The St. Ambrose School for Girls(63)
It’s Saturday of Columbus Day weekend, late in the afternoon. I’m in my dorm room alone and it’s eerily quiet. I’m one of the minority of students who are in Tellmer over the three-day break, most of the girls having been picked up to go home or to head off on a last-gasp vacation at a summer country house somewhere. Strots took Keisha away with her, and I gather they were bound for Newport, Rhode Island.
Before Strots left, she told me that they’ve decided to, as Strots put it, “You know, be together.”
So this is a romantic weekend, not just one for friends, and I’m glad because then I don’t feel left behind by my roommate. I decide that Strots telling me about Greta freed her heart for K. I don’t know whether this is true, but it makes me feel helpful. They’re going to stay at Strots’s grandmother’s house. Given that she thought Greta would be impressed with the place, I’m guessing it’s big as a football field and has more columns than the White House. Strots said that she only likes going there in the off-season. In season, evidently, there are too many parties.
Wow, is all I can think.
And there’s been another reminder of my roommate’s wealth, in addition to the ever-gestating gymnasium going up at the edge of campus: A long black limo has been spotted at the construction site and around the administration buildings. I’ve overheard it belongs to Strots’s father. She hasn’t mentioned anything about it, and she also hasn’t talked about seeing her dad. But how could she not, if he’s here at the school? Fathers and daughters… see each other, right?
As if I would know.
What I am certain of is that just as I have kept Strots’s secret, she has kept mine. I can tell she’s honored our pledge to each other because none of the other girls in the dorm, even Keisha, are treating me any differently—which is not to say they’re welcoming me into their cliques, but they haven’t shunned me like I’m a ticking time bomb about to go certifiable.
I’m well familiar with the look people give me when they know my truth. I was the recipient of plenty of those wide eyes and hissed whispers in my old school after my breakdowns. In my small town, Tera Taylor’s daughter going nuts was big news. That was why I ended up writing the essay my mom submitted to Ambrose’s admissions committee. “How I Spent My Summer” by Sarah M. Taylor. I’d gotten tired of the speculation, and decided to set the record straight with brutal honesty, even though I never had any intention of anybody actually reading it.
And then my mom found the thing. After which, Ambrose.
Returning to the present, I look down to my lap. As I sit on my bed, leaning back against the bare wall behind me, I have another book of Nick’s in my hands. It is The Plains of Passage by Jean M. Auel. It’s part of a series and a novel that, I gather, has sold very well. I’m interested in, but not gripped by, the content and prose, and I find myself curious as to why Nick has read the novel and is keeping it. It’s kind of pedestrian, for entertainment rather than depth, and there are other books on his shelves that go to this populist vein. What’s more, and this surprises me, he’s written notes in the margins, keeping track of the plot, which strikes me as wholly unnecessary. But maybe he’s practicing his skills as an editor, honing things so that his fallback to being an English professor is strong.
Although if you’re in your early twenties and your father is still paying your school bills, how much of a fallback do you need?
The idea Nick could be anything less than the intellectual titan I’ve made him out to be fills me with a strange dread. Because he is wonderful and he is smart, and I can make these declarations because I now feel as though I know the man. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been going in and out of his apartment regularly, and he visits me as well, like stopping by to share the New York Times best-seller list with me this past Sunday afternoon, and on Wednesday coming to see what I thought about Auel’s work so far.
Courtesy of our relationship—friendship, I mean—I’ve totally restructured my college trajectory. Previously drawn to math and science, I now pay extra attention in my English classes, and I’ve decided I’m now going to be a literature major for undergrad, go on to Yale to get my master’s, and then finish up inside those ivy walls with my doctorate.
After which, I will end up teaching wherever he does.
Oh, and I’m not like Ms. Crenshaw, on a solo mission monitoring the windows in his pale blue Porsche. These works of fiction that Nick and I discuss and dissect are a two-way street. We both talk. We both ask questions. We both listen to each other’s opinions and care about what they are. And people are noticing. The girls in Tellmer were confused at first, shooting curious looks in my direction as I knocked with growing confidence on his door, and then, when he began to seek me out, jealousy entered their eyes. Misfits are not supposed to ascend. They’re supposed to stay put underfoot, to be trod upon at leisure. But my peers’ issues with me are not my problem, nor do I give it much thought. I’m only interested in developing my relation—my friendship with Nick.
In truth, I sense that he’s lonely with his wife being gone so much, and I also feel that he’s lost in this sea of teenage girls who find him attractive and dote on him. On his side, he treats them all like little sisters, bundles of charming energy he must safeguard, and now that I know him so much better, I am certain that whatever anything with Greta looked like, nothing untoward was going on. In all our interactions, never, not once, has he ever done or suggested anything inappropriate, and I get the solid sense that it’s not about who I am. It’s about who he is. It’s such a relief not to worry that he’s capable of things that are wrong.