Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Swimming At Bath
The timed lighting ran out the moment that Professor Esme Dane placed her hand on a mis-shelved volume of Keats. The lights clicked off on the ninth floor of the library. As she groped the shelf for the book, five others tumbled from the other side of the stack, leaving a keyhole of daylight. Esme peered through and saw the red sky through the slate glass. The water in the Boston harbor below was choppy. Her eye caught a buoy, and as she leaned through the keyhole made of books, she saw one of her students lying on the floor on the other side of the stack. Two more books fell, echoing through the ninth floor.
Was she dead? The girl didn't move. Esme wondered what the girl was doing there. It was seven in the morning and the library wasn't open to students yet. The harbor wind whistled over the building. Esme swallowed. Were they alone? Had the girl been strangled? She had dirt on her neck. Streaks of dirt, maybe someone's handprint. Esme forgot that she was searching for the Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. She looked through the mesh of the metal flooring to the book stacks below and thought she saw a passing shadow. No, all she could see were the tops of the books. She took a Quarter from her pocket and aimed it dead center in the gap between the stacks and the mesh flooring.
She let it go and it dropped four floors before hitting concrete with a "ping."
Maybe in the GH section, across the floor, a book slammed from a shelf. There was a fluttering of pages as if several books opened and poured to the floor. Maybe a footstep. Then came a clanking as a draft rose through the floor. The heat ducts! Esme reminded herself. Heat ducts!
The girl hadn’t moved, so Esme turned to look for the closest exit. There was a spiral staircase somewhere in the darkness at the end of the stack that led to the floor below, but she couldn’t see it. The dim corridor beyond the staircase lead to the impossibly slow elevator. But she knew she shouldn't leave the girl. Or should she? If she could get to the stairwell, she could walk down the nine floors and trip the alarm on the fire exit. Security would amble over in no time.
She turned to the daylight cutting through the keyhole left by the books. Her student's name was Julia, and she always sat in the front row of Esme’s Jane Austen seminar. She never raised her hand; she blurted out whatever thought crossed her mind. Though she always appeared to have absorbed what she read, Julia had somehow missed every multiple-choice question on the midterm. Esme had thought of Julia as mannerless until the week before. When Esme couldn’t climb the ladder from the pool, Julia had hopped out of the water to offer Esme her hand. Most people looked away when Esme fumbled. Yet, Julia interrupted her swim then dove back into her lane as if it were all part of a routine. Esme had watched Julia’s red suit rippling under the water as she darted away. In that moment Esme thought Julia had the manners of a champion. Esme—a member of the 1968 Olympic Swim Team—had stumbled to the locker room, thankful that Julia had the manners not to ask what was wrong with her.
The wind rose, there was a rumble of a low-flying jet. Esme was startled. When she looked at the mesh of the floor she thought she saw a shadow move. Perhaps a wharf cat had gotten into the library, it had happened before. But maybe not, maybe Julia was dead. There had been a stalker on campus. Some homeless crazy who randomly showed up to sit through lectures, and then followed women to their cars. Or sat in unlocked cars. Or sat in stairwells. Waiting. And then said nothing, just moved on when he was caught. Maybe Esme was now being watched. She stuck her firsts into the depths of her pockets, unable to speak.
Julia moved. She wasn’t dead, at all. She curled up on her side, sucked her thumb for a moment, and then stopped. She was asleep on her coat. Her frizzy blond hair seemed alive in a shaft of light, with corkscrew curls that framed her square jaw. Esme sighed in relief. Then she thought she saw trails and stared at the girl to get a better look at the corners of her vision. She wondered if the flecks of light would reappear and obscure her focus—if her retina would detach.
Though her prognosis was good, Esme was in the habit of searching her sight for the onset of symptoms that might leave her blind. Her sight was clear, however, and Esme caught herself thinking Botticelli could not have painted a more beautiful sight than Julia asleep among the books. Esme’s eyes swept over her student, possessing her, and traveled to several piles of books about eighteenth-century literature.
Then she remembered why she had come from her office. An anonymous note had been left in her mail box saying that all the books marked “Austen 330 ENG” had been re-shelved in “Astrophysics 330 ENGIN.” All the books for her courses had been missing from the library since the beginning of the semester. Then Esme saw the book she was looking for. Hugged to the girl’s chest was the Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.
Esme was surprised by the quantity of books. Had Julia hidden them from the other students? She was thinking of shaking her, but as Esme gazed at Julia’s face, striped by the sun, she couldn’t move. The fierce crease that usually marked Julia’s forehead was erased by sleep.
Minutes passed, and still Julia slept soundly.
Esme cleared her throat. Nothing. She wanted the book back. Esme pushed a book about engine viscosity until it fell from its shelf. Nothing. She walked into the darkness of the stack, flicked on the light and came around the to the other side to kneel over the girl. Nothing. She was tempted to fondle a ringlet of blond hair.
As Esme turned away she heard the girl stir and wake up.
“How did you get in here?” said Esme. “The library isn’t open yet.”
Julia sat up. “Professor Dane,” she said. “What a surprise!”
“Were you here all night?” said Esme.
“A little bit.”
“Either you were or you weren’t,” said Esme.
The girl rubbed her eye with the ball of her fist.
Esme sniffed. The girl’s clothes were filthy beyond the grunge look popular with undergraduates.
“Professor Dane,” said Julia, her eyes brightening. “I like your suit,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for stolen books,” Esme said.
“So am I,” Julia said. “All the good stuff on Austen was missing, but the librarian said it was still in the library.”
“Julia, that’s your name isn’t it? You know it’s not fair to the other students that you have hidden all the books.”
Julia looked stunned. “It’s not me, ma’am. I combed through all the stacks until I found them.”
“Did you spend the night looking for them?”
“Days,” said Julia. “I knew they were here somewhere. All the stuff from the Romantic period has been raided. So I started on the sixth floor.”
Julia got up and limped stiffly. “Ow, my neck,” she muttered. “The floor’s kind of hard.”
“And you searched stack to stack?” said Esme.
Julia nodded. “Three floors up. Did you get the note I left in your mail box?”
Esme looked away. “You startled me,” she said. “I thought you were dead.”
“I must have dosed off,” said Julia. She hobbled around for a moment. “My leg is numb, sorry.”
* * *
Professor Esme Dane had to smoke. After teaching English 101 to a class of undergraduates who hadn’t read the assignment, she needed a cigarette. There was a tremor in her right hand. Her entire forearm was numb. She wondered if she would be able to swim her ten laps later in the day. The last time she’d lost the sensation in her arm she ran her hand into the aqua-tiled wall of the pool, breaking three fingernails. She didn’t feel the pain until she stopped swimming, stood up in her lane and saw blood running around her cuticles.
Smoke, she thought. If I smoke I will be fine.
Esme got in the elevator and rode down to the lower-level parking garage. Several times a day she made a pilgrimage to a stairwell where a litter of kittens was nesting in a hole in the wall. A winter storm was predicted, and Esme wanted to make sure the kittens had enough food. She had had her eye on a gray kitten for some time. One day in September, as she backed her Volvo into the handicapped zone, she noticed him. He was blue gray. Though he was a short hair, his fur was thick and stood on end. She wondered if he were part Persian. He was aloof and groomed himself as people scrambled to and from the elevators. If she could catch him, Esme thought, she would take him home. But the gray kitten wanted nothing to do with her. Whenever she reached for him, he bolted and found a new place to preen.
Esme lit up and looked through the hole. There was a calico—flecked in patches of four colors--a black kitty, and the gray kitty she desired, grooming his back leg.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” came a voice from below. Then a cough. Esme looked down where the cement stairs ended in dim light. She took a puff.
“This is my spot,” said Esme.
A cough. “You still shouldn’t smoke.”
Esme took another drag. “Who’s there?”
“Nobody.” A sniff.
Esme thought she recognized the voice and walked down the half flight to see who was there. In the shadows under the stairs, Esme saw Julia sitting on a sofa. She was reading the dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice Esme had left on the free book table two weeks before.
“Is that sofa from the third floor lounge?” Esme put her hand in the pocket of her wool trousers.
“Probably,” said Julia. “Hey, Professor Dane, I have a question for you.”
“You’ve got yourself a regular living room here.”
“So long as the lights don’t go out,” said Julia. “So this is my question: why is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice supposedly famous? I don’t get it.”
Esme puffed and eyed Julia. “It’s ironic. In Jane Austen’s day a women’s primary objective was to marry well.”
“I know,” said Julia. “But it seems to me, and call me funny if I am, that a single man in possession of a fortune does not want to get married, he wants to fuck around for as long as possible.”
“From whose point of view was that first line written?” said Esme.
Julia thought for a moment. “The busybody mother,” she said.
“The busybody mother who has five daughters to marry off,” said Esme. “Maybe you should write your next paper on that idea.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Julia.
Esme puffed, but worried that the smoke might bother Julia. The girl sounded as if she had bronchitis or something stuck in her lungs.
“I had this idea,” said Julia. “I was wondering what you think. Could I interview Jane Austen instead of writing a paper and ask her?”
“Jane Austen is dead, Julia.”
“I know that,” said Julia.
But from the look on Julia’s face, Esme wondered if the girl had a clue that Jane Austen had died in 1818.
“I wanted to write the interview and ask Jane Austen everything,” said Julia. “A total fabrication. I want to see if I can answer my own questions.”
“You can,” said Esme.
“That’s fucking great,” said Julia. “Fucking great.”
“Why are you here?” said Esme.
“I’m trying to get into the fifteenth chapter of volume one for your class at four.”
“You’re behind,” said Esme.
“I know,” said Julia. “I’m a little bit slow. It takes me a while.”
“We’re in volume three, chapter twenty,” said Esme. “How are you going to catch up?”
“As best I can,” said Julia, who discretely dabbed her nose with her shirt cuff. “I guess I should have kept my mouth shut.”
Esme puffed. “I don’t know why you bothered to come in today. There’s going to be a storm. The university might shut down early.”
Julia shrugged. “Professor Dane, what’s the Circus? You know in Persuasion? I didn’t get it. Is it a place or is it an event?”
“You read Persuasion? It’s not on the syllabus until April.”
“I was distracted, I could relate to Anne Eliot and Mrs. Smith.”
“The Circus is a ring of Georgian buildings in Bath,” said Esme. “Jane Austen lived around the corner at 25 Gay Street.”
The gray kitty poked its head out from the hole in the wall. From where Esme stood they were at eye level. The cat stared at her. He puffed himself out and started to purr. Esme stifled her impulse to reach for him.
“Hey, Hamlet,” said Julia. “I’ve named him the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father.”
“I’d like to take him home, but I can’t catch him.” said Esme. “I hate to see them left wild. Someone should care for them.”
“They know when to come in,” said Julia. She made a kiss kiss noise, and the kitten streaked by Esme and leapt into Julia’s lap.
“Hey!” said Esme. “How’d you do that?”
“He’s my boy,” said Julia. “Right, Hamlet?” Julia held the kitten’s head and made him nod.
“Still,” said Esme, “still!” she stuttered, surprised that the gray kitten could belong to someone else. She dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out with the heel of her boot. “Well. I have office hours now, I suppose I should go up.”
“But you don’t want to,” said Julia.
“How do you know?”
“Why would you want to listen to a bunch of whiners when you could stay and see Hamlet playing the role of Yoda?” Julia pushed down Hamlet’s ears. “There. When the student is ready the master appears,” she said, imitating Yoda. “He should have been in StarWars. Don’t you think?”
“I suppose,” said Esme. She buttoned her wool blazer and wrapped her scarf around her neck. “The temperature is dropping. Don’t stay down here too long.”
* * *
Esme was tired of excuses. The latest was from a kid who broke his arm in a mosh pit at a concert and claimed he could no longer type. Then there was Missy Strand, the princess. Though she had scored 1350 on her SATs and was offered a place at Harvard, she took a full scholarship from the state university because she didn’t want to be saddled with a giant loan. Yet Missy Strand seemed to be coasting. She recycled two of her papers from the required 200-level Brit Lit Survey for the 400-level Austen seminar. Esme knew the papers because she had graded them the year before. Missy wanted a recommendation letter from Professor Dane. The university offered a scholarship for one student to study at the University of Bath, in England, for a semester. Esme didn’t want to recommend Missy because she thought the girl lazy. Whoever won the scholarship was expected to return from England with nothing less than an A-. Professor Esme Dane wanted to see a fresh paper, a thoughtful paper exploring the changes in British class structure after the French Revolution. But when pressed, Missy Strand teared up and fled.
After an hour, Esme wished someone would call in a bomb threat, anything so she could leave for the day. At three o’clock she got her wish. The storm blew in off the Boston Harbor, enveloping the campus in a nor’easter. By three-thirty everyone was told to go home. On her way to her car, Esme looked for the kittens. She started out the door when she thought to look under the stairs. The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father spat past her. Another step down and Esme saw the tips of Julia’s rubber-toed sneakers, and then Julia herself, still sitting on the sofa with her arms crossed and her backpack zipped shut.
“You again,” said Esme. “We’re supposed to leave. There’s a blizzard blowing in.”
“You go ahead,” said Julia. “I’ll leave in a little bit.”
“No, Julia. The university is closed.”
“I’m waiting for someone.”
“I don’t believe you. The campus is empty. Do you need a ride somewhere?”
“I—not really.”
“Then come with me.”
“You really don’t want me.”
“Why is that?”
“Trust me.”
A siren began in the building above. “They’re going to lose power. Come on,” said Esme.
Julia wouldn’t budge.
“Look,” said Esme. “We have to leave. You can come to my house if you like.”
“I have head lice,” said Julia.
“Head lice?”
Julia avoided Esme’s eyes.
“Come on, we’ll stop at a drug store.”
* * *
Esme lived in the South End of Boston on the second floor of a townhouse built before the Civil War. Every wall in the apartment was lined with books. The shelves continued into the huge bathroom, where there were rows of moldering paperback mysteries. In the middle of the room was a giant bathtub with clawed feet. Esme filled it and added green bath oil, which made the tub look like a small pool in a large box of octagon tiles. Esme set fresh clothes for Julia on the armchair she kept in the bathroom. When Julia emerged, Professor Esme Dane sat her student on a stool in the middle of her kitchen and carefully began to comb the nits out of her hair.
“How did you learn to do this?” said Julia.
“My baby sister had a case or two growing up. Most kids on a farm do.” Esme looked at the instructions on the box. “Use special comb to remove dead lice.”
“The chemicals stink.” Julia sniffed.
“Do you have a cold?”
“I have asthma. The dust at school has been getting to me.”
A patch of dead lice clung tenaciously to Julia’s head, their eggs had adhered to shafts of hair a half inch from her scalp. Esme was pleased that she could see them so clearly, even though she knew it meant that Julia must have had the infestation for quite some time.
“This is embarrassing,” said Julia.
Esme chuckled. “My students accuse me of liking to nitpick. Here I am.”
Julia smiled, leaned forward so her curls hid her eyes. Then Esme noticed a tear fall off the girl’s face as she saturated the patch of lice with a cotton-ball full of Linden.
“It’s not that bad,” said Esme. “Where did you get them?”
“The last time I stayed in the shelter.”
“So you have been living on campus.”
Julia shrugged. “It beats the shelter, all those women who’ve fucked over their lives with men and kids.”
“The campus is dangerous at night,” said Esme. “There was a rape last year.”
“I know,” she said. “But I’ve learned how to stay low.”
They were silent.
"You gave me quite a fright this morning," said Esme.
“What’s the story with your briefcase?” Julia said, pointing to the ancient, somewhat shapeless leather bag Esme always carried. “It looks like it’s ready to belch papers.”
Esme smiled. “I bought it in Bath when I lived there. Every few years I get it re-sewn.”
“Why don’t you get a new bag? That one’s pretty beat.”
“You know, the leather from that bag was sealed in a cargo hold of a ship that sank in 1812.” Esme kept talking to distract herself. She enjoyed taking charge of Julia, of having an excuse to examine her hair closely, of soaking the roots of her hair with chemicals, then scruffing through her curls which held their shape, even when wet. “The leather sat at the bottom of the ocean for 150 years, until the harness maker in Bath got a hold of it.”
“So, you’ve just broken it in, is what you’re saying.”
“Pretty much,” said Esme. “There, now we let you sit for five minutes.”
Julia stretched. “Tell me about the Circus,” she said.
“The Circus?”
“In Persuasion,” said Julia. “In Bath.”
“I lived there, once,” said Esme.
“No!” said Julia. “How did you manage that?”
“I was writing my master’s thesis at Oxford.”
“Oxford. The Oxford?”
“The Oxford.”
“How did you do that?”
“I had a Fulbright.”
“What’s a Fulbright?”
“A scholarship.”
“So you lived in the Circus?”
“It was a sublet, and it was a grand summer. I stayed in Bath after Oxford.”
“Do you have pictures?”
“I do,” said Esme.
“Well, out with them,” said Julia.
Esme fetched a framed photo of herself taken thirty years before when she had long hair and no clue what she would do with her life.
“Look, it says Gay Street just like in Persuasion. You really lived there.”
“It’s time for phase two,” said Esme. She walked Julia to the kitchen sink and poured the second set of chemicals through the girl’s hair, then rinsed it with the small hand-held hose.
“It burns,” said Julia.
Esme held a facecloth to Julia’s forehead. “How’s that?” she said.
“I used to dye my hair when I danced downtown. Oh shit, this hurts.”
“Sorry,” said Esme. “Danced, were you with the ballet?”
“I wish,” said Julia. “I was an exotic dancer.”
“Really?”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not at all, why did you quit?”
“I had a little incident.”
“Oh?”
“No biggie, really. I've been banished to the university by a state agency. Yes, I'm thinking of changing my name to Doolittle.”
“Really?” said Esme.
“I shouldn’t have told you. Shit, me and my big mouth.”
“It’s not a problem,” said Esme. “I’ve heard worse.”
Esme had heard of convicts in state law school, or in the College of Public Service; of veterans finally straight enough to enroll for a BA thirty years after they came home from Vietnam. But never had she met a rehab case obsessed with literature.
Esme ran her fingers over her student’s scalp. “I think I got them all. I’ll give you fresh pajamas later. While I wash your clothes.”
“You mean I can stay the night?”
“The night,” said Esme.
* * *
It was time. High noon. Esme looked at the clock again. All the schools, including the university were closed. When the radio announced that the T was flooded and had shut down, Esme told Julia to stay.
But Esme wondered what to do. Julia was sitting on the sofa flipping the pages of a large book on Michelangelo. The girl seemed preoccupied. At five past the hour, Esme locked herself in the bathroom. Like staring at Julia the morning before—to see if her vision was clear—Esme touched a syringe kit, determined to feel it through numb fingers. She mixed the medication cocktail as the visiting nurse had showed her the week before. Then she sat in the armchair, and stuck herself in the thigh. Her right hand fumbled, unable to push down the plunger. She torqued the needle that pierced her flesh.
“Ow!” cried Esme, unable to move for a moment. She burst into tears. A minute passed.
“Professor Dane?” said Julia, through the door.
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
Esme wouldn’t answer. She attempted the injection again.
“Professor Dane are you all right?”
“No,” she said. “Go away.”
“Open the door.”
“No,” she said, barely audibly. A moment later Esme was surprised to hear the mechanisms of the lock scratching. Then she heard the lock turn. The door swung open.
“How did you do that?” said Esme.
“I picked the lock.”
Esme withdrew the needle from her thigh. “You’d think I could give an injection myself,” said Esme.
“Let me,” said Julia.
“My hand is numb. I can’t feel what I touch,” said Esme. “It makes me so damn mad!”
“Sit still,” said Julia.
“It’s not heroin,” said Esme.
“I know,” said Julia.
“It’s Interferon. Every week I get a shot in the opposite leg.”
“There. Done.” Julia withdrew the needle. Esme was stunned.
“Done. Done?” said Esme, pressing the puncture on her thigh.
“Easy pie,” said Julia.
“I’m not good with self injections,” said Esme, who touched the corner of her eye. “I have to get this down.”
Julia touched Esme’s hair. For a moment Esme leaned her head against Julia’s side.
“I could come back next week,” said Julia. “If you want.”
Esme nodded. The color began to leach from her face. She cleared her throat. “It’s working,” she said. “I have to lie down.” Esme lurched for the door and stumbled down the hall.
“It will be like I have the flu for the next ten hours,” said Esme. “I’ll probably sleep it off.”
“I should go,” said Julia.
“Stay,” said Esme. “Would you do me a favor? I’ll pay you? There’s fifty dollars on the kitchen table. Keep twenty and buy a few groceries with the other thirty.”
* * *
Esme slept soundly, with the vague feeling that she had a fever. When she awoke, the room was dark. Sleet ticked at the windows. She noticed that the apartment smelled of cooking and burning cedar. Esme was pleased. After previous injections she had woken up alone to a cold house. Julia must have thought to light a fire. As Esme sat up, she thought she smelled dope. She kicked off the covers, and sweat trickled down her spine. She wandered into the bathroom, and then down the hall to the living room.
Julia sat at Esme’s desk, tapping her foot. Around her neck was a short scarf, which accentuated her bare skin and cleavage. Julia was wearing Esme’s clothes, and Esme was stunned at how lovely the girl looked. When Esme wore the same low cut shirt, she had no idea that her exposed cleavage could be seen as sexy. On Julia, the plain old shirt was sexy, which somehow made Esme feel sexy—a feeling she hadn’t had in a while. Her eyes followed the satin trim of the neckline, which drew to a point between Julia’s breasts. Esme blinked. Her eyesight was so clear she blushed. Julia looked intelligent. She pouted as she read, and puffed on a joint. The joint became a roach in Julia’s next inhalation and bobbed on the end of the Randy wire that had been rolled in the cigarette paper.
Rather brazen, Esme thought. Julia had raided her stash. Esme admired and loathed the girl in the same instant. Then Esme noticed what Julia was reading. Fanned across the desk and spilling onto the floor were the blue exam books from the Austen midterm she had given the week before. Julia was holding a pencil with her other hand. She looked to be writing while she read from Esme’s grade book. Julia was sizing up the marks of every person Esme had taught in the previous two years. Perhaps Julia was even changing grades. Esme always entered them in pencil.
Julia looked up.
“What are you doing?” said Esme.
Julia giggled as she struggled for something to say.
“That’s privileged information,” said Esme. “I could have you expelled for that.”
“I was curious to see how I was doing,” said Julia.
“I’m going to get dressed,” said Esme. “In about two minutes I’ll be back. The blue books will be put away, and you’ll be doing something else.”
“I’ve made supper,” Julia said, hopefully. “Miss Dane?”
“Goddamn, my knee,” said Esme. “I’m falling apart. Just a minute.”
Five minutes later Esme limped to the table and sat down. Her grandmother’s linens covered the table. Her good silver had been set out and her wine glasses were dusted. “How kind of you to cook,” she said. “I didn’t expect it. I was thinking some cans of chicken soup would be enough.”
“Sodium broth is not food,” said Julia.
“It is in a pinch.”
“I’m sorry about—”
Professor Dane raised her hand.
“I mean—”
“Hush, Julia. Oh, how lovely. An entire turkey.”
“And I’ve made garlic bread.”
“And asparagus,” said Esme, serving herself.
“I can explain,” said Julia.
“Let me ask you,” said Esme. “How would you feel if you knew a classmate had read your and everyone else’s exam? If some classmate was fiddling with the teacher’s grade book. Would you think it was fair?”
“I just wanted to know where I stand,” said Julia. “I want to take the exam over. Besides, I was doodling.”
“Doodling?”
“I have this habit of making little art galleries with Post-it notes. Go look at your desk, I’ve hung a show for you. They’re all pencil abstracts. I’m in my graphite period.”
Esme went to her desk. Doodled Post-its were neatly stuck on all the drawers. Esme ran her fingers through her hair. “If you want help you should ask.”
“I am,” said Julia.
“You should visit me during office hours.” Esme sat down and took a bite of turkey. It was moist and should have been delicious, but her stomach was slightly sour. “And what were you doing smoking marijuana? My marijuana?”
“Sorry,” said Julia. “I liked sitting at your desk and looking out the window. It seemed like a natural thing to do.”
“To peek in all my drawers?”
“They were so cute, I couldn’t resist. Sorry.” Julia leaned back in her chair, averted her eyes, and sniffed.
“You look good in white,” said Esme. “I don’t care if you wear my clothes. But I do care if you smoke my dope.”
“I’ll pay you back,” said Julia.
“It’s not the money. It’s—oh hell—I smoke the stuff when I’m nauseous, which has been often, lately.”
“There’s still a roach, you want to smoke it?”
“Yes I do, thank you.”
Julia jumped to her feet, fetched the ashtray with the roach and sparked it for Esme. Esme took a long drag, keeping her eyes on Julia. The fire cracked in the fireplace.
“Pot is embarrassing for me to get,” said Esme.
Julia was clueless.
“The Marijuana. It’s illegal. I have to visit someone in a housing project to get it.” She took another drag and held her breath. “God forbid the people who need it most should be able to buy it with dignity. But no, there I am making connections in Southie. It irks me.” She took another hit and let the roach go out.
“I could score some for you,” said Julia.
“That’s one transgression too many,” said Esme.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re the student and I am the teacher. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“I know, but.”
“Listen, do you have any idea how awkward it might be for me to see you around school, knowing that I want drugs from you?”
“It’s not like you’re a junkie. You want it for medicinal purposes.”
“It’s still a drug and it’s still illegal. You’re my student. A literature student—a very bright one—and I refuse to contribute any more complications to your life.”
Julia licked her lips. “There’s all sorts of things I could do for you if you’d let me.”
Esme wasn’t listening. The room seemed dark, and her eyes rested on the white of Julia’s t-shirt. She blinked and noticed Julia’s nipples erect through the fabric. Esme recognized her jeans as Julia parted her legs slightly. She admired how loose they appeared on the girl, how Julia's curves gave the familiar denim a new shape.
Julia leaned over and took Esme’s face in her hands. “I’d like to kiss you.”
Esme was caught off guard. She took a deep breath, stifling her impulse to kiss Julia.
“I can’t,” said Esme.
Julia pulled Esme’s face toward her, but Esme turned her cheek and hugged her instead. “I’m your teacher, darling. I’m flattered, but it wouldn’t be right.”
Julia leaned back, then kissed her anyway.
Esme gave in for a moment then pushed away. “I said no.”
“I like it when you stare at my breasts.”
Esme was suddenly enraged. “The word is no. I don’t need or want you!”
“Excuse me.” Julia got up abruptly and went down the hall to the bathroom.
Esme had seen tears in Julia’s eyes. She cleared her throat and waited for Julia to compose herself and return. She hadn’t seen fresh linen on her table in over a year. She uncorked the wine and filled the glasses she hadn’t used since she’d been diagnosed with MS. The candles flickered in the draft, as the building was buffeted by wind. It was lovely of Julia to prepare a meal. Esme decided that she liked having her around, but that she needed to re-establish a boundary. She was the teacher, Julia was the student. She would apologize for staring and tell Julia about her problems with vision.
“Julia?” called Esme after a few minutes. “Dinner is getting cold.”
No answer.
“Julia, come out now,” said Esme. “We’ll talk it over.”
Esme got up and went down the hall. The bathroom door was open. Five steps beyond, Esme saw that the door to the apartment was left ajar. Esme closed the door and went to the front of the building. The streets of the South End were empty. She looked out the window to the north and saw a figure walking towards Massachusetts Avenue. The figure was enveloped by snow, then disappeared. Esme’s face burned with a slight fever. She slumped at the beautifully set table. When the food had cooled, she ate alone.
* * *
The Austen seminar became dull. Without Julia blurting opinions out of turn, the class was rudderless. Missy Strand sat through class pretending to take notes. Esme noticed that she drew horses when she was bored. Professor Esme Dane’s office hours came and went, and for all her visits to the stairwell, Esme had seen neither Julia nor the gray kitten all week. What had she done? She asked herself. Julia’s clothes, as well as her coat, were all still in the wash when she walked out. Whenever Esme thought of the figure disappearing in the snow she felt a terrible guilt. Where did she go? Was she warm enough?
* * *
It was Tuesday midmorning, and it was time. Esme let out a sigh and mixed her cocktail. Though she touched the syringe, though she held a drinking glass, her grip was clumsy. Small flecks filled the periphery of her vision. Esme dropped the glass and it shattered on the tiled floor. She sat in the armchair and looked at the broken pieces.
The doorbell rang.
“Who is it?” Esme said curtly into the intercom.
“Let me up,” said the voice.
Esme walked to the front of the building and threw open the window. “Who’s there?”
Julia stepped out from the doorway wearing a plaid coat Esme hadn’t worn in years. The coat had belonged to her lover and they had bought it at the flea market in Oxford thirty years before. Esme hadn’t even noticed that the coat was missing. When she fled the week before, Julia must have taken it from the coat rack by the door. She wore the coat belted and it suited her. Esme Dane needed to smoke. In Julia’s arms was the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father. Esme noticed that the kitten was now a full-grown cat, with splayed toes that he flexed from under Julia’s arm.
“Hamlet’s eyes are fucked up,” called Julia. “I think he needs a doctor.”
Esme buzzed Julia in, lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke out the window.
“I believe he has a cold,” said Esme. “He needs to be warm.”
“How do you know?” said Julia.
“I grew up on a farm,” she said. “Put him down, let him wander.”
Hamlet shook his ears and sneezed. He crouched, looked about but didn’t move. Esme longed to smooth his fur. She turned to Julia and stifled her impulse to hug her, to straighten her collar and touch her cheek to see if she was wearing rouge, or if her skin was chapped.
“Where have you been?” Esme finally said.
“Thinking,” said Julia. “I’m sorry about last week.”
“Me too,” said Esme. “Look, this isn’t a good time for me. I have to—”
“I promised I’d come back,” said Julia. “I’ll do it.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I felt bad. I’m not a cheat, Professor Dane. And I’m not a dope fiend or thief, either.”
“I didn’t think that you were.”
“I was trying to help you,” said Julia. “Because—the truth is I need help. I wanted you to like me, that’s all.”
“I do like you,” said Esme. “All right—I could use an extra hand that’s steady. My thumbs have a mind of their own. While I’m sleeping, will you shop and cook again? I’ll pay you. Then we’ll talk. Only this time don’t go running away.”
Julia gave the injection and they both lay down on Esme’s bed to watch the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, who had made himself at home on the middle of the feather duvet. Esme dozed off watching Hamlet preen his splayed toes.
* * *
After the shopping, after Julia had set out Little Friskies and litter for Hamlet, after the meal and the candles, Esme and Julia sat before the fireplace.
“I’m going to ask you questions and I want you to promise not to bolt,” said Esme. “I worried terribly about you this week.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I see far too many people float into the university and out again because no one pushes them. Tell me,” Esme said. “You got an A on the essay section of the midterm. Why did you go on and get every single multiple-choice question wrong?”
“I have a little problem with numbers.”
“Did you study?”
“Of course I studied,” said Julia. “Ask me any one of those questions and I’ll tell you the answer.”
“Why are you angry?” said Esme.
“Because—the truth is—I have to have an A,” said Julia.
“And why is that?”
“Because I owe it,” said Julia.
“That’s news to me,” said Esme. “I didn’t know students owed A’s. To whom do you owe an A?”
Julia shrugged.
“I thought you had to get a C or better to stay in the university. After all, it is a state school,” said Esme.
“And what good would that do me?” said Julia. “You think people who get C’s get to have a desk like that?” she pointed to Esme’s desk.
Esme smiled. “I found that on the street, darling.”
“You did?” said Julia.
“In the trash. Total rubish”
“Look at that, you still have the gallery.”
Esme looked at the art show made of Post-Its. “I like your drawings very much,” she said.
Julia sighed. “Don’t you think I owe an A to every person who took a chance on me? The truth is I’ve spent so many years working the nookie clubs I had no idea I had room in my head for words. I had no idea I could love books as much as I do.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve wasted years. Look at me, I’m getting so old.
Esme stifled her impulse to laugh. Julia old? She looked like she was in her late twenties.
“It used to be so easy” said Julia. “I’d dance at the club. Everyone wanted you, the younger the better. It’s crazy, Professor Dane, guys want to have sex with people who look like little girls. The more innocent and vapid looking, the better.”
“Tell me why?” said Esme.
“Because they can control them,” said Julia. “You know what happened? I was a Foster child. I ran away when I was seventeen. I hitchhiked to Boston from Fitchburg, got a fake ID, the whole bit. But then comes the day when you no longer pass as young, and a whole slew of little girls usurp your place, and then you’re lucky to walk away with a hundred dollars at the end of the night.”
Esme nodded.
“I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“Go on,” said Esme. “Get it out.”
