Looking for Laura, page 19
She’d flirted back. Why not? Flirting with Paul Driver had come more naturally to her than writing a term paper on Sarah Orne Jewett’s use of pine trees as a symbol of her characters’ austere and leafless lives, or unlocking the secrets of ribonucleic acid, or explaining whatever the hell Sartre was talking about in Being and Nothingness.
Still, standing before the ivy-twined Winfield gates now, six years after she’d dropped out of school, Sally felt a twinge of regret. She’d completed two years. Only two more, and she would have become a college graduate.
When Rosie had been about three years old, Sally had mentioned to Paul that she’d like to go back to college part-time and finish her degree. He’d pointed out, with infuriating logic, that she had a job she enjoyed, a daughter she adored, and a house and a husband, both desiring a modicum of attention. “When are you going to find time to go to school?” he’d asked.
“I was thinking, maybe one class a semester. I can take classes that meet in the evenings—”
“So you wouldn’t be eating dinner with us those evenings? You wouldn’t be eating with Rosie?”
“Well, I just thought…”
“And when would you get your homework done? Weekends? Weekends are when you take Rosie out into the backyard and play with her, and work on your garden, or you bake, or you read. Do you really want to sacrifice that time to schoolwork?”
She really didn’t.
But it would still be nice to get that degree. Maybe now that Paul wasn’t around to talk her out of it, she would investigate the possibility.
She passed through the gates and felt, once more, as if she’d landed over the rainbow. The air smelled greener and fresher on this side of the ornate wrought-iron portal—probably because the campus had expanses of lawn and lush plantings and no through streets clogged with cars spewing exhaust fumes into the atmosphere. Quaint paths cut across the lawns, weaving around mature maples and oaks, past budding rhododendrons and azaleas stirring awake in the new spring warmth. Majestic buildings of brick and brownstone rose up alongside the paths, gothic and imposing, their heavy glass windows whispering, “We are seats of knowledge. We are launch pads of privilege. Professors bore sophomores to tears in our rooms.”
She strolled past the academic buildings, the administration buildings and the sprawling monstrosity of a library, its pillared Greco-Roman core annexed and expanded with wings dating from at least three different decades, designed by at least three different architects. She hiked past the language building, where she’d met her doom in a first-year Russian class with Gozbodin Markoff. All she remembered from that class was Nye horosho, which meant, “Not good.”
Deeper into the campus stood the dorms, several quadrangles of bland brick buildings with smaller stand-alone residences surrounding them. Tina lived in Cabot House, one of the quad dorms. Entering the first quad under a brick archway that connected two of the dormitories, Sally had to veer around a game of Frisbee in which the three male participants were clearly showing off for a small gaggle of female onlookers. They jumped, they caught and tossed the disk in a single motion; they reached between their legs to snag it and flipped it behind their backs to launch it. The girls seemed impressed, but they were probably more impressed by the boys’ dramatic hair and healthy young physiques than by their prowess with the plastic toy.
Rosie would have sniffed and turned away. Once you’d seen a clown juggling while perched atop a towering unicycle, a few boys playing Frisbee would seem pretty mundane.
Sally found the main entrance of Cabot Hall and pushed the door open. A student posted at the entry desk stopped and asked her to identify herself. “I’m here to see Tina Frye. I’m Sally Driver.”
The boy ran his gaze from her hair to her sandaled feet and back up again. Although he had to be at least eighteen years old, he seemed much younger, his skin bearing lingering traces of acne, his hair shorn to the length of peach fuzz, his body swimming in an oversize T-shirt even though he was not a small person. If he looked that young to her, she probably looked that old to him. She was tempted to say, Excuse me—I’m twenty-six. I am not old enough to be your mother.
