To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Hi Anne
Here’s that Montana thing, see you Wednesday.
Thanks,
Hunter
Did you ever lay back and see so many stars overhead that they blurred together like snow? Well I have. And it was amazing to think that I spent every night of my life until that day in Montana looking up and not knowing what was really there. Light from the nearby city of Chicago makes it impossible to see the stars, except for the Big Dipper and a few others, and mostly the sky is sort of pink. I had no idea what the sky was supposed to look like. You can’t even see the constellations where I live. Now when I see horoscopes it makes me mad because I think, How are you supposed to know what all of these are if you can’t even make out the stars? Why would you care, anyway?
Did you ever stand in a braided river? Or watch a moose try to get a piece of sawgrass off it’s antler? Or a beaver go back and forth making it’s damn? Or spot mountain lion tracks and wonder how far away it was? Well, I have. These are the things I did during the day, when at night we had the incredible stars, in Montana, in the Bitterroot Range. I admit that mostly I was wishing my girlfriend (Nicole) was there, too because I tried to describe the stars but you can’t tell someone about something like that, you just have to see it. And I guess maybe it’s better sometimes if you don’t try to describe things, because the words aren’t the same as what you see in your mind, and then you read what you wrote and it’s totally this sad little version of the pictures you want to remember, and sometimes the words can kind of blur the pictures. I guess it’s true that I thought for a moment that I would keep all of the Montana stuff to myself, like a secret. But I tried to share it, because otherwise you just think about it alone. I think it’s better to try.
Anyway, probably the coolest thing about my school trip to Montana (which was totally cooler than I thought it would be since the English teachers went on it with us, but they were super mellow and not at all like normal) are the wild horses, or mustangs. They were completely wild. They had never had to take the bit (that metal part that horses have stuffed in their mouths all day) and when we went horseback riding along the trails and saw them in the fields way out, I swear it’s like the horse I was on felt that he wanted to live that way, like he was jealous, and I wanted to get down and take all the tact off of him and just let him free. I guess I think it’s like seeing the stars in Montana. You don’t know about how it’s supposed to be until you get out of your own prison, and my prison is Winnetka, Illinois, and like the horse I wish I could run free.
Actually, now that I think about it, there was this one time when I was a kid when my dad and I went outside in a blizzard, and the sky was pink like I said but you could see the snow, it looked grey, falling as it came down and it was all swirling around, and when I was watching the stars in Montana it was like that, just so much you thought you’d close your eyes and it would go away, but you did and it didn’t.
THE SEPTEMBER GRASS in the Pfaffs’ backyard was thick and soft, edged with slate where the flower beds bloomed. In a distant corner a sprinkler chick-chicked. Overhead the enormous oak trees were still green; only the smaller maples, nouveau specimens, were tinged with yellow. Hunter kicked out his enormous sneakers and leaned back on his elbows, his ever-present cap low on his brow, and pretended not to notice the printout of his essay in Anne’s hands. Beside him was a half-gallon Styrofoam tankard with a length of ribbed tubing for a straw. “Thirsty from practice,” he explained. He chewed and sucked at the straw constantly, aggressively, trailing threads of spit when he looked up to respond. It was quite disgusting, actually; there was Anne, hoping to find an essay in his several paragraphs of lovely imagery and real feeling, and the kid was slobbering away like a dog. To her initial reactions—he feels trapped and angry; he’s clearly in love, probably for the first time; he’s nostalgic for his childhood and missing his father—she added: he’d rather repel me than risk my affection. Also: he needs some manners.
“Hunter, it’s sure as hell not a college essay, but there’s some great stuff in here,” she opened.
“You told me not to worry about the essay part.”
“I did. Which may be one reason why you were able to write so clearly about what matters to you from this summer.”
“Why, because you think I’m not trying?”
“Because I think you’re not trying to please anybody else.”
He closed his fish mouth over the straw.
“Hunter, are you still thirsty, or could you set that down for a sec?”
“Why, it bothering you?”
“Yes. It’s gross. I’m seeing your spit.”
He laughed. “Nice.”
If she ever had children, Anne would remember never to talk to them about manners. Just tell them how they looked, and let them choose. She noticed that Hunter’s huge sneakers were not actually black, but white sneakers that had been scribbled over in black ink.
“Nice shoes, too, man,” she added.
“I hate new shoes,” he explained. “It’s so obvious your mom did the back-to-school thing.”
“You’re an athlete. You need new shoes for the season.”
“You sound like Mom.”
Anne gazed at the back of the house: broad screened porch opening onto the flagstone patio; twin wings of rooms fronted with French doors; gabled windows across the second and third floors. White clapboard, blue shutters. There were actual butterflies frisking the tall buddleias on either side of the porch. Lovely. What was this boy so angry about?
“Is she home?” Anne asked him.
“No. No idea where she’s at. Maybe shopping.”
“Dad?”
“He’s at work.”
That put one suspicion to rest: no divorce in the works. “So it’s just you.”
“Just me.”
So, no older siblings lurking either. She knew Hunter was his mother’s only child, but there might have been halves from his father’s side lying about over the summer, riling things up.
Hunter continued, “And Nicole would be over, but you’re here.”