“And do you know the worst of it? My future was decided by how I filled in those fucking ovals in tenth grade.”
“What ovals?” said Esme.
“Duh, Professor Dane, the ovals on a Stanford-9 form. Those god-awful tests; those same forms you gave us two weeks ago for the midterm. I always mismatched things, or read the wrong book at the wrong time. Those tests always came back saying ‘WRONG! You’re fucking wrong and an idiot!’ So I started playing dot-to-dot with the exams to pass the time and no one stopped me.”
Sleet tapped the window pane.
“I need to try again, Professor Dane. I need A’s and I’m not going to cheat to get them. I don’t care if I’m sleeping somewhere on campus. I’m a million miles from working a strip joint and every time I see an A I can almost imagine a different life. A future with a desk like that and clothes like yours.”
“Where have you been this week? Where did you go?”
“I have my places,” said Julia.
“Were you on campus?”
“I was.”
“Well?”
Julia shrugged. “I hide.”
“Why?”
“I was embarrassed.”
“Where?”
Julia averted her gaze. “My favorite place is in the library. Before the place is locked down, I go up into the ceiling tiles and into the ducts.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, why would I?”
Esme sighed. “It must get terribly cold.”
“Or hot, depending on the time of year. But I have several places.”
“Can I help you find a real place to live?”
“Actually, yes,” said Julia. She bit her lip and didn’t say anything for a moment. “I was hoping you’d help me get that scholarship to study at the University of Bath.”
“Oh, you were, were you?”
“Yes. I’ve decided I’d like to live in Bath, which is one of the reasons I need the aces.”
Esme laughed.
“I’m serious,” said Julia. “If I keep getting A’s I’m eligible. You need a 3.75 to even apply and I have a 3.86.”
“Do you?”
“Are you surprised?”
“No,” said Esme. “But let me ask you. Did you make a pass at me last week thinking I would change your grade?”
“It crossed my mind. But the truth is—the truth is—I kind of have a thing for you and I can’t help it. In fact, I get crushes on my teachers. I know that sounds dumb—I’ll leave now if you want me to.” Julia stood up.
“Sit down. No, I don’t want you to leave,” said Esme. “Do you make passes at all your teachers?”
“Of course not,” said Julia. “You think I could stand feeling like this twenty times over? It’s you that I like.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re cool. You could make me love anything. You could teach an entire seminar on bear shit and it would be great. I think that’s sexy, Professor Dane. And look at your clothes. No sissy shit. Look at your hair.”
“It’s gray.”
“White, Miss Dane. White. Who has hair so blond it’s white? That’s cool. Sometimes I can’t stop looking at you. Okay, I feel like an idiot.” Julia kicked the leg of her armchair and looked at the fire.
“I think you have a crush on learning, not me,” said Esme.
“I beg to differ.”
Silence filled the room. “You want to live in Bath? That’s daring.”
Julia rummaged through the front of Esme’s old jacket. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Everyone should smoke,” said Esme. She lit a cigarette and shook out the match.
Julia fished a small pipe out of her pocket, loaded the bowl, sparked it, and took a deep puff.
“Maui Wowie,” said Julia. “Would you like some?” She offered the pipe to Esme, then took it back. “Oh, never mind. You said you didn’t want me to score dope for you. Sorry. No offense.”
Esme watched as Julia took another hit.
“Girl, you do have nerve.” Esme held out her hand for the pipe and snapped her fingers.
“Oh, Professor Dane, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”
Esme snapped her fingers, “don’t be a brat, now,” she said. “It doesn’t become you.”
Julia handed over the pipe.
“Why do you need to go to Bath?” said Esme.
“I want to see the Circus—I want to see Jane Austen’s house—and stand where you stood in that picture—I want—I want to read.”
“Reading is good,” said Esme. “You don’t win the Bath Scholarship and then retire to the pastoral Cotswolds, you have to work when you get there.”
“I know that,” said Julia. “You caught me off guard. Bath is all I think about. Bath, and you. I’d take any class offered.”
“That’s more like it,” said Esme.
“I want to see the baths,” said Julia. “I want to touch the water and imagine it washing me clean.”
Esme cleared her throat. “I used to swim in the King’s Bath.”
Julia sat up straight. “No one is allowed to do that,” said Julia. “I don’t believe you.”
“It was the sixties,” said Esme. “When I spent the winter there.”
“No one has used the baths since 1923.”
“That’s what history books will tell you,” said Esme. “My lover was the grounds keeper. After the Pump House was closed and personnel had gone home, we’d swim. Sometimes we’d have to wait until 3 A.M. And we only did it in winter when the Cathedral was locked down and no one could spy on us.”
Julia was stunned. “You bathed at Bath?”
“I did.”
“What was it like?”
“Warm,” said Esme. “Even in the winter the water is 120 degrees. I’d dive in the water and come up somewhere in the middle with the snow falling all around.”
“Was the water as green as in the pictures?” said Julia.
“It was, but we swam at night.”
“Were you afraid?”
“I was in love.”
“Could you touch bottom?”
“If I dove,” said Esme. “But the water is full of minerals, so you float. We used to make love in the water, up against the diving stone.”
“You did?” said Julia. “You, Miss Dane? Wasn’t that illegal?”
“Don’t be a tease. I was wonderfully young. And foolish. My skin and hair used to be so soft. The waters supposedly have healing properties.”
“Tell me,” said Julia. “Didn’t you used to be a competitive swimmer?”
“I was,” said Esme. “That’s how I paid my way as an undergraduate.”
“Then how come you swim in the slow lane and flail around like you do?”
“The MS is betraying my body,” said Esme. “You have no idea what it’s like to have been a champion and then one day discover you can’t even get out of the pool.”
“Do you think the water at Bath would heal you? Would you swim there again?”
“If I had the chance.”
Julia was quiet for a moment. “I have to go to Bath. I have to have that scholarship, Miss Dane, that’s all there is to it. Can I take the exam over?” Julia started to cry.
Esme sighed. “Sit down at my desk,” she said. “I’ll ask you the same questions.” She got out a list from a file and took notes after each answer.
* * *
“You missed two,” said Esme. “Missing four or fewer is an A.”
Esme sorted through the blue books, found Julia’s and tore up the exam sheet. She replaced it with the notes she had taken, turned to the last page and changed the grade.
“The Dean prefers for the Bath scholarship to go to a student on the honors track,” said Esme. “So you behave. When, by the way, were you planning on asking for a recommendation letter?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know you needed one.”
“You’ll need three, I can only write one. Make sure your letter writers are willing to write dissertations.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get people to write three pages of sheer praise. And another thing. No one in my class ever gets an A with more than two absences. You’ve had your two.”
“Oh thank you,” said Julia. She sprang into Esme’s lap, kissed her on the lips and hugged her.
“Behave, now.”
“I am as best I can,” said Julia.
Hamlet, having explored the apartment jumped up on a hassock in front of the fire and stretched. He circled once before curling up. Esme’s hand slipped beneath Julia’s shirt. Her hand pulled Julia closer long before she could feel the warmth of Julia’s skin.
Julia sighed and relaxed, touching Esme’s hair. “I am as best I can.”
Was she dead? The girl didn't move. Esme wondered what the girl was doing there. It was seven in the morning and the library wasn't open to students yet. The harbor wind whistled over the building. Esme swallowed. Were they alone? Had the girl been strangled? She had dirt on her neck. Streaks of dirt, maybe someone's handprint. Esme forgot that she was searching for the Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. She looked through the mesh of the metal flooring to the book stacks below and thought she saw a passing shadow. No, all she could see were the tops of the books. She took a Quarter from her pocket and aimed it dead center in the gap between the stacks and the mesh flooring.
She let it go and it dropped four floors before hitting concrete with a "ping."
Maybe in the GH section, across the floor, a book slammed from a shelf. There was a fluttering of pages as if several books opened and poured to the floor. Maybe a footstep. Then came a clanking as a draft rose through the floor. The heat ducts! Esme reminded herself. Heat ducts!
The girl hadn’t moved, so Esme turned to look for the closest exit. There was a spiral staircase somewhere in the darkness at the end of the stack that led to the floor below, but she couldn’t see it. The dim corridor beyond the staircase lead to the impossibly slow elevator. But she knew she shouldn't leave the girl. Or should she? If she could get to the stairwell, she could walk down the nine floors and trip the alarm on the fire exit. Security would amble over in no time.
She turned to the daylight cutting through the keyhole left by the books. Her student's name was Julia, and she always sat in the front row of Esme’s Jane Austen seminar. She never raised her hand; she blurted out whatever thought crossed her mind. Though she always appeared to have absorbed what she read, Julia had somehow missed every multiple-choice question on the midterm. Esme had thought of Julia as mannerless until the week before. When Esme couldn’t climb the ladder from the pool, Julia had hopped out of the water to offer Esme her hand. Most people looked away when Esme fumbled. Yet, Julia interrupted her swim then dove back into her lane as if it were all part of a routine. Esme had watched Julia’s red suit rippling under the water as she darted away. In that moment Esme thought Julia had the manners of a champion. Esme—a member of the 1968 Olympic Swim Team—had stumbled to the locker room, thankful that Julia had the manners not to ask what was wrong with her.
The wind rose, there was a rumble of a low-flying jet. Esme was startled. When she looked at the mesh of the floor she thought she saw a shadow move. Perhaps a wharf cat had gotten into the library, it had happened before. But maybe not, maybe Julia was dead. There had been a stalker on campus. Some homeless crazy who randomly showed up to sit through lectures, and then followed women to their cars. Or sat in unlocked cars. Or sat in stairwells. Waiting. And then said nothing, just moved on when he was caught. Maybe Esme was now being watched. She stuck her firsts into the depths of her pockets, unable to speak.
Julia moved. She wasn’t dead, at all. She curled up on her side, sucked her thumb for a moment, and then stopped. She was asleep on her coat. Her frizzy blond hair seemed alive in a shaft of light, with corkscrew curls that framed her square jaw. Esme sighed in relief. Then she thought she saw trails and stared at the girl to get a better look at the corners of her vision. She wondered if the flecks of light would reappear and obscure her focus—if her retina would detach.
Though her prognosis was good, Esme was in the habit of searching her sight for the onset of symptoms that might leave her blind. Her sight was clear, however, and Esme caught herself thinking Botticelli could not have painted a more beautiful sight than Julia asleep among the books. Esme’s eyes swept over her student, possessing her, and traveled to several piles of books about eighteenth-century literature.
Then she remembered why she had come from her office. An anonymous note had been left in her mail box saying that all the books marked “Austen 330 ENG” had been re-shelved in “Astrophysics 330 ENGIN.” All the books for her courses had been missing from the library since the beginning of the semester. Then Esme saw the book she was looking for. Hugged to the girl’s chest was the Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.
Esme was surprised by the quantity of books. Had Julia hidden them from the other students? She was thinking of shaking her, but as Esme gazed at Julia’s face, striped by the sun, she couldn’t move. The fierce crease that usually marked Julia’s forehead was erased by sleep.
Minutes passed, and still Julia slept soundly.
Esme cleared her throat. Nothing. She wanted the book back. Esme pushed a book about engine viscosity until it fell from its shelf. Nothing. She walked into the darkness of the stack, flicked on the light and came around the to the other side to kneel over the girl. Nothing. She was tempted to fondle a ringlet of blond hair.
As Esme turned away she heard the girl stir and wake up.
“How did you get in here?” said Esme. “The library isn’t open yet.”
Julia sat up. “Professor Dane,” she said. “What a surprise!”
“Were you here all night?” said Esme.
“A little bit.”
“Either you were or you weren’t,” said Esme.
The girl rubbed her eye with the ball of her fist.
Esme sniffed. The girl’s clothes were filthy beyond the grunge look popular with undergraduates.
“Professor Dane,” said Julia, her eyes brightening. “I like your suit,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for stolen books,” Esme said.
“So am I,” Julia said. “All the good stuff on Austen was missing, but the librarian said it was still in the library.”
“Julia, that’s your name isn’t it? You know it’s not fair to the other students that you have hidden all the books.”
Julia looked stunned. “It’s not me, ma’am. I combed through all the stacks until I found them.”
“Did you spend the night looking for them?”
“Days,” said Julia. “I knew they were here somewhere. All the stuff from the Romantic period has been raided. So I started on the sixth floor.”
Julia got up and limped stiffly. “Ow, my neck,” she muttered. “The floor’s kind of hard.”
“And you searched stack to stack?” said Esme.
Julia nodded. “Three floors up. Did you get the note I left in your mail box?”
Esme looked away. “You startled me,” she said. “I thought you were dead.”
“I must have dosed off,” said Julia. She hobbled around for a moment. “My leg is numb, sorry.”
* * *
Professor Esme Dane had to smoke. After teaching English 101 to a class of undergraduates who hadn’t read the assignment, she needed a cigarette. There was a tremor in her right hand. Her entire forearm was numb. She wondered if she would be able to swim her ten laps later in the day. The last time she’d lost the sensation in her arm she ran her hand into the aqua-tiled wall of the pool, breaking three fingernails. She didn’t feel the pain until she stopped swimming, stood up in her lane and saw blood running around her cuticles.
Smoke, she thought. If I smoke I will be fine.
Esme got in the elevator and rode down to the lower-level parking garage. Several times a day she made a pilgrimage to a stairwell where a litter of kittens was nesting in a hole in the wall. A winter storm was predicted, and Esme wanted to make sure the kittens had enough food. She had had her eye on a gray kitten for some time. One day in September, as she backed her Volvo into the handicapped zone, she noticed him. He was blue gray. Though he was a short hair, his fur was thick and stood on end. She wondered if he were part Persian. He was aloof and groomed himself as people scrambled to and from the elevators. If she could catch him, Esme thought, she would take him home. But the gray kitten wanted nothing to do with her. Whenever she reached for him, he bolted and found a new place to preen.
Esme lit up and looked through the hole. There was a calico—flecked in patches of four colors--a black kitty, and the gray kitty she desired, grooming his back leg.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” came a voice from below. Then a cough. Esme looked down where the cement stairs ended in dim light. She took a puff.
“This is my spot,” said Esme.
A cough. “You still shouldn’t smoke.”
Esme took another drag. “Who’s there?”
“Nobody.” A sniff.
Esme thought she recognized the voice and walked down the half flight to see who was there. In the shadows under the stairs, Esme saw Julia sitting on a sofa. She was reading the dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice Esme had left on the free book table two weeks before.
“Is that sofa from the third floor lounge?” Esme put her hand in the pocket of her wool trousers.
“Probably,” said Julia. “Hey, Professor Dane, I have a question for you.”
“You’ve got yourself a regular living room here.”
“So long as the lights don’t go out,” said Julia. “So this is my question: why is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice supposedly famous? I don’t get it.”
Esme puffed and eyed Julia. “It’s ironic. In Jane Austen’s day a women’s primary objective was to marry well.”
“I know,” said Julia. “But it seems to me, and call me funny if I am, that a single man in possession of a fortune does not want to get married, he wants to fuck around for as long as possible.”
“From whose point of view was that first line written?” said Esme.
Julia thought for a moment. “The busybody mother,” she said.
“The busybody mother who has five daughters to marry off,” said Esme. “Maybe you should write your next paper on that idea.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Julia.
Esme puffed, but worried that the smoke might bother Julia. The girl sounded as if she had bronchitis or something stuck in her lungs.
“I had this idea,” said Julia. “I was wondering what you think. Could I interview Jane Austen instead of writing a paper and ask her?”
“Jane Austen is dead, Julia.”
“I know that,” said Julia.
But from the look on Julia’s face, Esme wondered if the girl had a clue that Jane Austen had died in 1818.
“I wanted to write the interview and ask Jane Austen everything,” said Julia. “A total fabrication. I want to see if I can answer my own questions.”
“You can,” said Esme.
“That’s fucking great,” said Julia. “Fucking great.”
“Why are you here?” said Esme.
“I’m trying to get into the fifteenth chapter of volume one for your class at four.”
“You’re behind,” said Esme.
“I know,” said Julia. “I’m a little bit slow. It takes me a while.”
“We’re in volume three, chapter twenty,” said Esme. “How are you going to catch up?”
“As best I can,” said Julia, who discretely dabbed her nose with her shirt cuff. “I guess I should have kept my mouth shut.”
Esme puffed. “I don’t know why you bothered to come in today. There’s going to be a storm. The university might shut down early.”
Julia shrugged. “Professor Dane, what’s the Circus? You know in Persuasion? I didn’t get it. Is it a place or is it an event?”
“You read Persuasion? It’s not on the syllabus until April.”
“I was distracted, I could relate to Anne Eliot and Mrs. Smith.”
“The Circus is a ring of Georgian buildings in Bath,” said Esme. “Jane Austen lived around the corner at 25 Gay Street.”
The gray kitty poked its head out from the hole in the wall. From where Esme stood they were at eye level. The cat stared at her. He puffed himself out and started to purr. Esme stifled her impulse to reach for him.
“Hey, Hamlet,” said Julia. “I’ve named him the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father.”
“I’d like to take him home, but I can’t catch him.” said Esme. “I hate to see them left wild. Someone should care for them.”
“They know when to come in,” said Julia. She made a kiss kiss noise, and the kitten streaked by Esme and leapt into Julia’s lap.
“Hey!” said Esme. “How’d you do that?”
“He’s my boy,” said Julia. “Right, Hamlet?” Julia held the kitten’s head and made him nod.
“Still,” said Esme, “still!” she stuttered, surprised that the gray kitten could belong to someone else. She dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out with the heel of her boot. “Well. I have office hours now, I suppose I should go up.”
“But you don’t want to,” said Julia.
“How do you know?”
“Why would you want to listen to a bunch of whiners when you could stay and see Hamlet playing the role of Yoda?” Julia pushed down Hamlet’s ears. “There. When the student is ready the master appears,” she said, imitating Yoda. “He should have been in StarWars. Don’t you think?”
“I suppose,” said Esme. She buttoned her wool blazer and wrapped her scarf around her neck. “The temperature is dropping. Don’t stay down here too long.”
* * *
Esme was tired of excuses. The latest was from a kid who broke his arm in a mosh pit at a concert and claimed he could no longer type. Then there was Missy Strand, the princess. Though she had scored 1350 on her SATs and was offered a place at Harvard, she took a full scholarship from the state university because she didn’t want to be saddled with a giant loan. Yet Missy Strand seemed to be coasting. She recycled two of her papers from the required 200-level Brit Lit Survey for the 400-level Austen seminar. Esme knew the papers because she had graded them the year before. Missy wanted a recommendation letter from Professor Dane. The university offered a scholarship for one student to study at the University of Bath, in England, for a semester. Esme didn’t want to recommend Missy because she thought the girl lazy. Whoever won the scholarship was expected to return from England with nothing less than an A-. Professor Esme Dane wanted to see a fresh paper, a thoughtful paper exploring the changes in British class structure after the French Revolution. But when pressed, Missy Strand teared up and fled.
After an hour, Esme wished someone would call in a bomb threat, anything so she could leave for the day. At three o’clock she got her wish. The storm blew in off the Boston Harbor, enveloping the campus in a nor’easter. By three-thirty everyone was told to go home. On her way to her car, Esme looked for the kittens. She started out the door when she thought to look under the stairs. The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father spat past her. Another step down and Esme saw the tips of Julia’s rubber-toed sneakers, and then Julia herself, still sitting on the sofa with her arms crossed and her backpack zipped shut.
“You again,” said Esme. “We’re supposed to leave. There’s a blizzard blowing in.”
“You go ahead,” said Julia. “I’ll leave in a little bit.”
“No, Julia. The university is closed.”
“I’m waiting for someone.”
“I don’t believe you. The campus is empty. Do you need a ride somewhere?”
“I—not really.”
“Then come with me.”
“You really don’t want me.”
“Why is that?”
“Trust me.”
A siren began in the building above. “They’re going to lose power. Come on,” said Esme.
Julia wouldn’t budge.
“Look,” said Esme. “We have to leave. You can come to my house if you like.”
“I have head lice,” said Julia.
“Head lice?”
Julia avoided Esme’s eyes.
“Come on, we’ll stop at a drug store.”
* * *
Esme lived in the South End of Boston on the second floor of a townhouse built before the Civil War. Every wall in the apartment was lined with books. The shelves continued into the huge bathroom, where there were rows of moldering paperback mysteries. In the middle of the room was a giant bathtub with clawed feet. Esme filled it and added green bath oil, which made the tub look like a small pool in a large box of octagon tiles. Esme set fresh clothes for Julia on the armchair she kept in the bathroom. When Julia emerged, Professor Esme Dane sat her student on a stool in the middle of her kitchen and carefully began to comb the nits out of her hair.
“How did you learn to do this?” said Julia.
“My baby sister had a case or two growing up. Most kids on a farm do.” Esme looked at the instructions on the box. “Use special comb to remove dead lice.”
“The chemicals stink.” Julia sniffed.
“Do you have a cold?”
“I have asthma. The dust at school has been getting to me.”
A patch of dead lice clung tenaciously to Julia’s head, their eggs had adhered to shafts of hair a half inch from her scalp. Esme was pleased that she could see them so clearly, even though she knew it meant that Julia must have had the infestation for quite some time.
“This is embarrassing,” said Julia.
Esme chuckled. “My students accuse me of liking to nitpick. Here I am.”
Julia smiled, leaned forward so her curls hid her eyes. Then Esme noticed a tear fall off the girl’s face as she saturated the patch of lice with a cotton-ball full of Linden.
“It’s not that bad,” said Esme. “Where did you get them?”
“The last time I stayed in the shelter.”
“So you have been living on campus.”
Julia shrugged. “It beats the shelter, all those women who’ve fucked over their lives with men and kids.”
“The campus is dangerous at night,” said Esme. “There was a rape last year.”
“I know,” she said. “But I’ve learned how to stay low.”
They were silent.
"You gave me quite a fright this morning," said Esme.
“What’s the story with your briefcase?” Julia said, pointing to the ancient, somewhat shapeless leather bag Esme always carried. “It looks like it’s ready to belch papers.”
Esme smiled. “I bought it in Bath when I lived there. Every few years I get it re-sewn.”
“Why don’t you get a new bag? That one’s pretty beat.”
“You know, the leather from that bag was sealed in a cargo hold of a ship that sank in 1812.” Esme kept talking to distract herself. She enjoyed taking charge of Julia, of having an excuse to examine her hair closely, of soaking the roots of her hair with chemicals, then scruffing through her curls which held their shape, even when wet. “The leather sat at the bottom of the ocean for 150 years, until the harness maker in Bath got a hold of it.”
“So, you’ve just broken it in, is what you’re saying.”
“Pretty much,” said Esme. “There, now we let you sit for five minutes.”
Julia stretched. “Tell me about the Circus,” she said.
“The Circus?”
“In Persuasion,” said Julia. “In Bath.”
“I lived there, once,” said Esme.
“No!” said Julia. “How did you manage that?”
“I was writing my master’s thesis at Oxford.”
“Oxford. The Oxford?”
“The Oxford.”
“How did you do that?”
“I had a Fulbright.”
“What’s a Fulbright?”
“A scholarship.”
“So you lived in the Circus?”
“It was a sublet, and it was a grand summer. I stayed in Bath after Oxford.”
“Do you have pictures?”
“I do,” said Esme.
“Well, out with them,” said Julia.
Esme fetched a framed photo of herself taken thirty years before when she had long hair and no clue what she would do with her life.
“Look, it says Gay Street just like in Persuasion. You really lived there.”
“It’s time for phase two,” said Esme. She walked Julia to the kitchen sink and poured the second set of chemicals through the girl’s hair, then rinsed it with the small hand-held hose.
“It burns,” said Julia.
Esme held a facecloth to Julia’s forehead. “How’s that?” she said.
“I used to dye my hair when I danced downtown. Oh shit, this hurts.”
“Sorry,” said Esme. “Danced, were you with the ballet?”
“I wish,” said Julia. “I was an exotic dancer.”
“Really?”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not at all, why did you quit?”
“I had a little incident.”
“Oh?”
“No biggie, really. I've been banished to the university by a state agency. Yes, I'm thinking of changing my name to Doolittle.”
“Really?” said Esme.
“I shouldn’t have told you. Shit, me and my big mouth.”
“It’s not a problem,” said Esme. “I’ve heard worse.”
Esme had heard of convicts in state law school, or in the College of Public Service; of veterans finally straight enough to enroll for a BA thirty years after they came home from Vietnam. But never had she met a rehab case obsessed with literature.
Esme ran her fingers over her student’s scalp. “I think I got them all. I’ll give you fresh pajamas later. While I wash your clothes.”
“You mean I can stay the night?”
“The night,” said Esme.
* * *
It was time. High noon. Esme looked at the clock again. All the schools, including the university were closed. When the radio announced that the T was flooded and had shut down, Esme told Julia to stay.
But Esme wondered what to do. Julia was sitting on the sofa flipping the pages of a large book on Michelangelo. The girl seemed preoccupied. At five past the hour, Esme locked herself in the bathroom. Like staring at Julia the morning before—to see if her vision was clear—Esme touched a syringe kit, determined to feel it through numb fingers. She mixed the medication cocktail as the visiting nurse had showed her the week before. Then she sat in the armchair, and stuck herself in the thigh. Her right hand fumbled, unable to push down the plunger. She torqued the needle that pierced her flesh.
“Ow!” cried Esme, unable to move for a moment. She burst into tears. A minute passed.
“Professor Dane?” said Julia, through the door.
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
Esme wouldn’t answer. She attempted the injection again.
“Professor Dane are you all right?”
“No,” she said. “Go away.”
“Open the door.”
“No,” she said, barely audibly. A moment later Esme was surprised to hear the mechanisms of the lock scratching. Then she heard the lock turn. The door swung open.
“How did you do that?” said Esme.
“I picked the lock.”
Esme withdrew the needle from her thigh. “You’d think I could give an injection myself,” said Esme.
“Let me,” said Julia.
“My hand is numb. I can’t feel what I touch,” said Esme. “It makes me so damn mad!”
“Sit still,” said Julia.
“It’s not heroin,” said Esme.
“I know,” said Julia.
“It’s Interferon. Every week I get a shot in the opposite leg.”
“There. Done.” Julia withdrew the needle. Esme was stunned.
“Done. Done?” said Esme, pressing the puncture on her thigh.
“Easy pie,” said Julia.
“I’m not good with self injections,” said Esme, who touched the corner of her eye. “I have to get this down.”
Julia touched Esme’s hair. For a moment Esme leaned her head against Julia’s side.
“I could come back next week,” said Julia. “If you want.”
Esme nodded. The color began to leach from her face. She cleared her throat. “It’s working,” she said. “I have to lie down.” Esme lurched for the door and stumbled down the hall.
“It will be like I have the flu for the next ten hours,” said Esme. “I’ll probably sleep it off.”
“I should go,” said Julia.
“Stay,” said Esme. “Would you do me a favor? I’ll pay you? There’s fifty dollars on the kitchen table. Keep twenty and buy a few groceries with the other thirty.”
* * *
Esme slept soundly, with the vague feeling that she had a fever. When she awoke, the room was dark. Sleet ticked at the windows. She noticed that the apartment smelled of cooking and burning cedar. Esme was pleased. After previous injections she had woken up alone to a cold house. Julia must have thought to light a fire. As Esme sat up, she thought she smelled dope. She kicked off the covers, and sweat trickled down her spine. She wandered into the bathroom, and then down the hall to the living room.
Julia sat at Esme’s desk, tapping her foot. Around her neck was a short scarf, which accentuated her bare skin and cleavage. Julia was wearing Esme’s clothes, and Esme was stunned at how lovely the girl looked. When Esme wore the same low cut shirt, she had no idea that her exposed cleavage could be seen as sexy. On Julia, the plain old shirt was sexy, which somehow made Esme feel sexy—a feeling she hadn’t had in a while. Her eyes followed the satin trim of the neckline, which drew to a point between Julia’s breasts. Esme blinked. Her eyesight was so clear she blushed. Julia looked intelligent. She pouted as she read, and puffed on a joint. The joint became a roach in Julia’s next inhalation and bobbed on the end of the Randy wire that had been rolled in the cigarette paper.
Rather brazen, Esme thought. Julia had raided her stash. Esme admired and loathed the girl in the same instant. Then Esme noticed what Julia was reading. Fanned across the desk and spilling onto the floor were the blue exam books from the Austen midterm she had given the week before. Julia was holding a pencil with her other hand. She looked to be writing while she read from Esme’s grade book. Julia was sizing up the marks of every person Esme had taught in the previous two years. Perhaps Julia was even changing grades. Esme always entered them in pencil.
Julia looked up.
“What are you doing?” said Esme.
Julia giggled as she struggled for something to say.
“That’s privileged information,” said Esme. “I could have you expelled for that.”
“I was curious to see how I was doing,” said Julia.
“I’m going to get dressed,” said Esme. “In about two minutes I’ll be back. The blue books will be put away, and you’ll be doing something else.”
“I’ve made supper,” Julia said, hopefully. “Miss Dane?”
“Goddamn, my knee,” said Esme. “I’m falling apart. Just a minute.”
Five minutes later Esme limped to the table and sat down. Her grandmother’s linens covered the table. Her good silver had been set out and her wine glasses were dusted. “How kind of you to cook,” she said. “I didn’t expect it. I was thinking some cans of chicken soup would be enough.”
“Sodium broth is not food,” said Julia.
“It is in a pinch.”
“I’m sorry about—”
Professor Dane raised her hand.
“I mean—”
“Hush, Julia. Oh, how lovely. An entire turkey.”
“And I’ve made garlic bread.”
“And asparagus,” said Esme, serving herself.
“I can explain,” said Julia.
“Let me ask you,” said Esme. “How would you feel if you knew a classmate had read your and everyone else’s exam? If some classmate was fiddling with the teacher’s grade book. Would you think it was fair?”
“I just wanted to know where I stand,” said Julia. “I want to take the exam over. Besides, I was doodling.”
“Doodling?”
“I have this habit of making little art galleries with Post-it notes. Go look at your desk, I’ve hung a show for you. They’re all pencil abstracts. I’m in my graphite period.”
Esme went to her desk. Doodled Post-its were neatly stuck on all the drawers. Esme ran her fingers through her hair. “If you want help you should ask.”
“I am,” said Julia.
“You should visit me during office hours.” Esme sat down and took a bite of turkey. It was moist and should have been delicious, but her stomach was slightly sour. “And what were you doing smoking marijuana? My marijuana?”
“Sorry,” said Julia. “I liked sitting at your desk and looking out the window. It seemed like a natural thing to do.”
“To peek in all my drawers?”
“They were so cute, I couldn’t resist. Sorry.” Julia leaned back in her chair, averted her eyes, and sniffed.
“You look good in white,” said Esme. “I don’t care if you wear my clothes. But I do care if you smoke my dope.”
“I’ll pay you back,” said Julia.
“It’s not the money. It’s—oh hell—I smoke the stuff when I’m nauseous, which has been often, lately.”
“There’s still a roach, you want to smoke it?”
“Yes I do, thank you.”
Julia jumped to her feet, fetched the ashtray with the roach and sparked it for Esme. Esme took a long drag, keeping her eyes on Julia. The fire cracked in the fireplace.
“Pot is embarrassing for me to get,” said Esme.
Julia was clueless.
“The Marijuana. It’s illegal. I have to visit someone in a housing project to get it.” She took another drag and held her breath. “God forbid the people who need it most should be able to buy it with dignity. But no, there I am making connections in Southie. It irks me.” She took another hit and let the roach go out.
“I could score some for you,” said Julia.
“That’s one transgression too many,” said Esme.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re the student and I am the teacher. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“I know, but.”
“Listen, do you have any idea how awkward it might be for me to see you around school, knowing that I want drugs from you?”
“It’s not like you’re a junkie. You want it for medicinal purposes.”
“It’s still a drug and it’s still illegal. You’re my student. A literature student—a very bright one—and I refuse to contribute any more complications to your life.”
Julia licked her lips. “There’s all sorts of things I could do for you if you’d let me.”
Esme wasn’t listening. The room seemed dark, and her eyes rested on the white of Julia’s t-shirt. She blinked and noticed Julia’s nipples erect through the fabric. Esme recognized her jeans as Julia parted her legs slightly. She admired how loose they appeared on the girl, how Julia's curves gave the familiar denim a new shape.
Julia leaned over and took Esme’s face in her hands. “I’d like to kiss you.”
Esme was caught off guard. She took a deep breath, stifling her impulse to kiss Julia.
“I can’t,” said Esme.
Julia pulled Esme’s face toward her, but Esme turned her cheek and hugged her instead. “I’m your teacher, darling. I’m flattered, but it wouldn’t be right.”
Julia leaned back, then kissed her anyway.