But she’d been summoned because Tina saw her as a mother figure of sorts. And she sure couldn’t pass for a student, not in her corduroy jumper, dark tights and plaid shirt, not with her unfashionably long, wavy hair. Not with the tiny lines that edged her eyes, the little crease that folded the skin at one corner of her mouth. She didn’t mind these souvenirs of her advancing age. She was actually kind of proud of them. But she knew they separated her from the students, whose greatest worries usually revolved around tomorrow’s test or where to score an evening’s worth of weed or whether some guy was going to ask them to the campus flick that Saturday, and if he did, whether that meant they were obligated to sleep with him afterward.
After assessing her, the boy lifted a desk phone, punched in three numbers and said, “There’s some lady here to see Tina Frye. What’s your name again?” he asked Sally.
Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. “Sally Driver,” she said.
“Sally Driver,” the boy repeated into the phone.
She turned to study the notices pinned to a bulletin board on the wall to her right. A pro-choice rally in front of the library Friday afternoon. A Celtic-music festival in the Higgins Auditorium on Sunday. A reading in the Boylston Reading Room by the poet-in-residence. Several pleas for rides to Boston, Long Island and Providence. Someone with a car offering regular rides to Hanover, New Hampshire.
Hanover, New Hampshire, was where Dartmouth was located. If Howard transferred to Dartmouth, Tina could catch a ride with whoever had posted that notice when she wanted to visit him.
The boy hung up the phone and cleared his throat, discreetly demanding her attention. “She’s on the third floor,” he said. “Room 314.”
As it turned out, Sally didn’t need to be told the room number. When she pushed open the third-floor fire door and emerged from the stairwell, she heard a stream of voices flowing out of one of the rooms. She followed the stream to its source: a closed door marked 314. The voices all sounded female, and they all seemed to be talking at once.
Sally knocked.
The door swung open to reveal a tear-stained, blotchy-faced Tina, her hair standing in odd tufts as if she’d been tugging at it. Her oversize Winfield College T-shirt drooped toward one shoulder, and her pants, as usual, were too baggy. “Oh, Sally, thanks for coming,” she managed to mumble before collapsing in Sally’s arms and sobbing inconsolably.
Sally half carried, half dragged her back into the room, a narrow rectangle not much larger than a walk-in closet, although six girls had somehow crammed themselves into it. Three sat on the unmade cot-size bed, one on the windowsill and one on the desk. The last one paced—two steps in one direction, two steps in the other. They all seemed deeply concerned with Tina’s trauma. Indeed, they all seemed to share equally in it. Their facial expressions ran the gamut from distressed to distraught. They had shiny tear tracks striping their cheeks.
Sally was glad she hadn’t arrived earlier. They might have all been blubbering then, and she would have had to mop the floor.
Although they were all uniformly weepy, Tina’s friends came in a variety of sizes, shapes and colors. None of them had the streaked blond hair that had been so popular on campus just a few years ago. Their apparel ranged from gym shorts and sweatshirt to silk blouse and tailored flannel trousers.
They might have finished their communal bawling, but they were still sniffling. Like a Greek chorus, they echoed Tina’s forlorn whimpers. Thank God they didn’t all drape themselves over Sally the way Tina did. She could barely stand under Tina’s floppy weight.
“The world hasn’t ended,” Sally said sharply—not because she wasn’t sympathetic but because she wouldn’t otherwise have been heard above the mournful chorus. “Get a grip.”
“That’s why I called you,” Tina wailed, taking Sally’s advice literally and gripping her shoulders.
“That’s why she called you,” a couple of the other girls confirmed in a resonant murmur.
“He’s just a guy,” Sally pointed out. “No guy is worth this much grief.”
Tina peeled herself off Sally and sucked in a tremulous breath. “Everyone, this is Sally Driver, the coolest lady I know.” Tina introduced her friends, a bevy of Caitlins and Amandas and Tanyas. Sally nodded and smiled at each of them, then promptly forgot their names.
“She’ll tell you,” the plump redhead predicted. “She’ll tell you Howard is a piece of shit for doing this to you.”
