Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

She finally tried, "Well, Thomas had a very ordinary summer, didn't he?"

  "No," said Tina, with the utmost gloom, "he was collating two manuscripts of Euripides for Professor Medeous. He just went home to do it because he doesn't like this place in the summer."

  "Well," said Janet, "I had an ordinary summer myself."

  "It didn't sound ordinary."

  "That's style, not substance. I made it sound interesting, that's all."

  "I don't see how you did it."

  Janet began to recommend the works of some eminent and fascinating diarists, but Tina interrupted her. "No, that's no good—because I wouldn't be able to see that what they were talking about had ever been ordinary, if they wrote it up so well."

  Janet was becoming exasperated, but she reminded herself that they had nine months in one another's company to come, and that Molly liked Tina. "Okay, look," she said, after some thought accomplished while they put their respective books on their shelves. "I've been meaning to start keeping my diary again. I'll write up some of the things you're around for—dinners in Eliot, and walks in the Arb, and a party if we have one—and I'll type it up for you, without the private parts, and you can read it, and compare it to what happened, and then maybe you'll see."

  Tina looked so radiant that Janet felt both oppressed and guilty. But she was committed now.

  CHAPTER 15

  Molly came back; Nick came back; Robin and Thomas and Peg came back. Molly had a new daishiki with blue tigers on it, and said cheerfully that she had six million new freckles; but she looked just the same to Janet. Peg was pale, thin, and abstracted; questioned, she squinted through her glasses and said that working as a bookkeeper for a children's clinic had been lucrative but not restful.

  "You should have come to Wisconsin," said Nick.

  They were sitting in Janet and Molly and Tina's room after supper, drinking mint tea provided by Peg and eating cinnamon cookies provided by the RA, who had turned out to be Kit Lane. He had left a little packet of them inside everybody's door and then vanished.

  Janet was reserving judgment on whether this was a good way to handle one's responsibilities. There was no need to reserve judgment on his baking. The cookies were as good as Melinda Wolfe's, if not so pretty.

  Peg put hers down untouched on the pink paper napkin provided by Tina and gave Nick an oblique look. "I thought it would be better to get away."

  "You can't get away from Blackstock, not really," said Nick. He had traded in his unruly mop of hair for a neat cap of curls, turned almost as brown as Danny, and gotten the earpiece of his glasses mended. He looked as if he had managed to get very far away indeed from anything that troubled him.

  "I felt so far away I thought I'd never get back," said Tina gloomily.

  Thomas smoothed her hair back from her forehead, and she smiled at him. Thomas too was brown and serene, with his hair bleached almost white and his gray eyes startling pools in all that tan. Janet looked at Robin, who was perched on Molly's dresser surveying the rest of them, on the floor, like a supercilious vulture. He was still his pale self, but his hair and beard were sleek as the pelt of an otter.

  "What in the world did you guys do in Wisconsin?" she said.

  "Meditation," said Nick.

  "Nothing too much," said Robin, gravely. "Know thyself. We thought on hubris, and were translated."

  "Somebody needs to translate that, " said Molly, tossing Tina's teddy bear at him.

  "O Robin," said Janet, without thinking, "how thou art translated."

  Nick laughed; so, after a moment, did Molly. Tina looked puzzled. Thomas had withdrawn himself from the entire conversation and was staring out the window at the red-streaked evening sky.

  Robin sat perfectly still, holding the teddy bear on one knee. Then he smiled slightly.

  "Robin is he who translates, not he who is translated," he said.

  "Were you ever in A Midsummer Night's Dream? " said Janet. She had just called him an ass. But you could almost always placate Robin by asking about acting.

  "A time or two," said Robin.

  Like Professor Ferris in The Revenger's Tragedy, Robin seemed always to play the Fool. So, for this play—"Puck?" said Janet.

  "And made an ass of Nicholas there," said Robin.

  "Now somebody say, 'That's not hard to do,'" said Nick, "and we can all laugh."

  Peg said, "Is that the play where they say the course of true love never did run smooth?"