Esme gave in for a moment then pushed away. “I said no.”
“I like it when you stare at my breasts.”
Esme was suddenly enraged. “The word is no. I don’t need or want you!”
“Excuse me.” Julia got up abruptly and went down the hall to the bathroom.
Esme had seen tears in Julia’s eyes. She cleared her throat and waited for Julia to compose herself and return. She hadn’t seen fresh linen on her table in over a year. She uncorked the wine and filled the glasses she hadn’t used since she’d been diagnosed with MS. The candles flickered in the draft, as the building was buffeted by wind. It was lovely of Julia to prepare a meal. Esme decided that she liked having her around, but that she needed to re-establish a boundary. She was the teacher, Julia was the student. She would apologize for staring and tell Julia about her problems with vision.
“Julia?” called Esme after a few minutes. “Dinner is getting cold.”
No answer.
“Julia, come out now,” said Esme. “We’ll talk it over.”
Esme got up and went down the hall. The bathroom door was open. Five steps beyond, Esme saw that the door to the apartment was left ajar. Esme closed the door and went to the front of the building. The streets of the South End were empty. She looked out the window to the north and saw a figure walking towards Massachusetts Avenue. The figure was enveloped by snow, then disappeared. Esme’s face burned with a slight fever. She slumped at the beautifully set table. When the food had cooled, she ate alone.
* * *
The Austen seminar became dull. Without Julia blurting opinions out of turn, the class was rudderless. Missy Strand sat through class pretending to take notes. Esme noticed that she drew horses when she was bored. Professor Esme Dane’s office hours came and went, and for all her visits to the stairwell, Esme had seen neither Julia nor the gray kitten all week. What had she done? She asked herself. Julia’s clothes, as well as her coat, were all still in the wash when she walked out. Whenever Esme thought of the figure disappearing in the snow she felt a terrible guilt. Where did she go? Was she warm enough?
* * *
It was Tuesday midmorning, and it was time. Esme let out a sigh and mixed her cocktail. Though she touched the syringe, though she held a drinking glass, her grip was clumsy. Small flecks filled the periphery of her vision. Esme dropped the glass and it shattered on the tiled floor. She sat in the armchair and looked at the broken pieces.
The doorbell rang.
“Who is it?” Esme said curtly into the intercom.
“Let me up,” said the voice.
Esme walked to the front of the building and threw open the window. “Who’s there?”
Julia stepped out from the doorway wearing a plaid coat Esme hadn’t worn in years. The coat had belonged to her lover and they had bought it at the flea market in Oxford thirty years before. Esme hadn’t even noticed that the coat was missing. When she fled the week before, Julia must have taken it from the coat rack by the door. She wore the coat belted and it suited her. Esme Dane needed to smoke. In Julia’s arms was the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father. Esme noticed that the kitten was now a full-grown cat, with splayed toes that he flexed from under Julia’s arm.
“Hamlet’s eyes are fucked up,” called Julia. “I think he needs a doctor.”
Esme buzzed Julia in, lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke out the window.
“I believe he has a cold,” said Esme. “He needs to be warm.”
“How do you know?” said Julia.
“I grew up on a farm,” she said. “Put him down, let him wander.”
Hamlet shook his ears and sneezed. He crouched, looked about but didn’t move. Esme longed to smooth his fur. She turned to Julia and stifled her impulse to hug her, to straighten her collar and touch her cheek to see if she was wearing rouge, or if her skin was chapped.
“Where have you been?” Esme finally said.
“Thinking,” said Julia. “I’m sorry about last week.”
“Me too,” said Esme. “Look, this isn’t a good time for me. I have to—”
“I promised I’d come back,” said Julia. “I’ll do it.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I felt bad. I’m not a cheat, Professor Dane. And I’m not a dope fiend or thief, either.”
“I didn’t think that you were.”
“I was trying to help you,” said Julia. “Because—the truth is I need help. I wanted you to like me, that’s all.”
“I do like you,” said Esme. “All right—I could use an extra hand that’s steady. My thumbs have a mind of their own. While I’m sleeping, will you shop and cook again? I’ll pay you. Then we’ll talk. Only this time don’t go running away.”
Julia gave the injection and they both lay down on Esme’s bed to watch the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, who had made himself at home on the middle of the feather duvet. Esme dozed off watching Hamlet preen his splayed toes.
* * *
After the shopping, after Julia had set out Little Friskies and litter for Hamlet, after the meal and the candles, Esme and Julia sat before the fireplace.
“I’m going to ask you questions and I want you to promise not to bolt,” said Esme. “I worried terribly about you this week.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I see far too many people float into the university and out again because no one pushes them. Tell me,” Esme said. “You got an A on the essay section of the midterm. Why did you go on and get every single multiple-choice question wrong?”
“I have a little problem with numbers.”
“Did you study?”
“Of course I studied,” said Julia. “Ask me any one of those questions and I’ll tell you the answer.”
“Why are you angry?” said Esme.
“Because—the truth is—I have to have an A,” said Julia.
“And why is that?”
“Because I owe it,” said Julia.
“That’s news to me,” said Esme. “I didn’t know students owed A’s. To whom do you owe an A?”
Julia shrugged.
“I thought you had to get a C or better to stay in the university. After all, it is a state school,” said Esme.
“And what good would that do me?” said Julia. “You think people who get C’s get to have a desk like that?” she pointed to Esme’s desk.
Esme smiled. “I found that on the street, darling.”
“You did?” said Julia.
“In the trash. Total rubish”
“Look at that, you still have the gallery.”
Esme looked at the art show made of Post-Its. “I like your drawings very much,” she said.
Julia sighed. “Don’t you think I owe an A to every person who took a chance on me? The truth is I’ve spent so many years working the nookie clubs I had no idea I had room in my head for words. I had no idea I could love books as much as I do.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve wasted years. Look at me, I’m getting so old.
Esme stifled her impulse to laugh. Julia old? She looked like she was in her late twenties.
“It used to be so easy” said Julia. “I’d dance at the club. Everyone wanted you, the younger the better. It’s crazy, Professor Dane, guys want to have sex with people who look like little girls. The more innocent and vapid looking, the better.”
“Tell me why?” said Esme.
“Because they can control them,” said Julia. “You know what happened? I was a Foster child. I ran away when I was seventeen. I hitchhiked to Boston from Fitchburg, got a fake ID, the whole bit. But then comes the day when you no longer pass as young, and a whole slew of little girls usurp your place, and then you’re lucky to walk away with a hundred dollars at the end of the night.”
Esme nodded.
“I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“Go on,” said Esme. “Get it out.”
“And do you know the worst of it? My future was decided by how I filled in those fucking ovals in tenth grade.”
“What ovals?” said Esme.
“Duh, Professor Dane, the ovals on a Stanford-9 form. Those god-awful tests; those same forms you gave us two weeks ago for the midterm. I always mismatched things, or read the wrong book at the wrong time. Those tests always came back saying ‘WRONG! You’re fucking wrong and an idiot!’ So I started playing dot-to-dot with the exams to pass the time and no one stopped me.”
Sleet tapped the window pane.
“I need to try again, Professor Dane. I need A’s and I’m not going to cheat to get them. I don’t care if I’m sleeping somewhere on campus. I’m a million miles from working a strip joint and every time I see an A I can almost imagine a different life. A future with a desk like that and clothes like yours.”
“Where have you been this week? Where did you go?”
“I have my places,” said Julia.
“Were you on campus?”
“I was.”
“Well?”
Julia shrugged. “I hide.”
“Why?”
“I was embarrassed.”
“Where?”
Julia averted her gaze. “My favorite place is in the library. Before the place is locked down, I go up into the ceiling tiles and into the ducts.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, why would I?”
Esme sighed. “It must get terribly cold.”
“Or hot, depending on the time of year. But I have several places.”
“Can I help you find a real place to live?”
“Actually, yes,” said Julia. She bit her lip and didn’t say anything for a moment. “I was hoping you’d help me get that scholarship to study at the University of Bath.”
“Oh, you were, were you?”
“Yes. I’ve decided I’d like to live in Bath, which is one of the reasons I need the aces.”
Esme laughed.
“I’m serious,” said Julia. “If I keep getting A’s I’m eligible. You need a 3.75 to even apply and I have a 3.86.”
“Do you?”
“Are you surprised?”
“No,” said Esme. “But let me ask you. Did you make a pass at me last week thinking I would change your grade?”
“It crossed my mind. But the truth is—the truth is—I kind of have a thing for you and I can’t help it. In fact, I get crushes on my teachers. I know that sounds dumb—I’ll leave now if you want me to.” Julia stood up.
“Sit down. No, I don’t want you to leave,” said Esme. “Do you make passes at all your teachers?”
“Of course not,” said Julia. “You think I could stand feeling like this twenty times over? It’s you that I like.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re cool. You could make me love anything. You could teach an entire seminar on bear shit and it would be great. I think that’s sexy, Professor Dane. And look at your clothes. No sissy shit. Look at your hair.”
“It’s gray.”
“White, Miss Dane. White. Who has hair so blond it’s white? That’s cool. Sometimes I can’t stop looking at you. Okay, I feel like an idiot.” Julia kicked the leg of her armchair and looked at the fire.
“I think you have a crush on learning, not me,” said Esme.
“I beg to differ.”
Silence filled the room. “You want to live in Bath? That’s daring.”
Julia rummaged through the front of Esme’s old jacket. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Everyone should smoke,” said Esme. She lit a cigarette and shook out the match.
Julia fished a small pipe out of her pocket, loaded the bowl, sparked it, and took a deep puff.
“Maui Wowie,” said Julia. “Would you like some?” She offered the pipe to Esme, then took it back. “Oh, never mind. You said you didn’t want me to score dope for you. Sorry. No offense.”
Esme watched as Julia took another hit.
“Girl, you do have nerve.” Esme held out her hand for the pipe and snapped her fingers.
“Oh, Professor Dane, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”
Esme snapped her fingers, “don’t be a brat, now,” she said. “It doesn’t become you.”
Julia handed over the pipe.
“Why do you need to go to Bath?” said Esme.
“I want to see the Circus—I want to see Jane Austen’s house—and stand where you stood in that picture—I want—I want to read.”
“Reading is good,” said Esme. “You don’t win the Bath Scholarship and then retire to the pastoral Cotswolds, you have to work when you get there.”
“I know that,” said Julia. “You caught me off guard. Bath is all I think about. Bath, and you. I’d take any class offered.”
“That’s more like it,” said Esme.
“I want to see the baths,” said Julia. “I want to touch the water and imagine it washing me clean.”
Esme cleared her throat. “I used to swim in the King’s Bath.”
Julia sat up straight. “No one is allowed to do that,” said Julia. “I don’t believe you.”
“It was the sixties,” said Esme. “When I spent the winter there.”
“No one has used the baths since 1923.”
“That’s what history books will tell you,” said Esme. “My lover was the grounds keeper. After the Pump House was closed and personnel had gone home, we’d swim. Sometimes we’d have to wait until 3 A.M. And we only did it in winter when the Cathedral was locked down and no one could spy on us.”
Julia was stunned. “You bathed at Bath?”
“I did.”
“What was it like?”
“Warm,” said Esme. “Even in the winter the water is 120 degrees. I’d dive in the water and come up somewhere in the middle with the snow falling all around.”
“Was the water as green as in the pictures?” said Julia.
“It was, but we swam at night.”
“Were you afraid?”
“I was in love.”
“Could you touch bottom?”
“If I dove,” said Esme. “But the water is full of minerals, so you float. We used to make love in the water, up against the diving stone.”
“You did?” said Julia. “You, Miss Dane? Wasn’t that illegal?”
“Don’t be a tease. I was wonderfully young. And foolish. My skin and hair used to be so soft. The waters supposedly have healing properties.”
“Tell me,” said Julia. “Didn’t you used to be a competitive swimmer?”
“I was,” said Esme. “That’s how I paid my way as an undergraduate.”
“Then how come you swim in the slow lane and flail around like you do?”
“The MS is betraying my body,” said Esme. “You have no idea what it’s like to have been a champion and then one day discover you can’t even get out of the pool.”
“Do you think the water at Bath would heal you? Would you swim there again?”
“If I had the chance.”
Julia was quiet for a moment. “I have to go to Bath. I have to have that scholarship, Miss Dane, that’s all there is to it. Can I take the exam over?” Julia started to cry.
Esme sighed. “Sit down at my desk,” she said. “I’ll ask you the same questions.” She got out a list from a file and took notes after each answer.
* * *
“You missed two,” said Esme. “Missing four or fewer is an A.”
Esme sorted through the blue books, found Julia’s and tore up the exam sheet. She replaced it with the notes she had taken, turned to the last page and changed the grade.
“The Dean prefers for the Bath scholarship to go to a student on the honors track,” said Esme. “So you behave. When, by the way, were you planning on asking for a recommendation letter?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know you needed one.”
“You’ll need three, I can only write one. Make sure your letter writers are willing to write dissertations.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get people to write three pages of sheer praise. And another thing. No one in my class ever gets an A with more than two absences. You’ve had your two.”
“Oh thank you,” said Julia. She sprang into Esme’s lap, kissed her on the lips and hugged her.
“Behave, now.”
“I am as best I can,” said Julia.
Hamlet, having explored the apartment jumped up on a hassock in front of the fire and stretched. He circled once before curling up. Esme’s hand slipped beneath Julia’s shirt. Her hand pulled Julia closer long before she could feel the warmth of Julia’s skin.
Julia sighed and relaxed, touching Esme’s hair. “I am as best I can.”
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Fat Like Me
“And you won’t regret hiring Bess,” said Louise. “She could sell a comb to a bald guy.”
Erma was desperate. She made most of her money during the summer, and for the entire month of June she had been without decent help. Erma’s slick little boutique, called Je ne sais quoi, was stocked entirely with clothes she had designed and sewn on the premises.
“I had no choice,” said Erma. “I’ll take your word that she’s excellent and leave it at that.”
Erma was a trim woman, a size five, who dressed in an understated manner. Like the stylish summer people who came to town, Erma never wore any article of clothing with writing on it, and God forbid, nothing purple. Her clients wore simply cut garments of good fabric in earth tones. For a dash of color, Erma sold scarves made of Italian tie silks. A swath of red was enough to set off the elegance of black. No more and no less. Erma stood with a yellow tape measure draped around her neck and looked out at the bay where an ocean liner was dropping anchor.
“And a model!” said Louise, who on the other hand, usually wore tye dye because that was what she sold in her shop. It also went with everything. Or so she thought. On that particular morning she was wearing a new arrival--a turquoise and purple shirt splotched with orange leaping dolphins. The other half of her usual work ensemble consisted of acid washed jeans, flip flops, and bright blue nail polish as shiney as new cars. Her bottoms were always understated in order to feature her tops.
Twenty years ago, Erma and Louise worked together at the Sunglasses Hut. It was the sort of dead-end Mac Job college kids work before they go back to school. Erma and Louise, however, had no intention of ever going to school, so on they stayed through the winters, imagining an economically out of reach future where they could have their own shops. That was until one cold day in January when their fates were sealed and all future transgressions of fashion were to be forgiven for life. Louise had the common sense to arrive on the beach with a harpoon she had bought at a yard sale the summer before. It was a particularly windy day. Erma had summoned her, waving madly from the tidal flats when she had had the luck to spot a 800 pound blue fin tuna that had found its way into shallow waters. Together, they managed to spear the great fish and drag it up onto the beach. Later they hauled it from the bay side beach over to the fishing pier in the bed of Louise's pick-up truck. That night they sold it to a Japanese fish broker for $52,000. Cash in hand, the two women were able to open businesses across the street from each other.
"The girl does have a sense of style," said Louise.
“I can just imagine a tall creature strutting the sales floor.” Erma tugged the ends of her tape measure. “August will be beautiful,” she said, imagining a glorious future.
“She’s a hand model,” said Louise. “She only models rings and hand lotion in her spare time.”
“Oh,” said Erma. “Why’s that?”
“She’s a bit—unique. You'll see.” Louise set a small styrofoam duck on the counter. Blue glitter sprinkled off its tail. “When does Bess start?” said Louise.
“Right now,” said Erma. “She’s on her way over.”
“Whoa,” said Louise. “I thought you’d want to meet her first.”
“With that ship coming in,” said Erma. “I’ll need all the help I can get. Besides, I’m working fourteen-hour shifts, and supposedly—” Erma lowered her voice and looked around to make sure the two of them were alone. “Supposedly, the fashion editor of Self Magazine is sending a scout. They want to give me a spread for the fall.”
“How wonderful,” said Louise.
“They’re doing an issue about innovators in fashion,” said Erma. “Small people like myself. Keep it a secret, will you? I’m not even going to tell the girls sewing for me until after it’s a done deal. I don’t want to jinx it. So, get that duck off my counter. Don’t think I didn’t see you leave it there. You know I hate cute things.”
Louise dropped the duck back into her pocket and drummed her fingers on the counter.
“I’m so busy,” Erma said, “I’d hire just about anybody who didn’t stand in the front window and pick her nose.” She turned to fuss with the hem of a blazer on a mannequin.
Louise cleared her throat. “There is one thing about Bess I think you should know—”
“Yes?” said Erma, absentmindedly fluffing the hand knit sweaters.
“She’s a model, but she’s a bit—”
“Yes?”
“Well, she’s chubby.”
“Chubby?”
“In fact, she’s fat.”
Erma’s heart sank as she turned to face her shop. She tried to attract clients who were between the sizes of five and nine. Despite her line making it into several fashion magazines, her sales over the last two years were down. Ladies from the cruise ships wanted mu mus and clothing the size of pup tents, not Erma’s haute couture. Damn. She glanced at the tastefully framed copy of the two-page spread of her designs that had appeared in the January issue of Allure. The spread hung near the door and was Erma’s proclamation of success to the badly dressed who trailed into her store and out again—too cheap and ignorant to buy anything. The year before, several pieces of her collection had made it into Town & Country. And the year before that she had made it into the Italian Vogue after she had passed the previous winter in Milan learning how to cut women’s suit jackets.
“Chubby,” said Erma, as though she had just said the word cancer. “Chubby? That can’t be. What will I do? I always dress the sales help with ready-to-wear.” Erma pulled out a pair of size 18 palazzo pants. “These are gigantic—a best seller, in fact. Will she fit these?” Erma stretched the elastic.
Louise shook her head. “Doubt it.”
“Oh why didn't you tell me?” whined Erma. “How big could she be?”
“You’ll have to adapt your patterns and make something for her,” said Louise. “Consider it an investment.”
Erma picked up her phone and began to dial Bess’ number. “I’m going to try and catch her before she comes in,” said Erma. “I’m not that desperate.”
“Too late,” said Louise, pointing out the door at a quaint and narrow lane. “That’s her.”
“Fat,” hissed Erma. “She’s enormous!”
Bess walked over the hill and through the crowd dressed in a daring tomato-red silk dress. The fabric moved beautifully over her bulk and flapped in the breeze around her shins.
“Oh no!” muttered Erma. “Quel dommage!”
On Bess’ feet were a pair of flat-bottomed shoes with painted leather flames curling over her toes. On her hands were mauve, crocheted gloves. Along the street, people turned their heads as she passed.
Bess passed by the front of the shop and entered the Mojo Diner five doors down.
“I thought I was getting some fresh young thing to be sweet to the non-buying customers while I worked on my fall line.”
“But you are. Bess is a born salesman,” said Louise. “When she worked at my cousin’s leather shop in the Village, he said the cash register would be so crammed with money, he wondered if she was dealing drugs on the side. Just give her a chance.”
Erma moaned as she looked at the daytrippers on the street. She tried to stifle her fury. “There has been an invasion of fudgies today and they’re collectively transgressing the laws of style." she jammed her fists in her pockets. "Look at them! I swear the tourists have turned into a herd of fudge-eating cows.”
“Excellent!" said Louise. "This means I’ll have a busy day. I saw three tour busses parked in the middle of town on my way over this morning.” Louise glanced at her watch, then across the street at her gift shop called Fisherman’s Trove. The store was momentarily empty because she had closed up and taped a “be back soon” sign on the door.
Erma tugged at her measuring tape. “Cows, cows, cows,” she said, looking at a fat couple—she with high hair, and he with an extended paunch, accentuated by a leather pouch clipped around his sagging middle. They were dressed in matching warm-up suits that went shish shish shish as they walked by.
“The horror!” Erma looked away. “The person who invented the butt pack should be shot,” she said. “Even the slimmest homosexual is reduced to a proletarian the moment he straps one on.”
“Shush,” said Louise. “Here she comes.”
“Oh my God,” said Erma. “She has the audacity to show up with a Mojo Malt! A two thousand calorie bomb! And I’m so starved.”
Bess came through the door of Je ne sais quoi.
“Hello Louise, love your top," she said as though she meant it. Then she turned to Erma, eagerly took her hand and gave it a shake. "I’m Bess,” she said. “Oh Louise, thanks for getting me a job. This is so cool—a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to work for a fashion designer. Especially since I’m too old to model and all. You have to be, like, a teenager to model.”
And thin! Thought Erma. Thin! Thin was the primary prerequisite to be a model. Erma wondered if Bess was an idiot.
“Wow!” said Bess. “Wow! Your shop looks like something dans le Rue de Rivoli en Paris. Totally Right Bank. Rive Gauche. And that bit there? Wow, just like a runway. I am going to strut the line like the Concorde landing! This is so cool!”
Erma started to open her mouth, but Bess interrupted her. “Here I brought you this protein drink,” said Bess. “You said you were too busy for meals, so I thought you’d need something. Wow!” said Bess. She tugged at the blazer on a mannequin in the center of the store. Then she fondled the hand woven rayon chenille scarves. “Even though I worship clothes—I really do—and I’m thankful for this job—I thought I’d stay the afternoon to see if we can work together. Wow.”
Erma nodded dumbly as she sipped the protien drink. “Can you by any chance sew?” she said. She wondered if she should try to keep Bess off the sales floor. She didn’t want a fat girl to scare anyone away. Especially the fashion scout, who was expected to drop in anytime before July 4th. The scout had refused to make an appointment. He planned to vacation in the vicinity and take Polaroids of suitable locations on the National Seashore. Then he would set dates for a photo shoot, if any, as he saw fit. Erma didn’t like that she was at his mercy.
“Sewing is like praying,” said Bess. “I just love it! If I’m too old to be a model, maybe I’ll just be a fashion designer instead.”
Erma sighed wondering what to do.
“By the way,” said Bess. “I saw your spread in Vogue a few years back and I thought it was excellent. I’d love to be able to wear one of your fitted suit jackets.”
Erma’s eyelid twitched. Fitted? The idea of anything fitted on Bess made her cringe.
“Well,” said Louise, “It looks like there’s a line to get into my shop. I can see there’s going to be a run on salt-water taffy. I best be going.”
“When is Patrice working?” said Bess.
“Starting today, Patrice will always work the dinner hour,” said Louise.
“Cool,” said Bess. “Patrice is my best bud.”
When Louise left, Bess told Erma: “Patrice worked at the head shop next to the leather emporium in the Village. We’re like you guys, you know? Only young. I’m all fashion and brains—like you, while Patrice is all business. You should see how Patrice sells the shit.”
* * *
Erma showed Bess her line of clothes and gave a tour of the workshop. There were ten sewing machines in Erma’s studio. The studio, like the sewing machines, was white, and looked out over the bay. In broad daylight, a green light flashed across the water from the lighthouse. Erma hoped the toot of the foghorn would add an ambience that would impress the fashion scout when he turned up. Je ne sais quoi was a part of real Cape Cod. She sold beautiful clothes that did not distract from the unadorned and breathtaking landscape. Her designs, like the great dune right outside of town, were great, simple in form, and like nothing else in the world.
Erma didn’t bother to see what on the racks would fit Bess. Instead, she showed Bess how to stitch labels on a pile of brown garments. She let the afternoon pass, hoping Bess would get bored and go elsewhere for employment. After all, there were dozens of shops that had “help wanted” signs hanging in their windows.
By the time Bess had labeled everything it was dinner hour. Bess made herself useful by Windexing fingerprints off of all the glass display cases. Erma stood in her front window glancing over at the Fisherman’s Trove with envy. What had Louise been thinking? Louise should have sent her Patrice, because Erma could see that Patrice was thin. Despite the young girl’s dreadlocks, despite the shapeless tie-dye skirt from India, despite the patchuli oil that wafted across the street, Patrice had line. She had nobby hipbones and a concave belly. She had hairy armpits that needed the attention of a hedge clipper. Erma sighed. Even so, with intervention, Patrice could have style. Most importantly, Patrice could be groomed to be useful to Erma.
“Is it always so slow?” said Bess. It had been a beach day. All the shoppers with money were out surfing. There was only two hundred dollars in the cash drawer.
“It’s the dinner hour,” said Erma. She looked out the door. No one was on the street. The fudgies had boarded their busses and gone away. The display cases squeeked under Bess’ attentive fingertips. Erma was rubbing her neck when a rather frumpy woman looked in the windows. The “frumpster” as Erma was fond of calling her, was wearing a very wide brimmed hat to shade her recent face lift.
“Her, again,” said Erma. “The hat is Bergdorf Goodman’s. It can stay, but she really ought to lose the Birkenstocks.”
“And the socks,” said Bess.
The corner of Erma’s mouth twitched as she watched the woman through the glass. “It’s Elizabeth Mumphry,” she said. “The richest woman in the west end. She has not one summerhouse on the ocean side, but two! She couldn’t decide which view she liked better so she bought them both. She never comes in.”
As Bess stood up, Windex bottle in one hand and rag in the other, she and Elizabeth Mumphry locked eyes.
Elizabeth leaned in the doorway. “Excuse me, miss,” she said, “but that is a fetching dress you have on. Might you have it in forest green?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” said Bess. “The dress is from my personal collection. But would you like a jacket? Or something of hand-woven rayon chenille?” Bess pulled separates from the racks, and waved them in front of Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Mumphry was frozen.
“Come in, come in, we have Extra Large.”
“The term Extra Large, is but a myth, dear,” said Elizabeth. “These days Extra Large has metamorphized to mean size Medium. No, I can’t bare the heartbreak of mis-marked clothing any longer.”
“I have just the thing,” said Bess.
Elizabeth stepped into the store and followed Bess as she ran her hand over the hangers. When Bess’ hand started to twitch, she plucked a hand woven blazer from the rack. Erma’s mouth watered. It was the most expensive garment in the store. “Try this,” said Bess.
“I think not,” said Elizabeth. “I need something concealing. As you can see, I’m, how you say, ‘well endowed.’” Elizabeth glanced about the store and saw the mannequin. The jacket was pinched in the middle to fit a person who was size three. “But what about that blazer on the mannequin? I do think it’s fetching. Do you have it in my size?”
“No,” said Erma.
“It’s a prototype for next year’s line,” said Bess. “It’s still one of a kind.” Bess held out the blazer she had chosen. “But try this. Humor me, I know it will work.”
Elizabeth reluctantly put on the jacket and strolled to the three-way mirror. It was a thin mirror, the type commonly used in dance studios. Elizabeth was surprised. “Do you have another color?”
Erma butted between them with another jacket. “Green,” she said.
Elizabeth ignored Erma, took the jacket and put it on. “Look at that—a diminished expanse,” said Elizabeth. “This design is priceless. I’ll take them both.”
After Bess put together three ensembles, all in size Extra Large, Elizabeth Mumphry rang up a tab of two thousand, nine hundred and forty-four dollars.
“One thing troubles me,” said Elizabeth, holding her Platinum Card in mid air.
Erma glared at the card—close, yet so far away.
“I know it’s illogical, but I don’t like the labels,” said Elizabeth. “I object to being labeled an Extra Large, when I prefer to think of myself as a Medium.”
“You are so right,” said Bess. “We’ll change the labels.”
“For a fee—”
“Free of charge!” said Bess.
“Could you?” said Elizabeth.
“Of course,” said Bess. “I’ll do it straight away, and you can pick up your clothes in an hour.”
Elizabeth handed over her Platinum Card. “Since you’re at it, would you mind attaching labels marked ‘Petite? It’s such a pretty word. It feels so good on the lips. Why be a Medium if you can be petite?”
“Right again,” said Bess.
“I never knew you had such a lovely shop,” said Elizabeth Mumphrey.
“What made you finally come in?” said Bess.
“You,” said Elizabeth. “Because you’re fat, like me. Yet you’re fatter, so you make me feel thin.”
“Well, thank you,” Bess said. “I guess.”
“It’s a pity you don’t sell the dress you’re wearing.”
The credit card machine spit out a long ticket—the sound Erma loved to hear most. Elizabeth signed it, lit a cigarette, and sailed out the door.
“Have a manageable day,” said Bess.
“I find it offensive that you are willing to mis-mark my clothes,” Erma said, when they were alone. “If something’s big enough to fit a cow, the label should say so.”
“But don’t you think the customer’s always right?” said Bess.
“That’s not the point. My integrity is compromised.”
“I believe the point is that you are three thousand dollars richer.”
* * *
Sales were up. Louise had been right. Everyday that Bess worked, she cleaned house. The shiny black shopping bags flew out of the store loaded with goods. Still, every dinner hour, Erma stared across the street at Patrice slouching on her stool over at the Fisherman’s Trove. Patrice spent afternoons at the beach and was happy to be bored through the dinner hour. She sold nick nacks hand over fist, barely looking up from her book that stayed spayed on the counter.
Night after night as Erma stared, Bess sold the store. She sold pantsuits from last year’s line that no previous customers would touch. Then Bess sold an entire rack full of impossibly tiny velvet dresses to a group of women who had come to town for Anorexic Pride Week. By the end of the first week, between the fudgies and the liner ladies, Bess had sold every last garment marked Extra Large. Contrary to what Erma believed, very thin people were not terrified by Bess. By Friday, Erma was forced to call in her seamstresses to sew deep into the night to replenish her stock.
“You are so hired,” said Erma, as she counted up the receipts at midnight. “This is the biggest day I’ve had in years."
“I guess I could work here,” said Bess. “If you’ll train me to cut and sew I could help you in other ways.”
“No, I’d prefer to keep you fresh for the sales floor,” said Erma. “My only problem is I don’t have anything that you can wear for the job, and what with your sales cleaning out my store, I have no time to alter my designs to fit you.”
“No no no,” said Bess. “I didn’t come here expecting a new wardrobe.”
“That’s a first,” said Erma, slightly disappointed. “Everyone who works for me covets my designs.”
Bess shrugged. “Do you sell gloves?”
“No.”
“Shoes?”
Erma glanced at the leather flames curling over Bess’ toes. “Of course not, darling,” she said. “I sell Pret au Porter—Ready to wear. My clerks are expected to wear my clothes. It’s part of the job.”
“Nothing’s ready for me,” said Bess.
Erma eyed Bess’ dress. It was almost the same as the dress she wore on her first day. The forest green sueded rayon draped softly over what she imagined to be rolls of Bess’ fat. Scary, thought Erma, trying to look away. Just below where Bess’ waist might have been, the fabric was delicately gathered to flare all the way down to the hem. The dress was dramatic, yet understated. Erma found herself staring at how the fabric had been cut against the bias and assembled—at how the drape gave the illusion that Bess weighed, perhaps, fifty pounds less.
“You’ll have to trust that I’m capable of blending with the fine upholstery in your store,” said Bess. “I insist, at least until you have time to sew again.”
“Okay,” said Erma.
Erma had never been so close to a fat person. Fat people wore stretch pants and drew attention to the disparity of size between hip and ankle. Fat people were not supposed to have style. Yet when Erma saw Bess, she almost stopped minding how fat Bess was. Erma started counting the yards of fabric it would take to clothe Bess tastefully. Five for a jacket, three for pants, two, maybe, for a blouse. Erma whistled and tugged on her measuring tape.
“Really,” said Bess. “I’m too shy to be measured.”
Erma let out a sigh of relief. Every year she paid summer bonuses in clothing to her sales help. “Very well, then, she said. “So long as you wear simple things. Understate, understate, that’s the name of the game. Especially for you. Please wear things that look like a blank canvas waiting for the perfect jacket.”
Bess’ eyes lit up. “What I’d give for one of your blazers,” she said.
“Later,” said Erma, dismissing her.
* * *
July Fourth came and went, and no fashion scout from Self Magazine showed his face. Erma was aggravated. The shop had been preened and cleaned, trampled by the weekend masses, then cleaned and preened again. The ensemble Erma had ready to show the scout still hung on its mannequin in the middle of the shop. It had been fingered and picked at, tried on by the microscopically petite, rejected and wanted. Erma refused all requests, instructing Bess to swat everyone off. The jacket was precious. It was next year’s line.
Late one afternoon, Erma caught Bess with the blazer turned inside out. She had the blazer lying across the counter where she was studying the seams and sketching how the fabric had been cut.