“She’ll help you figure out how to hang on to Howard,” the dark-skinned girl with the Rastafarian dreadlocks insisted.
“Listen, everyone, I’ve gotta talk to Sally alone.” Tina gave her friends a brave smile and blinked furiously, no doubt fending off a fresh spate of tears. “We’ll meet in Amanda’s room later and drink Southern Comfort, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Sure.”
“Later.”
The girls gathered around Tina, each offering a ritual hug before filing through the door.
The stillness in the room once they were gone was slightly disorienting. Sally gazed around, noticing for the first time the Brad Pitt poster on the wall above the bed—did Howard look like Brad Pitt? If he did, he might be worth all this drama—the textbooks piled on the desk next to a laptop; the bag of chocolate chip cookies; the empty beer bottles stacked along the top shelf of the bookcase; the stuffed teddy bear lounging on Tina’s pillow, clad in a tiny version of her Winfield College shirt; and the four mismatched shoes mixing it up with the dust bunnies under the bed.
“Do you want a cookie?” Tina asked, shuffling across the room to the bag on her desk. She was barefoot, and the hems of her pants dragged with each step. “I know these aren’t as good as what we sell in the New Day, but sometimes I, like, just want something kind of low quality, you know? Like, with preservatives and hydrogenated oil and stuff?” She unrolled the bag and popped a cookie into her mouth, then extended the bag to Sally.
“You make it sound so appetizing.” Sally declined with a shake of her head. “Tina, can we talk about this? I left Rosie with a neighbor—” having a grand time killing squids, but Sally didn’t say that “—so I’d like to find out what’s going on with you.”
“Nothing’s going on with me,” Tina said, then crumpled onto her bed and chewed. A few tears leaked from her eyes as she swept her tongue along her molars, causing one cheek and then the other to bulge as she scraped cookie mush from their surfaces. “It’s going on with Howard. He told me he’s definitely transferring to Dartmouth. He got accepted and he’s transferring.” Her voice dissolved in a sob. She reached for another cookie.
“I’m sure you’re sad,” Sally murmured, stating the obvious. She lowered herself to sit on the bed next to the teddy bear, leaving as much space as possible between Tina and herself. “But if it’s true love, his being at Dartmouth won’t have to come between you.”
“There are girls at Dartmouth.”
“There are girls here at Winfield.”
“But I’m at Winfield. He doesn’t need other girls if I’m around. I won’t be around at Dartmouth.”
“I thought you and he love each other.”
“But he’s a guy. You know how guys are. They think with their dicks. Ever hear the expression dickhead?”
Sally tried not to smile. “Not in reference to male thought processes. Tina, consider this. Dartmouth is, what? An hour away? Two hours? It’s not such a big deal.”
“It is if he goes up there and forgets about me. I love him, Sally. You know how much I love him.”
Sally did indeed: so much she’d injected ink into her skin.
“We’ve got two more years of school. Two whole years when he’s going to be up there and I’m going to be down here. It’s like—like I don’t think I can bear it.”
“Of course you can bear it. You’re smart and strong. You’ve got a good job, and you’re a good student—”
Tina rolled her eyes at that.
“And you’ve got all those wonderful friends. They’ll support you through this difficult time.”
“They all think Howard deserves to be shot. Or castrated. Or disemboweled. That was Caitlin’s idea.”
“Well…so, you’ve got some violent friends.”
“I don’t want to disembowel him. I want to be with him.” Tina licked the crumbs off her fingers and leaned toward Sally. “I thought, maybe you could give me some advice.”
“I’m giving you advice.”
“Not that advice. Different advice.” A tiny smear of chocolate clung to Tina’s lower lip. “Here was what I was thinking. Like, maybe, I could get pregnant, and then Howard would have to marry me.”
Sally leaned away from Tina and scowled. The teddy bear’s nose dug into her back.
