s expression grew even more concerned. “Stacey, Bonnie’s roommate, said Bonnie stayed up all Thursday night because she wanted to get your final in on time. And Stacey knew she’d finished it because the printer woke her up about six A.M. She says Bonnie isn’t always considerate that way. Karen, are you sure you don’t have her exam?”

  “I saw her briefly at lunch Friday, but she didn’t give me anything. And she never came to the office. I’d have remembered, because she was going to tell me something—” I paused as the significance hit me “—about—about Randy.”

  “That does it!” Earlene reached for the phone. “This is not the type of young woman who just takes off without telling anyone. And if Randy was involved—I’m reporting her missing.”

  The feeling of unease that I had been trying all weekend to exorcise began once again to rattle its spectral chains. What could have happened to hyper-conscientious Bonnie? I marked I for Incomplete in the slot for her final grade and left the grade sheet with the registrar. Maybe nothing else was resolved, but my grading, at least, was complete.

  “Karen? Can I offer you a cup of coffee?” Earlene caught me on my way out of the building.

  “Sure.” Not only did I like Earlene, I also enjoyed spending time in her office. She had decorated it with African masks and sculptures and large handwoven reed mats from Kenya. It was the most distinctive office I had seen at Enfield, where people seem to think nondescript shabbiness is a mark of intellectual merit.

  “I wonder what those old presidents out in the hall would think of your decor, Earlene? Or your outfit?”

  Today, perhaps in celebration of the upcoming holiday, Earlene was togged out in African fashion, wearing a purple batik dashiki over black leggings. With her close-cropped hair and the hammered silver hoops dangling from her ears, she looked stunning.

  Earlene laughed. “It really doesn’t matter, does it? They wouldn’t approve of yours, either.”

  I had made a real effort this morning to avoid my usual dishevelment. Wearing tight black jeans, a form-fitting black turtleneck sweater, short black leather boots, and my hair pulled back in a purple scrunchy retrieved from among Amanda’s rejects, I had left the house feeling … well … baaaad. But now, next to Earlene, I felt positively dowdy.

  Earlene wanted to talk about Sophia. “I saw her this morning and she seems to be doing a little better,” Earlene said, seating me in an armchair by her desk and pouring a cup of fresh-made coffee. After refusing food for two days, she said, Sophia had begun to eat again. She’d also agreed to talk to a hospital social worker.

  I had noticed a slight improvement on Sunday when Greg and I visited. Greg’s half-solicitous, half-teasing banter had even elicited a hint of animation. Sophia’s hair had been washed and brushed and lay on her pillow in an ashen profusion. Her blue-gray eyes, although pained and guarded, held their usual depths of intelligence and irony.

  “I’ve known Sophia since she was a freshman,” Earlene continued. “She grew up in Enf
ield, on the north side, over where the mills used to be, and she still lives at home. She’s a terrific student, but Enfield isn’t the best place for a kid on scholarship: all these yuppie puppies with their designer jeans and their designer drugs.”

  “Did she ever talk to you?” I was fishing to see if Sophia had confided in Earlene, too, about her involvement with Randy.

  “Only about her schedule and her work-study. Stuff like that. She never seemed comfortable talking about herself. Why? Do you know something I don’t?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, but she didn’t pursue the matter. She’d just remembered something. “Wait. About a year ago she came in one morning, obviously in distress. She wasn’t crying, but she had been. I remember thinking that her eyes had that kind of washed-out look to them. In my job I see too much of that. It was the only time I ever remember Sophia being less than completely composed.” She paused. “Do you want more coffee?” I nodded.

  It was good coffee, dark and full-bodied with a hint of nut flavor. While I sipped, Earlene leaned back in her chair and chewed on her upper lip as if she were trying to recover a memory. Sunlight from the tall, uncurtained windows slanted across the sculpted masks adorning the walls. Split between light and shadow, the stylized faces brooded ambiguously over our silence. Earlene leaned forward with a sigh.

  “I see so many students, and a surprising number of them are in crisis. After a while they all blur together. I may bitch about how privileged most of these kids are, but they’ve got problems you wouldn’t believe. I’m dealing with stuff that’s not too different from what’s happening on the streets of Cleveland where I grew up—drugs, pregnancies, incest, date rapes. It can be a real zoo. I guess when someone is as self-contained and responsible as Sophia is, I just breathe a sigh of relief and let her go her own way.”

  “But you remembered something?”

  “Yeah. She came in that morning as distraught as I’ve ever seen her. She wanted to know if it was possible for me to get her a room on campus. I looked into it but had to tell her that her financial aid covered only tuition, not room and board. I remember how disappointed she seemed. I asked if I should call her parents and see if we couldn’t work out some kind of delayed payment program. She went a little pale when I suggested that, jumped up from her chair and said, ‘No. Don’t do that. Things are fine just the way they are.’”

  In repose, her face shadowed in the sunlight, Earlene looked older than I had thought, her features more careworn. Her heavy eyebrows grew straight, without an arch, above the dark, deep-set eyes, and her dark skin gleamed in the sunshine as if it, like the African masks, had been carefully polished. She seemed lost in her reflections. I thought, not for the first time, This woman is really beautiful.

  When she didn’t pick up the conversation after a minute or two, I spoke. “At the hospital you said her father was ‘a scary dude.’”

  “Did I?” She laughed, fully present again. “Well, he sure is. Have you met him?”

  “No. But I’ve met his wife.” I remembered the pale ghost of a woman at Sophia’s bedside. “So I think I know something about him.”

  “Yeah. A cramped-up, constipated type. But domineering. And big? Whew! You know, the hell of it is, if Sophia hadn’t been so damn stoic about it, if she’d only confided in me, if I’d had any indication she was in such a state of crisis, I might have been able to work something out for her. There are ways …”

  “You’re not clairvoyant.”

