Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  He got more distance than she had, jumped up at once, and came trudging back through the clinging snow, beaming. "My goal is to crash right through those bushes and end up in the stream," he informed her.

  They climbed gasping to the top of the hill, and this time elected to make a race of it.

  Janet won the first time, but never again, though they kept at it for more than a dozen tries, filling the air with snow dust, covering themselves with snow, and attracting a small audience comprised of people on their way to dinner in Eliot. The spectators drifted off soon, complaining about the cold.

  "Let's try the big tray," said Thomas. "You can beat me another time."

  "What other time? It's going to be fifty tomorrow."

  "Next winter, then," said Thomas, rather gloomily. "I'll be here, imitating a freshman in the English Department. Is it a date?"

  "Sure," said Janet.

  They climbed the hill, stacked their trays on the sidewalk, and considered the large brown one.

  "You'd better take the front, I think," said Thomas, "to give me a little more room for my legs. Sit down where it's comfortable, and we'll work from there. Can you scoot forward about six inches? Yes, I know we'll resemble a pretzel, but there's no help for it."

  He sat down behind her, enveloped her knees in his long legs, and wound his arms around her shoulders. Janet thought suddenly of her mother's herb garden in the blazing middle of July, with the slabs of red paving overgrown with thyme, and the sundial in the middle, counting only sunny hours. Thomas smelled of rue.

  "Let's go," said Thomas; they made a concerted convulsive movement, and the tray went walloping down the hill as if it were on runners. It bounded off the path they had made about halfway down, turned sideways, and ran them with terrible speed parallel to Eliot, alight high on its hill, and tossed them out under one of the little maples at the edge of the stream.

  "Jesus," said Thomas, picking himself up, "are you all right?"

  "Sure," said Janet, taking his offered hand and hauling hers elf to her feet. One elbow

  and her tailbone felt sore, but she would have done it again in a moment. "You weren't scared, were you?"

  "Yes, I was—for two of us, since you haven't any sense." He picked up the tray. "It's dark. We'd better stop."

  "Molly said she'd make us cocoa."

  They floundered slowly through the snow, which down here was still knee-deep, with treacherous mattings of bent grass and drifts of leaves underneath. Janet became aware, for the first time since they began this encounter, of a certain constraint in the atmosphere.

  Seizing on the first topic of mutual interest that came to mind, she remarked, "I'm taking Greek 1 from Medeous starting tomorrow."

  "What the hell for?" demanded Thomas, stopping and staring at her. "Take it from Ferris in the fall, for God's sake."

  "I can't, I've got Eighteenth-Century Literature with Evans and the horrible Modern Poetry class."

  "Well, you can't take it from Medeous."

  "Why not?"

  "She's very jealous."

  "Of me? She doesn't know me from Adam."

  "Well, she will, won't she, once you take a class from her?"

  "What has she got to be jealous about? "

  "You are the dimmest intelligent woman I have ever met in my life," Thomas said, flung both his trays down in the snow, and took off at a great speed on his long legs.

  Janet snatched up a wad of snow, compressed it briefly, and hit him square in the middle of the back with it. He didn't turn. Janet picked up the trays and turned in the other direction, over the icy wooden bridge and up the hill to eat in solitary splendor at Dunbar.

  Let Thomas explain to the rest of them, if he dared.

  After she had eaten, she stopped by Nick and Rob's room in Taylor; neither of them was there, so she left Nick a friendly note and went to the library, where she spent the rest of the evening very happily reading an edition of Keats's letters. When she got home, Tina and Molly were in bed, drinking tea. "I wish you wouldn't fight with Thomas," said Tina reproachfully.

  "I don't fight with Thomas. Thomas fights with me."

  Tina rolled her eyes at Molly, who had the good sense not to respond. Janet went away, fuming, and brushed her teeth.

