It might have been easier to bear had he remained as high-minded (read: celibate) as she, but this appeared not to be the case. Whenever Tom was not surrounded by his fraternity-brothers-slash-rugby-teammates (despite the incident that had, in her view, brought them together, he had actually abandoned lacrosse for the even less restrictive mores of the rugby team), he was in the unwelcome company of girls. And far from those Jewish girls of his supposed preference, these girls always seemed to be blond, stick-figured specimens, clad in Fair Isle sweaters and white turtlenecks with patterns of tiny frogs or hearts or strawberries. Indeed, there was such a sameness to them that only a very, very close observer (like Portia) could detect the small discrepancies that meant there was not, in fact, one particular well-groomed and springy female in Tom’s life, but multiple, sequential girlfriends. They were uniformly pale, straight of spine, short, and giggly, but one had blond hair to her shoulders, another to her chin, another to a clavicle protruding from anorexia, and a fourth was short enough to fit comfortably—wrenchingly—beneath Tom’s sinewy arm.
Portia might have been raised in the nurturing bubble of the Happy Valley, fed on the I-have-a-dream-of-a-common-language utterances of poets and sages, but she knew right away what she was dealing with here. She was not quite a dolt who supposed there was no such thing as class in America, but the few WASPs she had actually contended with were those who had—like her mother—renounced privilege and resolved to tend their own gardens, whether on or off the commune. Amherst and Northampton and the even more hippie-infested hill towns to the north and west were one great muddle of altered surnames and handmade musical instruments, reused plastic bags from the Co-Op, and clothing made on someone’s loom. For her, students of other races and nationalities did not offer the much vaunted collegiate experience of “diversity”; for her, diversity came personified by a boy with whales imprinted on his salmon-colored slacks and a girl with a hairband carefully, precisely holding back her rigorously straight blond hair. People like Tom and the little girls under his arm were exotic fauna to her. How had they evolved? What did they eat? Why did they dress like that? And how could she be more… well, like them?
Individually, she had found, the females of the species were affable, sweet, fun, and rigorously polite when you mixed with them in the classroom or the dorm. In groups of two or more, however, they seemed to undergo a metamorphosis, shifting into a dialect she could grasp only the edges of, and becoming mysteriously intertwined, like a grove of slender, rustling aspen trees with a single root system underground. Even so, and not unreasonably, Portia tried cultivating friendships with some of these girls and, when that failed, with some of the boys, but she never seemed to pass through their collective membrane of well-mannered exclusion. She fell in with them as they walked out of class and nonchalantly sat at their tables in Thayer, from which (unlike those queen bees of the seventh grade) they were far too polite to exclude her. She collected their names—Peyton, Avery, Perry, Winkie—but they never seemed to take in hers. At the very nadir of her subjugation, she went down the street to Campion’s, which carried ample stock of anything a Dartmouth preppy might require, and spent good money on a turtleneck adorned with little shamrocks. (Portia’s roommate, an intense Chinese pianist, would memorably say of this item: “Oh? Are we Irish now?”) Sitting at their tables, wearing their clothes, falling into step beside them… these things did not bring her joy. They made her feel, instead, bizarrely earthy, hairy, vaguely unclean, and in her shamrock-imprinted turtleneck, which (in spite of her skeptical roommate) she had begun to wear constantly, just a tiny bit ridiculous.
Also gargantuan.
In the real world, she wasn’t fat, but she did have substance: thighs and breasts, wide shoulders and hips, and long, skinny feet. Her body was Susannah’s body, made for fieldwork on the Russian steppes and lots of childbearing (because you had to assume the Cossacks were going to kill a few). The little blond girls—she towered above them. The sleeveless Lilly Pulitzer dresses she tried on at Campion’s were always tight across the back. She had to suck in her breath to button the high-wasted khaki pants she’d ordered from L.L.Bean, and that stupid turtleneck stretched so much across her chest that the shamrocks looked distorted.
