The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel

by Thompson, Ted

  And so began the project of remaking himself. This meant working—for the college, yes, but also at a pancake house in town, where he picked up dishwashing shifts, and at an inn out in Harpswell, where he spent the weekends changing the linens and running the graveyard shift—all of which were time-consuming and menial but soon became a compulsion for him, necessary, as though the harder he worked on jobs that, as a judge’s son, he should never have had to take, the farther away all of the expectations of that life became. His days stretched for eighteen and twenty hours, during which he shoveled walkways or laid sod or sprayed scalding-hot water on dishes that were glued with syrup, and while he made enough money to eat, he had little to say to his classmates, much less to the only daughter of an orthopedic surgeon from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who was already surrounded by men.

  That is, until he got back to his dorm one night and she was sitting on his sofa. She was wearing old sweatpants and a green track T-shirt that was worn down to its final gauzy threads. Her hair was loose and she was hugging her knees, which had a can of beer held between them. Normally his manners would have compelled him to introduce himself, but he had been working at the inn since Friday night and now that it was technically Sunday morning, he had the energy only to walk past her, pull off his boots, and collapse into the chair at his desk.

  “Are you asleep?” she asked eventually.

  He shook his head, but it wasn’t until he heard the sound of the toilet flushing that he opened his eyes.

  “Are you here with Donny?”

  “Um”—she glanced around as though checking to see who was listening—“it’s not official or anything.”

  Anders slumped back in his chair. “He didn’t tell me.”

  “I’m Helene.”

  “I know.”

  She smiled. “You’re reading my favorite book.” She gestured to a paperback edition of Middlemarch on his desk, easily the fattest book he’d been assigned.

  “I didn’t actually read that.”

  She drained the rest of her beer. “Where are you from?”

  “Because I haven’t read Middlemarch?”

  “Because I’m trying to be polite.”

  Anders smiled. “North Carolina.”

  “Long way from home. You miss it?”

  “God, no,” he said. It was the first time anyone had suggested such a thing. “I hate it there.”

  She blinked a few times with a warm sort of smile, as though he’d just confessed something deeply intimate. “When people say things like that they’re usually just talking about their parents.”

  Anders raised his eyebrows. “You should start charging for this.”

  “Funny,” she said without seeming amused. “That’s exactly what Donny said.”

  “Roommates,” said Anders and they both nodded.

  The door opened and Donny was standing there in a Bowdoin Hockey sweatshirt. Helene stood up. “Good night, southern boy. Dream of tobacco fields.”

  “I told you,” he said after they’d shut the bedroom door. “I hate that place.”

  When she came by the next day to bring Donny his sweatshirt, she asked Anders how he was doing with a kind little grimace, as though there were some sort of ailment he were battling, an ailment that, as the semester wore on and his work piled up, seemed to grow inside of him. He had classmates and dorm mates and coworkers—indeed, he was surrounded by people all day—yet none of it felt real. Late at night he would wake up convinced he was tucked into his ironed sheets and listening to the pulse of cicada through the screens. It took a moment to recognize the hiss of the steam radiators and the stink of Donny’s practice socks drying on the irons, and to remember, in a terrible moment, that he was alone in the North. It was Helene, his roommate’s new girl, who had seen it before she even knew him and who had, when he took a detour by the info desk later that week to say hello, suggested he stop working so much, take a day off, and go skiing or something.

  “I don’t ski,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s not hard,” she said. “I could teach you in fifteen minutes.”

  It was finals week and the campus was clearing out, and Donny, he knew, would be on a bus back to Nashua by Thursday. “How’s Friday morning?” he said.

  The drive to Sunday River was about two hours on narrow country roads that wound up into the sparse interior of the state, where even the barns seemed abandoned for winter and the motto Vacationland was only a cruel reminder of the lives on the other side of Route 1. He brought along his wool hat and his copy of Middlemarch, which he was actually enjoying, but everything else down to the long underwear had been borrowed. He spent the morning trying to snowplow at Helene’s instructions and the afternoon trying to mask his frustration every time his skis popped off and he ended up Supermanned in the middle of Easy Street. Learning to ski, it turned out, was an activity better done in private, and it was hard to pretend that crashing was a hoot after he could no longer bend his knee. Helene of course was a beautiful skier, which he finally saw in full form as she carved off down the hill, looking for a medic who could retrieve Anders with a sled.

  The knee wasn’t anything as serious as the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon might fear, but it did require that he limp to the car and put his arm around her neck while she eased him into the front seat. The real problem—the ailment that, it turned out, had actually been growing inside him during the three sleepless months he had been in the North—started with a tickle in the throat that, after he’d spent an entire day face-planting in the snow, became a violent cough that seemed to be kicking at his chest from the inside. By the time they made it back, he was burning up, and she put her hand on his forehead and his cheek and told him that she felt terrible, that the whole skiing thing was all her stupid idea, and could she at least make him a cup of tea, which she did while he curled up on her dorm-room couch. “There,” she said as he blew on the steaming mug and took a sip. “Does that feel better?” He stayed three days.

