Homework
“Our mother believed that her love instructed us about how to be people,” Amy complained bitterly, and certainly not for the first time. She was helping Meg make dinner in the haphazard little kitchen of their High Street apartment. “She thought she could just influence us by being so intimate and affectionate that we couldn’t resist her.”
It was a chilly evening in the middle of November, just before Thanksgiving, when each night darkness falls noticeably earlier with a surprising suddenness. The three Green sisters and Teddy Bell had fallen into something of a weekday routine—classes, early dinner, schoolwork, and sometimes a little television before bedtime, if a movie they could all agree on was showing on one of the two stations they could get on their pathetic Goodwill television set, which only worked at all thanks to the judicious arrangement of a foil-covered coat hanger rigged by Teddy.
On the nights Meg wasn’t home until late, because of evenings with the two Frank children, Teddy often made dinner, though his idea of making dinner was usually to go out on his bicycle to get an assortment of delicious things from Jing’s, the Asian grocer up on Whitney Avenue past the Peabody Museum. Amy adored those
meals because he always stocked up on seaweed salad, cold sesame noodles, and her favorite, California rolls. Meg was hard on him about the expense of these meals.
“How much did you spend, Teddy, seriously?” she had asked him when she had come upon the evidence of their most recent Jing’s feast.
“I don’t spend it,” Teddy had replied evasively with a guilty grin. “It spends itself, somehow, and is gone before I know it.”
“And Janet was always so sweet and sympathetic and understanding and beloved by all,” Amy added with sarcastic emphasis, as if this were a new observation, which it wasn’t. “She always made me feel guilty for not being as good as I should be! Can you spell hypocrisy?”
Amy had become obsessive in her need to rehash the catastrophic events that had led them to this new way of life. Joanna, when present, would usually chime right in with her own grievances. Meg was never first to bring up the subject of their estrangement from their parents, and had grown quite weary of the subject, but she was nevertheless unwilling to deny Amy her right to a tenth grader’s repetitive angst.
“Well, she did influence us, you know,” Meg pointed out in her elder-sisterly fashion. “We couldn’t resist her and consequently we did evolve into pretty decent people, after all.” She had touched on the complexities of her living situation a few times in conversation with Mark, and those chats had left her feeling even less certain than she already was of the absoluteness of her sisters’ views.
She turned from the stove, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Hey, Ames, would you at least make an attempt to leave some of those string beans some middles at least, if you don’t mind? I know I bought enough for all four of us but it doesn’t look like it now with you snapping off a third of every bean there.”
“I didn’t say we weren’t decent people,” Amy said, picking through the remaining beans and nipping their ends with only slightly more generous standards for wilted ends and brown spots. Meg was such a nag about the cost of food—about the cost of everything, these days. “And I think you should stop trying to be the voice of reason all the time. I’m talking about the fuckbird. Janet. She’s the one who’s not a decent person.”
“Maybe a bad person, or someone capable of being bad, anyway, can still have been a good mother?” suggested Teddy, seeking to introduce one of the standard variations on this familiar melody while captively eavesdropping and reading his philosophy assignment at the table.
“When Bad Parents Happen to Good Children!” Amy intoned, dropping the last mutilated bean stub into the bowl.
“When an Incompetent String Bean Assistant Happens to Dinner—Next on the Table in Five Minutes!” announced Meg, trying not to get burned in the cramped space as she seized what remained of the beans and threw them into the big dented saucepan (two dollars at Goodwill) in which she had sautéed some chicken breasts and shallots. The microwave pinged that the potatoes were ready and then obsequiously suggested in its programmed scroll that they should enjoy their meal.
“So where the hell is Jo-Jo? I told her dinner was at seven tonight and she was expected or she should call or leave a note, damn it. It’s not so much to ask. Ordinary people do it.”
“I hate ordinary people,” Amy muttered.
“Teddy, will you get your books off the table so Amy can set it?” demanded Meg, ignoring Amy’s remark. “Amy, will you set the table right now? And I mean right now?”
“Have you considered the irony,” Teddy asked gently, closing up his books, “that while you three speak about the wonderful values you were raised to believe in, you’ve been totally harsh about your folks? I know it’s not my place to comment—”
“He said, commenting away,” Amy added.
“—But I really wonder if you have ever stopped to think about this. Was there no part of the famous Green wonderfulness, the loss of which you all mourn on a daily basis, that included compassion or forgiveness?”
Amy and Meg looked at him. There was a silence that might have gone on for quite a while had Joanna’s key not rattled in the lock just then.
“Sorry!” she called out from the long narrow hallway. She dumped her books and draped her coat on one of their bicycles. Joanna rushed to her place at the table with mock urgency, which irritated Meg. Was it too much to ask that people show up for dinner if she was going to go to the trouble of making it?
“Sorry, Mom!” Joanna said. Meg gave her a look. They sat down and began to eat while Joanna, who was oblivious to the tension still lingering in the room, reported.