“I mean, you did it, and it worked for you, right? I’m not saying—I mean, I know your husband died, and that really sucks and all. But for a while, you got to be together. He married you.”
Sally swallowed. God, she felt old. She couldn’t remember ever being as young as Tina. Even when she’d been Tina’s age, she’d never been that young. “Tina, this is not a good plan.”
“But you did it.”
“Not on purpose.”
“But you loved your husband, right? And then he married you. I mean, it worked.”
Sally opened her mouth and then shut it, opened and shut it again. If she had a cookie, she’d be able to put her jaw motions to good use by chewing it. She knew she had to say something, but the only thought that hung tight in her mind was: I didn’t love my husband.
Surely she’d loved him at the beginning. She’d loved him before she’d found the Laura letters. She’d loved him when he’d agreed to marry her, because his doing so was so honorable, so responsible. Given her own father’s absence, she’d loved Paul for doing the right thing.
Hadn’t she?
Hadn’t she loved his body? And the way he’d kept his things so tidy, like some anal-retentive fanatic? And the way he’d manfully consumed the vegetarian meals she prepared, with only a few snide criticisms about how her tofu stew definitely had more flavor than foam rubber, and if he added a little salt it actually tasted like salt? And the way he used to dazzle her with his explanations of how the probate process worked?
His body. Yes, she’d loved his body—although he’d been kind of small. He’d stood only five feet nine and a half—he’d always made a point of mentioning that half—and he’d weighed less than she did during the last few months of her pregnancy. Not that she had anything against short men. Five feet nine and a half wasn’t that short, and she was five-six herself, so it wasn’t as if she’d towered over Paul, although even if she had, why would that have made a difference? She could be very politically correct when it came to size. The only reason she was even thinking about it was that it had been such a different experience to kiss Todd, who stood at least six feet in height. Probably more than six feet. Six one and a half, maybe.
And kissing him had been entirely different from kissing Paul because it had been impulsive, and she’d been tired and not thinking clearly, and he’d carried Rosie up the stairs so gently, and his nose had been pink. She certainly didn’t love him.
“Sally?” Tina called to her as if from another county. Sally shook her head clear and returned her attention to Tina. “What I was thinking,” Tina said, “was, I could just, like, not wear my diaphragm. Was that how you got pregnant?”
“I didn’t have a diaphragm,” Sally told her. In college, she’d figured that if she found herself in a long-term, solid relationship she would get one, but when she and Paul started seeing each other, it wasn’t a long-term solid relationship. It went from a few dates to “I do” in a remarkably short interval. She hadn’t gotten a diaphragm until after Rosie was born.
“So you just, like, did it without anything?”
“We had a condom failure,” Sally said, feeling even older.
“Wow. That must have been hard to do—to make the condom fail so you could get pregnant.”
“I didn’t make the condom fail. I didn’t want to get pregnant. Listen to me, Tina. Getting knocked up is not a good way to keep Howard. He might just run away if you tell him you’re pregnant. Some men do that.”
“He wouldn’t. He loves me.”
“If he loves you, you’ve got nothing to worry about with his going to Dartmouth, right?”
Tina eyed Sally dubiously. She’d obviously expected Sally to counsel her on the most effective way of trapping a guy.
“Trust me,” Sally said. “You don’t want to get pregnant.”
“Why? Everything worked out so cool for you—except for that he died, but I mean, you love Rosie, don’t you? You’re glad you had your daughter, right?”
“Of course I love my daughter.”
“So if you had it to do over again, you really wouldn’t change anything, would you? I mean, except for his dying.”
“I—” Once again Sally felt like a fish, her jaw pumping as she tried to wrap her mouth around the right words. “I don’t regret for an instant having Rosie. But I wish I had finished college. And my husband was already done with his schooling. He could afford to support us. If you got pregnant, what would you expect Howard to do? Drop out of college and get a job to support you?”
“I could work, too. I could work more hours at the café.”
