A few days after defending her dissertation, on her way from Texas to her new teaching position in South Carolina, she had stopped at her parents’ home in Alabama, and all was destroyed in a flash. The Christmas wedding she and Victor had talked about never came to pass. He called, he wrote, he tried to see her, but she shut him out. She couldn’t marry, she told him. Not now, not ever. No, there was nothing to explain; she had simply changed her mind. She never breathed a word about what had happened to her in Alabama.
When she did marry, years later and against her better judgment, it was not Victor. Matthew Rich was the man she married, though not the man she loved. And not the man to whom she bore children. That part of marriage never happened.
At unexpected times Victor still came to mind. She remembered meals they had cooked together, books they had read, concerts they had attended. She knew he had moved back to his home state of California, for she had read an item in an alumni newsletter years ago: Victor Hart lives in Zion Park, CA, where he chairs the history department at South Chester University. His wife, Laura, is a systems analyst.
Julia wasn’t sure what a systems analyst was, but she wondered what kind of woman Laura Hart was, whether she had given Victor children. Sometimes she wondered if Victor ever thought about the girl named Julia Frederickson he had once claimed to love, the creator of solace with the reflecting eyes and the fresh, clear voice, whose truthfulness he admired.
• • •
AS she was exiting the auditorium, Marcy called her name. Julia turned around and waited for her. Marcy already had her cap off. “Am I glad that’s over. Good speech, though, and so short! Remember the year that old fogy went on forever and then started over at the beginning of his speech? It was like he was in a loop he couldn’t get out of.” She was trying to fluff her hair. “I hate these caps. Ring around the hairdo.”
The lawns were already flooding with graduates and their families, everyone laughing, posing for snapshots, giving high fives. Some of the teachers posted themselves at certain locations every year after graduation so that students could find them, introduce them to their parents, have pictures taken with them. Julia had never taken such a chance, however, for she had no confidence that anyone would come by. She and Marcy agreed on this point and usually made plans to go somewhere to eat as soon as they could take off their regalia and get away from campus.
As they walked toward Simmons Hall together, Marcy described what the other teachers seated on her row were doing during the ceremony. Seated farther back than Julia, those on Marcy’s row could get away with more. Julia caught only snatches of what she was saying—someone was working a Sudoku puzzle, someone else was reading a paperback book. No doubt another was texting, someone else dozing—all the same predictable back-row behaviors the younger teachers either had picked up from their students or had never outgrown themselves. In previous years, Julia had felt indignant over such reports, but today she could muster nothing beyond indifference.
In her office she removed her hairpins and took off her cap, then her robe. She laid her cap back in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet and hung her robe on the coat hook behind her door, where it would wait until she needed it again.
She was touching up her hair when Marcy appeared again with an armful of books and folders, her computer bag slung over one shoulder. “All set? You’re riding with me this time. I’ll dump this stuff in the backseat.”
Julia started to argue but changed her mind. Riding with Marcy, though always an exercise in patience, would necessitate a trip back to campus to get her car, which would give her a good reason to return to her office. She thought she might spend some time here this evening after they ate—a sort of private observance to close the school year and usher in her sabbatical.
It was almost four thirty by the time they made their way through the campus traffic and were finally seated in a place called Sticky Fingers in downtown Greenville, a drive of some thirty minutes, during which Marcy sprang it on Julia that this was to be her treat—an end-of-year, beginning-of-sabbatical, I’ll-miss-you celebration.
Though not a sentimental person, Julia suddenly realized that she would look back fondly on this outing with her friend. For years she had taken Marcy for granted, had even been annoyed with her on a regular basis, but now it struck her that she would miss seeing her, eating with her, hearing her stories and gossip.
As a friend, Marcy deserved more credit than Julia gave her. She made few demands and not only excused small slights but seemed to have no memory of them afterward. Further, she was clearly bright, though she seemed to think she had been hired at Millard-Temple only by some stroke of luck. She often expressed wonder that someone with Julia’s mind would stoop to be her friend. “Don’t say things like that,” Julia had told her more than once. “You’re the one who knows Brit Lit inside out.”
But Marcy would always laugh and counter with something like “What I know about Brit Lit could maybe fill a demitasse, but don’t ask me anything about any other kind of lit. I’m the one who thought Hiawatha was a girl, remember.”
They continued to look at the menu after the waitress took their drink orders, Marcy reading aloud and exclaiming over the various items. By now Julia was already being reminded that Marcy’s cheerfulness was hard to take for long stretches. Somehow she willed herself to relax, however. She was in no hurry. The more time here, the less time at home. She faded in and out of Marcy’s outflow of talk, occasionally providing an answer to a question or filling a pause with a brief remark.
At one point Marcy stopped, slapped the table on both sides of her plate of ribs, and said, “Shoot, girl, I’m going to miss you next year! Who’s going to listen to me? Larry’s going to miss you, too, I’ll tell you—he’ll be the one who has to sit through all my saved-up words at the end of the day. Poor guy, he’ll be begging for the condensed edition!” Larry was Marcy’s husband, about whom Julia knew more than she cared to. Most of it was good, however, for according to Marcy, Larry was “a husband to die for.”
