by Smiley, Jane
There were all physical types, from the blackest Africans to the palest northern Europeans (probably Nils Harstad, the dean of extension, who was a member of her church, defined this end of the spectrum), from the tallest—maybe seven feet—to the shortest, maybe three. They rolled through in wheelchairs, hobbled through on crutches, lifted their trays with hooks (farm accidents, most of those), carried white canes, followed guide dogs, watched her lips, wore hearing aids. They twitched and hunched and limped, or they seemed to dance. Breathtaking beauties of both sexes passed through the line. People who were quite the opposite of that did, too. There were girls who had shaved their heads and boys who had hair to their waists, and vice versa. A few had tattoos on their faces, more had them on their arms. People in thousand-dollar suits stood next to people in torn sweats and T-shirts, but everyone had on shoes and shirts. That was a health rule and the only sort of uniformity. Most of them spoke English, but probably she had heard, or even been addressed in, every major language in the world. She just kept smiling, because here exactly was her task, the task set by Jesus, to love the sinner even though you might hate the sin. Or, as she interpreted it, even though people were crabby and snappish and impolite and angry with each other and weird and hard to look at, being either enviable or grotesque, even though they were lusty and argumentative, and even though she had seen people eat some of the food that was supposed to be weighed at the checkout, stealing routinely, and right in front of her as if she weren’t there, she DID, mostly, love them as she knew she ought to.
What she really liked to think about was how far they had come to walk through her line—not only from all corners of the campus, but also from all corners of the world. She liked to think about them setting out, all on their own, one by one, from thousands of different spots, tracing meandering courses on their feet, in cars, on buses and trains, on airplanes of course. She liked to think how predictable it was, that at seven a.m. and eleven-thirty a.m. and five p.m., so many would be taken by the same urge, and then streams of them would converge on the commons, and in spite of all their differences, they would all be after the same appeasement of the same appetite, and then they would leave, no longer like converging liquids but like the dissipating atoms of a gas.
She worked hard and she didn’t like her job. She was tired of her coworkers and beginning to fear the sight of Jane and Amanda, two older women who’d been ladling food since the Second World War. She was so hungry to quit her job that she could taste it, but she didn’t see the people she had served over the years as participants in a secular humanist conspiracy. There were too many of them and they were too wrapped up in their appetites to be as focused as her brother thought they were. If secular humanism arose out of their activities—and surely it did, that was the evidence according to every preacher—it arose from a natural mixing of desires and appetites, the way an odor arises from a natural mixing of flavors. The secular humanists and the critical thinkers didn’t really offend her, maybe not as much as they should have. It was easier, once you were among them, to accept and even enjoy their flow.
6
Creative Writing
Assignment: Dialogue—dialogue is one of those elements of fiction writing that is at least as much of a skill as a talent, but you need to train yourselves to listen carefully when people are speaking, and to hear how they choose to phrase things as well as what they want to say. Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.
Your assignment is to eavesdrop upon and to write down about two pages of dialogue. Do not use a tape recorder. I want this dialogue to be filtered through your ear and your hand. Try the commons, your dorm dining room, the TV room at your fraternity. You’ll find a place. To protect the innocent AND the guilty, do not use names or describe the speakers. “Girl 1” and “Boy 1,” etc., are good enough. No copies necessary, we will read these aloud.
GARY OLSON positioned his desk a little closer than usual to the door of his room and turned off the CD player. Then he switched on his computer and opened a file labelled “CWASS.Doc.” Bob, he knew, was quietly working on statistics problems—he’d checked that with a trip to the bathroom. Lyle and Lydia, his quarry, were lounging on Lyle’s bed just the other side of the door. He could see their feet, hers bare, his sporting thin dark green socks that Gary thought typical of Lyle, whose idea of style was anything his mom sent from home. Gary himself wore only white athletic socks and Air Jordans. He turned the screen a little so that even if Lyle or Lydia looked in the doorway, they wouldn’t be able to see what he was writing.
GIRL: I’m hungry. Are you hungry?
BOY: You had that ice cream cone.
GIRL: That was just dessert.
(Silence)
GIRL: Are we going to that party tomorrow night?