  "Yes," said Thomas, turning his head suddenly. "It's a comfort to them—they're having trouble, true love always has trouble, therefore theirs is true love."

  "Shakespeare's always like that!" said Peg. "When you find out where the quotations came from, they always seem to mean something else."

  "That's what happens when you're all things to all men," said Nick.

  Peg frowned; Thomas looked at him and said, "And has he saved some?"

  "New Testament!" said Peg triumphantly. "St. Paul. I am made all things to all men . .

  ."

  ". . . That I might by all means save some," said Kit Lane from the doorway. "What are you playing here?"

  "Eating all the RA's cookies up without him," said Molly. "Thank you very much, and do come in."

  Kit came in like the cat they called him, his long black hair floating around his rosy-dark, fine-boned face. If the room had been dimmer, he would have given off light like the trappings of the horse he had ridden on Hallowe'en. He must have been in Wisconsin too. Or maybe it wasn't Wisconsin at all; Janet remembered the day a year ago that Peg pointed out the clump of boys in Taylor's dining hall. Maybe she had just gotten used to them over the school year, and a summer's absence had shown her the quality they had always.

  "Were you in Wisconsin, Kit?" she said. "With all these maniacs?"

  "Oh, yes," said Kit.

  "Like calls to like," said Nick.

  "And where were you, Peg?" said Kit, folding himself to the carpet beside her.

  "Earning my living," said Peg, with no expression. She was looking not at him but at the patched left thigh of her blue jeans.

  "We missed you," said Kit, in a cajoling tone that no other voice in the world—except possibly Thomas's—could have made better than laughable.

  "Professor Medeous didn't," said Peg, still to the patch.

  She said the title as if it were an insult. Kit tugged gently at the fat braid that hung down her back. "You'd be surprised," he said. "And she's not the sole member of the department."

  Peg looked straight at him and said, "I'm going to go find out if Sharon's back. I'll see you later." She stood up and shook out the ruffles of her shirt. "Thank you for the tea, Molly."

  "You brought it," said Molly; but Peg was already shutting the door behind her.

  "Sharon got back yesterday," said Janet.

  Kit tapped his temple with a forefinger.

  "No more than the rest of us," said Thomas, sharply.

  "The rest of us do what we're told," said his brother.

  "The more fools we," said Robin.

  "What are you all blathering about?" said Molly. "At leas t Vindice did something, even if he never once shut his mouth while he was doing it."

  All the Classics majors looked at her consideringly, as if she were a semilegible manuscript. Thomas's mouth was tight; everybody else just looked interested.

  "Don't you complain about the Bio Department?" said Kit, after a moment.

  "Oh, well," said Molly. "We do, don't we, Tina?"

  "Bio Department never takes us to Wisconsin, either," said Tina.

  "Poor babies," said Nick. "Only to Bermuda, and California, and Alaska."

  * * *

  September cooled its mild, sunny way into October, and the asters blazed along the banks of the stream. Janet's Modern Poetry class was less trouble than she had expected.

  Most of the poems were ugly and incomprehensible, or beautiful and incomprehensible, or so stark straightforward you wondered why anybody would bother to write them dow
n at all. But Mr. Tyler had readily consented to her doing her term paper on Christopher Fry (she had asked for Bob Dylan just to see the effect—but Jack Nikopoulos, of all the unlikely people, had beaten her to it), and it was possible to skip classes, or dream through them, or pretend to be a spy from an alien planet trying to figure out American culture.

  Greek 2, under Medeous's imperturbable guidance, was fussy and demanding. People who could read Herodotus handily might still gape stupidly at Euripides or trip over Homer, excerpts from both of whom appeared with increasing frequency in the homework assignments. The two dunces were still with them; Thomas was gone, which made the class feel rather flat. Odile was still there, giving a perfect example to everyone and causing the rest of the class to draw together in dislike. Janet, who was accustomed to either being or admiring and envying the best student in the class, hoped her own attitude had never been so smug.