“Uh-uh-ah,” said Erma. “I don’t show anyone how I put things together.”
“Then what do you do when people buy your designs?”
“By the time my designs hit the boutique show, the major manufacturers are already copying me,” said Erma. “The time to be secretive about a design is now. Before I’ve shown a line. Turn the jacket around, now.”
“I just wanted to see how you did it,” said Bess. “I admire how there are no pads, yet the shoulders appear broad.”
“Company secret,” said Erma.
Bess stared at the seams.
“Turn it back around,” said Erma.
Erma was jealous. All week long customers wanted whatever Bess was wearing. Even the fudgies. Three times that afternoon, as she watched Bess sell the store, as Bess walked the runway sassing the clientele, customers had pleaded for Bess’ dress.
“I suppose I could make a dress like yours,” Erma finally said. “Being as my customers covet it.”
“I think not,” said Bess. “I don’t want to see copies of myself coming and going.”
Erma was piqued. She had spent so much time looking at her—Bess the sales clerk—Bess of mighty bulk—Bess who hypnotized Erma’s clientele until their credit cards were maxed out—Bess the charm as big as a barn—who attracted new customers, fat and thin alike—enormous Bess, far fatter than any Extra Large on the rack—the Bess who compromised Erma’s sensibilities—the Bess with enormous dimples in her elbows. The Bess who dared to eat cake on the sales floor! Erma was annoyed because she thought Bess was presumptuous. Who’d want to look like Bess? Erma felt entitled to copy the dress for her not-quite-thin customers because, day after day, wasn’t she forced to look at gigantic Bess and say nothing of her bulk? Didn’t Bess owe her something?
“No?” said Erma. “I should think you’d find it a compliment that I want to copy your clothes.”
“Compliment? Let me see,” said Bess. “Ah yes, you asked me on my first day if I could sew.”
“That was before I knew you could sell,” said Erma. “You’re far too valuable to waste on the back room. Besides, how I cut my fabric is confidential.”
“So are the dimensions of my dress,” said Bess.
“Are they now?” said Erma. “Why’s that?”
“Because I might want to go into fashion design.”
“Really?” said Erma who tried to hide the smirk on her face. Erma turned and went back into the studio. All the seamstresses were at dinner, so Je ne sais quoi was empty.
“You don’t think I could be a fashion designer?” said Bess.
“Of course not,” said Erma.
“Why?”
“You’re fat, Bess. You’re crazy if you think you could be anything in the fashion world. In fact, I’m a little bit embarrassed for you when you parade around pretending you’re a model.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh come on, do you need a spelling primer? You’re not just a little pudgy, you’re beyond obese. I don’t know why you can’t see that.” Erma blushed and shook her head.
“Yet my designs are good enough for you to use?”
“I’d give you a cut,” said Erma. “You could come back next season, sell the store at night, and spend your days on the beach. That’s what you wanted isn’t it?”
“It’s not the complete equation,” said Bess.
The telephone rang. Erma picked it up. It was Louise who was waving in her store window from across the street.
“You’re a fool to want Patrice to work for you,” said Louise. “She just called in sick—more like getting laid, out in the dunes. My toilet’s backed up and running over, the taffy machine keeps overheating, and girl, I’ve got some goon coming over for three gross of crazy ducks, a box of which are down at the post office. Not to mention I have a line out the door. Someone put an ad in the paper saying I was giving out free back scratchers with every purchase. Would you come over here and run the cash register?”
Erma looked out at the front of the store. No one had been in for over an hour but the bald guy out front. He stood there wearing a fanny pack with a camera around his neck. One of his unmatched white socks was pulled up mid calf. He was fingering the ascots made of Italian tie silk. Erma stifled an impulse to run out and swat at his hands. She’d seen him in town all week. She passed him walking on the beach, dragging up driftwood. She’d seen him walking through poison ivy on the dune ridge. She’d spotted him grubbing through the shell shop as she walked by in the morning. She’d seen him at sunset snapping pictures of the lighthouse with a disposable camera. Erma wanted nothing to do with him. He was a fudgie who obviously had missed his bus.
Erma hung up the phone. “Let’s not fight,” she said.
“You hurt my feelings.”
“Well I’m sorry,” said Erma. “But you know and I know, that for you, fashion is pretty much out of the question.”
Bess looked down at the floor.
“I’m sorry to be the bad guy to tell you,” said Erma. “But you might as well figure things out now.”
Bess sniffed. “Bess do this, Bess do that. Did you ever stop and think what it’s like to be fat like me? To not have anything fit?”
“Of course not. I’m too busy trying to run a business catering to normal people. I’m sorry. Sometimes I open my mouth and rocks fly out. I don’t mean it.”
“Yes you do.”
“Look, I have to go help Louise. All hell has broken out because your pal Patrice bailed on her.”
“It’s not my fault,” said Bess. She used the hem of her dress to dry the corner of her eyes.
“I know,” said Erma. “Listen, I’m a grouch. When the store is empty close up for fifteen minutes and go get a Mondo Burger at Mojos. My treat. Help yourself to money from the till.”
Evading more confrontation, Erma squeaked out the back door, walked a block down the beach before she circled back up to the street to meet Louise in her gift shop.
* * *
Louise trafficked souvenirs with seaside motifs. The fudgie variety of tourists loved the musty shop that took up the main floor of a rotting sea captain’s house. Erma hated all the junk Louise sold. She hated the fake ambience created by fishnets, and the fake antique deep-sea diving suit Louise had bought at a rummage sale. Erma hated the fake harpoon and the glass fishing floats made in Taiwan that sold by the case. She hated that Bess moseyed across the street during lulls, and brought back handfuls of taffy that she not only ate on the sales floor but had the audacity to share with customers. Erma hated the cooking aprons that looked like giant lobster tails, the snowball paper weights with leaping whales. She hated the lighthouse lamps, and coffee cups that said Cape Cod. Erma detested everything in Louise’s store but Louise, herself. But what Erma detested most were the abundance of glitter-tailed Crazy Ducks.
When Erma banged through the door, Louise was unpacking Crazy Ducks. The styrofoam ducks were activated when the sun hit the little solar chips glued to their heads. At $2.99, Crazy Duck was still a best seller after five years. Set in a kiddy pool in front of the store—or even in a rusty pie pan in the shop window in the dead of winter—a succession of Crazy Ducks had spun about in the water, amazing the tourists. Erma took her place at the cash register and bit her tongue.
“Crazy!” said a tourist who had lined up twenty ducks on the counter to audition them.
“I’ll take two!” Ka-ching ka-ching went the cash register.
When there were no customers in the store Erma could bare it no longer. “Stupid tourist tricks,” she muttered. “Why me, god? Why? Where have all the beautiful people gone?”
“You know this is the hour when they’re either fucking in the dunes or having cocktails,” said Louise. “Besides, the beautiful people arrive when the rents go up.”
Louise had pink styrofoam pellets sticking to her arms. “Did someone hit you up side the head with a ‘let’s be mean’ stick?” she said.
“No,” said Erma. “I have Augustitous, and it’s barely July.”
“No fashion scout?”
“Not yet,” said Erma. “He hasn’t even called. Louise, is it my imagination or did the factory shit boxes of Crazy Ducks all over the store?”
“I ordered three gross for some artist. He wanted green, so I have to pick them out.
“What in the devil for?” said Erma.
“Beats me,” said Louise.
Erma ran the cash register while Louise fixed the taffy machine. Then Louise left to pick up another box of Crazy Ducks at the Post Office. While Erma sat in the window watching the sun set in the reflection of the mirror, she noticed Bess and the scrappy tourist with mismatched socks that had been in her shop. They were talking intently as they walked towards Mojos. The tourist held the door for Bess and followed her in the diner. When Louise returned, Bess and the tourist walked out of Mojo’s.
“Oh, that’s my duck man,” said Louise.
“Well I wonder what he wants?” said Erma.
“Beats me. He’s some friend of Patrice’s. She tried to hook him up with a discount on duckies, but I said no way. Though I did give in and take off twenty percent because he bought so many. He paid in cash.”
* * *
“You’ll never believe it!” said Bess. “While you were out, this photographer guy came in.”
“What!?” said Erma.
“This guy who freelances for Elle and Self Magazine,” said Bess.
“Did he see my ensemble?” said Erma.
“Which one?”
“What do you mean which one? The one you’ve been guarding since you started working here.”
“No, but he liked what I had on.”
“Of course he did,” said Erma hitting her forehead.
“Is he coming back?”
“To do a story about me!”
“You? But you don’t have a shop,” said Erma, putting her fists on her hips. “You don’t have any know how. And you’re—you’re—"
“Go ahead, say it.”
“You’re fat,” said Erma.
“So I should not have a sense of style.”
“That’s right.”
* * *
Come September, Erma received a polite little card from the fashion scout: Came to see you, you were out. Loved your sales girl, she had a fabulous line. See the October issue. I’ll call in April.
When Erma finally got her subscription, Louise came over with her copy and a pot of coffee. They spread the magazines out on the counter and flipped the pages. On page 208, there was not a two-page expose, but a four, then six-page spread titled: “F.I.T. student debuts collection.”
“Listen to this,” said Louise. “‘When the state of New York diagnosed Bess Rubens as disabled due to obesity, Rubens took the state funding for vocational training, and ran to the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology. ‘My only disability,’ said Bess Rubans, ‘is I could never find anything to wear.’”
“Give me a break,” said Erma.
“She goes on,” said Louise.
“‘Bess says the only thing a fat chick can buy Pret au Porter is shoes, gloves, hats, socks and accessories. No one should know more than Rubens, who has occasionally worked as a hand model since her teens. ‘I have gobs and gobs of cool shoes and accessories,’ said Rubens, ‘but nothing else.’ So Bess Rubens set out to create a line catering to ample women. Armed with her two year associates degree, Bess went to Cape Cod to work for fashion designer Erma Webb, where she learned how to adapt Webb’s famous designs to fit larger women.’”
“Oh Christ,” said Erma. “That’s my suit jacket! My beautiful design distorted!”
“Just the shoulders are yours,” said Louise. “And you learned them in Milano.”
“I should sue—I should sue because she’s ruined my look!”
“Well it says here that you were so nice to her,” said Louise, “and that you were a dream to work for. Listen to this: ‘Rubens says while working for Erma Webb she decided to enforce a new sizing system. ‘Erma’s customers inspired me,’ Rubens said. ‘No one wanted to be called an Extra Large, so I’ve altered my tags. Something marked Triple Extra Large by Jones New York will be marked Truly Substantial by me. And honestly, who wants to buy clothes marked Extra Large, when they can buy the same size marked Medium? I want my customers to feel good while wearing my clothes.’”
“I’m so disgusted,” said Erma.
There were pictures of Bess, not as a model, but leaning on her sewing machine in her rented cottage on the beach. Behind her, the bay out the window roiled with white caps. The green light was on in the lighthouse.
“It’s so cute, I could puke,” said Erma, flipping the page.
There were several pictures taken in the great dunes outside of town. The models were plump, but not as fat as Bess.
“‘So long as the United Colors of Benetton caters only to people size twelve and under, I’m excluded from their idea of a united world,’ said Rubens. ‘So I’ve decided to cater to the stylishly deprived. Because I’m fat I’ve lived like a negro relegated to the back of the fashion bus. Well no more’ says Rubens. ‘No more.’”
“She says negro?” said Erma.
“She says negro.”
“Politically incorrect. God, how rude.” Erma scowled at the dresses. They were beautifully cut. Fat women were frozen as they ran down the face of the dune. Two were caught in mid air. Shrouds of red fabric chased one and yellow paisley enveloped the other.
The last photo in the spread was taken at the beach forest pond. An obese girl had her back to the camera. Her fingers were laced behind her as she faced a pond of lily pads. Bess’ red dress was luminescent on the page. The shutter of the camera had been left open at dusk. A dozen fire flies streaked the photo with neon trails.
“Wow,” said Louise.
On the water was a gross of Crazy Ducks whirling hundreds of glittered circles onto the film.
“I never knew Crazy Ducks could be interesting,” said Erma.
Erma was desperate. She made most of her money during the summer, and for the entire month of June she had been without decent help. Erma’s slick little boutique, called Je ne sais quoi, was stocked entirely with clothes she had designed and sewn on the premises.
“I had no choice,” said Erma. “I’ll take your word that she’s excellent and leave it at that.”
Erma was a trim woman, a size five, who dressed in an understated manner. Like the stylish summer people who came to town, Erma never wore any article of clothing with writing on it, and God forbid, nothing purple. Her clients wore simply cut garments of good fabric in earth tones. For a dash of color, Erma sold scarves made of Italian tie silks. A swath of red was enough to set off the elegance of black. No more and no less. Erma stood with a yellow tape measure draped around her neck and looked out at the bay where an ocean liner was dropping anchor.
“And a model!” said Louise, who on the other hand, usually wore tye dye because that was what she sold in her shop. It also went with everything. Or so she thought. On that particular morning she was wearing a new arrival--a turquoise and purple shirt splotched with orange leaping dolphins. The other half of her usual work ensemble consisted of acid washed jeans, flip flops, and bright blue nail polish as shiney as new cars. Her bottoms were always understated in order to feature her tops.
Twenty years ago, Erma and Louise worked together at the Sunglasses Hut. It was the sort of dead-end Mac Job college kids work before they go back to school. Erma and Louise, however, had no intention of ever going to school, so on they stayed through the winters, imagining an economically out of reach future where they could have their own shops. That was until one cold day in January when their fates were sealed and all future transgressions of fashion were to be forgiven for life. Louise had the common sense to arrive on the beach with a harpoon she had bought at a yard sale the summer before. It was a particularly windy day. Erma had summoned her, waving madly from the tidal flats when she had had the luck to spot a 800 pound blue fin tuna that had found its way into shallow waters. Together, they managed to spear the great fish and drag it up onto the beach. Later they hauled it from the bay side beach over to the fishing pier in the bed of Louise's pick-up truck. That night they sold it to a Japanese fish broker for $52,000. Cash in hand, the two women were able to open businesses across the street from each other.
"The girl does have a sense of style," said Louise.
“I can just imagine a tall creature strutting the sales floor.” Erma tugged the ends of her tape measure. “August will be beautiful,” she said, imagining a glorious future.
“She’s a hand model,” said Louise. “She only models rings and hand lotion in her spare time.”
“Oh,” said Erma. “Why’s that?”
“She’s a bit—unique. You'll see.” Louise set a small styrofoam duck on the counter. Blue glitter sprinkled off its tail. “When does Bess start?” said Louise.
“Right now,” said Erma. “She’s on her way over.”
“Whoa,” said Louise. “I thought you’d want to meet her first.”
“With that ship coming in,” said Erma. “I’ll need all the help I can get. Besides, I’m working fourteen-hour shifts, and supposedly—” Erma lowered her voice and looked around to make sure the two of them were alone. “Supposedly, the fashion editor of Self Magazine is sending a scout. They want to give me a spread for the fall.”
“How wonderful,” said Louise.
“They’re doing an issue about innovators in fashion,” said Erma. “Small people like myself. Keep it a secret, will you? I’m not even going to tell the girls sewing for me until after it’s a done deal. I don’t want to jinx it. So, get that duck off my counter. Don’t think I didn’t see you leave it there. You know I hate cute things.”
Louise dropped the duck back into her pocket and drummed her fingers on the counter.
“I’m so busy,” Erma said, “I’d hire just about anybody who didn’t stand in the front window and pick her nose.” She turned to fuss with the hem of a blazer on a mannequin.
Louise cleared her throat. “There is one thing about Bess I think you should know—”
“Yes?” said Erma, absentmindedly fluffing the hand knit sweaters.
“She’s a model, but she’s a bit—”
“Yes?”
“Well, she’s chubby.”
“Chubby?”
“In fact, she’s fat.”
Erma’s heart sank as she turned to face her shop. She tried to attract clients who were between the sizes of five and nine. Despite her line making it into several fashion magazines, her sales over the last two years were down. Ladies from the cruise ships wanted mu mus and clothing the size of pup tents, not Erma’s haute couture. Damn. She glanced at the tastefully framed copy of the two-page spread of her designs that had appeared in the January issue of Allure. The spread hung near the door and was Erma’s proclamation of success to the badly dressed who trailed into her store and out again—too cheap and ignorant to buy anything. The year before, several pieces of her collection had made it into Town & Country. And the year before that she had made it into the Italian Vogue after she had passed the previous winter in Milan learning how to cut women’s suit jackets.
“Chubby,” said Erma, as though she had just said the word cancer. “Chubby? That can’t be. What will I do? I always dress the sales help with ready-to-wear.” Erma pulled out a pair of size 18 palazzo pants. “These are gigantic—a best seller, in fact. Will she fit these?” Erma stretched the elastic.
Louise shook her head. “Doubt it.”
“Oh why didn't you tell me?” whined Erma. “How big could she be?”
“You’ll have to adapt your patterns and make something for her,” said Louise. “Consider it an investment.”
Erma picked up her phone and began to dial Bess’ number. “I’m going to try and catch her before she comes in,” said Erma. “I’m not that desperate.”
“Too late,” said Louise, pointing out the door at a quaint and narrow lane. “That’s her.”
“Fat,” hissed Erma. “She’s enormous!”
Bess walked over the hill and through the crowd dressed in a daring tomato-red silk dress. The fabric moved beautifully over her bulk and flapped in the breeze around her shins.
“Oh no!” muttered Erma. “Quel dommage!”
On Bess’ feet were a pair of flat-bottomed shoes with painted leather flames curling over her toes. On her hands were mauve, crocheted gloves. Along the street, people turned their heads as she passed.
Bess passed by the front of the shop and entered the Mojo Diner five doors down.
“I thought I was getting some fresh young thing to be sweet to the non-buying customers while I worked on my fall line.”
“But you are. Bess is a born salesman,” said Louise. “When she worked at my cousin’s leather shop in the Village, he said the cash register would be so crammed with money, he wondered if she was dealing drugs on the side. Just give her a chance.”
Erma moaned as she looked at the daytrippers on the street. She tried to stifle her fury. “There has been an invasion of fudgies today and they’re collectively transgressing the laws of style." she jammed her fists in her pockets. "Look at them! I swear the tourists have turned into a herd of fudge-eating cows.”
“Excellent!" said Louise. "This means I’ll have a busy day. I saw three tour busses parked in the middle of town on my way over this morning.” Louise glanced at her watch, then across the street at her gift shop called Fisherman’s Trove. The store was momentarily empty because she had closed up and taped a “be back soon” sign on the door.
Erma tugged at her measuring tape. “Cows, cows, cows,” she said, looking at a fat couple—she with high hair, and he with an extended paunch, accentuated by a leather pouch clipped around his sagging middle. They were dressed in matching warm-up suits that went shish shish shish as they walked by.
“The horror!” Erma looked away. “The person who invented the butt pack should be shot,” she said. “Even the slimmest homosexual is reduced to a proletarian the moment he straps one on.”
“Shush,” said Louise. “Here she comes.”
“Oh my God,” said Erma. “She has the audacity to show up with a Mojo Malt! A two thousand calorie bomb! And I’m so starved.”
Bess came through the door of Je ne sais quoi.
“Hello Louise, love your top," she said as though she meant it. Then she turned to Erma, eagerly took her hand and gave it a shake. "I’m Bess,” she said. “Oh Louise, thanks for getting me a job. This is so cool—a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to work for a fashion designer. Especially since I’m too old to model and all. You have to be, like, a teenager to model.”
And thin! Thought Erma. Thin! Thin was the primary prerequisite to be a model. Erma wondered if Bess was an idiot.
“Wow!” said Bess. “Wow! Your shop looks like something dans le Rue de Rivoli en Paris. Totally Right Bank. Rive Gauche. And that bit there? Wow, just like a runway. I am going to strut the line like the Concorde landing! This is so cool!”
Erma started to open her mouth, but Bess interrupted her. “Here I brought you this protein drink,” said Bess. “You said you were too busy for meals, so I thought you’d need something. Wow!” said Bess. She tugged at the blazer on a mannequin in the center of the store. Then she fondled the hand woven rayon chenille scarves. “Even though I worship clothes—I really do—and I’m thankful for this job—I thought I’d stay the afternoon to see if we can work together. Wow.”
Erma nodded dumbly as she sipped the protien drink. “Can you by any chance sew?” she said. She wondered if she should try to keep Bess off the sales floor. She didn’t want a fat girl to scare anyone away. Especially the fashion scout, who was expected to drop in anytime before July 4th. The scout had refused to make an appointment. He planned to vacation in the vicinity and take Polaroids of suitable locations on the National Seashore. Then he would set dates for a photo shoot, if any, as he saw fit. Erma didn’t like that she was at his mercy.
“Sewing is like praying,” said Bess. “I just love it! If I’m too old to be a model, maybe I’ll just be a fashion designer instead.”
Erma sighed wondering what to do.
“By the way,” said Bess. “I saw your spread in Vogue a few years back and I thought it was excellent. I’d love to be able to wear one of your fitted suit jackets.”
Erma’s eyelid twitched. Fitted? The idea of anything fitted on Bess made her cringe.
“Well,” said Louise, “It looks like there’s a line to get into my shop. I can see there’s going to be a run on salt-water taffy. I best be going.”
“When is Patrice working?” said Bess.
“Starting today, Patrice will always work the dinner hour,” said Louise.
“Cool,” said Bess. “Patrice is my best bud.”
When Louise left, Bess told Erma: “Patrice worked at the head shop next to the leather emporium in the Village. We’re like you guys, you know? Only young. I’m all fashion and brains—like you, while Patrice is all business. You should see how Patrice sells the shit.”
* * *
Erma showed Bess her line of clothes and gave a tour of the workshop. There were ten sewing machines in Erma’s studio. The studio, like the sewing machines, was white, and looked out over the bay. In broad daylight, a green light flashed across the water from the lighthouse. Erma hoped the toot of the foghorn would add an ambience that would impress the fashion scout when he turned up. Je ne sais quoi was a part of real Cape Cod. She sold beautiful clothes that did not distract from the unadorned and breathtaking landscape. Her designs, like the great dune right outside of town, were great, simple in form, and like nothing else in the world.
Erma didn’t bother to see what on the racks would fit Bess. Instead, she showed Bess how to stitch labels on a pile of brown garments. She let the afternoon pass, hoping Bess would get bored and go elsewhere for employment. After all, there were dozens of shops that had “help wanted” signs hanging in their windows.
By the time Bess had labeled everything it was dinner hour. Bess made herself useful by Windexing fingerprints off of all the glass display cases. Erma stood in her front window glancing over at the Fisherman’s Trove with envy. What had Louise been thinking? Louise should have sent her Patrice, because Erma could see that Patrice was thin. Despite the young girl’s dreadlocks, despite the shapeless tie-dye skirt from India, despite the patchuli oil that wafted across the street, Patrice had line. She had nobby hipbones and a concave belly. She had hairy armpits that needed the attention of a hedge clipper. Erma sighed. Even so, with intervention, Patrice could have style. Most importantly, Patrice could be groomed to be useful to Erma.
“Is it always so slow?” said Bess. It had been a beach day. All the shoppers with money were out surfing. There was only two hundred dollars in the cash drawer.
“It’s the dinner hour,” said Erma. She looked out the door. No one was on the street. The fudgies had boarded their busses and gone away. The display cases squeeked under Bess’ attentive fingertips. Erma was rubbing her neck when a rather frumpy woman looked in the windows. The “frumpster” as Erma was fond of calling her, was wearing a very wide brimmed hat to shade her recent face lift.
“Her, again,” said Erma. “The hat is Bergdorf Goodman’s. It can stay, but she really ought to lose the Birkenstocks.”
“And the socks,” said Bess.
The corner of Erma’s mouth twitched as she watched the woman through the glass. “It’s Elizabeth Mumphry,” she said. “The richest woman in the west end. She has not one summerhouse on the ocean side, but two! She couldn’t decide which view she liked better so she bought them both. She never comes in.”
As Bess stood up, Windex bottle in one hand and rag in the other, she and Elizabeth Mumphry locked eyes.
Elizabeth leaned in the doorway. “Excuse me, miss,” she said, “but that is a fetching dress you have on. Might you have it in forest green?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” said Bess. “The dress is from my personal collection. But would you like a jacket? Or something of hand-woven rayon chenille?” Bess pulled separates from the racks, and waved them in front of Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Mumphry was frozen.
“Come in, come in, we have Extra Large.”
“The term Extra Large, is but a myth, dear,” said Elizabeth. “These days Extra Large has metamorphized to mean size Medium. No, I can’t bare the heartbreak of mis-marked clothing any longer.”
“I have just the thing,” said Bess.
Elizabeth stepped into the store and followed Bess as she ran her hand over the hangers. When Bess’ hand started to twitch, she plucked a hand woven blazer from the rack. Erma’s mouth watered. It was the most expensive garment in the store. “Try this,” said Bess.
“I think not,” said Elizabeth. “I need something concealing. As you can see, I’m, how you say, ‘well endowed.’” Elizabeth glanced about the store and saw the mannequin. The jacket was pinched in the middle to fit a person who was size three. “But what about that blazer on the mannequin? I do think it’s fetching. Do you have it in my size?”
“No,” said Erma.
“It’s a prototype for next year’s line,” said Bess. “It’s still one of a kind.” Bess held out the blazer she had chosen. “But try this. Humor me, I know it will work.”
Elizabeth reluctantly put on the jacket and strolled to the three-way mirror. It was a thin mirror, the type commonly used in dance studios. Elizabeth was surprised. “Do you have another color?”
Erma butted between them with another jacket. “Green,” she said.
Elizabeth ignored Erma, took the jacket and put it on. “Look at that—a diminished expanse,” said Elizabeth. “This design is priceless. I’ll take them both.”
After Bess put together three ensembles, all in size Extra Large, Elizabeth Mumphry rang up a tab of two thousand, nine hundred and forty-four dollars.
“One thing troubles me,” said Elizabeth, holding her Platinum Card in mid air.
Erma glared at the card—close, yet so far away.
“I know it’s illogical, but I don’t like the labels,” said Elizabeth. “I object to being labeled an Extra Large, when I prefer to think of myself as a Medium.”
“You are so right,” said Bess. “We’ll change the labels.”
“For a fee—”
“Free of charge!” said Bess.
“Could you?” said Elizabeth.
“Of course,” said Bess. “I’ll do it straight away, and you can pick up your clothes in an hour.”
Elizabeth handed over her Platinum Card. “Since you’re at it, would you mind attaching labels marked ‘Petite? It’s such a pretty word. It feels so good on the lips. Why be a Medium if you can be petite?”
“Right again,” said Bess.
“I never knew you had such a lovely shop,” said Elizabeth Mumphrey.
“What made you finally come in?” said Bess.
“You,” said Elizabeth. “Because you’re fat, like me. Yet you’re fatter, so you make me feel thin.”
“Well, thank you,” Bess said. “I guess.”
“It’s a pity you don’t sell the dress you’re wearing.”
The credit card machine spit out a long ticket—the sound Erma loved to hear most. Elizabeth signed it, lit a cigarette, and sailed out the door.
“Have a manageable day,” said Bess.
“I find it offensive that you are willing to mis-mark my clothes,” Erma said, when they were alone. “If something’s big enough to fit a cow, the label should say so.”
“But don’t you think the customer’s always right?” said Bess.
“That’s not the point. My integrity is compromised.”
“I believe the point is that you are three thousand dollars richer.”
* * *
Sales were up. Louise had been right. Everyday that Bess worked, she cleaned house. The shiny black shopping bags flew out of the store loaded with goods. Still, every dinner hour, Erma stared across the street at Patrice slouching on her stool over at the Fisherman’s Trove. Patrice spent afternoons at the beach and was happy to be bored through the dinner hour. She sold nick nacks hand over fist, barely looking up from her book that stayed spayed on the counter.
Night after night as Erma stared, Bess sold the store. She sold pantsuits from last year’s line that no previous customers would touch. Then Bess sold an entire rack full of impossibly tiny velvet dresses to a group of women who had come to town for Anorexic Pride Week. By the end of the first week, between the fudgies and the liner ladies, Bess had sold every last garment marked Extra Large. Contrary to what Erma believed, very thin people were not terrified by Bess. By Friday, Erma was forced to call in her seamstresses to sew deep into the night to replenish her stock.
“You are so hired,” said Erma, as she counted up the receipts at midnight. “This is the biggest day I’ve had in years."
“I guess I could work here,” said Bess. “If you’ll train me to cut and sew I could help you in other ways.”
“No, I’d prefer to keep you fresh for the sales floor,” said Erma. “My only problem is I don’t have anything that you can wear for the job, and what with your sales cleaning out my store, I have no time to alter my designs to fit you.”
“No no no,” said Bess. “I didn’t come here expecting a new wardrobe.”
“That’s a first,” said Erma, slightly disappointed. “Everyone who works for me covets my designs.”
Bess shrugged. “Do you sell gloves?”
“No.”
“Shoes?”
Erma glanced at the leather flames curling over Bess’ toes. “Of course not, darling,” she said. “I sell Pret au Porter—Ready to wear. My clerks are expected to wear my clothes. It’s part of the job.”
“Nothing’s ready for me,” said Bess.
Erma eyed Bess’ dress. It was almost the same as the dress she wore on her first day. The forest green sueded rayon draped softly over what she imagined to be rolls of Bess’ fat. Scary, thought Erma, trying to look away. Just below where Bess’ waist might have been, the fabric was delicately gathered to flare all the way down to the hem. The dress was dramatic, yet understated. Erma found herself staring at how the fabric had been cut against the bias and assembled—at how the drape gave the illusion that Bess weighed, perhaps, fifty pounds less.
“You’ll have to trust that I’m capable of blending with the fine upholstery in your store,” said Bess. “I insist, at least until you have time to sew again.”
“Okay,” said Erma.
Erma had never been so close to a fat person. Fat people wore stretch pants and drew attention to the disparity of size between hip and ankle. Fat people were not supposed to have style. Yet when Erma saw Bess, she almost stopped minding how fat Bess was. Erma started counting the yards of fabric it would take to clothe Bess tastefully. Five for a jacket, three for pants, two, maybe, for a blouse. Erma whistled and tugged on her measuring tape.
“Really,” said Bess. “I’m too shy to be measured.”
Erma let out a sigh of relief. Every year she paid summer bonuses in clothing to her sales help. “Very well, then, she said. “So long as you wear simple things. Understate, understate, that’s the name of the game. Especially for you. Please wear things that look like a blank canvas waiting for the perfect jacket.”
Bess’ eyes lit up. “What I’d give for one of your blazers,” she said.
“Later,” said Erma, dismissing her.
* * *
July Fourth came and went, and no fashion scout from Self Magazine showed his face. Erma was aggravated. The shop had been preened and cleaned, trampled by the weekend masses, then cleaned and preened again. The ensemble Erma had ready to show the scout still hung on its mannequin in the middle of the shop. It had been fingered and picked at, tried on by the microscopically petite, rejected and wanted. Erma refused all requests, instructing Bess to swat everyone off. The jacket was precious. It was next year’s line.
Late one afternoon, Erma caught Bess with the blazer turned inside out. She had the blazer lying across the counter where she was studying the seams and sketching how the fabric had been cut.
“Uh-uh-ah,” said Erma. “I don’t show anyone how I put things together.”
“Then what do you do when people buy your designs?”
“By the time my designs hit the boutique show, the major manufacturers are already copying me,” said Erma. “The time to be secretive about a design is now. Before I’ve shown a line. Turn the jacket around, now.”
“I just wanted to see how you did it,” said Bess. “I admire how there are no pads, yet the shoulders appear broad.”
“Company secret,” said Erma.
Bess stared at the seams.
“Turn it back around,” said Erma.
Erma was jealous. All week long customers wanted whatever Bess was wearing. Even the fudgies. Three times that afternoon, as she watched Bess sell the store, as Bess walked the runway sassing the clientele, customers had pleaded for Bess’ dress.
“I suppose I could make a dress like yours,” Erma finally said. “Being as my customers covet it.”
“I think not,” said Bess. “I don’t want to see copies of myself coming and going.”
Erma was piqued. She had spent so much time looking at her—Bess the sales clerk—Bess of mighty bulk—Bess who hypnotized Erma’s clientele until their credit cards were maxed out—Bess the charm as big as a barn—who attracted new customers, fat and thin alike—enormous Bess, far fatter than any Extra Large on the rack—the Bess who compromised Erma’s sensibilities—the Bess with enormous dimples in her elbows. The Bess who dared to eat cake on the sales floor! Erma was annoyed because she thought Bess was presumptuous. Who’d want to look like Bess? Erma felt entitled to copy the dress for her not-quite-thin customers because, day after day, wasn’t she forced to look at gigantic Bess and say nothing of her bulk? Didn’t Bess owe her something?
