Dissent was fomenting on the hill, though not quite as quickly or with as much intensity as Ruth might have liked. News of Happy’s work-study program had gotten around, and in general the students liked it. They liked having money, and there weren’t enough jobs to go around in Equinox. There were jobs at the shopping mall in Nestor, but you either had to have a car or time to take the bus, and not many Equinox students did. Of course, Ruth thought, they certainly had time to take the bus to the mall when they had money to spend—but it was better not to enter the domain of pet peeves, where she could go on for hours, categorizing everything that was wrong with the spending of money as a recreational activity.
And then there was the conspiracy theory. The one rotten thing to happen in Equinox during the past month that Happy Masters demonstrably didn’t do—this is what the anti-Happy contingent most wanted to discuss. “You think she killed that lady?” students demanded at the circulation desk, their voices deafeningly hushed. Every conceivable inconsistency was trumped up into damning evidence—the weight of the stone, the time of death, the angle of the body in the water. Motives were invented, scenarios assembled. Never mind the suicide note. Never mind Happy’s absence from town that day, or the clear set of footprints—Glenda’s—leading to the water’s edge. The worst part about it was that what Happy really did—threw an old woman out into the cold, and drove her to take her own life—wasn’t nasty enough. The students preferred the web of lies, the fascinating tapestry of implausibility, to the terrible truth.
And it wasn’t just the students. She’d gone to buy an ice cream cone from Jennifer Triesman yesterday. “Closed for the season,” she’d grunted. And then her voice brightened. “So, how’dy’a think she did it?”
“Who? What?”
“Fascist Takeover Barbie—how’d she kill the old lady?”
Ruth’s response—gentle but firm discouragement—fell upon deaf ears. Jennifer shook her head, waved her off. “Aw, go read a book,” she spat, as Ruth began the walk back to campus. Anger fueled her weary steps; she took it out on rocks and pine cones.
But enough for now. Growth in wisdom may be measured by decrease in bitterness: thus spake Nietszche, anyhow. It was time to pour her mental energy into the October newsletter, which scrolled, nearly complete, across the screen of her computer.
Dear Equinoxians:
Let me begin with a schedule change, for those students and citizens who might not already have heard: Parents’ Weekend, that 37-year-old Equinox College tradition, which had been scheduled for the third weekend in October, has been cancelled. The reason? There is no longer anywhere in Equinox for parents to stay. The Equinox Inn, in case you haven’t noticed, has been closed “for renovations.” What these renovations will entail is unclear, as the new owner—you guessed it, Happy Masters—has declined to reveal her plans. Some parents have demanded that the cost of their airline tickets be refunded; allow me to refer you to Dean Bullers’s office if your parents are among them, or wish to be.
As for local business owners who had expected to earn, as they have every year since 1972, additional money from the arrival of hundreds of parents to our town, I’m sad to tell you that you are simply out of luck.
I would also like to call to your attention, Equinoxians, a commonly known fact about the neurophysiology of the frog.
(Surely our beloved librarian/editor has lost her marbles? you ask yourselves. Bear with me, friends!)
Take any common species of frog—the kind, perhaps, that you might find living along the shoreline of our own Onteo Lake—the very shoreline that is now being sullied by shards of broken glass, splinters of clapboard, the exhaust from construction machines and the deep ruts left by their treads. Capture this frog and bring it into your home, into your kitchen, and place it in a deep pan of cold water.
Now place the pan onto the stove and turn on the heat. Watch what your frog does as its little bath grows more and more uncomfortable. Does it thrash around in terror? Does it cry out in pain? Does it leap out of the pan to safety? Certainly it should, it is equipped with powerful hind legs for the very purpose of escaping danger! But, alas, the frog does nothing whatsoever. It is incapable of perceiving the incremental increase in temperature, and so sits in puzzlement as it is boiled to death.
Students, citizens, friends, is anyone beginning to feel a little warm here in Equinox, despite the dropping temperature? Does anyone feel a little itch in their legs telling them that a bit of leaping might be in order? If so, please visit me here at the Hayao Shinohara Memorial Library, and join my little save-the-frog society. Don’t wait until you’re boiled alive!