  He knew all the laws regarding roommates and girls, but in his defense, he did have pneumonia and the flu at the same time, and he did stay confined to the couch, almost entirely unconscious, and when Helene did finally kiss him, it was only on the forehead during the height of a fever so he was never entirely sure if he’d dreamed it. All of which Anders would gladly relay to Donny, even though Donny had told him nothing about his pursuit of Helene, had in fact kept it all quite hidden in a way Anders found thoroughly shady. But regardless, he remained in her room instead of returning to his own, a detail that was hard to explain, as was her staying awake at night to read to him from Middlemarch.

  He woke at dawn after the third night, the sky lightening from navy to white and a blade of pink light burning the eaves across the quad. He cracked open the window, and the coastal air washed over him, a mix of salt and smoke and spruce. In a few hours she would be up to check his temperature and put a cool rag on his forehead and look at him with a squint of sympathy that was so imbued with affection it made him grin like an idiot. His fever was back up to 103. He needed more care, she told him, from a doctor, and he needed a real bed. The dorms would be closing soon and she had to get home for her own holiday in Wellesley, so it was understandable, at least rationally, that during his subsequent sleep, she called his house in Fayetteville and spoke to his father.

  He would pay to hear a recording of that telephone conversation, to hear how Helene had introduced herself to his mother, how his mother had responded, how Helene had explained the predicament—that Anders was too sick to ride the bus and certainly too sick for an airplane—and, once his mother went to fetch his father, as he was certain she did, to hear what Judge Hill had said to this strange girl who had his runaway son on her sofa. In her defense, he hadn’t yet told her much of anything about his life at home, and so, as most people from functional families do, she’d made the assumption that his parents were worried about where he was.

  “You did what?” Anders said when he woke up.

&nb
sp; “He was very nice. As soon as he heard you were sick, he said he’d be right here.”

  “Here? He’s coming here?”

  “He said he’ll call from the airport in Portland.”

  “I have to go,” said Anders, sitting up and searching around for his things.

  “Just relax. He thanked me for calling. He seemed, I don’t know, relieved.”

  Anders shook his head. “You don’t understand. This is exactly what he’s been waiting for. I’m never coming back here.”

  “Anders. How would you know if you haven’t spoken with him?”

  “I need you to take me to the bus station.”

  She shook her head. “Your dad’s already on his way.”

  “How could you do this to me?” Anders said and erupted into a fit of coughing. She kept her arms crossed until he caught his breath.

  “Where did you think you were going for the holidays?” she said.

  “Nowhere.”

  She stared at him.

  “The YMCA in Bath.”

  “Oh, Anders.”

  “I have to work.”

  She shook her head. “This is a much better plan.”

  Within hours his duffel was packed and his hair was combed and his father was standing in the middle of his roommate’s girlfriend’s room, which suddenly seemed cluttered with candles and cheap, unswept rugs. Judge Hill wore the same thing year-round—a cotton sweater between his tie and jacket—and his face remained slack regardless of circumstances, so the only indication of his mood was in the angle of his flocculent eyebrows. He kept cedar blocks in his drawers, so he smelled of wool and wood and a sharp lotion Anders could never identify but that smelled as though his father went to the wet bar each morning in his undershirt and slapped some whiskey on his jaw. He had arrived without a hat or a coat, the toes of his wing tips stained by snow, and, even after a flight, with a crease so firmly ironed in his slacks it seemed sharp enough to cut you.

  “These all your things?” his father said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Judge Hill looked at the duffel and then seemed to take in the rest of the room.

  “Can I get you anything?” said Helene. “Some tea, maybe?”

  She gestured to a bookshelf, where two mugs she had borrowed from the dining hall sat, discolored from a semester of instant coffee. Beside them were a collection of ceramic animals, squirrels and chipmunks and the like, that she collected and rearranged in different familial scenes that seemed to please her immensely.

  Judge Hill stared at the shelf. “Thank you, but I believe we’d better be on our way.”

  “It’s too bad it’s such a dreary night,” she said. “It’s really a beautiful campus.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “You’ll have to come back in the fall. It’s spectacular. Have you told him about the lobster bake?”

  Anders stared at her.

  “It’s amazing. The whole school sits at these long tables and everyone has one of those plastic bibs on, even the president, and there’s a band—what’s it called? The music with the trumpet and the bow ties?”

  “Tin pan,” said Anders.

  “Yeah, it’s a school tradition—they have a tin-pan band playing this happy oompah music with banjos and—”

  “I know what it is,” said Judge Hill.

  “Right,” said Helene. “Well, it’s a nice place.”

  “I’m sure,” said his father and looked at her for a long moment. “Thank you for your help,” he said, and he turned and left.

  When he was gone she gave Anders a shove on the shoulder. “He’s so southern!”