“No?” said Erma. “I should think you’d find it a compliment that I want to copy your clothes.”
“Compliment? Let me see,” said Bess. “Ah yes, you asked me on my first day if I could sew.”
“That was before I knew you could sell,” said Erma. “You’re far too valuable to waste on the back room. Besides, how I cut my fabric is confidential.”
“So are the dimensions of my dress,” said Bess.
“Are they now?” said Erma. “Why’s that?”
“Because I might want to go into fashion design.”
“Really?” said Erma who tried to hide the smirk on her face. Erma turned and went back into the studio. All the seamstresses were at dinner, so Je ne sais quoi was empty.
“You don’t think I could be a fashion designer?” said Bess.
“Of course not,” said Erma.
“Why?”
“You’re fat, Bess. You’re crazy if you think you could be anything in the fashion world. In fact, I’m a little bit embarrassed for you when you parade around pretending you’re a model.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh come on, do you need a spelling primer? You’re not just a little pudgy, you’re beyond obese. I don’t know why you can’t see that.” Erma blushed and shook her head.
“Yet my designs are good enough for you to use?”
“I’d give you a cut,” said Erma. “You could come back next season, sell the store at night, and spend your days on the beach. That’s what you wanted isn’t it?”
“It’s not the complete equation,” said Bess.
The telephone rang. Erma picked it up. It was Louise who was waving in her store window from across the street.
“You’re a fool to want Patrice to work for you,” said Louise. “She just called in sick—more like getting laid, out in the dunes. My toilet’s backed up and running over, the taffy machine keeps overheating, and girl, I’ve got some goon coming over for three gross of crazy ducks, a box of which are down at the post office. Not to mention I have a line out the door. Someone put an ad in the paper saying I was giving out free back scratchers with every purchase. Would you come over here and run the cash register?”
Erma looked out at the front of the store. No one had been in for over an hour but the bald guy out front. He stood there wearing a fanny pack with a camera around his neck. One of his unmatched white socks was pulled up mid calf. He was fingering the ascots made of Italian tie silk. Erma stifled an impulse to run out and swat at his hands. She’d seen him in town all week. She passed him walking on the beach, dragging up driftwood. She’d seen him walking through poison ivy on the dune ridge. She’d spotted him grubbing through the shell shop as she walked by in the morning. She’d seen him at sunset snapping pictures of the lighthouse with a disposable camera. Erma wanted nothing to do with him. He was a fudgie who obviously had missed his bus.
Erma hung up the phone. “Let’s not fight,” she said.
“You hurt my feelings.”
“Well I’m sorry,” said Erma. “But you know and I know, that for you, fashion is pretty much out of the question.”
Bess looked down at the floor.
“I’m sorry to be the bad guy to tell you,” said Erma. “But you might as well figure things out now.”
Bess sniffed. “Bess do this, Bess do that. Did you ever stop and think what it’s like to be fat like me? To not have anything fit?”
“Of course not. I’m too busy trying to run a business catering to normal people. I’m sorry. Sometimes I open my mouth and rocks fly out. I don’t mean it.”
“Yes you do.”
“Look, I have to go help Louise. All hell has broken out because your pal Patrice bailed on her.”
“It’s not my fault,” said Bess. She used the hem of her dress to dry the corner of her eyes.
“I know,” said Erma. “Listen, I’m a grouch. When the store is empty close up for fifteen minutes and go get a Mondo Burger at Mojos. My treat. Help yourself to money from the till.”
Evading more confrontation, Erma squeaked out the back door, walked a block down the beach before she circled back up to the street to meet Louise in her gift shop.
* * *
Louise trafficked souvenirs with seaside motifs. The fudgie variety of tourists loved the musty shop that took up the main floor of a rotting sea captain’s house. Erma hated all the junk Louise sold. She hated the fake ambience created by fishnets, and the fake antique deep-sea diving suit Louise had bought at a rummage sale. Erma hated the fake harpoon and the glass fishing floats made in Taiwan that sold by the case. She hated that Bess moseyed across the street during lulls, and brought back handfuls of taffy that she not only ate on the sales floor but had the audacity to share with customers. Erma hated the cooking aprons that looked like giant lobster tails, the snowball paper weights with leaping whales. She hated the lighthouse lamps, and coffee cups that said Cape Cod. Erma detested everything in Louise’s store but Louise, herself. But what Erma detested most were the abundance of glitter-tailed Crazy Ducks.
When Erma banged through the door, Louise was unpacking Crazy Ducks. The styrofoam ducks were activated when the sun hit the little solar chips glued to their heads. At $2.99, Crazy Duck was still a best seller after five years. Set in a kiddy pool in front of the store—or even in a rusty pie pan in the shop window in the dead of winter—a succession of Crazy Ducks had spun about in the water, amazing the tourists. Erma took her place at the cash register and bit her tongue.
“Crazy!” said a tourist who had lined up twenty ducks on the counter to audition them.
“I’ll take two!” Ka-ching ka-ching went the cash register.
When there were no customers in the store Erma could bare it no longer. “Stupid tourist tricks,” she muttered. “Why me, god? Why? Where have all the beautiful people gone?”
“You know this is the hour when they’re either fucking in the dunes or having cocktails,” said Louise. “Besides, the beautiful people arrive when the rents go up.”
Louise had pink styrofoam pellets sticking to her arms. “Did someone hit you up side the head with a ‘let’s be mean’ stick?” she said.
“No,” said Erma. “I have Augustitous, and it’s barely July.”
“No fashion scout?”
“Not yet,” said Erma. “He hasn’t even called. Louise, is it my imagination or did the factory shit boxes of Crazy Ducks all over the store?”
“I ordered three gross for some artist. He wanted green, so I have to pick them out.
“What in the devil for?” said Erma.
“Beats me,” said Louise.
Erma ran the cash register while Louise fixed the taffy machine. Then Louise left to pick up another box of Crazy Ducks at the Post Office. While Erma sat in the window watching the sun set in the reflection of the mirror, she noticed Bess and the scrappy tourist with mismatched socks that had been in her shop. They were talking intently as they walked towards Mojos. The tourist held the door for Bess and followed her in the diner. When Louise returned, Bess and the tourist walked out of Mojo’s.
“Oh, that’s my duck man,” said Louise.
“Well I wonder what he wants?” said Erma.
“Beats me. He’s some friend of Patrice’s. She tried to hook him up with a discount on duckies, but I said no way. Though I did give in and take off twenty percent because he bought so many. He paid in cash.”
* * *
“You’ll never believe it!” said Bess. “While you were out, this photographer guy came in.”
“What!?” said Erma.
“This guy who freelances for Elle and Self Magazine,” said Bess.
“Did he see my ensemble?” said Erma.
“Which one?”
“What do you mean which one? The one you’ve been guarding since you started working here.”
“No, but he liked what I had on.”
“Of course he did,” said Erma hitting her forehead.
“Is he coming back?”
“To do a story about me!”
“You? But you don’t have a shop,” said Erma, putting her fists on her hips. “You don’t have any know how. And you’re—you’re—"
“Go ahead, say it.”
“You’re fat,” said Erma.
“So I should not have a sense of style.”
“That’s right.”
* * *
Come September, Erma received a polite little card from the fashion scout: Came to see you, you were out. Loved your sales girl, she had a fabulous line. See the October issue. I’ll call in April.
When Erma finally got her subscription, Louise came over with her copy and a pot of coffee. They spread the magazines out on the counter and flipped the pages. On page 208, there was not a two-page expose, but a four, then six-page spread titled: “F.I.T. student debuts collection.”
“Listen to this,” said Louise. “‘When the state of New York diagnosed Bess Rubens as disabled due to obesity, Rubens took the state funding for vocational training, and ran to the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology. ‘My only disability,’ said Bess Rubans, ‘is I could never find anything to wear.’”
“Give me a break,” said Erma.
“She goes on,” said Louise.
“‘Bess says the only thing a fat chick can buy Pret au Porter is shoes, gloves, hats, socks and accessories. No one should know more than Rubens, who has occasionally worked as a hand model since her teens. ‘I have gobs and gobs of cool shoes and accessories,’ said Rubens, ‘but nothing else.’ So Bess Rubens set out to create a line catering to ample women. Armed with her two year associates degree, Bess went to Cape Cod to work for fashion designer Erma Webb, where she learned how to adapt Webb’s famous designs to fit larger women.’”
“Oh Christ,” said Erma. “That’s my suit jacket! My beautiful design distorted!”
“Just the shoulders are yours,” said Louise. “And you learned them in Milano.”
“I should sue—I should sue because she’s ruined my look!”
“Well it says here that you were so nice to her,” said Louise, “and that you were a dream to work for. Listen to this: ‘Rubens says while working for Erma Webb she decided to enforce a new sizing system. ‘Erma’s customers inspired me,’ Rubens said. ‘No one wanted to be called an Extra Large, so I’ve altered my tags. Something marked Triple Extra Large by Jones New York will be marked Truly Substantial by me. And honestly, who wants to buy clothes marked Extra Large, when they can buy the same size marked Medium? I want my customers to feel good while wearing my clothes.’”
“I’m so disgusted,” said Erma.
There were pictures of Bess, not as a model, but leaning on her sewing machine in her rented cottage on the beach. Behind her, the bay out the window roiled with white caps. The green light was on in the lighthouse.
“It’s so cute, I could puke,” said Erma, flipping the page.
There were several pictures taken in the great dunes outside of town. The models were plump, but not as fat as Bess.
“‘So long as the United Colors of Benetton caters only to people size twelve and under, I’m excluded from their idea of a united world,’ said Rubens. ‘So I’ve decided to cater to the stylishly deprived. Because I’m fat I’ve lived like a negro relegated to the back of the fashion bus. Well no more’ says Rubens. ‘No more.’”
“She says negro?” said Erma.
“She says negro.”
“Politically incorrect. God, how rude.” Erma scowled at the dresses. They were beautifully cut. Fat women were frozen as they ran down the face of the dune. Two were caught in mid air. Shrouds of red fabric chased one and yellow paisley enveloped the other.
The last photo in the spread was taken at the beach forest pond. An obese girl had her back to the camera. Her fingers were laced behind her as she faced a pond of lily pads. Bess’ red dress was luminescent on the page. The shutter of the camera had been left open at dusk. A dozen fire flies streaked the photo with neon trails.
“Wow,” said Louise.
On the water was a gross of Crazy Ducks whirling hundreds of glittered circles onto the film.
“I never knew Crazy Ducks could be interesting,” said Erma.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
The Infertile Maternity-Leave Temp
Part I
Unable to conceive on my own I ended up taking a job scheduling patients at a local hospital. I had two masters’ degrees and was working towards a Ph.D. when the diagnosis of infertility threw me for a loop and derailed me from my original intent—which was to be a college professor and have a fabulous life. I started working at the hospital as a temp—an adequately paid minion’s position in the hierarchy of hospital life that does not require a BA, though one would be preferred so that they know you can talk good. It turns out I talk very good so I was soon promoted to the role of maternity-leave temp. Yes, most sensible well-run organizations stock their human resources departments with a few maternity-leave gal Fridays to pick up the slack when someone goes on leave, or in worst case scenario—bed rest. Just look at the work place, the herds of folks working as mid-level administrative assistants are often breeding up a storm—or getting ready to get married so they can breed up a storm. Or plain and simply wearing big tops to mess with the boss’s head. Most women love these jobs because they get benefits and can support families without too much trouble. In my case, I became the infertile maternity-leave temp as I descended into a childless funk. How could having a baby ever be so hard?
To hell with a career—what I really needed at age 40 was a hospital-desk jockey job—where all efforts are spent on the telephone. Where I didn’t have to be a snappy dresser, where I could dash across the street without a fuss whenever I needed a blood test, or some other round of medical torture. I soon landed with the department of Coagulopathy Studies and voluntarily became the personal bitch to Dr. Eugenia Budd. Dr. Budd, a former oncologist, specializing in blood cancers, had a conversion experience upon giving birth to her first child: As she pushed him out—a healthy baby the result of four IVF attempts—she realized she wanted to work with the living—those who were going to live. In particular, those ladies with little clotting problems that sometimes cause numerous miscarriages. Well wasn’t this just my karma? WTF I thought when the temp agency placed me with her and all the other physicians who study blood, blood and more blood.
This is the story—and not exactly in order, There is a baby, oh yes, a baby girl, eventually, the result of many wishes, an unshakable will, and the contortions of modern medicine, and thankfully the HMO that footed the bill. And thankfully the state of Massachusetts and a savvy lawyer named Susan Crockin who lobbied our state legislature in the 1980s so that treatment for infertility is covered in this state. God bless her pea pickin little heart is all I can say. That or there is a baby that was born somewhere around here, we don't know, to a socially challanged individual who--or there is a lactose intollerant baby from Asia. Here goes—
I am pregnant again.
Five days pregnant, pee-on-the-stick-get-a happy-face pregnant. I am 44 years old. Before the infertile quietly say in their minds, where is my gun so I can shoot her and then myself, let me tell you about last time I was pregnant.
It was after an IVF cycle.
The fifth one. The very last one. My numbers rose. We were ecstatic, my wife and I. Yes, this one’s the deal, we thought, and we eagerly went back to the IVF clinic for that confirmation ultrasound only to find that there were no eggs in the basket. Oh, they were somewhere, likely to have drifted over to the fallopian tubes. But there was no gestational sack to be seen. No heart beat, just the rising numbers in my successive blood tests. On a January day, in a blizzard, the chemotherapy drug Methotrexate was jabbed into my ass. I was dismissed. And for two days I ached as the hopeful lining of my uterus melted away, and along with it, the happy hormones of pregnancy. I was in a biochemical post-partum state, clinging to the arm of my sofa. My wife watching from the other side of the room. Powerless.
I am four months pregnant.
Four months oh-god-could-it-be-true pregnant after a formerly frozen embryo was placed in my womb one hot July day. The day so hot, speeding to the IVF clinic across town. Resolved that whatever happens happens, and I don’t care so badly, but I do because I instinctively know, somehow that it will work. As we pass a used baby-toy store on Route Nine I see a giant ladybug that seems to be both a car and activity set. It is for a baby just starting to walk. I want the giant ladybug for the daughter I want to have. I want to sit it in my living room, like an auspicious sign because I know, I just know. I want it bad, but I say nothing. The car speeds on, the trees shading us. The nurse at the transfer holds my hand. Everything happens so easily, unlike the first 4 IVF attempts where I am still recovering from a trans-abdominal retrieval that feels like major surgery. The embryos go in. We watch them on the screen, they slide right in in a wash of lab-prepared serum. There they are. Perfect, thinking of dividing. We are given a picture. Somehow I know…I know. I am four months pregnant and carrying 2 pizzas and a two-liter of Coke for the workers installing windows at our house. I start to bleed. It feels like the first good trickle of menstruation. Maybe a twinge of a cramp. I lay down on the sofa. I call my doctor. I call out for my wife. We rush to the hospital and are put in triage. There is a line of people to be signed in. I don’t care about the woman who comes in behind me, suffering with the labor of her fourth child. I take the last available chair, sit, put my feet up on the wall and wait. I am angry and I am jealous. I am afraid I will lose this pregnancy. I start to talk to the baby. "Stay. We have so much. Each other and a nice home. A strip of green yard that looks like Ireland. Dogs that bound and play. Cats, and this beautiful city called Boston. A big sandbox called Cape Cod where we will turn you loose to play. Stay with us.
Agony. Let me tell you about agony.
I promised myself three years earlier that it would be easy. Yes. Put a little sperm in there and someone will grow. Just like that. It’s how it is done. Four cycles go by and anxiety sets in. Clomid is added to the regimen and wow. I am pregnant! Easy! I am so pregnant and fertile at 41 that my numbers skyrocket. The Dr. nods her knowing nod when she sees my rising HCG. It could be twins, but we won’t know until ultrasound. But when we get in there, there is no heartbeat. There are two empty sacks. Or are there three or are there four empty sacks? Or are those fibroids. I was blindsided. Blighted ovum. Lights on, no one home. A regular Andromeda Strain in my womb. I didn’t expect to fall apart later in the car, in the hospital-parking ramp. Dilate and Extract? Really? Missed abortion? How dare you call it that, check it off on a form that was printed in 1990 and then copied so many times the printing has blurred. I didn’t miss anything. I didn’t abort, that implies intention! But no matter my words, no matter my wishes, no matter how many times we wave the ultrasound wand, no matter how many times the hospital bills my HMO for tests and more tests. Nothing changes. A day after the Dilation and Extraction I can’t stop crying. My wife talks me into going to the movies. I decide to spend time in the bathroom because I can’t stand the theatre, the script, the everything. Don’t look in the mirror, I tell my self. Don’t look. But I do, and I start shaking, and I erupt with something I can’t explain. A tide of hormones, post partum rushing out, and me chasing them, begging them to stay. Please stay, yet I can’t move the moon overhead, It doesn’t work that way. I would have stayed pregnant forever, just to grow a fist of tissue. But that fist would never be a baby. Never. Six months later I look up the pathology results from my Dilation and Extraction to see what they excised. It was "grey tissue, the remnants of conception." It was cold and clinical. Probably some path-lab flunky writing descriptions late at night while going to medical school. Remnants. No curly blond hair or green eyes. No giggle. I print the pathology report. I hide it in my desk at work. I read it over and over again. Then I can’t stand seeing it and send it through the shredder.
I am seeing a newborn girl held up in the air.
She has an ancient look in her eyes. Like she is saying "What? I was happy there." My wife holds her. I see that look on my daughter and wife’s face for an eternity. I have known this baby forever. Yet in that moment I think, sense that something is terribly wrong.
That I am dying. After 5 days of induced labor the cesarean section was an emergency procedure. I ask later if I walked into the OR. My wife shakes her head, having been through a 5-day ordeal. So many times it seems I have walked into an OR in a Johnny with rubber socks on my feet. Somewhere around that third day something was wrong. I was begging for a c-section. I turned my head and closed my eyes. I will keep them closed until this or I am over. My ankles swelled up. My kidneys failed acutely. I wanted water fiercely. I was furious every time it was refused. I told my wife to shut the fuck up. Water.
I am watching a silver spotted dog fly down the length of the yard.
She spots a Frisbee and with honed skill becomes airborne, connects her mouth to the disk, snatches it out of the sky, lands with the grace of a dropped piano, and returns in a swift loop, insisting on another throw.
I am watching a small brown dog, a terrier with elegant legs that lives to jump. She cartwheels over the grass. She flips blindly in pursuit of the ball. She does a victory lap before placing the ball in my hand and posing like a short stop.
In my heart as I hear it on the monitor with the bongo clip of the infant’s heart rate, I imagine that silver dog galloping in the sheep pasture. Her galloping raises a yellow dust. Let me do this, my wife said just days before. She meant that she had to go be with the dog as they put her down. My beautiful silver problem dog with a Lone Ranger's mask and hemangioma carcinoma. Inoperable. We came home on a Tuesday after work and she could not run. She limped out of the house, her gums white, her toes splayed, looking at me knowingly. Truth is, she had been wheezing on the stairs, moaning in her sleep at the foot of the bed. I had thought she was imitating me at first because we are so in sync. I don’t know why, but this dog came into our home, chose me as her person and pushed the small brown dog out of my arms. There I was eight months pregnant, sitting on the filthy veterinarian’s floor waiting. My beautiful silver dog wasn’t glad to see me, her side shaved and re stitched up like some kind of Frankenstein, unable to lean on me. Already she knew what was in store, though I didn’t. As we parted, all I could think to do was to put three pieces of kibble in her mouth. It was all I had thought to put in my pocket. I slipped it in her mouth, feeling her tongue, and tickling her lips one last time. I love you. And she is glad to be rid of me. Our work together finished. If I could bring that day back, I’d have packed my pockets with sausages and raw green beans and buttered toast crust. All her favorites so she would know.
She went, the baby is to come. The dog, named for the goddess of motherhood is to watch and protect us.
I am getting a call from the nurse eleven days later.
This is after the 4th IVF, after a 3rd IVF was botched. This is after the surgeon got 30 eggs and over half of them were fertilized. This is after 10 were placed back inside me. "I’m sorry, but I don’t have the news you want." Everytime I get this call, every time right before I bleed, it’s as though those embryos are fire works—going up into the sky, exploding in beautiful promise one after another, yet they dissipate, fall, and fade.
This is after the embryologist comes into our blue curtained cubical to announce to the entire world—you have beautiful embryos, BEAUTIFUL! Six of them, ten of them, twelve of them, nine! It’s as though she says it on purpose within earshot of the woman next to us who does not have beautiful embryos—who will be 43 next week and cut off from all future IVF attempts with her own eggs. I know all this because our previous IVF attempts have crossed paths. I see her get up, in her Johnny and rubber hat and walk into the procedure room with as much dignity as she can muster, her graceful husband bringing up the rear. What I heard through the curtain: "Fragmented" "only one" "so very sorry" "Might as well try…"
The waiting room. Or:
The hierarchy of patient folders in the Assisted Reproductive Medicine Suite at a major hospital in Boston: No folder—couple holding hands: there for initial consult, scared, hopeful, or completely innocent of how their lives are about to be hijacked for a few years. Blue folder—novitiate: declared infertile—on to injectable medication and 2 well-timed interuterine inseminations (IUIs) per cycle. Easy-peasy, we will be pregnat in a snap. The red folder—The mother load, the infertile warrior—if there is a spouse, they are not holding hands because the social work department has probably suggested they commence marriage counseling. The very rarely seen shiny green folder—If held by an "older" patient yet hopeful-looking woman, she has probably plunked down somewhere in the ballpark of 30K to become ocyte recipient. Likewise, a shiny green folder held by a young annoyed-looking woman usually means she is being stimulated to donate her eggs. The wait at this hospital—the hospital where I have come to work—is always heinously long. No wonder the college kid is perturbed. Having arrived at 1 pm for a 1:15 appointment it is now 2:30 and counting, and that’s just how it goes. The inhabitants of the waiting room often get to know each other, or they slyly glare at each other, wondering, wondering, just what is her story?
One time so gleeful after an ultrasound on the 11th day of injectable stimulation, my wife hushed me when another woman got into the elevator. She was clutching the telltale red IVF folder to her chest and tears were pouring down her face as we rode to the 3rd floor in silence. "She didn’t have a good ultrasound" my wife said. "I heard them say they were going to cancel her cycle." And we? Well, this was going to be the time we told ourselves because I was growing eggs like a she lobster grows berries.
"I’m sorry, but I don’t have the news you want to hear."
The dogs and I are driving away. We go to a place called the Sheep Pasture. The big dog sticks her ears out the sunroof, her front feet standing on the console and her rump resting on the back seat. The little dog rides shotgun. The pasture is so beautiful you would think it was heaven. We walk and walk, my big dog in unabashed joy, ready to charge off and make friends. I am swollen from all the injectable drugs, and I cry silently, feeling the earth beneath my feet. I cry until I see all the other dog walkers. We converge on a gentle hill top. Twelve dogs weaving in and out amongst each other. 12! Having an impromptu play date, their bodies brushing up against one another in perfect joy. I realize that I would be the mother who would get the calls from the teacher because my dog is so badly behaved. In fact, that’s why we are there, so my problem dog with a healed brain injury can socialize. It cures me some how. The small brown dog—15 pounds—is smaller than the rest. Yet she always gets the ball. Always wins, always does a victory dance. I am proud of her. I cry less that night.
I am put in bed, a dog on either side of me to sleep and guard me after an emergency intubation on the first IVF cycle. There they always sleep. Especially on a sunny day.
I am watching a two-year old girl run full throttle down the length of the yard. Her little legs fly, her perfect little butt cheeks hang out from under her top. Up somewhere by the shed are her panties and shorts. She has made a compromise with us. She will wear the top, but the pants must go. After a full day of encasement at school she feels this is reasonable. Some people have entire out-door kitchens and grills so that they can eat en plein air on a hot day. The more sophisticatedly artistic among us paint en plein air. Our daughter, well, she poops en plein air. It wasn’t our intention to start this habit. What happened is our neighbor brought over a spare hand-me-down potty-chair, and we forgot to take it in the house. Then we realized that the house is very far away when you are two and you have to go NOW! So the potty stayed, and so she sits, from time to time, giving us a wave to let us know she’s all right. Once she has finished she stands up; kicking off all layers on her bottom half. A look of glee fills her eyes and she bolts away. Free at last, free at last; thank god almighty I‘m free at last!
"Maeve, where are your pants?" we ask when she simmers down.
She shrugs, finding her words: "I’m a no."
There was a lady—attractive, long dark hair—looking like a retired fashion model. She seemed so nice. She had the red folder. I still had blue, which means I was still in the IUI phase. I saw her months later at the hospital and I thought—jeesh—still not pregnant? She looked sad and resolved. Then came the time I had graduated to the red folder and I saw the same lady again while we both waited in a waiting room full of Oprah magazines as old as a toddler. Jeesh—still not pregnant, I thought. And it must have been some kind of final meeting because as she left the waiting room, a nurse practitioner called out her name. They came together and embraced, sharing a final intimate moment. And that’s the last time I saw her. I wonder if she adopted, or maybe she was pregnant. It dawned on me then that it doesn’t work for everyone.
Four years and counting and still childless. I might be pregnant again.
Tomorrow, a Saturday I will stop off at my favorite IVF clinic for a blood test on the way to New Hampshire. I have all the symptoms: the feeling like I could cry and the feeling happy and the feeling anxious and the feeling like I could just die all at once. Dr. Eugenia Budd and I are having a chit chat. "You know you don’t have to wait until tomorrow all you have to do is pee on a OPK stick and it will tell you. Ha HA HA! Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that. Oh well, bye!" Of course I have an OPK stick left over from my pre Clomid days. My wife is fast asleep upstairs. I pee on a stick. It is ever so slightly positive. I call Eugenia Budd back on my speed dial. She says "Seeeeeeee?" I go up and nudge the wife to show her. She sits up. "Now I’ll never nap!" she says
"Might as well get used to it".
We stop at the IVF clinic and we know what they are going to tell us later that day when they call.
I am pregnant again.
Four weeks pregnant, but without the ultrasound confirming what we know. I am caught in a rainstorm on Cape Cod so I dart into a clam shack and end up sharing a table with two urban doctors, a husband and wife, who talk a blue streak about their four children. When she asks about my children and I tell her I am in that state of almost pregnant she says "I am rarely wrong, but I am pretty certain it’s a girl."
I can’t stop eating and buying chicken soup at 11 am in the hospital cafeteria. I take too much so that the lid squirts when snapped on the Styrofoam cup. "It’s like a little boy!" I say to Aida, the cashier, who responds, "Yah, but you’re having a girl"
This emboldens me a week later when I climb out of the pool on a hot day, suddenly with cramps, only to discover a brown pool underneath me, and brown rivulets running down my leg. Noooo! It can’t be—it’s going to be a girl—both the psychic doctor and the cashier promised me. A girl, our girl. I go to the locker room, I am hemorrhaging all of a sudden. Big fruit like clots, one with what looks like a beansprout. I am naked wrapped in a towel that bears a widening red stain. "I think I am having a miscarriage," I say to a friend so lucky to be 7 months pregnant at the age of 40. She lays me down on the floor. Cell phones are brought to me. Bottled water administered. I am acutely aware of the glare from an angry looking woman. Does a smirk curl her lip? Has she cursed me, is she the victim of failed IVF or failed romance only to find she can’t bear children, and is therefore vengeful with jealously? Is this the evil eye? I close my eyes. I will walk to the emergency room across the street in my towel. I will stay there all day, past midnight. I will bleed and bleed and bleed and no heart beat, no gestational sack will ever be located by the callous x-ray technician chewing gum.
I describe what happens to Dr. Eugenia Budd, the hematologist and expert of coagulopathy who takes care of pregnant ladies who happen to miscarry a lot. Dr Budd used to be an oncologist but switched her focus on to trying to keep people with blood disorders pregnant. In a nutshell, Dr. Eugenia Budd knows it all. She’s been there personally, done that, and would never shit a shitter.
"That’s not good, sweetie. Sorry, so sorry" and I know that once again it’s a scratch.
"Don’t breathe," says the Dr. at the IVF clinic.
We went in with a song and dance: bleeding in the pool—here’s a frozen clot the size of a grapefruit slice in a zip lock bag. Blah blah blah. D&C I suppose, oh well, its not the first time. I bite my knuckles, I will be so stalwart and brave. They get me up and into the saddle, feet in the stirrups.
"Stop breathing…now."
"Breathe, stop. Hold it hold it."
"Say doc," I say. "Why is it that you keep telling me to stop breathing?" He has the ultrasound wand pushed way up above my cervix inside my vagina. "It’s kind of hurting."
"Don’t breathe," he says.
And I see a look of puzzlement play on my wife’s face.
"But why?"
"Because when you don’t breathe I can see the heart beat."
Someday when my wife gets the car and comes to collect me with our daughter, I will swoop the girl baby into the air, and turn around, watching the hospital towers spin above us. I will blink just to concentrate on the delicious giggle of the baby before she is strapped in her seat and driven home.
More tk--
Thursday, May 15, 2008
PINK BOOTS an Ashram Story
It was unusually hot in the city made of golden stone, and the black polyester robe Elyse wore while meeting with her tutor held the heat. Yet Elyse didn’t shed the garment—called a sub fusque—because she knew that it hid the wet rings that stained the magenta silk around her arms. Sweat trickled down her spine, as she occasionally glanced at an empty hook—a hook that had held sub fusques since 1651, when the small priory was expanded into a college out side the medieval city walls. Beyond the hooks were maroon velvet drapes, pulled back with a cord. Peonies stood in a Chinese vase on the mantle in front of the uneven window panes that distorted the striped lawns outside. A sprinkler kicked on, spitting a carefully measured dose of water on a specific quadrant of the lawn. The glow of lavender hedges coming into bloom paused her focus on the tutorial of the moment.
Much to her surprise, that morning Elyse discovered she’d aced several exams on economics. There on the step of the exam school, tacked to the door, was her name with the fact that she had scored a First rather than a perfectly honorable Second. The news was followed by luncheon where the woman who sat to her right was pale faced over the news that she had scored a Third. There was no use in pride in that moment for Elyse felt no glee. Gloating over her success in the face of someone who had so obviously failed was nauseating, so she turned the conversation to dinosaurs, the bird-boned creatures found in Wyoming, simply to pass the time—to steal the poison of the hour.
Elyse had acquired her will to study only five years before. On the first day at the university it came over her like a spell—a force so strong she’d held herself captive for years with no idea that she would one day find herself on the other side of the Atlantic, inside a gilded college gate looking out, rather than as a tourist looking in. She studied for studies’ sake, filling all the hours of the day until she often found herself stupid with knowledge by bed time. But knowledge for what? She wondered where the spell would leave her when it lifted. The greasy state university back home—with its cracking infrastructure and perennial budget cuts—had been replaced by trimmed gardens framed by gothic courtyards. Door knobs were pleasant to touch in this place—there was no turning of knobs while holding a paper towel for fear of catching the latest virus. The doors so pleasant to open were five hundred years old and stood fifteen feet tall. Turn them, touch them and they will open, majestic on ancient hinges. The kegerator binge parties of home were replaced by well-mannered trips to pubs. When she came up for air from the library stacks, or from the Xeroxed papers and notes in shorthand from lectures—when she actually drew breath acknowledging the day and where she found herself, she knew that she had unwittingly joined the aristocracy of the plucky, despite the fact that her tutor, Professor Max, was calling her bluff, scaring her out of her own ideas. Her glasses slid down her nose as Tutor Max clipped on in his well-trained English.
"Yes, but what about Degas’ dancers?" he said, obviously detesting the paintings. "Why do you see them as commentary on the economic contributions of women? How could you possibly shape a thesis on that proposal? Frankly, I find your ideas a little fluffy."
"Fluffy?" she said. She cleared her throat. "Fluffy is big business. The paintings are about work," said Elyse. "They’re not decorative at all. Look at the exhaustion," she said tapping a museum catalog from the Louvre. "Look at how the girls sleep as they await their auditions, or call backs, or what have you. Look at the anxiety on their mother’s faces as they knit to pass the time."
"All affectation, in my opinion. They’re trite—a visual cliche, really."
"They seem that way, now. But Degas was recording the economic anxiety of their time. These dancers are working girls. Daughters of butchers and lorry men, not trust-fund cases. A place in the corps of the Paris Opera put money in the family pot—so these auditions were crucial—the future hinged on the outcome."
Professor Max raised an eyebrow, whipped off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose as though he were in pain. "I still don’t know that you can stretch this topic for a D Phil."