Your faithful servant,
Ruth.
A sigh escaped the librarian’s lips: it always made her heart heavy to invite anyone to do anything. She was only setting herself up to be disappointed by her fellow man. But disappointment was different from despair; disappointment could be transformed into action. Besides that, it was inevitable. She would use her failure as a benchmark from which to judge future success. Truth, Schopenhauer once said, passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, and finally it is accepted as self-evident. She could hardly skip straight to step three, could she? Her disappointment would be the first step in the ratification of the truth that, so far, only Ruth wanted to hear.
She printed out the newsletter, xeroxed it (blue this time, to match the sky, which had cleared for the first time in a week), and left the stack on the circulation desk. She would distribute at lunchtime. Meanwhile, Janet Ping, herself in possession of the best work-study job in town, slid the first page off the top and read it in silence. Ruth watched her from the stacks, where she had gone to shelve books: Janet revealed a great deal with her body language, and Ruth was curious to know if she could be recruited for the cause. She’d seen Janet at Happy’s house the other night, looking suspiciously starstruck, and so had her doubts.
These were promptly borne out. Janet blushed, hung her head, and replaced the newsletter, face-down, on top of the stack. Then she moved as far from the pile as she could get.
“Fess up,” Ruth said to her, seconds later. “You’re a fan, aren’t you.”
Janet was flipping through a box of index cards: lending records that had gotten separated from their books. She nodded. “Sort of,” she said.
“Why, Janet? Did you have one of those dolls when you were a girl?”
Again she nodded. She pushed the index cards away and folded her hands.
“A time comes,” Ruth said, “when you must put away childish things.”
Janet shrugged.
“Will you at least keep an open mind?”
“Okay, Miz Spinks.”
“Ruth. You know you girls are supposed to call me Ruth.”
This, anyway, raised a smile. “You’re supposed to call us women.”
“Touché,” Ruth replied, though what she was thinking was that this was not a title they had yet earned. Nevertheless, she knew a conversation’s end when she heard one.
* * *
Over in Reeve Tennyson’s office, another meeting was about to take place. Reeve had an eleven o’clock conference with the “chairwomyn” of the Equinox College Gay-Straight-Bi-Transgendered Alliance. It was now eleven-thirteen, according to his watch, which he held up between his face and the window. Outside, the October day was sere and bright, the landscape afire with reds and yellows and oranges, and the air hazy with smoke from burning grass and leaves up and down the lake. It was, basically, a very nice day, but Reeve was incapable of enjoying it. He was annoyed by the chairwomyn’s lateness, of course, but that was par for the course at Equinox—nothing here was important enough for anybody to ever be on time for. No, he was still mooning over yesterday’s meeting with the board of trustees, that quintet of elderly matrons, who had approached him about the problem of aggressive grading.
“Aggressive grading?” he had inquired helplessly.
“Correct,” one or another trustee had replied—he tended to get them confused. There had evidently been complaints—where these had come from, and who had received them, he didn’t know—of Cs and Ds, and was it not true that grades were a matter of interpretation? These young women did not need performance anxiety to be added to their repertoire of emotional burdens, now did they?
No, Reeve had had to agree, they sure didn’t. He would pawn the problem off on shirking Dean Bullers, his toady—let Bullers curb the talent.
Because Reeve had a new problem to deal with—a credentials issue. A few professors did not, it turns out, have the degrees they claimed, nor had they taught where they said they had. Certain parents of certain students had discovered this, and informed the Mid-Atlantic States Academic Association, which accredited colleges in the region. That august body had requested, in a tersely worded letter, that the issue be quickly resolved. A few gentle phone calls to the professors in question had been returned by a lawyer from the union.
The trustees, upon hearing of this, had not been pleased.
Ellen leaned in and said, “April Cort is here.” He jumped, and his elbow banged against the window’s large cast-iron handle. “Yow!” he said, shaking his numbed arm, and he turned to find the Gay-Straight-Bi-Transgendered-Alliance chairwomyn standing in the doorway. Stocky, broad-shouldered, crew-cutted, she wore a white t-shirt tucked into worn blue jeans, and a pair of running sneakers. Her eyes were flinty, her biceps thick. She carried a clipboard. She had a default expression—stern, wary—that seemed to infer guilt and shame from everything it saw.