BOY: What party?
GIRL: You never listen.
BOY: I was listening. I know what party. I was just joking.
GIRL: What party?
BOY: That friend of yours in, uh—
GIRL: On Auburn Terrace. Melissa, on Auburn Terrace. I’m, like, talking to you all the time, and you’re, like, thinking about something else. It never fails.
BOY: You know where it is, why should I? You’ll remind me no matter what.
GIRL: What’s that supposed to mean?
BOY: Nothing. Did you put on some weight?
GIRL: No. (Pause) Yes. Just, like, two pounds, though. You can’t tell. Can you tell?
BOY: A little.
GIRL: You can’t tell. You’re guessing. Does it look bad? Where do you see it?
BOY: Around here.
GIRL: Here? or here? Exactly where?
(The bedsprings creaked)
GIRL: I don’t see it. Well, maybe a little here.
BOY: The back looks worse.
GIRL: What back? What do you mean?
(Pause)
BOY: Your ass.
GIRL: My ass looks bad from the back?
BOY: It doesn’t look bad.
GIRL: You said it looked bad.
BOY: I said it looked worse, not bad yet.
GIRL: Almost bad?
BOY: No, no. Not even almost bad.
GIRL: How long till bad? On a scale of one to ten, where ten is bad.
BOY: Shit.
GIRL: Tell me.
BOY: Just lose the two pounds.
GIRL: It’s water weight. It’ll go away by itself.
BOY: (unintelligible)
GIRL: What?
BOY: Nothing.
GIRL: Tell me.
BOY: You’ll get mad.
GIRL: No, I won’t.
[Gary thought, Yes, Lydia, you will.]
BOY: It better.
GIRL: It better what?
BOY: It better go away.
[Gary thought, What a dope.]
(Silence)
(Silence)
GIRL: You asshole.
BOY: Me asshole! You asked!
GIRL: I didn’t push. Really you wanted to tell me. You think I’m fat.
BOY: No, I don’t. You’re fine.
GIRL: Fine but not good, right?
[Gary thought, Two pages, that’s enough.]
He saved his file and printed it out, secreted it in his binder, turned off the computer. He didn’t feel too bad, not as bad as he usually felt, trying NOT to hear Lyle and Lydia talk. Maybe Mr. Monahan was right about how if you faced up to some horror and wrote about it, you felt better about it, you made it yours, and smaller than you. Horror was exactly the word for Lyle and Lydia. Bob said not to pay any attention, but Bob spent most of his time with a hog somewhere.
Lydia appeared in the doorway and smiled at him. She had a great rolling voice and beautiful smile, she was petite and her hair was thick and honey-colored. Given a choice, Gary would have put her in a much different story.
7
Homo Economicus
DR. LIONEL GIFT, distinguished professor of eco
nomics, was, as everyone including Dr. Gift himself agreed, a deeply principled man. His first principle was that all men, not excluding himself, had an insatiable desire for consumer goods, and that it was no coincidence that what all men had an insatiable desire for was known as “goods,” for goods were good, which was why all men had an insatiable desire for them. In this desire, all men copied the example of their Maker, Who was so Prodigious and Prodigal in His production of goods that His inner purpose could only be the limitless desire to own the billions and billions of light-years, galaxies, solar systems, worlds, life-forms, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles that He had produced. Perfect in the balance He incarnated of production and consumption, He represented a model that the human race not only COULD strive for, but MUST strive for. In this, his private theology, Dr. Gift felt that he had reconciled faith and relativity, self and the vastness of time and space. In fact, every time astronomers demonstrated that there was more out there, and that it was farther away than anyone had thought, every time a physicist successfully quantified vastness, or even minuteness, for that matter, Dr. Gift felt a genuine thrill, the thrill of toiling toward the holy.