She paused. She was finishing an MA—a lesser degree. They were highly selective about whom they chose to stay on.
"D Phil?" she said. "This is an extra topic for the MA."
"That I’d like to have fit the D Phil. You really need to narrow down your topic as soon as possible. Carry on."
Elyse continued. "If dancers in Belle Epoch didn’t move on to find a place teaching or costuming after they were no longer useful for the stage, they often became prostitutes."
"What proof do you have?"
"It says so here."
"And what proof does Professor, yes, Professor Shackleton have?"
Elyse had trained herself not to shrug. Instead her eyes widened for a moment.
"See? I caught you up," he said smugly.
"Obviously these aren’t the daughters of today" said Elyse. None of them came from rich families, nor were they trained and coached like Olympic athletes. These are emotionally exhausted women."
"Girls," he corrected.
"Whatever, my point is, where do you think Mimi in La Bohem worked before she stayed up in her garret stitching flowers?"
Professor Max poured himself a glass of port.
"She was a flower, herself," said Elyse. "And then she was relegated to the margins."
"This is all hearsay," he said. "How do you make the assumption that art—over exposed art, at that—is going to reflect empirical statistics?"
She sighed. "You yourself said that our man Ruskin said we study a culture by the three things left behind: it’s literature, art and architecture."
"What about public record?"
"I’ll have to go to the Biblioteque National and start digging."
"Well, outline it, then" he said. "Make your point and back it up. I suppose we could send you abroad between terms. In the mean time, read Shackleton’s notes, check his sources and see if they sort out. Then draw your own conclusions." He downed his port then checked the clock.
"The devil is in the details," he said. Then he leaned forward as if he were a co-conspirator. "This time, spell check and proof the outline you bring back." he said, "You ought to have the basic understandings of the English language by the time you’re a D Phil candidate. In fact we almost let you go over the issue."
"Yes, I’m sure you are right," she said.
He nodded and she was dismissed.
The bells of Magdalen Tower had been ringing for over an hour by the time the tutorial ended. The official topic was the economic contributions of women during the Industrial Revolution. After decades of exhaustive statistics that focussed on the male condition, under the guise of the "human condition", women professors began to put a price tag on the work of women. Elyse picked up on the thread, choosing to focus on conditions in the Victorian age.
The ringing, the statistics, filled her head and reverberated like chanting. It had been an exhausting day. She swore that if she blinked she might find herself transported to Massachusetts where she’d find last year’s beater car parked somewhere in a darkened lot. On the side of the car, a vandal had spray painted the words: "Shake well before using." If she blinked she might be getting in, slamming a door filled with Bondo anti-rust compound, and driving home. But she didn’t blink, she walked on a gravel path with her Professor Max, barely able to keep his pace despite his seventy years. When she saw him ride off on his bicycle, Elyse wandered across High Street and then along mediaeval back streets to a meadow full of wandering cows. The river Isis was beyond, hidden from plain sight by rushes. When she climbed the arch of a bridge that led to the college boathouses she paused to look down at the river. It wound around the town like a giant, but docile, mud-black snake. Moving on she counted six boathouses until she found the house that wore her college crest like a crown. Two griffins sitting back to back, a ticket, really, that told her come on in, you belong—you tricked them into keeping you despite the fact that you can’t spell.
The boathouse, of all places, reminded her of her unexpected entitlement. In that house, clear of worldly clutter, Elyse was given the choice of any boat that she would like to row. She stashed her books and robe in an ancient shell then chose a single crew and walked it out to the dock. She plopped it in the water returned for two oars and then was stopped by a light breeze. A chill rose up her back where the sweat had streamed down her spine. The empty punts lined up along the dock looked like giant slippers.
"My Guru’s shoes," she muttered.
All the boats for her college were red. Red like the Guru’s robes and shoes. Elyse got in her boat and pushed away from the dock. Somewhere down the stream where the river grows narrow and loops back upon its self, Elyse heard the pluck and then drone of a sitar. It came from beyond the rushes where she could not see, and blended with the pealing of the ringing bells. She stopped paddling and let the stillness of the river push the crew. Who played the sitar, she wondered. Another student? Someone teaching an Eastern music seminar? A tourist or gypsy passing through? The collision of sound was magnificent.
Entitlement. Professor Max had an anticlimactic way to tell her that she would be moving on to a Doctorate. Yet a state of entitlement was where she found herself. The boat was so new in the water-carved riverbanks. Her clothing, altered, her mind transformed by inhaling the thoughts of others and corrupting them into something different but uniquely her own. If she blinked she could almost see herself walking barefoot on lawns that were meant only for Fellows. Sometimes she dreamt herself there—barefoot and transparent. Of all the subtle hierarchies, strangers walking on certain college lawns disturbed her the most because they were fertilized with the ashes of dead scholars—to find herself in forbidden territory made her wake with a start. To be a scholar was something that seemed out of reach. What she was doing, actually, was playing. There was nothing scholarly about any of it. It all was a form of yoga; the intense focus eventually setting her free. Yet how strange it was—she was on to a Doctorate even though she had dropped out of high school—skipping college in her formative years. She blinked at that moment sitting in her crew drifting on the river. The bells rang, the sitar was struck, and the memory of living in an Indian Ashram flooded her thoughts, sweeping her back in time.
Part Two
What came to mind first was the incense. It was not an ordinary incense but a concoction mixed by the great Swami—the Master—or the Guru, because it was said that She and God lived in the same body as One. Elyse didn’t know if she could believe all the talk. What she did know was that she trembled when the Guru was nearby.
Like all objects the Master touched, the incense was heavenly. When burned it blew out the Ashram gates and drifted all over the world. Ashram means "without the fatigue of worldliness," and Elyse had fled there when she thought her life was ending. The gates of the Ashram opened up like arms, and the incense made her feel as though she’d come home. She’d close her eyes to the thin smoke wafting around her, feeling as though the Guru were personally holding her in her silk-wrapped arms.
Another pluck and drone of the sitar and Elyse completely forgot about the oars in her hands. She forgot about her books and robe. Firsts and Seconds dissolved, and the memory of Degas disappeared along with everything Max had said to her only an hour before. Instead, she set her eyes on the turquoise dome reflected in the water, and shuddered with delight as incense from somewhere else came wafting up the river.
Unburned, the incense, called dhoop, was a sticky resin that held together grains of rice, sacred grass, seeds, floral essences, tree bark, dried apricots, cow dung, gold leaf, mud of the Ganges, the dust from the Guru’s shoes, a certain granola from France, ashes from sacred fires, and other unknown ingredients. Once looking in a bin full of incense Elyse discovered a small tin clown—a Cracker Jack prize covered in the amber resin. Why a toy? A cheap toy? She wondered. Why not?
Where was the plucked instrument? How in the devil could the entirely unique scent of dhoop make its way past Folly Bridge? Elyse remembered how the smell made her a bit crazy. Where did it come from? Was it in last year’s fallen leaves, still holding to the rushes, the mud from the Isis, or in the particular smell of English mold, or maybe its cure—a chemical bought from a grocery store mixed with water and used to swab down the stone walkways of the college. As she pierced the surface of the water with an oar, a gust blew about her, returning her to the Ashram.
*****
Elyse was young—she did not look twenty-five—but she was obviously too old to pass as a teen. This secretly infuriated her because she never thought that she would age. Dancers were supposed to be young, and Elyse who was the least talented of the very best, worked inordinately hard to appear fleet of foot and ageless. Her days were spent in the scrutiny of her own form in mirrored walls. But as she watched her feet spring through intricate allegros she failed to notice how something had set in her face. She'd grown hard while girls around her shone with a supple innocence she could no longer fake.
Elyse had always been mistaken for someone younger. The years of training had sculpted her body to appear as though she was at the beginning of adolescence. One night after she had gone to the Ashram to stay, the Guru called all the young girls forward. Elyse naturally followed and felt at ease as the collective sigh and hush of the crowd rose around her. The Guru had a present for them. After each girl bowed at the feet of the Master she was given a japa mala—a string of beads delicately linked with golden wires. The mala was used to still the chatter of the mind by counting the infinite names of Shiva. Elyse waited in anticipation. One girl got pearls, another a delicate string of tiger’s eye, yet another a string of rudraksha beads—beads that were called "the tears of Shiva" and grew on a rare tree in Nepal. All were so exquisite and Elyse glanced at her naked arms—hoping the Guru would clasp a mala of coral and pearls around her wrist. Yes. Coral and pearls, that’s the one she saw sitting next to the Guru, and that’s the one she decided she wanted.
She was the last of the young girls to bow, and when she sat up from her Guru’s feet in patient expectation, the Guru had nothing for her. All Elyse could do was get up and walk away hoping no one would catch the tears that were starting to spill down her face.
The next night when all the girls were called forward Elyse went first. She bowed and sat up. The Guru loomed before her, her legs tucked under a tent of red silk, her eyes great saucers, and her cheeks dimpled by an all-knowing grin. In the Guru’s hand was a wand of peacock feathers that she used to stroke Elyse in the face. For that eternal moment Elyse forgot why she was there—forgot all things she could possibly want. The Guru gave her a swat, a gentle reminder to move along. When she took her seat along the sidelines she noticed that all the younger girls who came after her were given saris in silk and brocade. The next day the girls were to be dressed up like dolls to participate in an elaborate puja. The puja was a ritual involving chanting and offerings to invoke the blessings of celestial and earthly deities.Instead, the next day Elyse sat on the temple floor with the older women. As the parade of young beauties offered camphor, dhoop, ghee, and flowers to the temple deity, it dawned on Elyse that she had become invisible. Her beauty had disappeared in the wake of fairer girls. Elyse closed her eyes and burned as if she’d swallowed a wasp’s nest. As it had become in the corps of the ballet, so it was in God’s house.
Though she wasn’t getting attention outwardly, in meditation she went places. She saw temples in her mind, and once saw the Goddess Laxshmi open up her hands and rain down pearls on the temple floor. The falling pearls spanked the white marble and ricocheted playfully before coming to rest by piling softly in her lap. Her head, she was certain, had been filled with gems. Opened right up from the top and filled like a well-placed rain barrel. Unstruck sounds reverberated through her head with melodies tapped out by the smooth cool of pink coral.
It was odd to see Laxshmi—for Laxshmi was the bestower of boons and wealth. Odd because whenever Elyse opened her eyes on the world, all she ever saw were the things she didn’t have. Closing her eyes was her only way to escape the absence.
The next evening in meditation she noticed that within her mind she was sitting on the surface of an ocean. Her legs were crossed, heels hooked on top of each knee, and for some reason this posture kept her from sinking. Strangely enough, her right knee did not ache, nor was there fire in the scar from the two-hundred stitches that zagged over the knee from surgery three years before. The sea where she floated was made of churned milk and was topped with cut diamonds. As Elyse drew breath the gems shushed beneath her as though cooled by the tide. In this place in her head, she saw herself scooping the diamonds beside her as though they were a gritty sand. Within the handfuls were pearls that melted into the milk when they were flung away again. Elyse knew that if she could fill her pockets from this place, she could catch a bus down to New York. Somewhere around Mid-town and Sixth she could sell them. If she only had the where-with-all to fill her pockets. Somehow, though, the grit of New York disappeared as small white caps broke around her. It wasn’t money that she wanted, not when she had landed in this place, into the ocean of Laxshmi’s milk.
The temple bell sounded. She awoke dazed and wandered out onto the moon-lit lawn. For the first time since she had arrived she was distracted from the chatter of beautiful girls with their variations of japa malas dangling from their hands. Elyse wandered away to find the Master sitting perfectly still in a courtyard, clad in a robe the color of a poppy. The moment Elyse approached, the Master’s gaze pierced something within her causing her to drop on her knees and bow. For what seemed like an evening, people came and went around her, until at last, common sense told Elyse to move off her bad knee. When she sat up she overheard the Master saying "There will be boons—misfortune always hides a boon."
*****
Everyday Elyse wanted to escape into the sea of milk within her mind and stay there, but what she needed to do was try to make sense of her life. What was Laxshmi doing in her head when her contract was up and career over? She was ashamed. The ballet company had let her go. Fifteen years of training, fifteen years of anticipation and longing, and all she had to show for it was two seasons in the corps, and an injury fatal to her career.
Elyse’s last performance was with the company corps on a stage floating on an Ashram lake. It was a mystery who booked the performance. It might have seemed like another stop, just another gig amongst many. But Elyse chose to stay behind to separate herself from the other dancers. Retirement for Elyse meant going solo without ever dancing solo. Thankfully, her last performance was an adagio with nothing quick to jar her knees or refracture her feet. She sighed. She felt pretty good, but not good enough to leap.
The dance company used up jumpers and turned them out broken. For that final time on stage she stepped into the turn sequence and spun dervish like—one quick flourish that gathered applause—five revolutions in a pique turn before sticking it in time to the orchestral big-bang ending. Her super turn was as close to a solo as she ever got. Applause erupted from the thousands of devotees sitting on the lakeside hill. The clapping became a thunder, then rhythm that turned into spontaneous chanting. Tears rolled down Elyse’s face. There were no curtains to close that would hide them, just the wide open sky full of stars above.
Elyse could no longer bear the auditions, the competitive classes that turned into contests. She was obsolete at twenty five and unable to out jump the upstarts that flooded the city every summer. After that last performance she knew that she’d cry all night, so she arranged to stay behind while everyone else got back on the bus for New York City. What stung the most was that while her contract was left un-renewed, three of her peers had been plucked from the corps to become soloists in the next season. There was no way that she could get on the bus with her merry peers. The rehearsal director took pleasure in these moments when the corps was divided into the chosen and the rejected. How could she possibly ride on the bus, her throat in her mouth? Shake well before using, she thought.
Arranging a stay in the Ashram was a bit like checking into a hotel. She got in line with a bus-load of devotees who had just arrived from Israel. She paid for a two-day stay and then watched as her former peers got on the bus—those with the resources to have been coached like Olympic athletes—those who had been surgically altered to enhance their beauty. Melinda with her size three micro waist and pelvis like a spoon, promoted to soloist for her loveliness alone. Behind the outrageously happy came the six other corps members who had been let go. Quietly they brought up the rear and filed to the back of the bus. Watching the clipped and groomed—those born with the biological lottery of the right bone structure and weight—Elyse realized that it had been a no-contest all along.
"Goodbye my life," she said as the bus drove away.
Rather than going to the dormitory where all the single women slept in what was formerly a ballroom, she stayed up all night, sitting quietly in a flower garden. When the sky lightened and birds began their racket, she heard the drums and bells of the temple, calling early risers to prayer. She followed the sound, forgetting the night before, and before she knew it she had walked into the vigorous Ashram schedule without a second thought.
Two days passed and she was back in line at the accommodation desk arranging to stay for a week. And two days after that she was wondering how she could stay longer. She calculated her money: She had six hundred and twenty dollars, and a sublet apartment in New York that she could give up. She shared the "loft" with its brown carpets and three front windows looking over Sixth Avenue with four other people. It was called a loft because it had once been an open floor that had been sub divided by sheet-rock, two-by-fours, and office dividers that had been pulled from a dumpster on a Madison Avenue loading dock. The loft now consisted of four living cubicles. Between the two sets of cubes was a very dark living room, a kitchenette, and a cubicle bathroom. At the front of the loft was one window, where parked a manic roommate who was always pounding on a Smith Corona typewriter.
It wasn’t like she actually lived in the loft, it was more like she camped there between gigs. In February she came home from the road to find someone’s cousin’s drunken friend in her bed. He was passed out and snoring away at two in the afternoon. A plugged-in amplifier and two Fender guitars took up most of the floor. She camped on the sofa and left again long before the guest roused and rejoined the living. In April she came home to a silver Great Dane stretched out on her side of the bed and a rather dirty Jack Russell terrier curled up on the pillow. In its mouth was a green tennis ball, wet with spit. It growled when she set down her suitcase. By the moans coming from the cubicle that looked over Sixth Avenue—the only room to actually have a door—Elyse guessed that the dogs belonged to a mysterious non-roommate. She woke the Dane and pushed him so that his legs flipped over the side of the bed leaving him in an upright position. Ushering them out of her space, she knew full well that her room, bed, pillow and curtain used for a door, was rented with the agreement that an occasional squatter would be welcome so long as she was on the road. She smugly got into a bed that smelled of wet dog and closed her eyes. But the dogs were not easily evicted—as she drifted off to sleep they quietly parted the curtains and crept back up on the bed. When she awoke the next morning she rolled over to find the terrier sharing her pillow, the ball still clamped in its mouth.
Why call that cubicle home, she asked herself. Why go back at all when she was bound to find someone in her bed. And why return if going there would remind her that she had no company dance class to attend? Oh, she could go up town and take an open class at the New York City Ballet, but she would be out fifteen dollars, every time. She’d also be out with her pride—company class was always mandatory. How could she pay for something she had formerly been paid to do? Why go anywhere at all when she could stay in the Ashram and chase after the Guru who was able to bestow the gift of forgetfulness?
Elyse sublet her sublet over the phone, filed for unemployment, wrote out her rent check to stay in the Ashram, and commenced to try and forget the last ten years.
But she couldn’t really. Something had changed and she was beginning to stew. In this enchanted place of clipped gardens and iridescent tiles her beauty quit working. It used to be that she’d walk into a room and all attention would shift her way. Though she took what she thought of as her rightful place among the fresh and unscathed, along side those with new breasts and barely the curves of widening hips, she always found herself separated or left behind the group. Then came the night she was given a seva assignment. Seva means "selfless service" and anyone who stayed would be given a job that would take up a full work-day. Once again, Elyse stood in line with all the other young girls. One girl with thick dark curls became the Guru’s assistant; another with a blond braid like a rope down her back would take away all the gifts the devotees brought to the Guru. A girl from India with thick eyelashes would iron saris and linens, and shine the silver like a house girl. And still another would type the Guru’s letters, while her twin sister would go to the temple to polish the marble steps in front of the statue of the Guru’s Guru’s Guru. Elyse stood in anticipation wondering where she would be sent.
"So!’ said the Guru. "Do you like animals?"
"I love them!" Elyse blurted. She didn’t know why she’d said it, except she remembered pulling a fat green tick off of the terrier back in April.
"Do you like horses?"
"I used to ride," she said, recalling the fall of seventh grade when she went riding every Sunday afternoon for a month.
"Then you shall be perfect to work in the cow shed." The Guru swatted her with the wand of peacock feathers in the direction of a new supervisor.
What was I thinking? she asked herself. Why did I ever admit that I had once rode a horse and was capable of holding a rake? Her first morning in the small barn was spent shoveling manure into wheel barrels that were then taken away. No sooner had one been filled when another would appear. After a week of shoveling cow flops by day, and dressing up like a Hindu goddess at night, Elyse began to burn with jealousy. All around her were young girls and women who were so beautiful and vibrant. It was as though the Guru held them in her hands, shined them up and let them out into the world where they did well no matter where they landed. They were so unabashedly gay. Though Elyse got gussied up every night, she seemed to be ignored. Once she committed to stay, her power to enchant lost all potency. Without a mirror in the cowshed to remind her of who she was, she felt like the sun was malingering behind a cloud.
Every fresh face she saw reminded Elyse of her mother’s nagging voice. "Have a back up plan, don’t drop out of school, what? Did you hit your head? Why don’t you become a beautician, a medical x-ray technician, an assistant mortician. But Elyse would have none of it. She was to be what she willed for as long as she willed it. Yet there she was—suddenly just past being young—only to discover that without her beauty to distinguish her, she had nothing.
She burned as she admitted it to herself that her mother might have been right. She had no safety net and she had fallen. She saw the last stop on the train of her life coming, and all that awaited her was a job in her mother’s gift shop, HAFTA HAVIT. With each cow flop she shoveled she saw herself living south of Boston, in her formally rural town that had been re-zoned into a series of strip malls. From such a shop she’d soon be selling collectibles. Regular cutie pies with big eyes, Lladro figurines from Spain—Cinderellas scrubbing away but with necks so long they were destined to get the guy, or become a soloist, or a model with a Carte Blanche credit card to Barney’s in New York. Elyse winced as she imagined herself forced to sell the Cadillac of all figures—Hummel! She wouldn’t be selling them, really, but helping the indecisive and gainfully unemployed as they auditioned them for their collections. The job also came with the role of facilitator for the Hummel Club, a monthly meeting for serious collectors who came from as far away as Utica, NY, and Naperville, Illinois; a job that also required a careful scrutiny of inventory before and after the meeting because someone in the club—her mother hated to admit—had sticky fingers. Dastardly! For who could possibly dare to steal the Accordion Boy? For lunch Elyse would soon be eating humble pie, and at closing time she’d count the take from the perpetually bored who confessed they’d wanted to be dancers, just like her, or poets, or florists, or movie stars.
Last stop, Elyse. Yet there she was in the Shangra La of the Ashram surrounded by girls who would go on to good schools and excellent careers. Girls who would eclipse her just as the girls in the corps de ballet eclipsed her. She never thought her dancing days would be over; how could they? how dare they when she worked so hard, she asked with the repetitions of the mantra.
*****
Training had been easy. Her legs stretched and she could touch her shins to her ears. She had a back that allowed her to fold in half. Before her injury she could jump as though she were meant to dance in the sky. Turning was easy. Music? She mistook herself for sound. Elyse was so proud she’d dance and show off for anyone who would watch. She’d injured herself when she was trying to catch the attention of the artistic director outside the studio. A constantly perturbed man with a beautiful vision, he couldn’t even remember her name, and he didn’t care when she slipped on spilled water, fell, tore her ACL and shattered her kneecap.
"Where now?" she asked the sacrificial fire outside the temple. She lit a candle. She watched the people around her. They looked as though they had their heart’s desire, as though everything came as a bonus. Cars, homes, jobs that didn’t feel like slavery. They had husbands and wives and kids in the best schools, they went on cruises through paradise on spring break and still they arrived every June to bow at the Guru’s feet.
She sighed and looked down at the hem of her skirt. Fashion dictated all women should wear eyelet that summer, and she felt lucky to have scored a white petit coat on a 7th Avenue sidewalk jumble sale for only a dollar. A dollar! When she stood up straight—holding her shoulders just so—so her collarbones made a perfect top of a T to her frame—she resembled Giselle—the statue of Degas’ Giselle—the heroine of her favorite ballet. At that moment an ash landed above the hemline of eyelet. She jumped up to brush it away, but it was too late—an unmendable hole was burned. Elyse then noticed that her singed eyelet was actually dingy with wear. The piece of cloth had turned a slight shade of grey. In fact, everything was mud and shit and grey. The Guru must have noticed. Shortly after her internship in the cowshed began, Elyse was mysteriously reassigned to the schoolhouse, where she was asked to sit amongst all the ten-year-olds living in the Ashram.
*****
It wasn’t long before Elyse realized the children were as lost as she was. Fifteen years of training out of a twenty-five year life had robbed Elyse of growing up. She’d never really played hopscotch; she worked out jump patterns. Technically she was an assistant, but really she was there as a pupil in disguise. Together, Elyse and the children were subject to the will of Delphine Fussencouch—a Ph.D. candidate not exactly thrilled to be teaching ten-year-olds. Not this summer when so much would be at stake come fall when her dissertation was due for review. Elyse had to be careful not to misbehave because Miss Fussencouch—Dr. Fussencouch to be—was full of Ivy League expectations, and took herself very seriously.
"Sit down!" said Miss Fussencouch. "I said SIT DOWN right now!" Yet all the little boys—now spring loaded from sitting all morning, listening to the drone of the stories of the Maha Barata—continued to run in circles, wielding plastic swords.
"Who’s a good sitter?" Elyse finally said. For some reason the pack of wild boys liked her, so they all swirled like leaves in a tempest, that, finally losing their fury, came to rest around her, holding their feet so their soles touched, and their knees bobbed like butterflies.
"Oh squacketty do, squacketty do," said a sullen and dreamy girl. Her hair was limp and hung as long as her chin. When washed—she looked like her name: Belle, a pretty Belle who Elyse thought should be photographed because at any moment she would change completely and forever. Going to school some morning with a rough and tumble persona only to re-emerge as a beauty in the late afternoon. It happened all the time. When Elyse mentioned this to Belle’s father—a nature photographer by trade—he replied that it would be egotistical to focus on Belle as she looked. Belle, like everyone else was not her body, but a spirit living inside the suit of her soul.
Suit of her soul? What a load of crap, Elyse thought. But actually, Elyse felt like she had been boxed in the nose. What was the point of this Belle having a picture of herself to remember these days? The girl wasn’t particularly happy. In fact, Elyse discovered that she and Belle had something in common. Neither of them liked Miss Fussencouch very much. It started when Miss Fussencouch insisted that she be called Miss Fussencouch at all times. She pointed this out to Elyse in front of the class. Miss Fussencouch was practicing to be a professor someday, not an educator. A professor was light years ahead of an educator in social rank, which meant she was NEVER to be addressed as Delphine, her first true name.
"Pssst." said Belle, as they sat on the floor in close proximity while watching a slide show on the Hindu goddess, Durga.
"What?" said Elyse, risking expulsion for quietly responding out of turn.
"Durga, the goddess of motherhood and protection, rides a magnificent tiger," said Miss Fussencouch, shining a laser-beam pointer at the projection screen.
"Should we address the Goddess as Mrs. Durga?" Belle whispered. "Do you think there’s a Mr. Durga?"
"Would Belle like to share with the class?"
Put on the spot, Belle was speechless and embarrassed for a moment. Then she piped up "Whoa to the moron who messes with Durga’s children," she said.
"Correct," said Miss Fussencouch who turned away from the class to resume her collegiate lecture.
"Miss Fussencouch is a pricklepuss," Belle whispered.
All over the Ashram was a public announcement system that broadcast chanting from the temple. In quieter moments, the chanting wafted its way into the schoolhouse windows. Whenever a set of visiting Brahman priests set up a puja in the temple, a rather fat and unmanageable boy would go to the center of the schoolhouse classroom, stand on his head and chant: "Oh what a goose I am, oh what a goose I am." He had uncanny rhythm and balance, as though he practiced yoga well and often despite his bulging belly. Elyse had no idea what his real name was. He had a Norse name that was garbled into the word "Grub"—a nickname that didn’t seem to bother him in the least. When he stood on his head, which was as often as possible, Grub’s belly popped out over the elastic of his shorts. His favorite top—now a size too small—rode up over his middle. On the tee shirt was a large drawing of a mosquito with the slogan "Minnesota State Bird". His socks were no longer white, but grey, well seasoned after the third day of wear.
As the summer ripened, Grub and Belle came to prefer collecting salamanders in the woods to sitting in the classroom. Soon their bond became a business venture, for it was Grub who would lead Belle’s father to the gems in nature that surrounded the Ashram. Elyse occasionally saw the three of them—the two children bolting ahead while the wild haired photographer, equipment in tow, trailed several paces behind. And Grub, ever the lover of the great out doors, had to be watched at all times during thunderstorms. On one particular morning, Grub dashed outside with the first roll of thunder, and stood under the trees looking up at the sky.
"YOU! You get inside here this instant!" cried Miss Fussencouch.
"I prefer to be with nature," Grub said.
"Go get him," Miss Fussencouch ordered. Just then, lightening struck the tree above Grub, encasing the world in a flash of diamond green.
"I think not," said Elyse. She looked outside, it started to pour.
"Must you always be insubordinate?"
"Are you serious?" said Elyse.
"I have a lesson to complete." Miss Fussencouch bristled, enjoying the social hierarchy that enabled her to demand someone else to do something dangerous or dirty. "Listen, if this were a true school situation, I would have you written up for insubordination."
"Must you always talk like you shit dictionaries?" said Elyse, terrified of lightening and not sure what the insubordination meant.
"OH!" said Delphine. "We have got to talk! I don’t care if the Guru said to let him go, he’s always so disruptive when he returns, I’d rather he not come back at all. If this were a real university, he would not be tolerated."
Yet Grub always tried so hard with his re entry, Elyse noted. He had something to show for his time away. Snails or frogs. Grub darted into the woods singing "shoulda-coulda-woulda shoulda-coulda-woulda, as thunder rumbled and the rain spanked the leaves. He’d dashed away so many times, the Guru advised the teachers in the schoolhouse to let the boy go. Yes, they let him go off into the wilderness, and being as nature made him a good eater, he always came back in time for lunch. On the morning of the storm he returned just as everyone had settled for the ten minutes of meditation required of all preteens before they were dismissed.
"Hey everyone," he said. His voice was like flipping on a light switch. "I have raided a nest full of salamanders. There’s one or two for everyone. Hurry, my pockets are full of them and they are tickling me."
Meditation and class was over. The children found the salamanders sublime—orange with pink spots—tiny writhing lizards by the handful, a perfect subject for Belle’s father when he came to get her.
Then came the day when he arrived late for a talk about the Lord Shiva. It was a particularly hot afternoon, one in which there were rumors floating around that the Guru was going to pay a visit to the school to listen to one of Delphine Fussencouch’s lectures. Grub moved gently and came in the back door as a slide projector flashed different images of Shiva—Shiva dancing—the Nataraj—Shiva in meditation, snakes draped around his neck. Shiva with Uma on his left—trident in hand, snakes coiled up on his head as a turban. Shiva with the river Ganges sprouting out of his head. What everyone failed to notice was that dangling around Grub’s neck was a giant bull snake that hung limply like a jump rope. It was so still that it could have been mistaken for a pretend snake one buys at a hardware store in order to scare mice in a barn. As Delphine Fussencouch continued her lesson, oblivious to Grub’s guest, the boy stretched out his arm in wonder, allowing the reptile to gradually waken and slide off and onto the floor. It was a beautiful creature—dull black and dry and warm on its back where the sun had touched it. So quiet except for the occasional flicking of the tongue, and the place where its sides flexed with its breathing. The snake had been sleeping in the midday sun across the hood of a pick up truck. It had been lulled into a hot meditative silence. When Elyse put her hand down, she brushed against it. She thought it was the arm of a child. But then it wrapped around her wrist. Elyse screamed. An arm does not become a circle and then jolt forward five feet long. Everyone else screamed and stared in disbelief as the snake suddenly slipped through a gap in the floorboards and disappeared.
All except Belle who cried, "Oh you caught her! Good job, Grub!"
"OUT" cried Miss Fussencouch as though it were Elyse who brought in the snake.
"What did I do?" said Elyse.
"OUT! How can I teach when you are the cause of constant interruption?"
"Me? I should think you’d be happy to have me here as your warden."
"Warden? The Guru brought me here to practice teaching."
"Well," said Elyse, trying not to insult Delphine Fussencouch’s sensibilities. "Somehow I think your material might not match the needs of fourth graders."
"You constantly undermine me."
"Me? How?"
"You think I don’t see that smirk on your face? Don’t you know Ashram children are special? They’re gifted and talented." Delphine Fussencouch peered through the crack in the floor where the snake exited. The schoolhouse, slated for demolition, had no basement and actually sat up off the ground on low stilts. Elyse was relieved to see sunlight through the floorboards.
"How will I ever get tenure?" Muttered Miss Fussencouch. "It’s unfair that the Guru sends me here and then gives me you as an assistant."
"Life’s usually unfair," said Elyse, parroting a line she’d often heard her mother say.
"OUT" Miss Fussencouch repeated. "And take your two troublemakers with you." She pointed to Belle and Grub who suddenly looked very small. "You are fired!"
Elyse felt her chin wiggle, a symptom of impending tears. "You can’t fire me. Only the Guru can fire me, or the Seva department.
"OUT" she said pointing to the picnic table in the middle of the yard. She shoved a book in Elyse’s hands. "Take this and read it and make them memorize a stanza."
"A stanza?"
Miss Fussencouch rolled her eyes which sufficed to say—you idiot didn’t you learn anything in school? "A stanza is a four line paragraph."
Elyse looked at the Bhagavad Gita, and then the treeless yard. "In the direct sun? But it’s blazing."
"I don’t care. These kids—AND YOU—have to learn how to endure your karma."
"Fine" said Elyse. "FINE! But let me offer you some advice before I go, Delphine: I’m sure a McDonalds somewhere would be glad to hire you. They are always looking for managers. People with people skills." Elyse turned on her heal then and fled before Delphine Fussencouch could think of something to say.
"Well said!" said Grub when they were out of earshot. "You sure told her off."
A tear ran down Elyse’s face, which she brushed away quickly so the children did not see it.
"You know what I think?" said Belle sitting on a picnic table in the unforgivable brightness. "I think Miss Fussencouch is a fucker."
Elyse sat down, put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands, and looked at the two ostracized children. For a moment they were quiet. The children sat glumly as though they expected Elyse to scold them like everyone else.
"Yes," agreed Grub. "A fucker."*"It’s hot," said Belle. "A FUCKity fuck fuck fucker."