  Anders rolled his eyes. “He isn’t known for his conversation.”

  “He misses you. You can tell by the way he looks at you.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can’t see it, but it’s plain as day.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Your father loves you,” Helene said and Anders kissed her fully on the mouth.

  In retrospect, especially that which is afforded by forty years, everything was clear. It would have seemed, through the next two days he and his father spent on I-95, with Anders in a heap in the backseat of the rental car, listening to the insistent rhythm of the road, that he’d completely blown it. He’d misread all the cues—she was an only child with parents who were still married to each other, destined already for one of the helping professions. He thought of the way she spoke to those guys with the stains on their shirts and the bits of toilet paper still stuck to their necks from shaving. It was the same way she spoke to her ceramic squirrel when she thought no one was listening: her attention had nothing to do with the person. He thought again and again about her look of panic and confusion after he’d kissed her, the firmness of her push on his belly as she stepped away. Donny was a six-four defenseman on the hockey squad who, surprisingly, could talk your ear off about the Battle of the Bulge, and what was Anders? Another lonely guy confusing her kindness with interest.

  They stopped at a diner in New Jersey, Anders’s face hot from sleep and imprinted with the rented Pontiac’s upholstery.

  “Tell me something,” his father said from behind his menu. It was the first time either of them had spoken in hours. “How do you pay for that school?”

  “Why?”

  “I looked it up. It’s expensive.”

  “I rob banks, Dad.”

  His father turned a big plastic page.

  “Scholarships, mostly.”

  “They pay for it.”

  “Yes, sir. Most of it.”

  “And how did you convince them to do a thing like that?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because I had a conversation recently with Douglas Knight.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “He’s the president of Duke University and he says he’ll take your northern credits.”

  Anders took a deep breath and shook his head. “Not interested.”

  His father dropped his menu. “Tell me, what is it about Bowdoin that’s worth working yourself until you’re infirm?”

  “It’s pronounced ‘Boh-din.’ ”

  “Let me explain something to you,” his father said abruptly. “You can run around and pretend to be whoever you want. I don’t care—you can change your whole name. But one of these days the thing you’re going to need more than anything else is a sense of being. A home. And you can’t invent that out of thin air. It’s already been given to you. It’s where you were born, and like it or not, it’s who you are.”

  Anders stared at him. Judge Hill settled back into reading the menu.

  “Your appointment with President Knight is in the second week of January.”

  Anders walked out of the restaurant.

  He spent that break sitting with Miss Rose by her ironing station in the basement of his house in North Carolina, watching her make astonishingly swift work of a basket of fitted sheets. She was in her sixties, at least a decade older than either of his parents, and nearly six feet tall, solid, with arthritic knuckles and a stare from behind her bifocals that could stop Anders cold. She would never let him help with any of her work but he enjoyed being around it, as he had as a kid—the hiss and smell of the iron, her radio mumbling—though this time, he did most of the talking, telling Miss Rose about all of his jobs up north and the air that smelled like pine and how they had lobster even at the drive-ins and how his friend Helene had taught him to ski. She listened intently and when he was done, she clicked off her radio.

  “It sounds to me like you’re headed back there,” she said, spraying one of his father’s shirts.

  “Of course I am.”

  She peered over the top of her glasses.

  “Does your father know that?”

  “He will soon. And you’re not going to tell him.”

  She shook her head. “You bet I’m not.”

  “Oh, come on. He’ll live.”

  Miss Rose opened the collar, spray
ed some starch.

  “Not him I’m worried about.”

  She’d been there for the eruption over the exams, when his father had called him a parasite and roared that in his day they’d killed kids for less, that if Anders had been alive then he’d already be dead and buried out back like a mule, and she’d been there for the long years of silence that followed. She knew more about his family than anyone in the world, so she knew what was coming. A few weeks later, his father drove him to Durham, and he found his way out of the back of the admissions building and to the bus station while his father was still idling out front in his Cadillac.

  He made it up to Brunswick, still in his rumpled interview suit. The campus was white and quiet, freezer-burned with the sort of air that punched the breath from you and seemed to muffle every sound other than the squeaking of footsteps. He had no coat so he ran to his dorm and when he opened the door, his lips blue and the tips of his ears burning, he saw the room was bathed in candlelight. Donny and Helene had covered a cardboard box with a white sheet and were eating lamb chops on Chinet plates.

  “Sorry,” Anders said, turning to leave.

  “Don’t be retarded,” said Donny. “Come back. Where would you even go?”

  Anders blew into his hands. “I don’t know. The union?”

  “Jesus, you’re shivering,” said Donny. “What the hell’re you wearing?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Sit down. Take some food.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Jesus, just take some. You look like a bum.”

  Donny handed him a plate and a plastic cup filled with cabernet from a jug. He and Helene made room for him at their table. After two days of eating from vending machines in bus depots, Anders could feel himself coming back to life.

  “Look at him go,” said Donny. “Sure doesn’t seem like he’s dying.”