If not for the nose ring, April would look exactly as though she had come to read the electric meter. Reeve had long wondered about the relationship between lesbians’ resentment of men and their emulation of men. Perhaps those were two separate categories of lesbians? Anyway it did not seem like a safe topic to broach. April Cort’s round face—quite a feminine face, in spite of everything—registered disappointment, as if Reeve had already refused to grant her whatever she was about to request. He gestured toward a chair and sat down behind his desk. April Cort remained standing.
“Hi, April,” he said.
“Hi, President Tennyson. I’ve come to talk to you about the Sally Streit thing.”
It was with a familiar despair that he forced himself to ask. “Sally…Streit?”
“The nationwide expert on lesbian sexual issues? Who GSBTA wants to invite to give a talk? But there isn’t enough money in the budget? I’m sure you were briefed on all this. Anyway, we want your office to pitch in.”
Reeve folded his hands on the desk and took a breath. “What sort of talk are we talking about, here?”
“You know,” April said, frowning. “A sex talk.”
A sex talk. Right. There had been a time when he would tell himself that he would eventually get used to having this kind of conversation at work, but the target date for that transformation kept getting pushed back, and now it had receded over the horizon, leaving only a wistful pink glow. There was no getting used to it, he understood now: it could only be endured. He spoke slowly and deliberately. “A lecture, you mean? On what exactly—gender issues?”
For the first time April Cort began to look a little bit uncomfortable. “Nnnnooo…”
“What, then?”
“Like…sex.”
“Like what about it?” he asked. Surely he could be forgiven for the sudden chafing discomfort underneath his slacks? Funny, he hadn’t really noticed it before, but April Cort was almost kind of…pretty. “Like, having it?”
“Like yeah,” she said, and then elaborated: “Lesbian sex.”
“Right. Sure.”
“Well, it’s mostly a talk, anyway…”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Reeve said, “What do you mean…mostly?”
April sat down in sudden exasperation, clearly having said more than she intended. She leaned forward, setting the clipboard on Reeve’s desk. He was charmed to see that the legal pad it held read only, President Tennyson 11am Thurs. Discuss Sally S. She spoke in a voice increased in pitch and decreased in age. “Okay, it’s like, it’s like she’s a sex advice person. For girls. And we’re all, like, of the age when, you know, some of the girls here, they don’t know what it’s like to do it with a girl, and it’s, I dunno, it’s important for everybody on campus to be comfortable together. So she comes to a place and she sort of like gives a presentation about that, and so like then everybody’ll know where everybody’s coming from.”
“Well,” Reeve said impulsively, “not everyone on campus is…a lesbian. Right?”
She scowled.
“I mean, maybe you all are, as far as I know. But—but the ones who aren’t, if there are such, ah, persons, which I’m sure there are, maybe they would be…uncomfortable? With the idea of…of such a talk.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” April Cort said.
“Okay,” Reeve quickly replied.
“Anyhow she talks about sex, and how girls do it with girls, and it’s really fun and funny and intimate, and then there’s a sort of a demonstration.”
There was a beat. Reeve ventured, “Do you mean there’s a…what is there exactly?”
“A sort of show.”
“Like what,” Reeve said, “does she show?”
“Things. That she brings. And she does things, sort of with them.”
Reeve adjusted himself below the desktop, concealing it with a general backwards lean into his chair. If she noticed, she didn’t let on. “In front of everybody?”
“Uh-huh.” Staring at the clipboard.
“Without…that is…is she…naked?”
April looked up suddenly. “Semi-,” she said. And then she filled the silence that followed by saying, “It isn’t like it’s just her, I mean audience members participate too, if they want.”
Reeve was now completely flabbergasted. He said, “You mean this woman comes and has sex with students on stage? Sex, with things she brings? Are you serious?”
“So what?” April challenged, though he sensed that it seemed ridiculous even to her.
Reeve shook his head, at last feeling confident that he could take a stand. “I can’t fund that!” he said. “It’s just not of any academic value. What you do in your private life is none of my business, but, you know.” He took a breath. “I mean…come on!”