  Eighteenth-Century Literature was an unexpected amount of trouble. It appeared to Janet that she had read already, in English 11, every bearable piece of work any of the Augustans had done, and now wandered bewildered in a world that was artificially pastoral, unaffectedly nasty, and never, never said what it meant. She still loved Evans's lectures, but it was as if he were discussing some other literature altogether; she could never connect what he said with what she was reading on any except the most intellectual level—and while intellect was certainly necessary to an understanding of these writers, it was not sufficient. It all made her think of Tina's problem with writing interesting letters.

  The journal was giving her less trouble than she had feared. The brilliant weather, the familiar but still, in many ways, mysterious company, their varying degrees of wit, loquacity, and patience, were a pleasure to record; it was like taking snapshots, only a great deal more rewarding, because the technical aspects of the matter were far more under one's control.

  Tina was less pleased; Tina was, in fact, in despair. Half of what Janet saw going on she never noticed, and half of what remained she simply found boring. They had a number of frustrating and inconclusive conversations about it; the upshot of the whole thing was that Janet came back from an unsatisfactory session with Pope's "Pastorals," flung her books and notebook on the bed ("Hunting," remarked the notebook under today's date, "is the moral equivalent of war—young men will shoot something"), and called up Thomas on the telephone. He was living in Dunbar with Sharon's boyfriend Kevin, who as a Physics major was, perhaps, as far from anybody in Classics as Thomas could conceive of getting.

  The telephone rang thirty-two times; a young woman with a slight Chinese accent answered, sounding resigned, and finally Thomas's reverberating voice said, "Hello?" in highly impatient tones.

  "It's Janet," said Janet.

  "Oh, sorry; I thought it was that moron who thinks Kev and I have got Schiller. What's up?"

  "Have you been telling Tina she's ordinary?"

  "What would be the good of that?"

  "Well, that's what I thought; but she's all worked up about it, and you know everything just gets worse when she's worked up. Are you guys doing all right?"

  "Oh, I don't know," said Thomas, discontentedly. "It's all very pleasant, but it's not going anywhere. And Tina wants it to, you know; she's got an amazingly puritanical conscience for somebody of her—well, anyway, I think she thinks the only justification for premarital sex is to get married when you can." He paused. "It's a very old idea, come to that," he said.

  "This doesn't sound very healthy."

  "Well, breaking up wouldn't be very healthy, either. I should have done it last summer, if I was going to do it; it has such an awful effect on people's studying, and it's bad enough to break the girl's heart without worrying if I'm going to keep her out of medical school too."

  "She's only a sophomore."

  "She needs four years of straight A's to—"

  "Okay, all right, I don't know why I'm arguing with you anyway—I don't want you to break up with Tina. But she needs a new social group or something. We make her feel inferior."

  "Well—"

  "I've got an idea."

  "Splendid."

  "Why don't you take Tina folk dancing? They meet every Wednesday, and you know perfectly well she doesn't really want to come with the rest of us and watch arty foreign films."

  "Sounds like you're the one who doesn't—"

  "Oh, I hate 'em, but I like seeing what makes Robin laugh." There was a pause while Janet considered the implications of this and Thomas said nothing. She said, "Well, why don't you take Tina folk—"

  "Because I've got two left feet."

  "All the better."

  There was another pause.

  "I suppose it can't hurt to try," said Thomas.

  Janet felt obscurely guilty. "You're being very lamblike about this," she said.

  "You have a talent for nonoffensive interference," said Thom as, politely, and hung up.

  The folk dancing was a great success. Tina talked about it endlessly, checked out records of the music from the library, and began getting together with two other girls from the dancing group, including Susan from last year's Fourth Ericson, to sew her own costumes. She was no more tedious than anybody else going on and on about an obsession; and she was far, far easier to live with. And in the middle of November, the day before Winter Term Registration, she broke up with Thomas.