Susannah, of course, considered dieting to be the fruit of the poisoned tree that was male chauvinist society. Portia, who was, after all, an athlete for most of her adolescence, had never seen the point of restricting her food intake, but then again, she’d never had to size herself up against girls who could have shopped in the boys’ department. Now, she embarked upon the usual sorry voyage of self-loathing and well-meaning starvation, getting a late start on calories versus carbs, Tarnower versus Atkins. She had been raised too well to resort to finger-pointing—down-the-throat finger-pointing—which was the second most popular leisure-time activity in her all-women’s dormitory (the first being late night gorging on peanut butter and Mallomars), but she was out for bones: hips, knees, even the jutting clavicle of that anorexic girl who obviously had the strength of character to starve herself. Which Portia did not. At least, not for more than a day or two, after which she would succumb to a base urge to feed herself.
Still, she beat on. Tom was her green light, her low door in the wall. (She was actually encouraged, rather than deterred, by Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which she read that freshman spring in her course on British fiction with no self-awareness whatsoever.) She could never get close enough, or lovely enough, or interesting enough, to catch his attention. And nothing else had caught her own.
Since quitting the crew team, Portia had not had a regular crowd and in time had drifted from Rebecca and her salon of thinkers and artists. Her roommate, with whom she’d been randomly paired, was an odd, driven girl, increasingly obscure as the months passed and by the end of the spring term barely speaking to Portia or anyone else. (Two years on, she would be expelled for plagiarizing a paper on Rosie the Riveter, evaporate from the roster of alumni, and never be heard from again.) All through the bitter New Hampshire winter, Portia battled serial sinus infections. When spring came and the campus softened into mud, she declared a halfhearted major in art history, then switched (hardly more enthusiastically) to English, organizing her projected Dartmouth Plan around a study abroad program in Edinburgh, the fall of her junior year. She finished out the semester with indifferent grades and returned that summer to the soccer camp (out of shape from her own abandonment of the game, not to mention her loss of muscle from erratic nourishment, but at least relieved that her beau of the previous summer had stayed on the West Coast), and so endured what would be her final months under Susannah’s roof. At the time, it did not occur to her that she was depressed, and had been for a while, but later she would wonder at Susannah’s obtuseness on the matter. Susannah, whose microattentions had been the burden of her life, who had borne down on her relentlessly to discover what she was thinking, what she was feeling, what concerned and obsessed and riled and devastated her, had seemed to achieve this long desired distance just at the moment a bit of attention might have served them both. Portia would spend many evenings that summer on the fetid living room couch, watching Ben Johnson first win and then lose his gold medal at Seoul and listening to her mother rage beside her as Bush wiped the floor with Dukakis; and years later, these—rather than the very worrying state of her emotions, not to speak of her grades, plans, and actual (rather than imaginary) relationships—were her clearest memories of those months.
And then, astoundingly, like a lacrosse ball out of the darkness, it all changed again.
On an afternoon in late October, Thomas Wheelock Standley came and sat next to her in the student center, taking the empty seat so quietly that she had no time to react. There was no obvious reason for this. The place was far from full, and she had commandeered a choice table at a window overlooking the Green, complete with its view of the new freshmen struggling to build their own bonfire. There was, unfurled before her on the table, a copy of the Dart
mouth, containing a passionate but inelegantly written editorial objecting to the Dartmouth Review’s most recent outrage, and this Portia had been reading, dully, feeling the familiar mixture of accord and resignation she always felt when the subject came up. The struggle between the two publications had become slightly epic, one hoisting a totem of Woodward and Bernstein, the other a totem of William F. Buckley (a substantial contributor, as it happened), and clashing at every opportunity. Ideologically, the thing was a no-brainer. The Review had patronized blacks and women on campus, infiltrated the gay and lesbian student association with a hidden tape recorder (and published transcripts), and staged a lobster feast in response to a campuswide fast sponsored by the Third World Association. They were, without question, a repellent lot. But they seemed, like any other class of vermin, ineradicable, and she had seen enough of her mother’s various agitations to question the point of protest.
When he began to speak to her, she failed at first to truly process the words. It seemed to her that this must be only another of the countless imaginary conversations they had had, on subjects too numerous to count, and this one simply following on from the last or the one before. He asked about the editorial, and gave his opinion of the bonfire being assembled outside, and asked what classes she was taking this term.