"Enough, you guys, you shouldn’t swear," said Elyse.*"Even if she is?" said Belle.
"A Fucker?" said Grub. He scratched his side with a finger that had been God-knows-where. "Bummer," he said. "I have been trying to catch that old girl for a week now. She sleeps under the bungalow where we’re staying. And there old Miss Fussencouch had to go scare her half to death. Now I’ll never get her back, and how will she get back home to her nest of babies?"
"A snake, Grub, you brought a snake into the classroom. What were you thinking?"
"Don’t you ever listen?" said Grub. "I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be Shiva. Not only is the guy blue, but he always has a snake for a necklace."
"Or a hat," said Belle.
" I just wanted to see if Miss Fussencouch could tell I take her seriously."
"But you didn’t have to bring a snake in the school!" said Elyse.
"Well it’s not like it was a loaded gun."
"True."
"I would never bring a loaded gun. Besides I am pretty sure it’s not a poisonous snake."
"You scared the crap out of me," said Elyse.
"Me too," said Belle. "I thought it was rubber."
Elyse shaded her eyes and looked at her two charges. "Just what am I doing being punished for something I didn’t do?"
Belle and Grub shrugged up and down, embarrassed.
"Off we go," said Elyse, pointing to where swings hung in the distant shade, several paces from the cowshed where she first worked when she arrived. "Quickly, before we are found out." Quietly they crept past the front window of the schoolhouse, in plain sight of Miss Fussencouch who was absorbed in her lesson, or who was scolding someone else, they really couldn’t tell.
"I’m hungry," said Belle when they made it to the swings. A cicada above them began to rub its legs together noisily harmonizing with the chanting Brahman priests.
"Or-eee-o, Or-EEE-o!" the boy sang in unison.
"Or-eee-o, Or-EEE-o!" Elyse chimed in.
"Or-eee-o, Or-EEE-o!" They chanted for better part of an hour, rising and falling on the swings, pretending to be the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.
It became dizzying, like endless poems that made little sense. The heat rising off the grass made Elyse long to nap, to dream, to imagine a life washed clean.
They forgot themselves and sang so loud that the Guru who, unbeknownst to them, was visiting in the cow shed came out. She gazed at them, then passed swiftly. Elyse, high on her swing felt a dizzying wave of surprise when she saw the Guru’s red robe flash in her sight. Then she noticed that the Guru carried an old boot under her arm. One of the very same boots Elyse had worn while mucking out the cowshed. Elyse wondered what happened to the other boot. She felt a pang of longing. If only she could wear the boots now, maybe her feet would take her in the right direction.
Elyse, Belle and Grub dug their heels in the gravel and came to a stop. They were suddenly quiet, as were the cicadas.
"Play on," said the Guru, "play on."
But Elyse couldn’t because much to her astonishment the Guru headed to the schoolhouse door and knocked. Out came the perturbable Miss Fussencouch, who immediately changed her demeanor. The Guru silently handed Delphine Fussencouch the boot, and left as quickly as she came, and Delphine Fussencouch, who stood in the door bewildered, held the boot and watched the Guru go.
The children, sitting in their swings, stayed silent for some time until at last, Belle began to fidget.
"My problem," announced Belle, once the cicadas resumed their song, "is I don’t like reading. It is such a bore."
"I am going to learn when I am ten," said Grub. "My mom’s a child psychologist and she says making kids learn before they are in Former Operational Thought puts pressure on them." He said this as though the statement were a pre-recorded voice over. "I’d like to wait until I am twenty. Of course it’s a real problem when your friends insist on discussing The Hobbit and all you can do is say you saw the movie which is nothing like the book from what I am told; I mean how could it? The book is as fat as a brick."
"My brother was a Hobbit Head," Elyse said. He read that book three times the summer after sixth grade. God he was smart. And me? I'm barely able to read street signs."
"Not true," said Grub. I see how you pay attention to Miss Fussencouch. You must be doing good in college."
"College?" said Elyse, who was surprised. "I dropped out of high school at sixteen in order to dance professionally."
"So?" said Grub.
"So I have two more years of high school left before I could even consider college."
"You do? You could have fooled me," said Grub "Well I mean if you were in college you’d be a brainstorm being as you are certainly in Former Operational Thought and can think about abstract things with ease."
"Oh shut up," said Belle.
"As you can tell, Belle is a child."
Belle punched him. "You know there are more interesting things to do."
"To tell the truth," said Grub, "as soon as I learn to read I’m going to renounce it because my job when I grow up will have little to do with books."
"Oh really," said Elyse, "What are you going to be?"
"An entomologist. A bug expert," said Grub. "I’m going to keep bees, and I am going to perform autopsies on decomposed bodies."
"Gross," said Belle.
"I will know how long a person’s been dead by how fat the bugs eating him are. None of that involves much reading. Seems to me it involves measuring and looking things up."
"And writing things down," said Belle.
"Piece of cake," said Grub.
"If it makes you happy," said Elyse.
"You know what I like about you?" said Belle, who turned to look Elyse over from top to bottom. "You’re not trying to make us something we’re not."
"Yeah, that’s it," said Grub. "I knew there was something about you I liked. I like bugs and that’s okay with you. Too bad we can’t get married some day."
"Why’s that?" said Elyse.
"My mother would never approve of someone much older than me."
Elyse nodded. "That sounds sensible, but why would you want to marry me?"
"Everyone jokes that no one will want me so I anticipate it will be a problem," said Grub. "I think I’ll marry the first person who does not mind my interests. You don’t seem to care so I think you’d be a good choice," he said. "Will you keep me in mind someday when you are shopping around for a husband?"
"I will indeed, Grub," said Elyse. "You’re the first person who has ever proposed to me."
*****
Delphine Fussencouch got the foot. Not a stranger to the idea that symbols often say more than words, when she received the Guru’s boot, caked with dried mud she took it as a sure sign that it was time to leave. She had remained in the stasis of "All But Done" or "All but Dissertation" for over a year, wavering on the brink of being dropped as a doctoral candidate. What she needed most was to quit shouting at ten-year-olds, and just go write her ideas down.
But booted right out with barely a peep or hint that it was coming! Life in the Ashram was like that. Life was like that. One day you’re going to your seva and the next thing you know you are dismissed. Lessons over. Time to go. Pack it up and plan to leave in a week or four days. The same is true with jobs or careers or dancers or fruit. They have shelf life and are programmed to end whether one can accept it or not.
Elyse found Delphine Fussencouch crying silently in the schoolroom when she went back after dark to retrieve a sweatshirt she had left behind when she had been expelled. Delphine Fussencouch had expected to be alone when Elyse caught her.
"Are you all right?" said Elyse.
"Not this very second. Please go. No stay. What should I do next?"
Elyse was surprised that Delphine would ask her for advice considering their mutual contempt.
"I guess get on with my life," said Elyse.
"But that’s the thing, I’ve been stalling. I was hoping to not write a dissertation."
"Don’t you have some moldy university to go back to?"
"My time there is up, too. They wouldn’t renew my teacher’s assistance until I wrote something that put me on the track to graduation."
"So what’s your problem?" said Elyse.
"I don’t know," sniffed Delphine. "What I do have is a father who is eager to have me take over the family mortuary."
Elyse suppressed a smile. "Would you rather have my job? I’ll be selling figurines in my mother’s store in Massachusetts."
"Of course not!" snapped Delphine. "I thought you were going back to the ballet. Some place extraordinary"
Elyse wondered what to say. "I’ve retired."
"I wish I could say I was retired from something."
"You wouldn’t if you were," said Elyse, who didn’t want to talk about it.
"All this time I thought you were some sort of dance goddess, marking time before dashing off to your next fantastic season."
"Would I really still be here if I had that in front of me?"
"Why wouldn’t you be?" said Delphine.
Elyse looked at Delphine and wondered if she would ever become less acidic. It was painful to be near her, for she instinctively knew what small thing to say in order for the other person to close up and turn away. Yet this astringency didn’t prevent Elyse from talking—from reaching out.
"To tell the truth, I don’t know where I am headed, either. I wish I had a dissertation to finish—anything that put me on the road to somewhere."
Delphine nodded. "What would you do if you could do anything?"
Elyse sat back and smelled the distant sea in the air. "I guess I’d get to be the person who carried the knowledge for a little while."
"Then you should ask the Guru to make you wise."
"It’s a long way to go," said Elyse, pondering the fact that in complete exhaustion from over training, she had dropped out high school to prevent them from failing her in all her classes. All those incompletes and red Fs now required explaining, though at the time she had good enough cause, having been cast in Sheherazad.
"So maybe you’re a fallow field waiting to be turned over," said Delphine.
"Maybe I’ll just ask for a slice of the moon," said Elyse.
"You might consider being less sarcastic when someone compliments you," said Delphine. "I mean, how can you be open to receiving anything when you act like a jerk all the time?"
Me a jerk? Elyse wondered if Delphine was projecting and decided to say nothing.
"I mean, you get this vacant look on your face, are you so out of it that you don’t know what the Guru does? Don’t look dumb, now, it doesn’t become you. She’s the boatman."
"Okay?" said Elyse.
The Guru’s shoes, the very dust itself is the boat in which we ride."
Delphine picked up the pink boot. A clod of dirt broke off. "Fool," she said. "The thing is we don’t always see it that way, do we?" She handed Elyse the dirt. "Here, a treasure."
"How would I ever begin, though?" said Elsye.
"By putting one foot ahead of the other and seeing where you go," said Delphine.
******
Elyse forgot about the Guru’s other boot. Forgot everything about wishes and dreams as she wrapped up in an emerald sari that kept her dancers’ legs closed. All was forgotten as she made her way towards the guru in a long line that was five-people wide—all of whom bore gifts and money for unfulfilled wishes. Her heart pounded wildly, and the perfumed oil she wore released its scent with the heat that rose off her chest. It was all rather delicious. She closed her eyes as she bowed before the Guru letting the wand of peacock feathers stroke her back. When she finally sat up, opening her eyes the world looked to be a shade of watery blue. In the Guru’s lap sat the other pink boot. Ancient, its patent leather—once so gloriously shiny that it drew eyes in the streets of London—was now cracking. The pink boot was caked with dried mud. The Guru said nothing as she handed it to Elyse.
"You’re giving me the other boot?" she said in astonishment. "Does that mean it’s time for me to leave?"
"In a few days," said the Guru who swatted her face as if to wipe it clean.
For some reason, Elyse got up half-ecstatic and half-sad, because sad, after all, was what she knew how to be most.
*****
Elyse and Delphine’s last day on the Ashram coincided. That afternoon Elyse was given the task of herding the children to the out-door pavilion to see their Guru. She was supposed to take them there and leave, not to go in and sit with the Guru, which is what she really wanted. There would be no opportunity to express all the things Elyse longed to say. The children baa-baa-ed in electric excitement as Elyse coaxed them to sit at the feet of the Guru, who as usual, looked like a poppy.
Elyse couldn’t help herself. She gawked. The Guru was dressed in shades so vibrant—her hair was so jet black—that it seemed like she was plugged in. Or that she had got hold of and kept lightening bolts in her pocket. The children lit up in front of her. As she watched them transform, Elyse spied a box of toys beside the Guru. She was suddenly filled with envy. She wanted an action figure with a space pistol, a purse full of make up, a stuffed animal—maybe the cute little badger—no—the unicorn—so beautiful pure and white. Elyse bit her lip. She wanted a toy—she wanted a bracelet—some token to remind her of the willies she got whenever the Guru passed by. Anything to remind her that sometime a boon was to follow her disaster.
The last of the bleating children passed by her, but she was so absorbed looking at the toys she hardly noticed Delphine Fussencouch.
"You have to go now," said Professor Delphine Fussencouch to be. "This is really only for the children." Delphine’s form filled the door, blocking Elyse’s view of the Guru. Elyse’s heart broke as Delphine, the almost friend, became Miss Fussencouch, a woman with a brilliant future. Miss Fussencouch closed the gate to shut Elyse out and turned away taking her place amongst the children, a haughty smile on her face. Though shoed off, Elyse quietly came back and peered through the lattice that framed the door, just in time to see the children collect their toys.
The toys were regular—having cost only about five dollars each. They were equal all except for one extraordinary doll. The doll was huge and obviously very expensive. It wore an embroidered apron, and under it poked eyelet so fresh it puffed out like a carnation. The doll had a tiny back-pack full of even tinier books, and green eyes that closed when she was laid down. Over its shoulders was a magenta cloak trimmed in white fur, and on its feet were silver skates. The more Elyse looked at the doll, the more it seemed to grow in detail. That morning, the doll had been brought to the Ashram and given to the Guru by a famous movie star, and now all the girls gawked in fascination as they walked by it. They lingered, paying more attention to the object than to the Guru. None of them dare touch it, it was so fancy.
Except for Belle who sat on her heels, halfway back in the room. Her mouth hung slack as she watched. She didn’t rush up to collect her toy. She seemed bored. After awhile her foot started jiggling, and she began looking around, wondering when it would be time to leave.The Guru stopped time. She motioned Belle forward. Belle crawled up on her hands and knees. Elyse couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she saw the Guru’s eyes loom wide as they talked. Belle was shruggy of shoulder, dispassionate, but then became attentive. Elyse watched as the sullen girl began to shine before the master. Seeing this erased Elyse’s doubts about the Guru. Some kind of alchemy was going on, the Guru shining people when they weren’t looking. Maybe, thought Elyse. Maybe someday when I least expect it I’ll shine.
The Guru was holding both the magnificent doll and Belle at the same time. Even so, Belle started to slip away. She began to bow, but the master set her up right and plopped the doll into the girl’s arms. Belle’s face lit up seeing its perfection, then she offered it back. The Guru leaned forward in her chair and then pressed the doll into Belle’s arms for keeps. Belle’s eyes were full of astonishment. She then bowed and got up to walk away, her mouth an O of surprise.
The other girls clicked their tongues jealously. Elyse could hear them muttering to each other how they deserved the doll more than Belle. But where did the Guru place the doll but in the arms of what seemed like the least worthy girl.
Belle turned to look back. The master shone, and Belle dropped down on her knees hugging her doll. Her slim body seemed to fold around the doll as the girl touched her forehead to the floor, for the first time placing her heart over her head.
*****
Elyse wasn’t sure when the bells of Magdalen Tower stopped ringing. Maybe it was when another crew passed by, its oars piercing the reflection on the surface of the water. The blue dome shimmered and danced as the other boat slid by. There were ripples of blue and ripples of green and somewhere above in space the Guru was conducting the Universe, thought Elyse. Her spell had been broken. How glad she was she’d not been mistaken for a child. How odd it was that her scholar’s hood, trimmed in ermine, resembled the cape on that doll she saw briefly once long ago. Dreaming spires, thought Elyse. She began to paddle again, her hands stiff around the oars. In that town of colleges was the slice of moon. On that very day, Elyse wanted to drop down on her knees as if she’d been the one given the doll. Drop down on her knees in surprise as she skillfully rowed back to the dock.
"There will be boons" Elyse remembered the Guru saying. "Misfortune always hides a boon."
Much to her surprise, that morning Elyse discovered she’d aced several exams on economics. There on the step of the exam school, tacked to the door, was her name with the fact that she had scored a First rather than a perfectly honorable Second. The news was followed by luncheon where the woman who sat to her right was pale faced over the news that she had scored a Third. There was no use in pride in that moment for Elyse felt no glee. Gloating over her success in the face of someone who had so obviously failed was nauseating, so she turned the conversation to dinosaurs, the bird-boned creatures found in Wyoming, simply to pass the time—to steal the poison of the hour.
Elyse had acquired her will to study only five years before. On the first day at the university it came over her like a spell—a force so strong she’d held herself captive for years with no idea that she would one day find herself on the other side of the Atlantic, inside a gilded college gate looking out, rather than as a tourist looking in. She studied for studies’ sake, filling all the hours of the day until she often found herself stupid with knowledge by bed time. But knowledge for what? She wondered where the spell would leave her when it lifted. The greasy state university back home—with its cracking infrastructure and perennial budget cuts—had been replaced by trimmed gardens framed by gothic courtyards. Door knobs were pleasant to touch in this place—there was no turning of knobs while holding a paper towel for fear of catching the latest virus. The doors so pleasant to open were five hundred years old and stood fifteen feet tall. Turn them, touch them and they will open, majestic on ancient hinges. The kegerator binge parties of home were replaced by well-mannered trips to pubs. When she came up for air from the library stacks, or from the Xeroxed papers and notes in shorthand from lectures—when she actually drew breath acknowledging the day and where she found herself, she knew that she had unwittingly joined the aristocracy of the plucky, despite the fact that her tutor, Professor Max, was calling her bluff, scaring her out of her own ideas. Her glasses slid down her nose as Tutor Max clipped on in his well-trained English.
"Yes, but what about Degas’ dancers?" he said, obviously detesting the paintings. "Why do you see them as commentary on the economic contributions of women? How could you possibly shape a thesis on that proposal? Frankly, I find your ideas a little fluffy."
"Fluffy?" she said. She cleared her throat. "Fluffy is big business. The paintings are about work," said Elyse. "They’re not decorative at all. Look at the exhaustion," she said tapping a museum catalog from the Louvre. "Look at how the girls sleep as they await their auditions, or call backs, or what have you. Look at the anxiety on their mother’s faces as they knit to pass the time."
"All affectation, in my opinion. They’re trite—a visual cliche, really."
"They seem that way, now. But Degas was recording the economic anxiety of their time. These dancers are working girls. Daughters of butchers and lorry men, not trust-fund cases. A place in the corps of the Paris Opera put money in the family pot—so these auditions were crucial—the future hinged on the outcome."
Professor Max raised an eyebrow, whipped off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose as though he were in pain. "I still don’t know that you can stretch this topic for a D Phil."
She paused. She was finishing an MA—a lesser degree. They were highly selective about whom they chose to stay on.
"D Phil?" she said. "This is an extra topic for the MA."
"That I’d like to have fit the D Phil. You really need to narrow down your topic as soon as possible. Carry on."
Elyse continued. "If dancers in Belle Epoch didn’t move on to find a place teaching or costuming after they were no longer useful for the stage, they often became prostitutes."
"What proof do you have?"
"It says so here."
"And what proof does Professor, yes, Professor Shackleton have?"
Elyse had trained herself not to shrug. Instead her eyes widened for a moment.
"See? I caught you up," he said smugly.
"Obviously these aren’t the daughters of today" said Elyse. None of them came from rich families, nor were they trained and coached like Olympic athletes. These are emotionally exhausted women."
"Girls," he corrected.
"Whatever, my point is, where do you think Mimi in La Bohem worked before she stayed up in her garret stitching flowers?"
Professor Max poured himself a glass of port.
"She was a flower, herself," said Elyse. "And then she was relegated to the margins."
"This is all hearsay," he said. "How do you make the assumption that art—over exposed art, at that—is going to reflect empirical statistics?"
She sighed. "You yourself said that our man Ruskin said we study a culture by the three things left behind: it’s literature, art and architecture."
"What about public record?"
"I’ll have to go to the Biblioteque National and start digging."
"Well, outline it, then" he said. "Make your point and back it up. I suppose we could send you abroad between terms. In the mean time, read Shackleton’s notes, check his sources and see if they sort out. Then draw your own conclusions." He downed his port then checked the clock.
"The devil is in the details," he said. Then he leaned forward as if he were a co-conspirator. "This time, spell check and proof the outline you bring back." he said, "You ought to have the basic understandings of the English language by the time you’re a D Phil candidate. In fact we almost let you go over the issue."
"Yes, I’m sure you are right," she said.
He nodded and she was dismissed.
The bells of Magdalen Tower had been ringing for over an hour by the time the tutorial ended. The official topic was the economic contributions of women during the Industrial Revolution. After decades of exhaustive statistics that focussed on the male condition, under the guise of the "human condition", women professors began to put a price tag on the work of women. Elyse picked up on the thread, choosing to focus on conditions in the Victorian age.
The ringing, the statistics, filled her head and reverberated like chanting. It had been an exhausting day. She swore that if she blinked she might find herself transported to Massachusetts where she’d find last year’s beater car parked somewhere in a darkened lot. On the side of the car, a vandal had spray painted the words: "Shake well before using." If she blinked she might be getting in, slamming a door filled with Bondo anti-rust compound, and driving home. But she didn’t blink, she walked on a gravel path with her Professor Max, barely able to keep his pace despite his seventy years. When she saw him ride off on his bicycle, Elyse wandered across High Street and then along mediaeval back streets to a meadow full of wandering cows. The river Isis was beyond, hidden from plain sight by rushes. When she climbed the arch of a bridge that led to the college boathouses she paused to look down at the river. It wound around the town like a giant, but docile, mud-black snake. Moving on she counted six boathouses until she found the house that wore her college crest like a crown. Two griffins sitting back to back, a ticket, really, that told her come on in, you belong—you tricked them into keeping you despite the fact that you can’t spell.
The boathouse, of all places, reminded her of her unexpected entitlement. In that house, clear of worldly clutter, Elyse was given the choice of any boat that she would like to row. She stashed her books and robe in an ancient shell then chose a single crew and walked it out to the dock. She plopped it in the water returned for two oars and then was stopped by a light breeze. A chill rose up her back where the sweat had streamed down her spine. The empty punts lined up along the dock looked like giant slippers.
"My Guru’s shoes," she muttered.
All the boats for her college were red. Red like the Guru’s robes and shoes. Elyse got in her boat and pushed away from the dock. Somewhere down the stream where the river grows narrow and loops back upon its self, Elyse heard the pluck and then drone of a sitar. It came from beyond the rushes where she could not see, and blended with the pealing of the ringing bells. She stopped paddling and let the stillness of the river push the crew. Who played the sitar, she wondered. Another student? Someone teaching an Eastern music seminar? A tourist or gypsy passing through? The collision of sound was magnificent.
Entitlement. Professor Max had an anticlimactic way to tell her that she would be moving on to a Doctorate. Yet a state of entitlement was where she found herself. The boat was so new in the water-carved riverbanks. Her clothing, altered, her mind transformed by inhaling the thoughts of others and corrupting them into something different but uniquely her own. If she blinked she could almost see herself walking barefoot on lawns that were meant only for Fellows. Sometimes she dreamt herself there—barefoot and transparent. Of all the subtle hierarchies, strangers walking on certain college lawns disturbed her the most because they were fertilized with the ashes of dead scholars—to find herself in forbidden territory made her wake with a start. To be a scholar was something that seemed out of reach. What she was doing, actually, was playing. There was nothing scholarly about any of it. It all was a form of yoga; the intense focus eventually setting her free. Yet how strange it was—she was on to a Doctorate even though she had dropped out of high school—skipping college in her formative years. She blinked at that moment sitting in her crew drifting on the river. The bells rang, the sitar was struck, and the memory of living in an Indian Ashram flooded her thoughts, sweeping her back in time.
Part Two
What came to mind first was the incense. It was not an ordinary incense but a concoction mixed by the great Swami—the Master—or the Guru, because it was said that She and God lived in the same body as One. Elyse didn’t know if she could believe all the talk. What she did know was that she trembled when the Guru was nearby.
Like all objects the Master touched, the incense was heavenly. When burned it blew out the Ashram gates and drifted all over the world. Ashram means "without the fatigue of worldliness," and Elyse had fled there when she thought her life was ending. The gates of the Ashram opened up like arms, and the incense made her feel as though she’d come home. She’d close her eyes to the thin smoke wafting around her, feeling as though the Guru were personally holding her in her silk-wrapped arms.
Another pluck and drone of the sitar and Elyse completely forgot about the oars in her hands. She forgot about her books and robe. Firsts and Seconds dissolved, and the memory of Degas disappeared along with everything Max had said to her only an hour before. Instead, she set her eyes on the turquoise dome reflected in the water, and shuddered with delight as incense from somewhere else came wafting up the river.
Unburned, the incense, called dhoop, was a sticky resin that held together grains of rice, sacred grass, seeds, floral essences, tree bark, dried apricots, cow dung, gold leaf, mud of the Ganges, the dust from the Guru’s shoes, a certain granola from France, ashes from sacred fires, and other unknown ingredients. Once looking in a bin full of incense Elyse discovered a small tin clown—a Cracker Jack prize covered in the amber resin. Why a toy? A cheap toy? She wondered. Why not?
Where was the plucked instrument? How in the devil could the entirely unique scent of dhoop make its way past Folly Bridge? Elyse remembered how the smell made her a bit crazy. Where did it come from? Was it in last year’s fallen leaves, still holding to the rushes, the mud from the Isis, or in the particular smell of English mold, or maybe its cure—a chemical bought from a grocery store mixed with water and used to swab down the stone walkways of the college. As she pierced the surface of the water with an oar, a gust blew about her, returning her to the Ashram.
*****
Elyse was young—she did not look twenty-five—but she was obviously too old to pass as a teen. This secretly infuriated her because she never thought that she would age. Dancers were supposed to be young, and Elyse who was the least talented of the very best, worked inordinately hard to appear fleet of foot and ageless. Her days were spent in the scrutiny of her own form in mirrored walls. But as she watched her feet spring through intricate allegros she failed to notice how something had set in her face. She'd grown hard while girls around her shone with a supple innocence she could no longer fake.
Elyse had always been mistaken for someone younger. The years of training had sculpted her body to appear as though she was at the beginning of adolescence. One night after she had gone to the Ashram to stay, the Guru called all the young girls forward. Elyse naturally followed and felt at ease as the collective sigh and hush of the crowd rose around her. The Guru had a present for them. After each girl bowed at the feet of the Master she was given a japa mala—a string of beads delicately linked with golden wires. The mala was used to still the chatter of the mind by counting the infinite names of Shiva. Elyse waited in anticipation. One girl got pearls, another a delicate string of tiger’s eye, yet another a string of rudraksha beads—beads that were called "the tears of Shiva" and grew on a rare tree in Nepal. All were so exquisite and Elyse glanced at her naked arms—hoping the Guru would clasp a mala of coral and pearls around her wrist. Yes. Coral and pearls, that’s the one she saw sitting next to the Guru, and that’s the one she decided she wanted.
She was the last of the young girls to bow, and when she sat up from her Guru’s feet in patient expectation, the Guru had nothing for her. All Elyse could do was get up and walk away hoping no one would catch the tears that were starting to spill down her face.
The next night when all the girls were called forward Elyse went first. She bowed and sat up. The Guru loomed before her, her legs tucked under a tent of red silk, her eyes great saucers, and her cheeks dimpled by an all-knowing grin. In the Guru’s hand was a wand of peacock feathers that she used to stroke Elyse in the face. For that eternal moment Elyse forgot why she was there—forgot all things she could possibly want. The Guru gave her a swat, a gentle reminder to move along. When she took her seat along the sidelines she noticed that all the younger girls who came after her were given saris in silk and brocade. The next day the girls were to be dressed up like dolls to participate in an elaborate puja. The puja was a ritual involving chanting and offerings to invoke the blessings of celestial and earthly deities.Instead, the next day Elyse sat on the temple floor with the older women. As the parade of young beauties offered camphor, dhoop, ghee, and flowers to the temple deity, it dawned on Elyse that she had become invisible. Her beauty had disappeared in the wake of fairer girls. Elyse closed her eyes and burned as if she’d swallowed a wasp’s nest. As it had become in the corps of the ballet, so it was in God’s house.
Though she wasn’t getting attention outwardly, in meditation she went places. She saw temples in her mind, and once saw the Goddess Laxshmi open up her hands and rain down pearls on the temple floor. The falling pearls spanked the white marble and ricocheted playfully before coming to rest by piling softly in her lap. Her head, she was certain, had been filled with gems. Opened right up from the top and filled like a well-placed rain barrel. Unstruck sounds reverberated through her head with melodies tapped out by the smooth cool of pink coral.
It was odd to see Laxshmi—for Laxshmi was the bestower of boons and wealth. Odd because whenever Elyse opened her eyes on the world, all she ever saw were the things she didn’t have. Closing her eyes was her only way to escape the absence.
The next evening in meditation she noticed that within her mind she was sitting on the surface of an ocean. Her legs were crossed, heels hooked on top of each knee, and for some reason this posture kept her from sinking. Strangely enough, her right knee did not ache, nor was there fire in the scar from the two-hundred stitches that zagged over the knee from surgery three years before. The sea where she floated was made of churned milk and was topped with cut diamonds. As Elyse drew breath the gems shushed beneath her as though cooled by the tide. In this place in her head, she saw herself scooping the diamonds beside her as though they were a gritty sand. Within the handfuls were pearls that melted into the milk when they were flung away again. Elyse knew that if she could fill her pockets from this place, she could catch a bus down to New York. Somewhere around Mid-town and Sixth she could sell them. If she only had the where-with-all to fill her pockets. Somehow, though, the grit of New York disappeared as small white caps broke around her. It wasn’t money that she wanted, not when she had landed in this place, into the ocean of Laxshmi’s milk.
The temple bell sounded. She awoke dazed and wandered out onto the moon-lit lawn. For the first time since she had arrived she was distracted from the chatter of beautiful girls with their variations of japa malas dangling from their hands. Elyse wandered away to find the Master sitting perfectly still in a courtyard, clad in a robe the color of a poppy. The moment Elyse approached, the Master’s gaze pierced something within her causing her to drop on her knees and bow. For what seemed like an evening, people came and went around her, until at last, common sense told Elyse to move off her bad knee. When she sat up she overheard the Master saying "There will be boons—misfortune always hides a boon."
*****
Everyday Elyse wanted to escape into the sea of milk within her mind and stay there, but what she needed to do was try to make sense of her life. What was Laxshmi doing in her head when her contract was up and career over? She was ashamed. The ballet company had let her go. Fifteen years of training, fifteen years of anticipation and longing, and all she had to show for it was two seasons in the corps, and an injury fatal to her career.
Elyse’s last performance was with the company corps on a stage floating on an Ashram lake. It was a mystery who booked the performance. It might have seemed like another stop, just another gig amongst many. But Elyse chose to stay behind to separate herself from the other dancers. Retirement for Elyse meant going solo without ever dancing solo. Thankfully, her last performance was an adagio with nothing quick to jar her knees or refracture her feet. She sighed. She felt pretty good, but not good enough to leap.
The dance company used up jumpers and turned them out broken. For that final time on stage she stepped into the turn sequence and spun dervish like—one quick flourish that gathered applause—five revolutions in a pique turn before sticking it in time to the orchestral big-bang ending. Her super turn was as close to a solo as she ever got. Applause erupted from the thousands of devotees sitting on the lakeside hill. The clapping became a thunder, then rhythm that turned into spontaneous chanting. Tears rolled down Elyse’s face. There were no curtains to close that would hide them, just the wide open sky full of stars above.
Elyse could no longer bear the auditions, the competitive classes that turned into contests. She was obsolete at twenty five and unable to out jump the upstarts that flooded the city every summer. After that last performance she knew that she’d cry all night, so she arranged to stay behind while everyone else got back on the bus for New York City. What stung the most was that while her contract was left un-renewed, three of her peers had been plucked from the corps to become soloists in the next season. There was no way that she could get on the bus with her merry peers. The rehearsal director took pleasure in these moments when the corps was divided into the chosen and the rejected. How could she possibly ride on the bus, her throat in her mouth? Shake well before using, she thought.
Arranging a stay in the Ashram was a bit like checking into a hotel. She got in line with a bus-load of devotees who had just arrived from Israel. She paid for a two-day stay and then watched as her former peers got on the bus—those with the resources to have been coached like Olympic athletes—those who had been surgically altered to enhance their beauty. Melinda with her size three micro waist and pelvis like a spoon, promoted to soloist for her loveliness alone. Behind the outrageously happy came the six other corps members who had been let go. Quietly they brought up the rear and filed to the back of the bus. Watching the clipped and groomed—those born with the biological lottery of the right bone structure and weight—Elyse realized that it had been a no-contest all along.
"Goodbye my life," she said as the bus drove away.
Rather than going to the dormitory where all the single women slept in what was formerly a ballroom, she stayed up all night, sitting quietly in a flower garden. When the sky lightened and birds began their racket, she heard the drums and bells of the temple, calling early risers to prayer. She followed the sound, forgetting the night before, and before she knew it she had walked into the vigorous Ashram schedule without a second thought.
Two days passed and she was back in line at the accommodation desk arranging to stay for a week. And two days after that she was wondering how she could stay longer. She calculated her money: She had six hundred and twenty dollars, and a sublet apartment in New York that she could give up. She shared the "loft" with its brown carpets and three front windows looking over Sixth Avenue with four other people. It was called a loft because it had once been an open floor that had been sub divided by sheet-rock, two-by-fours, and office dividers that had been pulled from a dumpster on a Madison Avenue loading dock. The loft now consisted of four living cubicles. Between the two sets of cubes was a very dark living room, a kitchenette, and a cubicle bathroom. At the front of the loft was one window, where parked a manic roommate who was always pounding on a Smith Corona typewriter.