“Ah,” she sighed dramatically. “Sorry to hold you up. In that case, let me tell you a few things that really interested me in your piece.”
“Fine.”
“First, how profound it can be to feel insignificant in the face of Nature—to feel both irrelevant and deeply accompanied. Make sense?”
“Sort of,” he said. Anne appreciated that Hunter’s first experience of the sublime appeared essentially contemporaneous with what most likely was his first experience of sexual intercourse. Nicole the Sophomore Now was performing a valuable service to Hunter’s college applications, though Anne cringed to think of someone so young performing such acts at all.
“Second,” she continued, “the desire to share one’s feelings but the difficulty of putting them into words. Wanting to keep things private but thinking they’d be even more special if you could share them. Yes?”
“Yeah.” He was brightening a bit.
“Third, feeling like the world has been hidden from you, like you’ve not been able to see things as they really are. Yes?”
“Oh, totally.”
“Fourth, wanting to just be free to go see that world.”
“Exactly.”
“Fifth, feeling guilty about that. Remembering being a kid, and your dad, maybe, and wondering why it was all okay then if it feels so crappy now.”
“Eh. Maybe.” He bowed over the cup again and sucked.
“So, look. These things—the stars you can’t see from this backyard right here; the horses you wanted to set free to roam—these are very real things. I know you saw them this summer. But they’re also metaphors. Do you see that?”
“Things that refer to other things, you mean.”
“Yes, or to other feelings. This is what’s so interesting about this writing. You’ve got metaphors in there without e
ven trying.”
“Cool,” said Hunter.
“Very cool. But I want to use them to understand what’s most important to you. Does anything of what I’ve said strike a chord with you?”
“Maybe the horses part. I think the stars bit is kind of lame, now. And I shouldn’t have left that stuff about the blizzard. I could care less.”
On the contrary, thought Anne. She had to find a way to meet Mr. Pfaff so she could understand.
“Okay, let’s take the mustangs, then,” she said. “Could you sit up? It’s kind of hard when you’re lying down.”
“I’m awake,” he muttered.
“Hunter!”
He rustled up, gathered in his legs, and slapped his knees. He seemed to fold uneasily, tightly and at wrong angles, like a broken ladder. “Sorry. I’m up. What was it you asked?”
“Hunter,” she repeated. “Look. I’ve been to college. I don’t need to apply again. But I understand you may want to apply early decision to Amherst, is that right?”
“Looks like it,” he replied.
“Which means, if you get in, that you’ll go there. You’ll pull your application to every other school. Is that what you want?”
“Looks like it,” he repeated.
She laughed, though his point was serious. “Hunter, I can’t do this for you. Whether it’s Amherst or somewhere else, you need to choose. We need a great essay. And you’ve got some good stuff to work with here. I’m trying to help you, but I’m not going to write it for you.”
“Okay,” he said.
Anne waited. The sprinkler had finished. She wanted to scan the yard for a gardener or other silent staff, but Hunter needed her attention.
“The mustangs,” she prompted. “I’m wondering what it is that you wish you could run free of. What’s the bit in your mouth, if that makes sense?”
“I don’t know,” he told her. “School. My parents. Everything.”
Anne gestured toward the expanse of house. “I don’t know, this doesn’t look all that bad,” she said.
He dug his fingers into the lawn, tightened his hands, and tore up two handfuls of grass. He let them fall.
“So you just don’t like school? Having to work?”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t mind, like—I get my stuff done.”
“I know you do. And I see there’s other things. Tennis. You worked on photography for a time, didn’t you? And guitar?”
“I don’t really do those anymore,” he said.
“Why not?”
Hunter shrugged. He had commenced violently shredding grass between his fingernails. “Look,” he said angrily. “It’s not like I can write a college essay about horses. So this is stupid.”
“Of course you can write a college essay about horses. But you’re going to be smart about it. You’re going to let the admissions people know that you know exactly what you’re doing. It’ll be a hell of a lot more interesting than all those essays about what people want to major in or what community service they just did or what their grandmother said right before she croaked.”
This earned a slight smile. She was still in the game.
Hunter brushed off his palms and took the sheet of paper from Anne. “I just think there’s a way you can do things, you know, for yourself, or you can feel like you have to do them for other people.”
“Yep,” Anne said, excited. “So the saddle is other people’s ambitions, maybe? Does that seem right?”
“Right,” he said. He was studying his words. “It’s in this part, about wanting it to be, you know, a secret. It’s like, if you say anything, you risk it not being real to yourself anymore.”
“Amazing how hard it is to protect our own desires, isn’t it?” asked Anne.
Hunter thought for a moment. She watched his chest rise and fall, the brim of his cap low over his chest.
He looked up at her. “Do you deal with that?” he asked. “Like, are your parents psyched you do this? With us?”
Anne flinched. Teenagers had unfailing aim.
“I think they’re proud that I’m earning a living,” she told him. Then she added, unthinking, like the lonely fool she was: “But I think, actually, they’d like me to be married.”
He heard the truth. “Would you like that?”
“Soon,” she lied. Yesterday.
“Wow. But makes sense. Like, aren’t you, like, thirty?”
