by Nancy Thayer
“Every day’s the day with you, babe,” Steve had grinned, turning toward her.
Afterward, he had gotten up and dressed and left her there swooning under the covers. She was as lazily satiated as a bear who had just devoured a honeypot. Also, she didn’t want to move around; she didn’t want gravity to pull the semen down, away from her eager egg.
Today her temperature was still high, 98.4. The basal temperature dropped at the beginning of menstruation. But the eighteenth day was really too early for any indication of anything. Her temperature wouldn’t start to drop—if it was going to—for about a week.
Sara looked down at her chart. Dutifully, according to instructions, she had circled each point on the chart whenever she and Steve had had intercourse. Now those circled dots looked back at her like so many googly eyes, like groups of nippled breasts. She was nuts. She was obsessed. She was sleepy. She and Steve had stayed awake late last night, partying with friends, then sitting up watching and laughing at an old horror movie. She had had only six hours of sleep. She should go back to bed or she’d be cranky all day.
But first she sat a bit longer, in the silvery silence of the kitchen, studying the chart, as if it could tell her something now, as if she could read her fortune there among the leaps and dips of the penciled dots, which formed mysterious and meaningful constellations, like those of the stars.
Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, Sara’s temperature was still at 98.4. She kissed Steve good-bye, poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, then curled up on the sofa with the Seraphina manuscript. Poor old Seraphina was locked in a dark underground passageway, wearing only a see-through nightgown and the obligatory sweeping cape. Sara yawned.
My mother often said that she knew early on that I was lost to the farm, that she knew when I was only six years old. It was a winter day, when the snow was piled like walls around the house and school was canceled and the white air was filled with the lowing of hungry cows and the answering growl of tractors plowing paths to the barns.
I was in my bedroom, playing school. Four dolls were lined up on the floor and I stood across from them, wearing a flowered flannel dress my mother had handsmocked across the bodice, matching ribbons around my pigtails, and my mother’s high-heeled dress shoes over my thick white socks. I was writing on a chalkboard, pretending to be a teacher.
Mother stood in the door watching, unobserved, silent, until I wrote on the board: 1 plus 1 equals 4.
“Jenny!” she cried, interrupting me. “Why did you write one plus one equals four? You know better than that! Don’t you?”
I turned to her, exasperated. “Oh, Mother, of course I know that one plus one equal two. Everyone knows that. But I just get so bored with the same answer all the time.”
Then Mother knew I was lost to the farm. For although nature plays her tricks on farmers to keep them in a state of constant and anxious uncertainty—will an early frost kill the crops, will a drought kill the crops, will a flood kill the crops?—the daily life of a farmer is based on repetition. The cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, must be fed twice a day, at regular times, or there will be no milk, no eggs, no bacon, no lamb: those animals are the farmer’s household gods and offerings must be made regularly, sacrifices in the name of life. There are days when the work seems holy, the simple act of scattering corn filled with a pagan and Christian grace, when the cow’s steamy breath rises out hot and high on a snowy day like ghosts, like the Holy Ghost. But there are also days when the same acts seem only drudgery, dulling to the spirit and senses and the stupid cows knock against each other greedily and shit on the clean golden straw you have just pitched down from the loft. Then the doves fly cooing upward across the shaft of light and their cry is a knife in the heart, a reverberating yearning: There must be more. But where? But where?
Sara turned the page; there was no more about Jenny. Just sexy Seraphina calling out for Errol.
“Oh, no!” she cried aloud, for it was Jenny she wanted to know about. She flipped through the manuscript, skimming over the pages until she found what she wanted: another section about Jenny.