It wasn’t like she actually lived in the loft, it was more like she camped there between gigs. In February she came home from the road to find someone’s cousin’s drunken friend in her bed. He was passed out and snoring away at two in the afternoon. A plugged-in amplifier and two Fender guitars took up most of the floor. She camped on the sofa and left again long before the guest roused and rejoined the living. In April she came home to a silver Great Dane stretched out on her side of the bed and a rather dirty Jack Russell terrier curled up on the pillow. In its mouth was a green tennis ball, wet with spit. It growled when she set down her suitcase. By the moans coming from the cubicle that looked over Sixth Avenue—the only room to actually have a door—Elyse guessed that the dogs belonged to a mysterious non-roommate. She woke the Dane and pushed him so that his legs flipped over the side of the bed leaving him in an upright position. Ushering them out of her space, she knew full well that her room, bed, pillow and curtain used for a door, was rented with the agreement that an occasional squatter would be welcome so long as she was on the road. She smugly got into a bed that smelled of wet dog and closed her eyes. But the dogs were not easily evicted—as she drifted off to sleep they quietly parted the curtains and crept back up on the bed. When she awoke the next morning she rolled over to find the terrier sharing her pillow, the ball still clamped in its mouth.
Why call that cubicle home, she asked herself. Why go back at all when she was bound to find someone in her bed. And why return if going there would remind her that she had no company dance class to attend? Oh, she could go up town and take an open class at the New York City Ballet, but she would be out fifteen dollars, every time. She’d also be out with her pride—company class was always mandatory. How could she pay for something she had formerly been paid to do? Why go anywhere at all when she could stay in the Ashram and chase after the Guru who was able to bestow the gift of forgetfulness?
Elyse sublet her sublet over the phone, filed for unemployment, wrote out her rent check to stay in the Ashram, and commenced to try and forget the last ten years.
But she couldn’t really. Something had changed and she was beginning to stew. In this enchanted place of clipped gardens and iridescent tiles her beauty quit working. It used to be that she’d walk into a room and all attention would shift her way. Though she took what she thought of as her rightful place among the fresh and unscathed, along side those with new breasts and barely the curves of widening hips, she always found herself separated or left behind the group. Then came the night she was given a seva assignment. Seva means "selfless service" and anyone who stayed would be given a job that would take up a full work-day. Once again, Elyse stood in line with all the other young girls. One girl with thick dark curls became the Guru’s assistant; another with a blond braid like a rope down her back would take away all the gifts the devotees brought to the Guru. A girl from India with thick eyelashes would iron saris and linens, and shine the silver like a house girl. And still another would type the Guru’s letters, while her twin sister would go to the temple to polish the marble steps in front of the statue of the Guru’s Guru’s Guru. Elyse stood in anticipation wondering where she would be sent.
"So!’ said the Guru. "Do you like animals?"
"I love them!" Elyse blurted. She didn’t know why she’d said it, except she remembered pulling a fat green tick off of the terrier back in April.
"Do you like horses?"
"I used to ride," she said, recalling the fall of seventh grade when she went riding every Sunday afternoon for a month.
"Then you shall be perfect to work in the cow shed." The Guru swatted her with the wand of peacock feathers in the direction of a new supervisor.
What was I thinking? she asked herself. Why did I ever admit that I had once rode a horse and was capable of holding a rake? Her first morning in the small barn was spent shoveling manure into wheel barrels that were then taken away. No sooner had one been filled when another would appear. After a week of shoveling cow flops by day, and dressing up like a Hindu goddess at night, Elyse began to burn with jealousy. All around her were young girls and women who were so beautiful and vibrant. It was as though the Guru held them in her hands, shined them up and let them out into the world where they did well no matter where they landed. They were so unabashedly gay. Though Elyse got gussied up every night, she seemed to be ignored. Once she committed to stay, her power to enchant lost all potency. Without a mirror in the cowshed to remind her of who she was, she felt like the sun was malingering behind a cloud.
Every fresh face she saw reminded Elyse of her mother’s nagging voice. "Have a back up plan, don’t drop out of school, what? Did you hit your head? Why don’t you become a beautician, a medical x-ray technician, an assistant mortician. But Elyse would have none of it. She was to be what she willed for as long as she willed it. Yet there she was—suddenly just past being young—only to discover that without her beauty to distinguish her, she had nothing.
She burned as she admitted it to herself that her mother might have been right. She had no safety net and she had fallen. She saw the last stop on the train of her life coming, and all that awaited her was a job in her mother’s gift shop, HAFTA HAVIT. With each cow flop she shoveled she saw herself living south of Boston, in her formally rural town that had been re-zoned into a series of strip malls. From such a shop she’d soon be selling collectibles. Regular cutie pies with big eyes, Lladro figurines from Spain—Cinderellas scrubbing away but with necks so long they were destined to get the guy, or become a soloist, or a model with a Carte Blanche credit card to Barney’s in New York. Elyse winced as she imagined herself forced to sell the Cadillac of all figures—Hummel! She wouldn’t be selling them, really, but helping the indecisive and gainfully unemployed as they auditioned them for their collections. The job also came with the role of facilitator for the Hummel Club, a monthly meeting for serious collectors who came from as far away as Utica, NY, and Naperville, Illinois; a job that also required a careful scrutiny of inventory before and after the meeting because someone in the club—her mother hated to admit—had sticky fingers. Dastardly! For who could possibly dare to steal the Accordion Boy? For lunch Elyse would soon be eating humble pie, and at closing time she’d count the take from the perpetually bored who confessed they’d wanted to be dancers, just like her, or poets, or florists, or movie stars.
Last stop, Elyse. Yet there she was in the Shangra La of the Ashram surrounded by girls who would go on to good schools and excellent careers. Girls who would eclipse her just as the girls in the corps de ballet eclipsed her. She never thought her dancing days would be over; how could they? how dare they when she worked so hard, she asked with the repetitions of the mantra.
*****
Training had been easy. Her legs stretched and she could touch her shins to her ears. She had a back that allowed her to fold in half. Before her injury she could jump as though she were meant to dance in the sky. Turning was easy. Music? She mistook herself for sound. Elyse was so proud she’d dance and show off for anyone who would watch. She’d injured herself when she was trying to catch the attention of the artistic director outside the studio. A constantly perturbed man with a beautiful vision, he couldn’t even remember her name, and he didn’t care when she slipped on spilled water, fell, tore her ACL and shattered her kneecap.
"Where now?" she asked the sacrificial fire outside the temple. She lit a candle. She watched the people around her. They looked as though they had their heart’s desire, as though everything came as a bonus. Cars, homes, jobs that didn’t feel like slavery. They had husbands and wives and kids in the best schools, they went on cruises through paradise on spring break and still they arrived every June to bow at the Guru’s feet.
She sighed and looked down at the hem of her skirt. Fashion dictated all women should wear eyelet that summer, and she felt lucky to have scored a white petit coat on a 7th Avenue sidewalk jumble sale for only a dollar. A dollar! When she stood up straight—holding her shoulders just so—so her collarbones made a perfect top of a T to her frame—she resembled Giselle—the statue of Degas’ Giselle—the heroine of her favorite ballet. At that moment an ash landed above the hemline of eyelet. She jumped up to brush it away, but it was too late—an unmendable hole was burned. Elyse then noticed that her singed eyelet was actually dingy with wear. The piece of cloth had turned a slight shade of grey. In fact, everything was mud and shit and grey. The Guru must have noticed. Shortly after her internship in the cowshed began, Elyse was mysteriously reassigned to the schoolhouse, where she was asked to sit amongst all the ten-year-olds living in the Ashram.
*****
It wasn’t long before Elyse realized the children were as lost as she was. Fifteen years of training out of a twenty-five year life had robbed Elyse of growing up. She’d never really played hopscotch; she worked out jump patterns. Technically she was an assistant, but really she was there as a pupil in disguise. Together, Elyse and the children were subject to the will of Delphine Fussencouch—a Ph.D. candidate not exactly thrilled to be teaching ten-year-olds. Not this summer when so much would be at stake come fall when her dissertation was due for review. Elyse had to be careful not to misbehave because Miss Fussencouch—Dr. Fussencouch to be—was full of Ivy League expectations, and took herself very seriously.
"Sit down!" said Miss Fussencouch. "I said SIT DOWN right now!" Yet all the little boys—now spring loaded from sitting all morning, listening to the drone of the stories of the Maha Barata—continued to run in circles, wielding plastic swords.
"Who’s a good sitter?" Elyse finally said. For some reason the pack of wild boys liked her, so they all swirled like leaves in a tempest, that, finally losing their fury, came to rest around her, holding their feet so their soles touched, and their knees bobbed like butterflies.
"Oh squacketty do, squacketty do," said a sullen and dreamy girl. Her hair was limp and hung as long as her chin. When washed—she looked like her name: Belle, a pretty Belle who Elyse thought should be photographed because at any moment she would change completely and forever. Going to school some morning with a rough and tumble persona only to re-emerge as a beauty in the late afternoon. It happened all the time. When Elyse mentioned this to Belle’s father—a nature photographer by trade—he replied that it would be egotistical to focus on Belle as she looked. Belle, like everyone else was not her body, but a spirit living inside the suit of her soul.
Suit of her soul? What a load of crap, Elyse thought. But actually, Elyse felt like she had been boxed in the nose. What was the point of this Belle having a picture of herself to remember these days? The girl wasn’t particularly happy. In fact, Elyse discovered that she and Belle had something in common. Neither of them liked Miss Fussencouch very much. It started when Miss Fussencouch insisted that she be called Miss Fussencouch at all times. She pointed this out to Elyse in front of the class. Miss Fussencouch was practicing to be a professor someday, not an educator. A professor was light years ahead of an educator in social rank, which meant she was NEVER to be addressed as Delphine, her first true name.
"Pssst." said Belle, as they sat on the floor in close proximity while watching a slide show on the Hindu goddess, Durga.
"What?" said Elyse, risking expulsion for quietly responding out of turn.
"Durga, the goddess of motherhood and protection, rides a magnificent tiger," said Miss Fussencouch, shining a laser-beam pointer at the projection screen.
"Should we address the Goddess as Mrs. Durga?" Belle whispered. "Do you think there’s a Mr. Durga?"
"Would Belle like to share with the class?"
Put on the spot, Belle was speechless and embarrassed for a moment. Then she piped up "Whoa to the moron who messes with Durga’s children," she said.
"Correct," said Miss Fussencouch who turned away from the class to resume her collegiate lecture.
"Miss Fussencouch is a pricklepuss," Belle whispered.
All over the Ashram was a public announcement system that broadcast chanting from the temple. In quieter moments, the chanting wafted its way into the schoolhouse windows. Whenever a set of visiting Brahman priests set up a puja in the temple, a rather fat and unmanageable boy would go to the center of the schoolhouse classroom, stand on his head and chant: "Oh what a goose I am, oh what a goose I am." He had uncanny rhythm and balance, as though he practiced yoga well and often despite his bulging belly. Elyse had no idea what his real name was. He had a Norse name that was garbled into the word "Grub"—a nickname that didn’t seem to bother him in the least. When he stood on his head, which was as often as possible, Grub’s belly popped out over the elastic of his shorts. His favorite top—now a size too small—rode up over his middle. On the tee shirt was a large drawing of a mosquito with the slogan "Minnesota State Bird". His socks were no longer white, but grey, well seasoned after the third day of wear.
As the summer ripened, Grub and Belle came to prefer collecting salamanders in the woods to sitting in the classroom. Soon their bond became a business venture, for it was Grub who would lead Belle’s father to the gems in nature that surrounded the Ashram. Elyse occasionally saw the three of them—the two children bolting ahead while the wild haired photographer, equipment in tow, trailed several paces behind. And Grub, ever the lover of the great out doors, had to be watched at all times during thunderstorms. On one particular morning, Grub dashed outside with the first roll of thunder, and stood under the trees looking up at the sky.
"YOU! You get inside here this instant!" cried Miss Fussencouch.
"I prefer to be with nature," Grub said.
"Go get him," Miss Fussencouch ordered. Just then, lightening struck the tree above Grub, encasing the world in a flash of diamond green.
"I think not," said Elyse. She looked outside, it started to pour.
"Must you always be insubordinate?"
"Are you serious?" said Elyse.
"I have a lesson to complete." Miss Fussencouch bristled, enjoying the social hierarchy that enabled her to demand someone else to do something dangerous or dirty. "Listen, if this were a true school situation, I would have you written up for insubordination."
"Must you always talk like you shit dictionaries?" said Elyse, terrified of lightening and not sure what the insubordination meant.
"OH!" said Delphine. "We have got to talk! I don’t care if the Guru said to let him go, he’s always so disruptive when he returns, I’d rather he not come back at all. If this were a real university, he would not be tolerated."
Yet Grub always tried so hard with his re entry, Elyse noted. He had something to show for his time away. Snails or frogs. Grub darted into the woods singing "shoulda-coulda-woulda shoulda-coulda-woulda, as thunder rumbled and the rain spanked the leaves. He’d dashed away so many times, the Guru advised the teachers in the schoolhouse to let the boy go. Yes, they let him go off into the wilderness, and being as nature made him a good eater, he always came back in time for lunch. On the morning of the storm he returned just as everyone had settled for the ten minutes of meditation required of all preteens before they were dismissed.
"Hey everyone," he said. His voice was like flipping on a light switch. "I have raided a nest full of salamanders. There’s one or two for everyone. Hurry, my pockets are full of them and they are tickling me."
Meditation and class was over. The children found the salamanders sublime—orange with pink spots—tiny writhing lizards by the handful, a perfect subject for Belle’s father when he came to get her.
Then came the day when he arrived late for a talk about the Lord Shiva. It was a particularly hot afternoon, one in which there were rumors floating around that the Guru was going to pay a visit to the school to listen to one of Delphine Fussencouch’s lectures. Grub moved gently and came in the back door as a slide projector flashed different images of Shiva—Shiva dancing—the Nataraj—Shiva in meditation, snakes draped around his neck. Shiva with Uma on his left—trident in hand, snakes coiled up on his head as a turban. Shiva with the river Ganges sprouting out of his head. What everyone failed to notice was that dangling around Grub’s neck was a giant bull snake that hung limply like a jump rope. It was so still that it could have been mistaken for a pretend snake one buys at a hardware store in order to scare mice in a barn. As Delphine Fussencouch continued her lesson, oblivious to Grub’s guest, the boy stretched out his arm in wonder, allowing the reptile to gradually waken and slide off and onto the floor. It was a beautiful creature—dull black and dry and warm on its back where the sun had touched it. So quiet except for the occasional flicking of the tongue, and the place where its sides flexed with its breathing. The snake had been sleeping in the midday sun across the hood of a pick up truck. It had been lulled into a hot meditative silence. When Elyse put her hand down, she brushed against it. She thought it was the arm of a child. But then it wrapped around her wrist. Elyse screamed. An arm does not become a circle and then jolt forward five feet long. Everyone else screamed and stared in disbelief as the snake suddenly slipped through a gap in the floorboards and disappeared.
All except Belle who cried, "Oh you caught her! Good job, Grub!"
"OUT" cried Miss Fussencouch as though it were Elyse who brought in the snake.
"What did I do?" said Elyse.
"OUT! How can I teach when you are the cause of constant interruption?"
"Me? I should think you’d be happy to have me here as your warden."
"Warden? The Guru brought me here to practice teaching."
"Well," said Elyse, trying not to insult Delphine Fussencouch’s sensibilities. "Somehow I think your material might not match the needs of fourth graders."
"You constantly undermine me."
"Me? How?"
"You think I don’t see that smirk on your face? Don’t you know Ashram children are special? They’re gifted and talented." Delphine Fussencouch peered through the crack in the floor where the snake exited. The schoolhouse, slated for demolition, had no basement and actually sat up off the ground on low stilts. Elyse was relieved to see sunlight through the floorboards.
"How will I ever get tenure?" Muttered Miss Fussencouch. "It’s unfair that the Guru sends me here and then gives me you as an assistant."
"Life’s usually unfair," said Elyse, parroting a line she’d often heard her mother say.
"OUT" Miss Fussencouch repeated. "And take your two troublemakers with you." She pointed to Belle and Grub who suddenly looked very small. "You are fired!"
Elyse felt her chin wiggle, a symptom of impending tears. "You can’t fire me. Only the Guru can fire me, or the Seva department.
"OUT" she said pointing to the picnic table in the middle of the yard. She shoved a book in Elyse’s hands. "Take this and read it and make them memorize a stanza."
"A stanza?"
Miss Fussencouch rolled her eyes which sufficed to say—you idiot didn’t you learn anything in school? "A stanza is a four line paragraph."
Elyse looked at the Bhagavad Gita, and then the treeless yard. "In the direct sun? But it’s blazing."
"I don’t care. These kids—AND YOU—have to learn how to endure your karma."
"Fine" said Elyse. "FINE! But let me offer you some advice before I go, Delphine: I’m sure a McDonalds somewhere would be glad to hire you. They are always looking for managers. People with people skills." Elyse turned on her heal then and fled before Delphine Fussencouch could think of something to say.
"Well said!" said Grub when they were out of earshot. "You sure told her off."
A tear ran down Elyse’s face, which she brushed away quickly so the children did not see it.
"You know what I think?" said Belle sitting on a picnic table in the unforgivable brightness. "I think Miss Fussencouch is a fucker."
Elyse sat down, put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands, and looked at the two ostracized children. For a moment they were quiet. The children sat glumly as though they expected Elyse to scold them like everyone else.
"Yes," agreed Grub. "A fucker."*"It’s hot," said Belle. "A FUCKity fuck fuck fucker."
"Enough, you guys, you shouldn’t swear," said Elyse.*"Even if she is?" said Belle.
"A Fucker?" said Grub. He scratched his side with a finger that had been God-knows-where. "Bummer," he said. "I have been trying to catch that old girl for a week now. She sleeps under the bungalow where we’re staying. And there old Miss Fussencouch had to go scare her half to death. Now I’ll never get her back, and how will she get back home to her nest of babies?"
"A snake, Grub, you brought a snake into the classroom. What were you thinking?"
"Don’t you ever listen?" said Grub. "I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be Shiva. Not only is the guy blue, but he always has a snake for a necklace."
"Or a hat," said Belle.
" I just wanted to see if Miss Fussencouch could tell I take her seriously."
"But you didn’t have to bring a snake in the school!" said Elyse.
"Well it’s not like it was a loaded gun."
"True."
"I would never bring a loaded gun. Besides I am pretty sure it’s not a poisonous snake."
"You scared the crap out of me," said Elyse.
"Me too," said Belle. "I thought it was rubber."
Elyse shaded her eyes and looked at her two charges. "Just what am I doing being punished for something I didn’t do?"
Belle and Grub shrugged up and down, embarrassed.
"Off we go," said Elyse, pointing to where swings hung in the distant shade, several paces from the cowshed where she first worked when she arrived. "Quickly, before we are found out." Quietly they crept past the front window of the schoolhouse, in plain sight of Miss Fussencouch who was absorbed in her lesson, or who was scolding someone else, they really couldn’t tell.
"I’m hungry," said Belle when they made it to the swings. A cicada above them began to rub its legs together noisily harmonizing with the chanting Brahman priests.
"Or-eee-o, Or-EEE-o!" the boy sang in unison.
"Or-eee-o, Or-EEE-o!" Elyse chimed in.
"Or-eee-o, Or-EEE-o!" They chanted for better part of an hour, rising and falling on the swings, pretending to be the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.
It became dizzying, like endless poems that made little sense. The heat rising off the grass made Elyse long to nap, to dream, to imagine a life washed clean.
They forgot themselves and sang so loud that the Guru who, unbeknownst to them, was visiting in the cow shed came out. She gazed at them, then passed swiftly. Elyse, high on her swing felt a dizzying wave of surprise when she saw the Guru’s red robe flash in her sight. Then she noticed that the Guru carried an old boot under her arm. One of the very same boots Elyse had worn while mucking out the cowshed. Elyse wondered what happened to the other boot. She felt a pang of longing. If only she could wear the boots now, maybe her feet would take her in the right direction.
Elyse, Belle and Grub dug their heels in the gravel and came to a stop. They were suddenly quiet, as were the cicadas.
"Play on," said the Guru, "play on."
But Elyse couldn’t because much to her astonishment the Guru headed to the schoolhouse door and knocked. Out came the perturbable Miss Fussencouch, who immediately changed her demeanor. The Guru silently handed Delphine Fussencouch the boot, and left as quickly as she came, and Delphine Fussencouch, who stood in the door bewildered, held the boot and watched the Guru go.
The children, sitting in their swings, stayed silent for some time until at last, Belle began to fidget.
"My problem," announced Belle, once the cicadas resumed their song, "is I don’t like reading. It is such a bore."
"I am going to learn when I am ten," said Grub. "My mom’s a child psychologist and she says making kids learn before they are in Former Operational Thought puts pressure on them." He said this as though the statement were a pre-recorded voice over. "I’d like to wait until I am twenty. Of course it’s a real problem when your friends insist on discussing The Hobbit and all you can do is say you saw the movie which is nothing like the book from what I am told; I mean how could it? The book is as fat as a brick."
"My brother was a Hobbit Head," Elyse said. He read that book three times the summer after sixth grade. God he was smart. And me? I'm barely able to read street signs."
"Not true," said Grub. I see how you pay attention to Miss Fussencouch. You must be doing good in college."
"College?" said Elyse, who was surprised. "I dropped out of high school at sixteen in order to dance professionally."
"So?" said Grub.
"So I have two more years of high school left before I could even consider college."
"You do? You could have fooled me," said Grub "Well I mean if you were in college you’d be a brainstorm being as you are certainly in Former Operational Thought and can think about abstract things with ease."
"Oh shut up," said Belle.
"As you can tell, Belle is a child."
Belle punched him. "You know there are more interesting things to do."
"To tell the truth," said Grub, "as soon as I learn to read I’m going to renounce it because my job when I grow up will have little to do with books."
"Oh really," said Elyse, "What are you going to be?"
"An entomologist. A bug expert," said Grub. "I’m going to keep bees, and I am going to perform autopsies on decomposed bodies."
"Gross," said Belle.
"I will know how long a person’s been dead by how fat the bugs eating him are. None of that involves much reading. Seems to me it involves measuring and looking things up."
"And writing things down," said Belle.
"Piece of cake," said Grub.
"If it makes you happy," said Elyse.
"You know what I like about you?" said Belle, who turned to look Elyse over from top to bottom. "You’re not trying to make us something we’re not."
"Yeah, that’s it," said Grub. "I knew there was something about you I liked. I like bugs and that’s okay with you. Too bad we can’t get married some day."
"Why’s that?" said Elyse.
"My mother would never approve of someone much older than me."
Elyse nodded. "That sounds sensible, but why would you want to marry me?"
"Everyone jokes that no one will want me so I anticipate it will be a problem," said Grub. "I think I’ll marry the first person who does not mind my interests. You don’t seem to care so I think you’d be a good choice," he said. "Will you keep me in mind someday when you are shopping around for a husband?"
"I will indeed, Grub," said Elyse. "You’re the first person who has ever proposed to me."
*****
Delphine Fussencouch got the foot. Not a stranger to the idea that symbols often say more than words, when she received the Guru’s boot, caked with dried mud she took it as a sure sign that it was time to leave. She had remained in the stasis of "All But Done" or "All but Dissertation" for over a year, wavering on the brink of being dropped as a doctoral candidate. What she needed most was to quit shouting at ten-year-olds, and just go write her ideas down.
But booted right out with barely a peep or hint that it was coming! Life in the Ashram was like that. Life was like that. One day you’re going to your seva and the next thing you know you are dismissed. Lessons over. Time to go. Pack it up and plan to leave in a week or four days. The same is true with jobs or careers or dancers or fruit. They have shelf life and are programmed to end whether one can accept it or not.
Elyse found Delphine Fussencouch crying silently in the schoolroom when she went back after dark to retrieve a sweatshirt she had left behind when she had been expelled. Delphine Fussencouch had expected to be alone when Elyse caught her.
"Are you all right?" said Elyse.
"Not this very second. Please go. No stay. What should I do next?"
Elyse was surprised that Delphine would ask her for advice considering their mutual contempt.
"I guess get on with my life," said Elyse.
"But that’s the thing, I’ve been stalling. I was hoping to not write a dissertation."
"Don’t you have some moldy university to go back to?"
"My time there is up, too. They wouldn’t renew my teacher’s assistance until I wrote something that put me on the track to graduation."
"So what’s your problem?" said Elyse.
"I don’t know," sniffed Delphine. "What I do have is a father who is eager to have me take over the family mortuary."
Elyse suppressed a smile. "Would you rather have my job? I’ll be selling figurines in my mother’s store in Massachusetts."
"Of course not!" snapped Delphine. "I thought you were going back to the ballet. Some place extraordinary"
Elyse wondered what to say. "I’ve retired."
"I wish I could say I was retired from something."
"You wouldn’t if you were," said Elyse, who didn’t want to talk about it.
"All this time I thought you were some sort of dance goddess, marking time before dashing off to your next fantastic season."
"Would I really still be here if I had that in front of me?"
"Why wouldn’t you be?" said Delphine.
Elyse looked at Delphine and wondered if she would ever become less acidic. It was painful to be near her, for she instinctively knew what small thing to say in order for the other person to close up and turn away. Yet this astringency didn’t prevent Elyse from talking—from reaching out.
"To tell the truth, I don’t know where I am headed, either. I wish I had a dissertation to finish—anything that put me on the road to somewhere."
Delphine nodded. "What would you do if you could do anything?"
Elyse sat back and smelled the distant sea in the air. "I guess I’d get to be the person who carried the knowledge for a little while."
"Then you should ask the Guru to make you wise."
"It’s a long way to go," said Elyse, pondering the fact that in complete exhaustion from over training, she had dropped out high school to prevent them from failing her in all her classes. All those incompletes and red Fs now required explaining, though at the time she had good enough cause, having been cast in Sheherazad.
"So maybe you’re a fallow field waiting to be turned over," said Delphine.
"Maybe I’ll just ask for a slice of the moon," said Elyse.
"You might consider being less sarcastic when someone compliments you," said Delphine. "I mean, how can you be open to receiving anything when you act like a jerk all the time?"
Me a jerk? Elyse wondered if Delphine was projecting and decided to say nothing.
"I mean, you get this vacant look on your face, are you so out of it that you don’t know what the Guru does? Don’t look dumb, now, it doesn’t become you. She’s the boatman."
"Okay?" said Elyse.
The Guru’s shoes, the very dust itself is the boat in which we ride."
Delphine picked up the pink boot. A clod of dirt broke off. "Fool," she said. "The thing is we don’t always see it that way, do we?" She handed Elyse the dirt. "Here, a treasure."
"How would I ever begin, though?" said Elsye.
"By putting one foot ahead of the other and seeing where you go," said Delphine.
******
Elyse forgot about the Guru’s other boot. Forgot everything about wishes and dreams as she wrapped up in an emerald sari that kept her dancers’ legs closed. All was forgotten as she made her way towards the guru in a long line that was five-people wide—all of whom bore gifts and money for unfulfilled wishes. Her heart pounded wildly, and the perfumed oil she wore released its scent with the heat that rose off her chest. It was all rather delicious. She closed her eyes as she bowed before the Guru letting the wand of peacock feathers stroke her back. When she finally sat up, opening her eyes the world looked to be a shade of watery blue. In the Guru’s lap sat the other pink boot. Ancient, its patent leather—once so gloriously shiny that it drew eyes in the streets of London—was now cracking. The pink boot was caked with dried mud. The Guru said nothing as she handed it to Elyse.
"You’re giving me the other boot?" she said in astonishment. "Does that mean it’s time for me to leave?"
"In a few days," said the Guru who swatted her face as if to wipe it clean.
For some reason, Elyse got up half-ecstatic and half-sad, because sad, after all, was what she knew how to be most.
*****
Elyse and Delphine’s last day on the Ashram coincided. That afternoon Elyse was given the task of herding the children to the out-door pavilion to see their Guru. She was supposed to take them there and leave, not to go in and sit with the Guru, which is what she really wanted. There would be no opportunity to express all the things Elyse longed to say. The children baa-baa-ed in electric excitement as Elyse coaxed them to sit at the feet of the Guru, who as usual, looked like a poppy.
Elyse couldn’t help herself. She gawked. The Guru was dressed in shades so vibrant—her hair was so jet black—that it seemed like she was plugged in. Or that she had got hold of and kept lightening bolts in her pocket. The children lit up in front of her. As she watched them transform, Elyse spied a box of toys beside the Guru. She was suddenly filled with envy. She wanted an action figure with a space pistol, a purse full of make up, a stuffed animal—maybe the cute little badger—no—the unicorn—so beautiful pure and white. Elyse bit her lip. She wanted a toy—she wanted a bracelet—some token to remind her of the willies she got whenever the Guru passed by. Anything to remind her that sometime a boon was to follow her disaster.
The last of the bleating children passed by her, but she was so absorbed looking at the toys she hardly noticed Delphine Fussencouch.
"You have to go now," said Professor Delphine Fussencouch to be. "This is really only for the children." Delphine’s form filled the door, blocking Elyse’s view of the Guru. Elyse’s heart broke as Delphine, the almost friend, became Miss Fussencouch, a woman with a brilliant future. Miss Fussencouch closed the gate to shut Elyse out and turned away taking her place amongst the children, a haughty smile on her face. Though shoed off, Elyse quietly came back and peered through the lattice that framed the door, just in time to see the children collect their toys.
The toys were regular—having cost only about five dollars each. They were equal all except for one extraordinary doll. The doll was huge and obviously very expensive. It wore an embroidered apron, and under it poked eyelet so fresh it puffed out like a carnation. The doll had a tiny back-pack full of even tinier books, and green eyes that closed when she was laid down. Over its shoulders was a magenta cloak trimmed in white fur, and on its feet were silver skates. The more Elyse looked at the doll, the more it seemed to grow in detail. That morning, the doll had been brought to the Ashram and given to the Guru by a famous movie star, and now all the girls gawked in fascination as they walked by it. They lingered, paying more attention to the object than to the Guru. None of them dare touch it, it was so fancy.
Except for Belle who sat on her heels, halfway back in the room. Her mouth hung slack as she watched. She didn’t rush up to collect her toy. She seemed bored. After awhile her foot started jiggling, and she began looking around, wondering when it would be time to leave.The Guru stopped time. She motioned Belle forward. Belle crawled up on her hands and knees. Elyse couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she saw the Guru’s eyes loom wide as they talked. Belle was shruggy of shoulder, dispassionate, but then became attentive. Elyse watched as the sullen girl began to shine before the master. Seeing this erased Elyse’s doubts about the Guru. Some kind of alchemy was going on, the Guru shining people when they weren’t looking. Maybe, thought Elyse. Maybe someday when I least expect it I’ll shine.
The Guru was holding both the magnificent doll and Belle at the same time. Even so, Belle started to slip away. She began to bow, but the master set her up right and plopped the doll into the girl’s arms. Belle’s face lit up seeing its perfection, then she offered it back. The Guru leaned forward in her chair and then pressed the doll into Belle’s arms for keeps. Belle’s eyes were full of astonishment. She then bowed and got up to walk away, her mouth an O of surprise.
The other girls clicked their tongues jealously. Elyse could hear them muttering to each other how they deserved the doll more than Belle. But where did the Guru place the doll but in the arms of what seemed like the least worthy girl.
Belle turned to look back. The master shone, and Belle dropped down on her knees hugging her doll. Her slim body seemed to fold around the doll as the girl touched her forehead to the floor, for the first time placing her heart over her head.
*****
Elyse wasn’t sure when the bells of Magdalen Tower stopped ringing. Maybe it was when another crew passed by, its oars piercing the reflection on the surface of the water. The blue dome shimmered and danced as the other boat slid by. There were ripples of blue and ripples of green and somewhere above in space the Guru was conducting the Universe, thought Elyse. Her spell had been broken. How glad she was she’d not been mistaken for a child. How odd it was that her scholar’s hood, trimmed in ermine, resembled the cape on that doll she saw briefly once long ago. Dreaming spires, thought Elyse. She began to paddle again, her hands stiff around the oars. In that town of colleges was the slice of moon. On that very day, Elyse wanted to drop down on her knees as if she’d been the one given the doll. Drop down on her knees in surprise as she skillfully rowed back to the dock.
"There will be boons" Elyse remembered the Guru saying. "Misfortune always hides a boon."
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