At the same time, men were not perfect in their insatiability. While in the large, it never failed them, in the small, they tended to jump from one item to the other, wanting today a steak and tomorrow a tomato and the next day chicken Kiev. As far as insatiability was concerned, the spirit may be willing, but the flesh was weak, time was limited, the purity of desire was fettered by circumstances. You could say, though, and Dr. Gift often did say, that this was our very humanness, this was what made us interesting, from the point of view of economics, and even poignant, in a sense. And it certainly provided the avenue for getting ahead. Our differing desires put us into different markets, and that allowed for creativity, entrepreneurship, original thinking, progress. It was an inspiring cosmology that drew Dr. Gift out of himself, spirit-wise. His clear and potent explanation of these and other principles of economics to beginning students (or “customers”—Dr. Gift felt that Bob Brown’s habitual appellation for the matriculators at the university was both subtle and inspired) had won Dr. Gift two university teaching awards, and he was always ready to remark that these meant more to him than all the other prizes and citations of his long career, more than the photographs of himself with presidents and prime ministers that were scattered around his office, more than everything except the money and consumer goods that the money had bought him over the years. To value those goods above all was, of course, in line with his deepest principles. Other universities were always after Dr. Gift, but he made the principled stand that as long as this university paid him the most money (enabling the consumption of the most goods), here was where he would stay.
Like God’s, Dr. Gift’s condition as a male was uncontaminated by any infusion of the female. He was unmarried, had never desired children, and devoted himself to teaching, research, and consulting. He was a busy man, and the highest-paid faculty member, by far, on the campus.
There were whole countries that Dr. Gift had made what they were today. So far they were small countries—Costa Rica was the only one most people had heard of, so he stopped mentioning the others because he always had to say what they used to be called or where they were near, which, he thought, diminished their importance and therefore his accomplishment, but Costa Rica everyone knew about. Costa Rica was a paradise, and in gratitude for what he had done for them, the Costa Rican government had given Dr. Gift a house overlooking a very nice beach on the western coast. This boon illustrated another of Dr. Gift’s principles, that gifts were consumption of another kind, but still consumption, still a manifestation of insatiable desire—payment for services already rendered, or down payment for services to be rendered later. The longer he lived, the better deal the house would turn out to be for the Costa Rican government, because the cost of maintenance of the property had been transferred to him, while the sense of obligation (or repayment) that he now felt and that they could assert both privately and publicly could be drawn upon for many years to come. It was true, as the Chinese said, that the acceptance of a gift should never be undertaken lightly. But Dr. Gift felt that strong principles and a clear understanding of costs and benefits forearmed a recipient against economic surprises.
In addition to his other work, Dr. Gift had been chair of the university promotion and tenure committee for the last two years. It was the most sensitive committee on the campus, the one most fraught with politics. The benefits of every positive decision were modest, the costs of every negative one potentially disastrous. It was a small committee, but it needed a strong and principled leader. What repaid Dr. Gift for his time and hard work were the connections he made and strengthened with other important members of the university community, whose specialized knowledge could be had at lower cost if they felt a personal tie with him. Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.
One profitable practice, in Dr. Gift’s view, was meeting with the committee once or twice before any departmental materials were referred to it, and so he sent out a memo calling a meeting in the second week of classes, and so he reserved the economics seminar room, and so he sat at the head of the walnut seminar table and watched the other members file in.
Dr. Helen Levy, professor of foreign languages (French and Italian), set down her thermos of black coffee and nudged her briefcase under the table with her foot. She considered this meeting the real beginning of the school year because this committee, which she had sat on the previous year, had a way of burdening your life. She glanced around, smiling at each member as he or she came in. The group, for the first time ever, was a miracle of political correctness, an unstable compound that on this overwhelmingly white, male campus would mutate after this year to the more usual, and more comfortable, ratio of all white men except for one “designated minority.” This year, though! Helen smiled right at old Gift, the complacent fool. His habit of oily pontification, with which he had greased every conflict last year, greased it and greased it until out of misplaced deference or simple fatigue the committee had given in, that habit wouldn’t do him a bit of good this year. Helen had sat on other committees with all of these people, deplored all the time spent in meaningless argument, but this time, however fatuous in substance, the effects she foresaw in balking old Gift would be splendid indeed. She said, “Well, Lionel, have a pleasant vacation?”
“Vacation?”
“Summer recess.”
“Oh, yes. Well, the weather was pleasant, but of course my work proceeds seamlessly, year-around.”