  Janet found out about it not from Tina, who had (as Tina explained later with a certain pride) accomplished the breakup in the interval between Introduction to International Relations and an appointment to sew skirts with Susan, but rather from the spurned Thomas, who was disposed to blame Janet. It was almost the first gray day of that autumn.

  Janet was sitting at her desk, looking out over Bell Field instead of reading Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot." The rich colors of grass and yellow willow and red maple lay under the dark sky like some unreadable illuminated capital.

  Janet had just turned back to the beginning of the poem, and was reading with a certain sympathy the exhortation, "Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu'd I said, Tye up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead," when there came a tremendous pounding on the door, followed by Thomas.

  Janet twisted around in her desk chair and stared at him.

  "Thanks a lot," he said bitterly.

  "Shut the door if you're going to yell. What did I do?"

  Thomas sat down on Tina's bed, as he always did; then he shook himself and got up in a hurry and sat on the edge of Janet's desk. "Tina just broke up with me."

  "Well?"

  "Because I can't partake of her interests—which means solely that I am not completely absorbed in folk dances."

  "And that was my idea. Are you really upset?"

  Thomas glowered at her. He had let his hair grow all summer and all fall, and seemed to have no idea what to do with it. He looked a great deal like Janet's idea of an angel, except for the scowl, and the fact that he bit his fingernails.

  "I wouldn't put it past you to do it on purpose," said Thomas.

  "Thank you so much. Why the hell should I? You think I want a repetition of last year's behavior, when you disappeared for two weeks? No thanks."

  "She's not unhappy, she's as pleased with herself as she can be."

  "Well, what's the problem, then? You didn't break up with her because you didn't want to ruin her grade-point average. So now you're free, and you still won't ruin her grade-point average. What is the matter?"

  "I need to find somebody else—oh, hell," said Thomas, and grinned at her. Janet received the uneasy impression that, rather than suddenly seeing that he was being absurd, he was simply sitting on his anger. "I just wonder who I'll have lunch with on Mondays.

  Silly of me."

  You can eat with us," said Janet, "Peg and Nick and me, I mean—but I do know what you mean. You feel kind of cast adrift." She had meditated on breaking up with Nick, more as an exercise in imagination than out of any major dissatisfaction, and had experienced a remarkably strong di
sorientation and panic at the mere notion.

  "I certainly do," said Thomas. He pushed his long hands through his bright hair, and jumped off the desk. "Sorry to barge in on you like this. I guess I'll see you Monday—where?"

  "Dunbar—look, we're used to having you around, you know—are you going to disappear on Molly and me?"

  "I don't know. I don't know how awkward it's going to be. I did yell at Tina; she probably doesn't want to see my face for a while. Let me get used to being a bachelor, all right?"

  "Well, call if you need anything."

  "A good dose of self-esteem, that's all—no, don't look so alarmed, I was just joking.

  See you later." He went out, banging the door.

  Janet sat on her desk and looked straight down at the sidewalk, and in a few moments Thomas came trudging along it, his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket and his head bent—probably against the wind, Janet thought, but he looked dejected. She got up and went from the eastern window to the northern, and watched him slither down the eroded gully below Eliot, walk onto the wooden bridge, and pause in the middle to lean on the rail and throw bits of something brown, probably bread, onto the water. A collection of ducks gathered out of nowhere, clucking and wanking at him. He went on leaning on the rail long after he had run out of bread and the ducks had drifted away complaining. Janet leaned also, on Molly's desk, and watched the wind whip his hair over his face. Finally he turned and went, very briskly, across the bridge, up the hill, and in the nearest door Dunbar afforded. Janet straightened up, and discovered that her wrist was numb and the edge of the desk had made a white mark on her palm. She had wasted twenty minutes.

  She sat down to Pope again. She had just got into a mood where she could admire his very great technical skill and be mildly entertained by the paragraph beginning, "Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in ink, my Parents' or my own?" when there was another knock. This was a nervous brushing of knuckles across the door panels, rather than Thomas's pounding; but like Thomas, the caller then opened the door—so violently that it crashed into the stop provided against just such hasty treatment—and skittered into the room.