Portia gaped. For one thing, she looked not terribly well and was wearing not her khaki-and-shamrock ensemble of the previous spring, but old jeans and a purple Amherst sweatshirt that had not seen the inside of a washing machine in some time. Her hair, likewise neglected, fell in heavy waves down her back, curling in places when it wanted to curl, and she had, she realized, and with horror, been actually chewing the thumbnail of her left hand when he sat down, and possibly for a minute or so after.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last, when there was a break in the conversation, “but do we know each other?”
“Of course!” he said brightly. “Remember, at Rebecca’s? Last winter?”
She nodded, thoroughly numb.
“I’m Tom,” he said. “Remember?”
Portia eventually indicated that she did.
“And you’re Portia,” he added. “You’re Jewish, right?”
She stared at him, turning this question in her addled brain.
Jewish was a door that opened onto many rooms. Jewish, meaning of the faith, worshipping that long-ago God of the desert who had singled you—or at least your ancestor—out for special treatment (how “special” could itself be endlessly debated). Portia was a stalwart atheist, believing no more in the baffling desert God than the equally baffling Gods of Joseph Smith or Mother Ann Lee. Or Jewish, meaning of the tribe, marked and endlessly victimized, blown across the planet for generations but inextricably tied to one another and their shared past, like the Celts or the Mongols or the Africans. But here, too, she felt unqualified to stake much of a claim, given that she was, as far as she knew, only half Jewish (albeit the half that counted) and had no idea what the other half was and whether it might actually cancel out Susannah’s half. She had sometimes explained that she had not been “raised” Jewish, could not speak Hebrew or dance the hora, had never read from the Torah or Talmud or attended synagogue or—God forbid!—been bat mitzvahed. Her religious upbringing was limited to the brass menorah Susannah had produced one year when she was small, lit two nights running, and abandoned (for years!) on the mantelpiece in the living room, and also to Susannah’s brief flirtation with Feminist Seders, a women-only Passover assembly with an orange on the seder plate and a Haggadah full of solidarity with oppressed women across the globe. But that, too, had abated after a year or two.
She looked at him carefully. She had not been this close to him for many months, not since that day in February in Rebecca’s crowded cinder-block room, except for the one giddy morning last spring when she had taken the seat behind him in geology and was able to spend the entire class period examining the geological strata of his blond hair. He has this thing for Jewish girls, she remembered, then, dredging the extraordinary phrase from her memory, shaking it off, holding it up to the light, then letting it fill her with the strangest happiness. He seemed not at all concerned to be waiting this long for an answer.
“Yes,” she told him, smiling. “Yes, I am.”
I would like to share with you something about my current medical situation. Last month, I consulted with my doctor because of a digestive problem. He performed tests and I was given a diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). There is no cure for IBS, and I do not know what the future will hold for me, but I am determined to face this challenge with the same determination I have faced every other challenge in my life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE DESTINATION BOARD
A little over a year later, in a grubby café not far from the Gare du Nord, with a plate of highly suspect celeriac before her and a very heavy backpack at her feet and a heart—not to put too fine a point on it—newly rent to howling shreds, Portia realized that she was pregnant.
The celeriac was not something she had ordered on purpose. She wasn’t entirely sure what it was, for one thing, and—speaking no French—was not in a position to ask. But of the various cold items in bowls on the counter, it actually looked the least dangerous, if not the most appetizing, and she was too bereft to walk any farther, so she went inside the café and nodded and pointed at the bowl, thinking vaguely that it might be a kind of pasta and unlikely to hurt her stomach, which had been bothering her. But then the small plate of the stuff materialized before her, and she was able to give it a good look and a good sniff. A thin tendril of nausea began to waft up from the plate and coil around her throat, and Portia, who without entirely realizing it had already begun to cry, suddenly understood—irrevocably, precisely, horribly—just what that nausea meant.