Afterward they walked all the way down Main Street to the Liberty Bridge, a cantilevered affair over the Reedy River. They stopped in a few of the shops along the way and got ice cream at one of them. When Marcy dropped her off by her car back at the college almost three hours later, Julia allowed an awkward hug before she opened the door to get out. Marcy put a hand on her arm. “Hey, kiddo, you seem a little down. You going to be okay?”
Julia nodded. “Oh, sure, I’ll be fine.”
“It’s been a hard year for you,” Marcy said. “You deserve some time off.” She cocked her head. “So, what are you going to do with yourself?”
They had been over this ground before, but only in general terms. “Oh, a little of this and that,” Julia said.
Marcy waited a moment to see if there was more, then said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I’d do if I had a year off. I’d go back to Kansas and spend a whole month in the town where I grew up. I’d drive by my old house at least once a day and visit my old schools and the grocery store and the library and the church and the park and my granddaddy’s barber shop and all the rest of it. I’d relive my whole childhood, right up to the day I got married and had to start being a boring old adult.” She laughed. “How about you—you going back home for a little bit?”
The question only proved how little Marcy knew about her, though, in all fairness, it more accurately proved how little Julia had shared with her. She shook her head. “No, I won’t be doing that. Nobody’s there anymore.”
Marcy smiled at her. “Well, if you need anything, you’ll holler, won’t you? Don’t be a stranger. Keep in touch, okay? I’ll sure be lonesome eating by myself in the cafeteria every day. Can we have lunch together sometimes?”
Julia felt suddenly very tired. Talkative people wore her out, especially when so much of the talk was in the form of questions. She nodded. “Sure, I’ll be around. Give me a call.”
“I’ll do it!” Marcy said. “Bye now, girl
friend! Don’t forget me! Have fun!” She waved, blew a kiss, and as she pulled away gave several toots of her horn. Julia watched her turn the corner and head toward the front gate. Such an innocent soul, Marcy. It was amazing that she had such a friend.
After Marcy’s car disappeared from sight, Julia went inside Simmons Hall and sat in her office with the blinds open until she could see night falling over the campus. She left the light off so as not to attract attention, in case anyone else happened to be in the building on the evening of graduation day. Presently she heard the slam of a door down the hall, then laughter, followed by “I’m so out of here!” And then all was quiet for a long time.
At last she rose from her desk, walked to the door, and took a long look around her office. In the months to come, she knew she would think of it often, as a familiar land where she had once lived and one to which she longed to return. Out in the hall she tested the doorknob to make sure it was locked before heading down the dark hallway.
• • •
OVER the next week Pamela continued to call every evening with the same question: “Did she come yet?” She also said things like, “Well, you need to get on with your life. You’re too tense. I think you ought to pack a suitcase and come see me for a couple of weeks. Sisters do usually visit each other, you know.”
As if it would ease anybody’s tension to spend a week in the same house with an inveterate nail biter like Pamela. Julia always thanked her but declined, claiming she was too tired to pack a suitcase. She hadn’t told Pamela about her sabbatical yet because she dreaded hearing all the questions, all the advice about how she should use the time, especially more hints about visits.
As the days wore on, she began to allow herself to believe that the threat of Carmen was past. She wasn’t ready yet to open Matthew’s closet, but she busied herself cleaning the back porch and kitchen cupboards, getting her teaching wardrobe washed and pressed and properly stored, watching movies, taking long walks, going back and forth to the library.
She began reading late into the night. She finished two books about writing, even took some notes to integrate into her lectures. Her colleague had been right about the Stephen King book—it was very good, even though King said bluntly that nobody really needed how-to books in order to learn to write well. You could learn everything you needed to know, he said, by reading and paying attention and rubbing shoulders with people in the normal course of living and working. And by writing, of course. You had to write a lot to learn to write well.
And this frothy-sounding principle from the other book by a writer she had never heard of: “To achieve the highest mark in fiction, the writer himself must live life fully.” She wrote that down, too. Though insipid, it could launch a class discussion: What does it mean to live life fully?
Somewhere in the back of Julia’s mind during the reading of these two books, an intention had formed. She had to write a story of her own and get it published. If she didn’t, she could never hope to put to rest her fear and guilt over Jeremiah’s stories. Not that writing a good story would absolve her, but maybe it would clear her mind, gain her a few more nights of sleep, or at least a few nights of more sleep.
Many years ago she had read a description of guilt that had stuck with her, the gist of it being that guilt is an irresistible thing humans latch on to and carry around like precious cargo. She thought it might have been in a Steinbeck novel, though she couldn’t remember which one. She had read the passage many times, then had closed the book never to finish it.
• • •
ON the second Saturday morning in June, Julia rose early, having decided sometime during the night to drive to Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia, today. It would take seven hours of driving time altogether, and then the walking tour. Not only would it get her out of the house in case Carmen came, but she would also be able to list the trip under “Professional Growth and Development” in the next update of her faculty portfolio.
Besides visiting Andalusia, she had made another decision during the night: If she could get through another week safely, she would put Carmen completely out of her mind and get on with the summer.