Her hands were folded in her lap and she stared at them with singular intensity. Had he embarrassed her?
“What does she charge?” he had to ask.
“Five thousand dollars.”
“Holy Moses!” he blurted. “Five grand?! To come to Equinox and…and…” He groped for the words. “People pay this person to come screw, or whatever, eighteen-year-old girls? April, are you insane?!”
“Women,” April said flatly; the meter reader voice was back.
“Huh?”
“Eighteen-year-old women,” she said, standing. “And nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and beyond. That’s who you’re treating like babies, President Tennyson. You are insulting grown-up women.”
“Huh,” he said again, despite its having failed once already.
“Like I said, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re just an old fart who doesn’t care about anything. You had your woman and you threw her away, and now you hate us all. Well, the hell with you.”
“Wait a minute here!”
She snatched the clipboard from the desk. “Goodbye, Reeve,” she spat, and flung open the door and stalked through it. He heard her sneakered footsteps squeaking down the hallway.
After a few minutes, Ellen poked her head in. “I’m going to lunch?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Nice try, there,” she added.
“Thanks,” Reeve said. “Thanks a heap.”
* * *
In the cafeteria, April was livid. “That fucker is a fucking sexist racist asshole pig.” She threw down her fork and knife in disgust, then almost as impulsively grabbed them up and began eating again.
“He’s a racist, too?” Rain wanted to know. Her round face peered out from between two panels of uncombed hair.
“Probably,” April said through a mouthful of lasagna.
“I’m not surprised the man is squeamish,” Ty drawled, and she dabbed at her mouth with the linen napkin she carried around in her handbag. “What did you expect?”
“Dunno,” April grunted.
“Actually?” Sara said. “He is a racist? That’s how he got fired from his last job?”
“Really?” Janet asked. She hadn’t been paying much attention to the conversation until now, instead concentrating on her food, which was really very good, and her impending assistance of Happy Masters. She had the shakes, on account of midterms and lack of drinking. She thought there might be a chance she would fail French.
“I Googled him,” Sara went on. “He said black men shouldn’t fuck white women.”
“He said that?” Rain gasped.
“I say,” Ty muttered, “men shouldn’t fuck women, period.”
“I am so not surprised,” April said. “So not surprised. He’s a menace to the communal environment.”
“I don’t like the way he walks,” Sara said. Her torn dress seemed to be itching her and she reached over her shoulder to scratch. “He walks like he’s got a stick in his butt.”
“Maybe he’s secretly a fag,” Ty offered.
“We should out him,” Sara suggested.
“No way,” April said, “that would be like a compliment to him. We oughta protest. We should picket his office or something.”
“I don’t know,” Rain said, hesitantly. “I think this whole sex chick thing is a little weird.”
“You know, hon,” April came back, “you’re not as hetero as you think.”
Rain appeared taken aback. “No?”
“No. How come you hang around with us all the time? You’re the only straight girl.”
“I’m straight!” Sara said.
“You don’t count, you’re twisted,” April said. Sara appeared for a moment to struggle not to beam with pride.
“It’s just you guys are more relaxed,” Rain said, sounding rather doubtful.
Ty appeared to be licking her lips, and her eyes had grown sad and distant. She gazed at Rain with longing.
“Okay, that’s it,” April said. “We’re protesting to get Sally Streit on campus. Stop the bullshit, I say. Meeting tonight in my room. Who’s with me?”
“I am,” Sara said.
“I’m in,” Ty said.
Rain sighed. “Okay, I guess.”
“Babe, how about you?”
Janet had polished off her lasagna and was mopping up the sauce with a piece of bread. “I don’t know. I don’t feel so good.”
“You look okay to me.”
“I think I’ll beg off.”
“Whatever,” April said, attempting to conceal her disappointment with a shrug. Janet felt bad, but she had other priorities. She reached out and touched April’s hand, which lay on the table curled into a fist. April twitched a little but didn’t take the hand. Well, whatever. Janet got up.
“Goodnight, everybody,” she said, and walked off and slid her dirty tray into the rack. Her heart gasped with relief. She smoothed her dress with both her hands and hurried out into the night, and to her first glass of wine.