She was not supposed to be alone in the café, in Paris, on the eve of the Christmas holiday. She was supposed to be with Tom, toasting the end of the term and the start of their great, defiantly unstructured European adventure, anticipated for giddy months, refined by postcard (from Edinburgh to the small town near Toulouse where Tom had spent the fall, and back). They had met only once during that time, in London, for a weekend of well-worn tourist exercises and a room in a Bloomsbury hotel. The hotel was called the Ivanhoe, but the garish mural in the basement bar portrayed an Antarctic scene, with penguins and sleds. (“Wrong Scott,” the manager had said mirthlessly when asked.) When she thought of the weekend later, especially in the queasy misery of that unlovely Paris café, she thought only—with sharp, wounding jolts of pain—of the elation that had wound through it and of one moment in particular: walking through Berkeley Square on the damp Saturday afternoon, destination Knightsbridge, especially Harrods, especially the food hall where Tom’s mother had once taken him to tea when he was very young and his father was working at the London office of Morgan Stanley. Tom had made a fetish of this memory, as he had of certain iconic moments in his life: the note his father had left hidden beneath his pillow on the day he left for boarding school, the jumping trophy won at a horse show and then taken away when another rider objected to the height of his pony (half a hand too tall, it turned out), the southern gothic horror show of a family reunion (South Carolina, his mother’s side), when the weekend was crashed by self-termed relations who had not really been invited. And tea at Harrods with his mother and brother, stirring pebbles of hard sugar into their cups. Taking her there seemed to Portia like an act of union, even an end run around the mother in question, who had been far from welcoming in the flesh. And walking there across the city, into the building darkness, with Portia’s waving hair (which he loved) escaping from its enclosures (in the way that he loved), and feeling still the physical prickle of his hands on her body, and passing through Berkeley Square, Tom had started to sing, not unreasonably and not—it had to be said—particularly well, that old song about nightingales in Berkeley Square, and she had thought: This can only be the sweetest moment of my life.
Had it happened that day? That afternoon? Later that night, after the play they had gone to with good intentions but then left in the intermission, because, all things considered, they would rather be back at the Ivanhoe, back in bed? Or the next morning, before he had left for the ferry and she for King’s Cross and Edinburgh, for the interminable final weeks of their separation? She hadn’t felt anything physical. She had been far more attuned to her general anticipation for their reunion and the effort of late-in-the-day scholarship to redeem her (thus far) undistinguished schoolwork. But nothing of the body. Nothing… clinical. Moving a fork through those repellent white, soupy strings of celeriac, she could not remember when she had last had her period. Then she could not remember when she had last thought about it.
Tom had come to Paris, as planned. And the train station, as planned. But he had left her there to go be with some other woman, and that had certainly not been planned, at least not by her. The woman, who apparently waited discreetly outside (in a café probably far more picturesque than the one she herself was sitting in), was a Dartmouth sophomore from his language program, with a name Portia had immediately repressed, so that even years later she found herself making it up with the aid of an imaginary WASP rhyming dictionary: Twinky? Blinky? Stinky? This person would prove to be athletic and flat and asexual and blond, not—in other words—outwardly distinguishable from the women who had preceded Portia’s tenure in Tom’s life (minus, of course, the Jewish girls), but—cruelly—she would be the one he married.
Yet Rebecca had also been far from mistaken about the Jewish girls.
From the moment he’d sat beside her in the student center and nonchalantly reminded her of who he was and where they’d met to that final night in the Wrong Scott hotel, Tom had thrown himself headlong into her assorted relative abundances: flesh and hair, emotion, eccentricity. He had adored the extravagance of Susannah, who was a screamer, a gesturer, a sensualist, whose disapproval (even) had passion and extravagance. He had adored Susannah so much that he had been impervious to the fact that Susannah had not adored him back, not the littlest bit. Portia, fearing the worst—expecting the worst—had first taken him home over the winter break, for three days of brittle tension that culminated in an outburst even Tom could absolutely not miss, in which her mother had dragged her from the dinner table (Tom had been explaining that his work covering sports for the Dartmouth Review was not political—it was sports, after all!), secured her behind the insubstantial door of the sitting room, and demanded to know what the fuck she thought she was doing with this reactionary, boorish, chauvinistic son of privilege.
Admission Page 42