  * * *

  Greek 1 met in a small and oddly shaped room on the first floor of Appleton, the building devoted to the Department of Fine Arts. The building itself was an uninspiring twin to the library, redeemed only by the possession of a rather pleasant fountain with an abstract sculpture in the middle. Nobody had been so optimistic as to turn on the fountain yet, but its bowl was full of melted snow and the gray metal sculpture looked well in a halo of icicles. The room's windows looked out on the fountain; the room itself might once have been somebody's office. A long table with a lectern and eight desks had been crammed into it, but there turned out to be only six students. One of them was Odile; another, to Janet's considerable astonishment, was Thomas. He came in last, and gave her a sheepish grin.

  Before she could decide how to respond, Professor Medeous came in.

  Janet had not realized before how tall she was. She must be well over six feet. Her hair fell to her knees. She was wearing a skirt and blouse in the red-and-green plaid of the Erskine tartan, to which Janet doubted she was entitled. She carried a pile of books and papers under one arm, and swept the class with a grave impersonal gaze that widened suddenly, on Thomas. She seemed as surprised to see him as Janet had been. She put the books and papers down on the table, still looking at Thomas; and he stood up and gave her a Drop-Add slip. She went on looking at him, and he took a pen from his pocket and gave that to her. She went on looking.

  "Double major," said Thomas to her, exactly as if there were nobody else present.

  "For a seven-year stay, that will do well," she said, and signed the form.

  Odile giggled. Medeous gave her a quelling look, and Odile swallowed hard and sat up very straight. Janet looked at Thomas, but he was still holding out his hand to Medeous for his green slip, and when he had gotten it back and turned to face the class, he looked perfectly blank. He sat down behind Janet, which annoyed her; and the class began.

  Medeous taught them the Greek alphabet, which was entertaining; and the maddening and erratic system of accents, which was not. Thomas, of course, knew the Greek alphabet perfectly and had also mastered the accents. His gorgeous voice, too large for the little room, made music of the nonsense syllables the rest of them were stumbling over. What the hell was he doing here?

  Medeous was pleasant and patient, but not at all comfortable to deal with. Janet could not believe that this was the woman who had been suspected of making up dirty jokes for her class in Aristophanes. The rest of the class, especially Odile, seemed willing to laugh at their own mistakes in pronunciation; but nobody tried it twice. A profound lack—indeed a positive denial—of humor seemed to be Medeous's primary characteristic, if you left out her mere physical presence. She made the little room seem crowded. Janet found herself tucking her feet far back under her desk, in case Medeous should trip over them. And yet there was really plenty of room. It was enough to make you go get a ruler and measure the distance between your desk and the teacher's table.

  Medeous dismissed them a little early, with instructions to do the exercises in Chase and Phillips associated with the alphabet and the accent system, and to glance at Lesson 3, which had alarmingly to do with something called the First Declension.

  Janet left in a hurry, but Thomas caught up with her beside the fountain.

  "Look, I know you hate my guts," he said, "but just don't act like it in there, all right?"

  "I thought Medeous was a jealous god?"

  "I want her to be jealous about the wrong thing."

  "What's the right thing, for God's sake?"

  "Nick, you idiot."

  "You've got to be kidding."

  "Nope."

  "And look. Could she really get you expelled just for mocking her in a play?"


  "Not exactly. Not through normal college channels, no, so you don't need to give me

  that lecture you're contemplating about the Student Council and the Grievance Committee and all that. Look, Tina's got a class; are you meeting anybody, or do you want to have lunch?"

  "I'm meeting Peg and Diane in Dunbar, so we can watch the lake melt. Come on, if you want."

  "Peg gives me the creeps."

  "What?"

  "She's so quiet."

  "That's just because she doesn't know you very well. Come on. Tina will like it if I take care of you."

  "I'll be sure and praise you to the skies. Are you three rooming together next year?"

  "I don't know," said Janet.

  CHAPTER 14

  At Blackstock, the spring of 1972 was a miracle. You could not say of it, as one commonly said of spring in Minnesota, "If it falls on a weekend, let's have a picnic," or "I missed it this year, I was in the shower." It began in a leisurely manner in early April, and hindered only by a few sodden snowfalls that had vanished before sunset next day, it opened itself out slowly like a gigantic paper fan, and bestowed its gifts one at a time, instead of dumping them wholesale on your unsuspecting head and vanishing with a nasty chuckle into the wilting heat of summer.