“Twenty-seven. But thanks.”
Hunter guffawed into a closed fist. “Sorry. So do you have a boyfriend?”
“No comment,” said Anne. “Back to your mustangs. I think there’s a great essay in there about discovering your own wishes versus delivering on the hopes of others. It has something to do with school, and something to do with parents, and a lot to do with college, which is where you have to start switching from the one to the other. Choosing your own major, making your own schedule, getting wasted or not getting wasted. You know? So it’s important. And timely.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I see that.”
“So that’s the essay to write for next week. Just see what you can do. Don’t be afraid to keep those mustangs in there—they’re gorgeous, we want to see them. But also say what’s true. What they make you think and feel.”
“Okey-doke.”
“Cool,” said Anne. She stood and smoothed down her skirt. She felt Hunter watching her body, and felt naked from her knees down. She crossed her arms over her bag.
“See you,” he said, and lay back in the grass. Then he called, “Go round to the driveway. Doors might be locked.”
From somewhere came the sound of shears in a hedge. Anne scanned briefly but saw only Hunter, prone in the emerald lawn. For a moment she wanted to stalk back and slap him across the face. Then in front of her a small browned man emerged from a shadow, clippers in hand, and moved hunched, almost furtively, toward the far privet. Sweat drenched his shirt. Princes and princesses in their towers, all of them, Anne thought. Did money ever do anything other than make children lonely?
HERE IS WHAT was going to happen: Anne was going to wake up one morning in full possession of the authority she needed to go out and start her life. To acquire the position she really wanted—whatever that was—and succeed. Like Gregor Samsa in reverse, she’d reach her two feet to the floor and head into the world a whole person.
She did not know how to explain why it hadn’t happened yet. She had been careful and diligent. She’d earned terrific grades. There had been classes in college about which she was passionate, and books she underlined so hard she tore the page. She was desperate to understand how stories worked, and poems and plays; how did they make one feel? She vivisected Virginia Woolf, line by line, and the book’s heart kept beating. Her professors loved her, but none of them shared with her the knowledge she needed: How did such work lead to a life full of days? What, exactly, did one do? Her peers, meanwhile, seemed to discover their futures easily and completely, on any given day, as though they’d reached into their pockets and found a key on a ring—appearing at breakfast senior year in suits for corporate recruiting events, or already prepping for the LSAT or MCAT. Anne sat flummoxed in a carrel full of novels and realized, come June, she had no way to make a living.
So she interned. As a student teacher, as a radio reporter, once for the blocked writer-wife of a famous film director. In the afternoons and evenings she tutored grade schoolers so she could pay rent on the bedroom she shared in an apartment that was, per the lease, to house three young, college-educated women, and which in fact sheltered four women, a stray tomcat, a guy they found on Craigslist, and the guy’s pet rat.
None of the internships took. But tutoring: now, that she could do. In fact, she was damn fine at homework. School had been her glory; why not go back? There was always the option of doing a Ph.D. It was perfect. A long project, several years in which to dig herself deep into a subject; not an internship, but an apprenticeship. Anne wanted to go the distance. She wanted to fall in love.
&nb
sp; She chose English literature. Several universities offered her fellowships. At home, at her parents’ house in the suburbs, she unfolded her thick acceptance letters on the kitchen counter. Her mother smoothed the pages with her palm, dish towel balled in the other hand, and let tears shine in her eyes. Her father paused to survey the notes. He skimmed their opening paragraphs, then set a hand hard on his only child’s shoulder and said, “I’d pick that one.” He’d never admit his choice was based on his wish to keep her close by; they made the best offer, he said, had the best job placement and faculty. So the University of Chicago it was.
There she walked the new halls like a trainee surgeon in a hospital, given access to the brightest rooms and the sharpest tools. She signed up for Cold War and the Creation of the American Backyard and an entire seminar on the year 1851 in England. She loaded up her canvas tote at the Seminary Bookstore and dragged it home. Year one turned to year two turned to year three. Martin was proud. Mitchell loved all the free time she had to walk with him. And there she was, at play in the fields of the word, except that the amber reading rooms revealed themselves to be a sort of Neverland, where nothing ever happened, and nothing ever would. What baffled Anne was that so much passion should come to nothing; and that her former college classmates who were, say, derivatives traders, did the same thing she did with words, only with numbers, and thanks to capital investment and a market as bizarre as a Rube Goldberg machine, they were making millions. Literally, millions. For three years Anne stood in line once a semester to pick up her fellowship check, some thousands, a rich offering for the humanities. She appreciated that the Marxist students were always first when the office opened at nine. The very same ones who argued, in their seminar on Moby-Dick, that the whale signified a commodity and that the book was an allegory of the industrial revolution. To which point the queer theorists took great exception: the whale was a phallus, an argument the feminists agreed with but for violently different reasons. The postcolonial theorists claimed the cetacean was an animation of statehood, and the theory-of-aesthetics folks considered anality relevant to the discussion. The disability studies student—who herself was rumored to have chronic fatigue—stopped conversation with her assertion that the enormous whale signified the longed-for bodily wholeness, a comment she made while leaving class early, as she often did.
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