She dressed quickly, ate a little breakfast, printed out directions, and by eight o’clock was locking the back door of the stone house. She got into the Buick, set the trip odometer, and pulled away from Ivy Dale, none of it with much enthusiasm. For some reason, this trip felt more like something she needed to do rather than wanted to.
Heading toward the interstate, she made another decision: Today she would try to live life fully. She had heard the phrase many times before running across it in the book, of course, and even though it was a cliché, it might be something to take up her mind today. She knew it probably started with a positive attitude—another nebulous concept, with a whiff of false virtue about it, one of those traits she associated with shallow naïve people. But it couldn’t hurt. It might be fun to become a different person for a day.
The day promised to be a fine, sunny one—there, that was a start on a positive attitude. And the summer was spread out before her, and an entire year after that. She reminded herself again that many of her colleagues would love to be in her place, getting paid for all that time to do whatever they wanted to do.
As she settled into the flow of traffic, another idea returned to her, something else she had thought of during the previous night—that after this refresher drive to Andalusia she could perhaps plan a trip along the eastern seaboard. New England was full of authors’ homes. Such a trip would certainly give her something to show for her year out of the classroom. Besides courage to leave her comfort zone, it would require research and preparation, not to mention careful budgeting, and then the trip itself would occupy a great deal of time and in the end provide her with even more professional activities to list in her portfolio. And maybe ideas for stories, too.
The miles passed agreeably enough. Before long she tuned the radio to Weekend Edition on NPR and listened for a while to a woman from Australia talking about the year she spent as a doctor in the African bush. “I’ve never liked change,” the woman said in her starchy, clipped accent. “I was absolutely petrified, but now I’m gratified that I did it.” Here was inspiration—a woman who was afraid to leave her comfort zone but did it anyway and was glad afterward.
Shortly there followed a story about a restaurant in Tennessee called the Critter Hutch, specializing in dishes featuring squirrel, possum, and rabbit. “Fried is the cooking method of choice here at the Critter Hutch,” the radio narrator said. In the background were kitchen sounds—clanging metal, whirring mixers, sizzling grills, running water, shouting, clattering, thunking. Though Julia had no interest in actually eating at the Critter Hutch, she suddenly wished she could see it. What a wonder—the world was full of such diverse people, even in neighboring states. Maybe she should make a list of some of these places for day trips. Tennessee wasn’t that far away.
• • •
THE radio soon became only background noise as Julia fell to remembering. Matthew’s people had lived in Tennessee. He had taken her there the first Christmas after they were married. As she recalled, the relatives she had met on that trip were just the type to eat possum and squirrel. By then the grandmother who had raised Matthew was in failing health in a nursing home called Quiet Acres. They had gone to see her.
A bizarre but curiously tender scene came to Julia’s mind. The grandmother, whom Matthew had always spoken of as Gran, was a wisp of a woman, part Cherokee, with sharp features, skin like old leather, and a long tangle of yellow-gray hair.
When they entered her room, Gran was staring hard at the door as if willing someone to appear. “Oh, bless us, you’re here, Matty,” she said, her voice a high-pitched warble yet oddly commanding. “Come over here quick.” She raised a twisted hand toward her bedside table. “Look inside there and get that jar.”
There was only one jar in the drawer, and Matthew took it out. It was a jar of hair removal cream. “You got to
do this, Matty.” She touched a clawlike finger to her jawline. “I got these old whiskers down here, but my hands are too crippled up to do anything.”
Matthew had held back. “I brought Julia to meet you, Gran,” he said. He cast a look at Julia that said, Help me out here. But Julia stayed where she was, at the foot of the bed. She must have spoken the usual niceties—Glad to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you—but Gran had eyes only for Matthew.
“Nurses here can’t do squat,” Gran said. “Only one I like—a colored girl. All the rest I got no use for. Don’t reckon half of them ever even went to nursing school.” She pushed herself up higher on her pillows. “Go on, Matty, get a washrag from the sink and wet it. It tells you how to do it on the jar.”
Julia remembered little else about that trip to Tennessee, but she could still see Matthew sitting on the edge of his grandmother’s bed, smoothing cream onto her face and then gently wiping it off. Afterward he brushed the tangles out of her hair. Julia hadn’t thought much about the incident at the time, but it struck her now as a marvel. She wondered why she couldn’t have learned to love a man like that, couldn’t have at least tried. It was at unguarded moments like this that she felt the impact of her carelessness, her failure to notice important things.
Well, Matthew had been careless, too, leaving her saddled with so many debts that she’d been forced to deplete almost every resource, even most of her modest inheritance. She had always trusted him to pay the bills and keep their accounts in order. After all, as an insurance adjuster, he worked with numbers every day. It was incredible to think she had known so little about their finances, that she had no idea, for example, about the bad investments or the other two credit cards Matthew used besides the one they shared, and that he routinely robbed one to pay the other. Electronic equipment, expensive clothes, things for the house, a new car every couple of years—nothing that worried her at the time, but all of which added up to a lot of money.
To See the Moon Again Page 6