  There was an entire week in which nothing bloomed but snowdrops and bloodroot and the rue anemone, which Janet refrained from picking and giving to Thomas. The willows turned a brilliant yellow-green all along their drooping boughs. Nick and Janet, crossing the wooden bridge to Dunbar in order to wander happily among the trees on that side of the stream, found a mass of writhing garter snakes, brown and yellow with here and there a bit of black. A nest of vipers. I die after a nest of Dukes, thought Janet, adieu. She liked snakes; but looking at these squirming on the sunny bank, she shivered.

  Her classes were splendid—rather a waste, when one could have ignored them altogether in favor of the weather. Medeous always made your heart jump when she walked into the room, but she was a very patient and careful teacher who could always find some inspired way to explain something somebody was stuck over. She needed this talent, since two of the members of the class were no good at languages. Why they had chosen a knotty and practically useless one like Classical Greek, Janet could not imagine; it transpired that one of them wanted to enter seminary and the other had a Greek grandmother. The one drawback of the class would probably have been advertised as an advantage: there were so few students, you could not hide if you were having an off day.

  Especially with the two linguistic dimwits fumbling all the questions, almost everything would come around to everybody. But learning Greek was, on the whole, satisfactory. And Medeous had more humor than one might suppose. The first sentence she gave them contained a pun. It translated as "The evil women in the tent are hitting the road," where the Greek meant only, "striking the thoroughfare," and not "embarking on a journey." Janet wrote it up in nice big letters and posted it over her bed, where it made an odd contrast to the colorful signs saying, "TAKE PILL!" that Molly and Tina had been obliged to tape up over their own pillows.

  English 11 was such a wild delight that she could hardly bear it. She had not expected this reaction to the authors with whom the course began: Pope, Swift, Johnson. But they inhabited the period of Evans's expertise, and his enthusiasm for them was so great and the clarity of his understanding so compelling that Janet found herself reading them as she might read a particularly misty far-future work of science fiction. She was by nature and training an adherent of the Romantic school, but she was at the moment a little frightened of it and all its works. It produced a bewildering and infinite universe devoid of answers.

  The Augustans, with every bit as keen a feeling for those aspects of existence, had chosen to deal with them very differently. And when you were in love with someone who perplexed you, and friends with people you could hardly stand half the time and didn't understand even when you could, there was a great deal more c omfort in the Augustans than in the Romantics. She remembered the moment in which Nick had quoted Addison on happiness, and thought she knew why he had chosen so moderate an author.

  History 12, which was parceled out by the department for its own convenience, so that all you registered for was a class period, turned out to concern the French Restoration, and to be taught by Mr. Wallace, a chunky, bearded young man who was rumored to be a Marxist. He certainly had a very startling classroom manner; it involved a great deal of shouting and thumping of his fist on the table. He never shouted at or about the students, no matter how stupid they were being, what incensed him appeared to be the idiot fluctuations of history and the imbecility of humanity in general. Janet found him amusing but not very comprehensible; but it didn't matter. You were allowed to go pretty much your own way in this class, and what Janet found herself doing was reading the complete works of Honore de Balzac (in translation, in old editions out of the college library whose yellowing pages had never been cut). And this was another form of science fiction, an alien culture faithfully described, complex, alive, and fascinating.

  She was able to express all this, at considerable length, to Molly, who had been greatly taken with their Shakespeare course, and mourned continually that one was not required to read poetry in order to become a marine biologist.

  It was a blissfully quiet term. Nobody had any upheavals.

  Thomas did not show any temper. Nick, thank goodness, had stopped making digs at Thomas, and Robin unbent enough to play tennis with Tina. She said he had a very peculiar notion of the rules, but at least he never got tired before she did.