Heat hurts. If you put your hand on the red burner of an electric stove, the heat hurts so much that you instinctively draw that hand away. When I was sixteen, we had a summer in Kansas that was as hot as the burner of a stove, and the sun coiled red above us every day, relentless in its burning. It hurt to go outside, and air-conditioned tractors had not been invented yet—not that we could have afforded one. Our farm unraveled around our weathered house, rows and rows of plowed and planted land turning to dust, the hidden seeds crumbling. Even the messy cottonwoods, planted along the fencelines to act as windbreaks for the fields, began to wither and dry up, their leaves turning cracked and then brown. The grass around the house crackled and exploded with angry grasshoppers and crickets as we walked on it, and the well went low, so that what water we rationed out tasted old and rusty.
The coolest place in the house was the basement, where we had several cots, a card table with a shortwave radio, and stacks of canned foods, all in preparation for an imminent tornado or Russian bombing. We owned one old pickup truck and couldn’t afford to drive frivolously, so I wasn’t able to visit friends—but then, I had no friends to visit. At sixteen I had become both “intellectual” and sexual, in ways my classmates were not prepared for. I didn’t want to get married and have babies and my own farm like the other girls at my four-county school—I wanted to get out and travel and drink champagne and write novels. I liked learning. I wanted to go to college. I had become a freak in my own town.
So when I wasn’t helping with chores I was alone, in the cool dark basement, reading. Until the middle of July, when I put on my best clothes and packed my mother’s cardboard suitcase and was sent to the “camp for academically talented children” to which I had won a scholarship. When the principal had called me into his office at the end of the school year to tell me I had won the scholarship, I had thought: this is the beginning of my real life.
And I was right, although not in the way I imagined.
The camp was in western Massachusetts. I hadn’t been out of Kansas before, I hadn’t even been to Kansas City. I had spent weekends or summer days at various Girl Scout camps in the area, and so my idea of a “camp” included sleeping bags, wienie roasts, and hiking boots to protect you from snakebite.
The “camp” was on the campus of a boys’ preparatory school that was not in session in the summer. The buildings were more beautiful than anything I had ever seen. It all looked like what books had told me castles were like. The rolling grounds with groves of green hardwoods and pastel-flowering bushes were as amazing to me as miracles. As I walked to the room I had been assigned, I tried to adjust my expectations to fit this idea of a “camp,” but no one had explained it to me and I was only sixteen—there was only so much I could imagine.
I shared the room, at first, with Olivia DeWitt, from Connecticut, the tiredest girl I had ever seen. Her face had no animation. She moved languorously, dropping her clothes here, there, dropping herself finally onto the bed.
“I like your necklace,” I said in my midwestern friendly way, wanting to make her like me.
“Why do you call it a nicklace?” she asked, so bored she could hardly speak the words.
Olivia had brought her tennis racket. I had not. I had never played tennis. She had brought her black riding boots. I had not. I rode, but western style, on heavy roping saddles on farm horses. Olivia’s parents were at their “summer home”—so were mine, but theirs was the same as their winter home, it was their only home, and they were working like slaves there, sweat and dirt drying in brown lines in my father’s red burned neck, into my mother’s chafed hands. Olivia sailed. I did not.
I walked with Olivia to the auditorium for orientation; we didn’t speak. I was afraid to be ridiculed again for my accent. I don’t know why she didn’t speak. She seemed too tired to have anything to say, but once inside she waved to some girls she knew, and she hurried off to
sit with them, leaving me alone.
Thus openly abandoned, I walked down the aisle, telling myself that everyone here must feel uncomfortable this first day.
“Hi,” someone said. “Sit here.”
I looked to see the green-gold eyes of Jeremy Gardner smiling upon me. He was the tallest, handsomest, blondest, most magical boy I had ever seen.
I sat down next to him, my heart thumping so hard I was afraid he’d hear it. He told me he was in the math section, I told him I was in creative writing and literature. He said he was from Connecticut; I said I was from Kansas. He asked me if I’d like to take a walk with him after dinner. I said I would. Then the headmaster started speaking and we had to stop talking, but we kept looking at each other sideways, then smiling. For the first time in my life, I was in love. So many new emotions, so fast.