  “No, but it would sure help. Well, I’ll keep an eye on Sophia as best I can. But it seems you’re the one she trusts.”

  “Yeah.” I reflected for a minute. “Well, when I teach poetry, I’m dealing with some pretty elemental feelings—love, hate, self-loathing, despair. It’s heavy stuff and students tend to think I’ve got a handle on it. If I don’t watch out they use me as a mother confessor.” I sighed. “Well, if there’s anything I can do …” My resolve to stay uninvolved seemed to be evaporating fast.

  “I’ll let you know. And you let me know. And, by the way,” Earlene added as I got up to leave, “I wish I could wear black the way you can.” She looked at me appraisingly, her eyes narrowed. “Today you look positively feline.” She nodded, raising her eyebrows in approval.

  I always knew this was a discerning woman.

  The talk with Earlene had given me some insight into Sophia’s state of mind. She’d probably built a separate emotional world for herself, one where school, books, and ideas took on the affectional weight of mother and father. After a while, I imagine, she felt herself to be adequately protected by her intellectual armor, merely walking through the daily motions of her family life.

  No wonder she had been so vulnerable to Randy.

  I decided to drop in on her later. I’d take along some light reading: murder mysteries, maybe. Death, mayhem, and general social corruption: just what she needed to get her mind off her problems. Hey, I mean it. But now, to clear my head, shake this oppressive uneasiness, and celebrate the end of the semester, I was going swimming.

  The gym was almost deserted. Those students who weren’t either taking exams or studying for them had already left for home. I was relieved to see that I didn’t have to strip in front of any of my students. For a woman staring forty in the face, there is nothing more disconcerting than having a naked twenty-year-old inquire earnestly about your syllabus as you emerge, saggy and dripping, from the shower.

  The woman’s locker room is a cavernous and dreary place, smelling of a particularly noxious combination of air freshener and damp feet. Enfield seems to spend a great deal of money, especially alumni money, on athletics, but not much of it is thrown in the direction of women’s sports.

  At the moment the locker room was empty, and, except for a gym bag sitting open on a bench just under the high, opaque glass-block windows, there was no sign of anyone having been there at all that day. A fairly threadbare white towel was thrown over the bag, and a worn pair of duck boots sat lined up neatly under the bench.

  On my way to the pool I glanced into the Nautilus room and was surprised to see Margaret Smith working out on the biceps machine. Dressed in sweat shorts and an Enfield T-shirt, deep in communion with her mirrored image, she looked nothing like the pale, nondescript scholar of the Faculty Commons or the hysterical woman of the fatal Christmas party.

  As I opened the door to the pool and nodded to the lifeguard, I wondered for the first time about Margaret. How old was she? Was she married or partnered in some way? Did she have children? Was she really a human being with hopes and fears like the rest of us? But that was going a little beyond the scope of my imagination.

  I dove into the pool and forgot all about Margaret—and suicide, and murder, and final grades. For thirty minutes I knew nothing but the motion of my muscles, the intake and exhaling of my breath, and the flow of the cool, clear water over my body. The preoccupations of the past few days scattered and then vanished, and I thought fleetingly of Amanda, and Christmas, and how I could prepare a sumptuous holiday dinner for two when one was a vegetarian and the other wasn’t. I thought about Avery, and the presidential portraits, and the fact that his was nowhere to be seen in that imposing corridor. My response to him in the diner the day before, I decided, had been just a momentary erotic aberration. But what a stupid thing! My boss! I must really be hard up, I thought. I must really be desperate. Then I stopped thinking altogether. I swam my usual half mile, threw in five additional laps for good measure, and emerged from the pool renewed and ready for another go-round with life.

  Margaret Smith was in the locker room when I entered, drying her short gray-brown hair in front of the long mirror. The threadbare towel and worn duck boots were hers. I still wore my bright yellow swim cap and had wrapped myself in a large chartreuse towel with a hot pink palm tree on it. The towel was a gift from Amanda, who is delighted that her mother is, as she puts it, “finally doing something for your body.” I looked, I know, as frivolous as I was certain Margaret had always t
hought me to be.

  Margaret appeared startled to see me and nodded in her customary wary manner. Dressed now in a saggy brown wool crewneck sweater and brown tweed pants, equally shapeless, she had regained her customary persona of faded British don. Except for a faint color in her cheeks, she looked middle-aged and not particularly healthy.

  I unzipped my gym bag to get my shampoo and conditioner. “How are you, Margaret?” I can do the social thing when it’s necessary. “Have you finished grading your exams yet?”

  Her response was slow in coming. “Why do you ask?”

  Jeez. “No reason. Just being polite.”

  “Oh. Well. In that case, yes. Yes, I have.”

  “Great,” I responded inanely, and escaped to the shower room. I took a very long, very hot shower.

  When I came back into the locker room, Margaret was gone, and I was alone with the scarred benches and battered lockers.

  Eight

  JILL GREENBERG was getting off the hospital elevator as I came out of the gift shop with a paperback mystery.

  “Hi,” she said. “I just saw Sophia. She’s better than I expected. She actually smiled when I asked permission to seduce her social worker. What a hunk!”

  Jill was in rare form today, hair flamboyantly loose, curling in profusion around her heart-shaped face. Her cowl-necked jersey was hot pink, a shocking contrast to the orange tones of her wild curls. The gigantic plastic bananas dangling from her ear-lobes were a shade of purple not to be found anywhere in nature. Her jeans seemed to have been grafted onto her body, and with dark red lipstick she had shaped a stylized 1950s mouth over her own delicate lips. Somehow this outrageous conglomeration of colors and shapes combined to create a charming image. I doubted she had any idea just how very young and innocent she looked.