  Nick and Robin pulled their exasperating mysterious act only once, at lunch in Eliot on a glorious day at the end of April. Janet was complaining bitterly about a class of Greek verbs that upset all she had learned previously. Just as she got her feet on the ground, this new set of endings leapt up to confound her.

  "Well, learn them if you know what's good for you," said Nick, scraping the pineapple filling out of the middle of his cake and giving it to Tina, who was going to make a sandwich out of it. "Medeous won't hear anything against the language."

  "I don't know," said Thomas. "She's been uncommonly patient this term. I can't help thinking she's pulled off some coup, somehow, somewhere; she's as smug as a cat in a dairy."

  Nick and Robin looked at him, both their heads cocked at the same angle and each with the left eyebrow raised. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, thought Janet, grinning.

  Thomas found them less appealing, apparently; he scowled and said sharply, "And she hasn't once sworn at the two dunces in our class."

  "And I have," said Janet. "We play this awful game where one student has to ask another a grammatical question—and you've got to know the answer, when you're asking, in case your victim doesn't. And I took pity on one of the dunces—Mr. Caspar, wasn't it, Thomas? I asked him for the future subjunctive of the verb blapto. It means to hit or harm; but that doesn't matter."

  Robin and Nick burst out laughing; Tina and Molly looked patient. "So he made it up," said Janet, "properly, I guess; he stuck the sigma between the root and the first-person singular subjunctive ending."

  "And Janet," said Thomas, also laughing, "said, 'no, no, no, there is no fucking future subjunctive!'"

  "What did Medeous say to that?" said Nick, looking suddenly sober.

  "She made me figure out what part of speech 'fucking' was in that sentence," said Janet. "And then she made me translate it."

  Nick looked at Thomas, who nodded Nick looked at Robin. Robin made a wry mouth, as if he had eaten something sour. They went on staring at one another. Thomas grimaced at them and began to eat his dessert. "Did she finally wrench Chester Hall away from the Music Department?" said Nick to Robin.

  "No," said Robin, "and she won't, either. They haven't anywhere to move those pianos, since the practice rooms in the M&D Center all leak."

  "This bodes some strange eruption to our state," said Nick.

  "You just hope that's all," said R
obin,

  "What are you talking about?" said Tina.

  "Departmental politics," said Thomas, soothingly, and hit her in the forehead with a grape.

  The ensuing food fight involved two other tables and took them all out onto the balcony.

  May ninth was Thomas's birthday. Tina was taking him out to dinner at the only fancy restaurant the town afforded, and had been dampening about suggestions for a cake or a surprise party or an expected party. Janet decided she would have to give him the Hamlet calendar before or after Greek class. She had found some wrapping paper in the college bookstore with Greek letters on it in green and red and yellow, which was satisfying.

  Molly, seeing her wrapping the calendar that morning, said, "Is that for Thomas? Are you going to see him in class? Can you give him my present?"

  "Sure," said Janet, and Molly fetched a box containing three jars of orange marmalade, one with whiskey in it, one bitter, and one sweet, and proceeded to wrap it in some silver paper she had been hoarding for months. "Since Tina is being selfish," she said.

  Janet was startled. "They don't get to see much of each other; why shouldn't they spend Thomas's birthday on their own?"

  "It's not that," said Molly. "It's the way she scotched all the suggestions for a party later, or earlier. We could all use some diversion. Sharon's crabby, and Peg looks like a ghost, and Nora's fretting over her comps. And I think Thomas would have liked it. He doesn't seem like he's used to having a fuss made about him."

  "Well, I'll do the best I can in the time I have. Do you want to come to lunch with us—I thought I'd do it then, instead of handing the stuff to him on the sidewalk."

  "Can't—bio class."

  "Can't you skip it for once?"

  "I could if it was for once. I skipped it last time to go for a walk with Robin."

  Something in her voice made Janet look at her. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her hair falling in twists across her face, making the blue ribbon of the package into a coil of little fringes. Janet said, "Does Robin need diversion too?"

  "Mmmm," said Molly.