That afternoon the entire group had to trail around with the athletic director to see the camp. The mornings were given over to classwork in our various specialties; the afternoons were free for study or sports. There was a pond, a stable, a tennis court, a soccer field. After lectures on good sportsmanship, we were sent to our rooms to get ready for the evening meal.
Olivia moved slowly, but was gone from our room before I was ready, and when I entered the dining hall, she was already seated at a table in the middle of the group of girls from the auditorium. I moved toward the table.
“Sorry,” a dark-haired girl said, pushing the chair so it slanted against the table. “I’m saving this for a friend.”
I moved to the end of the table.
“Sorry,” a blonde said. “I’m saving this for a friend.”
I turned, feeling my face reddening, and looked as well as I could with my downcast eyes around the dining hall. There were two other tables; one full of boys, Jeremy Gardner included, all of them horsing around. And the other table, which was obviously where I belonged.
Obviously, because at that moment Mr. McCausland, the headmaster, touched my arm.
“Why don’t you sit at that table, Miss White?” he asked. “That’s where the other midwesterners are.”
The other “midwesterners” were Trudy, a shy pretty girl from Indiana; Allen, a boy with bottle-opener teeth from Nebraska; Larry, a boy from Oregon, who could have been handsome were it not for a case of red-and-black screaming acne; Odessa, from Mississippi; George, from Arizona; and Hilda, a terrified, six-foot-tall cornfed Amazon of a girl from Iowa.
Sitting down next to them that first day, introducing myself, I thought in a panic: My God, we’re all Outsiders. This is the Outsiders’ table. I babbled and smiled and hoped that perhaps we could somehow all find a way to cohere into a group as happy and superior as those at the other tables. But this was not to happen; we were doomed from the start. We knew we were Outsiders. Hilda and Trudy were sitting next to each other, already partners against the world; they formed a bond early and never let anyone else in. Odessa, whom I sat next to and tried to be friends with, was, I soon came to discover, a real intellectual, also poor, also ambitious, and she had little time for fun. We Outsiders always ate together, but other than that were not a real group—which was really all right with me. I only wanted to be with Jeremy.
My life quickly fell into a pattern. Classes in the morning, swimming with the Outsiders in the pond in the afternoon—we didn’t know how to play tennis, and I didn’t like to ride because I didn’t do it properly, the English way. Dinner with the Outsiders, and then the evenings, which were sometimes filled with lectures on wildlife or astronomy walks, and sometimes left open. Then all the students would gather in the cleared dining hall to watch a movie or dance or just talk.
That was when I got to be with Jeremy. I will always believe that he really did like me, liked me. He liked hearing me talk about our farm and the animals, cows, horses, dogs, cats, hens, geese. My pet rabbits. His parents had an apartment in New York City, but he had lived most of his life at boarding schools and summer camps. He loved animals but had never been able to have a pet. It was an old story about a rich boy: his parents never spent any time with him. They sent him away as much as possible. Much later, I was to think back on that time and wonder if Jeremy had been drawn to me because in my voluptuousness I seemed maternal, and certainly I was more responsive than the other girls there. More corny. He was a handsome rich boy but he needed something from me. And God knows I needed anything he could give me during those six weeks when I lived among strangers.
It was on the very first night that I knew I would always be among strangers there. During our painful dinner I tried to chat and laugh with the other Outsiders, tried to pretend that we hadn’t been ostracized, that we weren’t different. I heard my silly voice trilling out far too loudly, carrying raucously through the dining hall, and I knew I was overdoing it and couldn’t stop myself. The girls at the other table laughed low, as if humming. The only person at my table who tried to join in my pitiful ruse was acned Larry, and he was very nice. Still, there was at our table such an aroma of sweating misery that it tainted the food we ate. Now I suppose we were only victims of some adult’s theory of “geographical distribution,” just as black children were victims of busing twenty years later.
Jeremy Gardner left the dining hall, punching another guy in the shoulder as he went, but not without looking over at me and mouthing, “See you later!” I threw him a smile, pretending that I was having a wonderful time. At last, when I had sat through the meal for what I considered a decent amount of time, I sprang from my untouched food and my untouchable clan and headed for the bathroom.