“Getting and spending?” Helen smiled.
“More or less, yes. On many levels, yes. A cogent way of putting it.”
Dr. William Garcia, professor of psychology, could see them taking up their roles as soon as they walked into the meeting room. Father Lionel, humorless, even, you might say, witless, big with gravity though actually a rather small man. Mother Levy, full of a feminine power that was profound but essentially reactive, bringing sustenance in the form of coffee to the meeting, which she would certainly offer around at some point. Sister Bell, the youngest, perhaps the most brilliant, probably (and she hadn’t even opened her mouth, and Garcia had never actually met her before) the most recalcitrant (though she would experience her recalcitrance as authentic rebellion). Brother John Vernon Cates, a black man who had fled to science and would fruitlessly strive to bring “facts” to bear on every conflict between Mom and Dad. And finally himself, of course, a lifelong mediator—he could already feel the tension and it already hurt him. He was better in groups of boys, as he had been great, in his youth, on the playground, big enough, quick enough, good-looking enough, well-meaning enough, good at sports. Most men, in fact, were competent in groups that mimicked the playground, incompetent in groups that mimicked the family; that was why all-male committees ran the most smoothly. He had publishe
d a paper about it in the Journal of Social Psychology that had been cited in fourteen other papers. He was not sanguine about this year’s committee work, foresaw a tangle of controversies involving every member’s whole personality structure, with appeals to professionalism (which often worked in groups of men) ineffectual and resented. He said, “Professor Levy. Weren’t we on the parking committee together some years ago? I seem to remember that.”
“Oh! The parking committee! I thought the perk for that would be a special permit or something. Do you know I got ten tickets that year? Would you like a cup of coffee? There are some cups over there. This is a nice French roast.”
Garcia shook his head. “This late in the day, it disagrees with me.”
There, they had done it. She had made him her son, and he had made her his mom, and made himself sickly, to boot. He could say almost anything for the rest of the semester, and she would probably agree with it. He looked at old Gift, who was grinning, as usual. Did they call economics the dismal science? They should have saved the term for psychology.
Dr. Margaret Bell, a brand-new full professor of English at thirty-four years old, who had been the most heavily recruited faculty member in the history of the English department eight years before, thought that serving on committees with Cates the Chemist was the bane of her existence. Student Judicial Committee, Minority Student Affairs Steering Committee, Black Studies Hiring Committee, Dean Search Committee, Black Awareness Month Committee, Library Committee, Faculty Senate Salary Committee. She had served on eight university-wide or college-wide committees that took up an average of four hours per week. When she had called her dissertation advisor at Harvard and complained about this, she had been told, “You have two courses of action and you have to pursue them both. Draw the line at one committee per year, and work to hire more black faculty members so that you can spread the wealth around.” Well, she had gotten used to the committee work, and often used the time to think through knotty logical points in papers she was writing, but she hadn’t gotten used to Cates the Chemist, who had the least amount of personality she had ever encountered in a man, much less a black man. After years with him, listening to him talk, following the train of his thoughts, she had diagnosed his problem as some sort of brain damage that had left him without instincts. His entire response to every stimulus was cerebral and had to be thought through. Dr. Bell, who urged her students to call her “Margaret,” thought it one of the weirdest disabilities she had ever seen, and she might have regarded it with dispassionate interest except that he also considered it his responsibility to discount the instincts of others and draw the regard of the committee back to “facts.” He always did this in measured tones, usually after she had spoken, as if in reaction to some wild irrationality that she represented. In social situations, he was overly formal, as if all he had to offer was exceptional manners. His wife was from Ghana, a pleasant woman but hard to get to know, and amused at Margaret’s single status. Her usual greeting when they met was “And how old are you now, Miss Bell?” as if she had some sort of right, earned through marriage, to take an interest in Margaret’s personal life. Margaret knew she was from a village, one of the twenty-seven children of a man with five wives, so she had decided this interest was kindly, but even Margaret’s mother had given up asking her about men, so where did Cates the Chemist’s Wife get off? Margaret pursed her lips and said to Helen Levy, “I heard you spent the summer in the French Alps?”