The girls’ rooms were on the second floor of the building, and so was the large many-stalled bathroom we all shared. I raced for a stall and entered, locking the door, grateful for privacy. I was cramping with a fierce attack of diarrhea brought on by nothing I had eaten. As I sat there, racked with every kind of torment, I heard the doors open and the eastern girls came in, their assured voices floating unabashed in the air.
“… Jeremy can’t possibly like her. It’s just her big tits.”
“Tits, my dear, udders!”
A scream of laughter. “She is such a cow.”
“I think she’s beautiful. Like Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Oh, God, I suppose, but her ‘beauty’ is so tacky.”
“I think you’ll discover, darling, that what you call tacky is what men like.”
“Exactly.”
More laughter.
I was bent double in my stall, trying not to make any noise that would embarrass me and make them aware of my presence. All around me doors slammed, toilets flushed, girls laughed.
“I don’t think Jean has anything to worry about. I can’t imagine that he’d ever be unfaithful to Jean.”
“Still, perhaps we should write her?”
On this note, they left. I sat in my stall, paralyzed, really ill. I tried to console myself, to do what my mother would tell me to do: to “be sensible.” It wasn’t that those girls disliked me, it was that they were championing a friend, I told myself. And no one likes a girl who steals someone else’s guy. I tried not to take it personally.
But it was a very personal summer. Everything came close, too close. All the other Outsiders were in math or sciences; I was the only literature Outsider, and so I walked from my room or the dining hall to the classroom and back to my room alone; and while the group of eastern girls who walked in a cluster just in front of or behind me were not within touching distance, their presence pressed in on me like the Kansas heat. My face burned. I would shrivel into myself, wishing I could pull my ears right into my head so that I wouldn’t hear the low hum of their laughter, their whispers, which I was sure were all about me. I would carry my books against my chest, my arms crossed over my books hard, trying to crush my offending bosom flat. Olivia DeWitt spent every evening until lights-out in the other girls’ rooms; at lights-out she’d run into our room, jump into bed, and go to sleep without a word to me. Her absolute avoidance of me was as vivid and visceral as
insults or blows, and I lay quaking in my bed, sick at my stomach, as if physically attacked.
But what came closest that summer was Jeremy Gardner. That summer I wrote for my class a short story about a woman who wore around her neck a heart-shaped locket with an intricate design like an arabesque on the front. If one looked closely, he could see that the design was really a keyhole, and in truth the locket was her heart and she was living her life waiting to meet the man who carried in the lapel of his jacket a small gold key. That key would unlock her heart and the man and woman would know they were meant for each other, had been sent to each other by fate. But no one came to the town where the woman lived, and no one wore jackets, let alone anything extraordinary in their lapels. So the woman traveled, saved her money, took jobs that would enable her to travel and to live among men who wore jackets. Still she did not meet the man with the key to her heart. And it embarrassed her so, as she grew older, to wear that heart-shaped locket, and it kept her from knowing other men. Finally, when she turned thirty (which to me at sixteen seemed infinitely far away), she gave up in despair and went to a jeweler to have the locket and chain broken, and her neck was free. As she turned to leave, a wonderfully handsome man entered. He had a gold key in his lapel. The woman cried “Oh!” and smiled at him. She almost threw herself on him. The man looked at her face, then looked down at her neck, and, as it was bare, his face went blank and he walked on past her without speaking.
It was a foolish story but not without its humble truths, and no one knows how it is that with one glance a boy can break through into a girl’s heart. Jeremy and I might as well have worn locket and key, for we responded to each other on sight and when we were together we were complete and satisfied. In spite of our different interests, we were intellectual comrades, and I told him about the symmetry of poetry; he told me about the symmetry of math. We both felt separated, apart from our families and peers, different. We could put on a good show, but we were lonely most of the time, even with others. Together, we were blissfully content.