“So, there was this new guy who could not remember how to do a mocha and a whole bunch of people came in and ordered tall mochas just when I was ending my shift, I swear, it was like the Mocha Appreciation Club was having its monthly meeting all of a sudden. What a complete space cadet. The new guy, I mean, Mr. Rivetface. I think they must have pierced some part of his brain by mistake. Do you know, incidentally, you guys, I am about the only barrista in any coffee place in town without multiple piercings? It’s a wonder they hired me, I’m so unpierced. I am so, so, so glad you talked me out of that nose-piercing thing last year, Meg, what the hell was I thinking? And everybody compares infections and they’re always borrowing Neosporin from one another—”
“Overshare! Overshare!” bleeped Amy and Meg together.
“Sorry. So anyway, I must have showed him the perfect mocha like five times during the shift. I think he was high or something. Really. And then two of them were supposed to be decaf and he forgot practically while I was still calling them, you could just
see it happening. His head just couldn’t hold the information for more than two seconds. It was pathetic. I would still be there if I hadn’t simply lied and marked two random ones decaf anyway.”
Joanna looked around at her sisters and Teddy. Teddy was thoughtfully studying his plate. Only Meg met her eye. “Don’t give me that look, Meg! They weren’t old ladies with heart conditions or anything. They’re just fussbudgets because they read too many magazine articles about caffeine. They thought it was decaf and that’s probably the most important thing about how it affects you, right? What you believe it is?”
“Ah,” Teddy murmured, “a Lockeian approach to the effect of un-decaffeinated coffee.”
“Not more a Berkeleyan approach?” Meg challenged. “Esse est percipi. To be is to be perceived. To be perceived as decaf is to be happily sipped as decaf.”
“So, as I was saying,” Joanna continued, giving Teddy a friendly kick under the table but otherwise pretending to ignore both of them, “Anyway, they never tip. And they’re not old or anything, I promise. I think they’re graduate students, I see them a lot. And then there was this other new person being trained today, a townie, this girl who said she’s never had a cup of coffee in her life. She told me she has Diet Coke for breakfast, with a PowerBar. So this girl was a total spaz also, and on top of that, she kept asking people if they wanted their beans ‘grounded,’ like electrically or something.”
“Janet the Good would have kittens over what you did,” said Amy. “Man, would she rake you over the coals about a million ways for the decaf thing.”
“And then her husband, Mr. Integrity and Forgiveness, would know about some insane New Zealand study of decaf drinkers and their sleeping patterns versus a placebo group of people who only thought they were getting decaf,” added Joanna.
“And then what would happen after that?” Teddy wondered.
Watching Joanna suddenly drop her gaze into her lap, he regretted the question because he was reluctant to cause pain, and his previous impertinent observation still hung in the air, unanswered. He had become so much more than a detached observer of the Green sisters. Participant observation, Meg, who had taken a class in anthropology, called his presence in their lives.
“Lou would probably have very nicely made me drink three big cups of strong coffee before bedtime so that I could have a totally restless night of caffeine insomnia, develop some empathy for people who have their own reasons for drinking decaf, and, thereafter, repent my careless ethical misjudgment,” Joanna replied, subdued and less cocky, after this moment of reflection, which had started out as a witty retort but had then devolved into a genuinely thoughtful guess as to her father’s likely response to her careless expediency with the truth.
“Right, and then Janet would have wanted you to write an essay about all you have learned about your inner sense of worth and your recognition of the selfhood of others, in terms of decaffeinated coffee, which she would have submitted to the Journal of Sanctimonious Goodness, and then the two of them would have made a contribution to a fair trade coffee organization in Guatemala in your name because they would have been so, so, so proud of you!” mocked Amy, who had a knack for simultaneous wit and viciousness, which she especially loved to display in front of Teddy.
“Sounds like you’ve all got some sort of internalized imperative from them irresistibly tweaking your conscience anyway,” Teddy said lightly, after a long moment when the only sound at the table was that of cutlery clinking.
“Having a conscience is so inconvenient,” Joanna remarked finally. “I can’t help wishing at times that our mother and father hadn’t been so particularly efficient with their, whatever you call it, their moral suasion.”
“Oooh, moral suasion! Big vocab!” Amy exclaimed.
“Pay attention and you might learn something, dingdong,” Joanna retorted, oblivious to the way they had circled around to a point quite close to the incompleted conversation that had been taking place just before she came into the apartment.
“Don’t be hard on the staff, where is your familial teaching by example, Miss Efficient Moral Suasion?” Teddy came back cheerfully.
“Efficient suasion,” chirped Amy. “Fish swish, Swedish, suede, swash, wash, cash, sash, sashimi, sushi—”
“SHUSH!” Joanna and Meg cried together. Teddy grinned and reached across the table to pet Amy on the head to show his sympathy.
“So, listen, you guys, we need to make a plan for Thanksgiving,” Meg said a moment later, serious now.
“Can’t we just skip it?” Joanna said. “I just knew you would bring this up again. I’ve been dreading this decision. My birthday last week was bad enough, and we got through that.”
“But I love Thanksgiving dinner,” Amy wailed. “How can we just not have a Thanksgiving dinner? I always peel the chestnuts for the stuffing! And then Joanna and I make the stuffing and the cranberry sauce while we listen to our old Pete Seeger tapes! I thought we were going to be a family on our own! Meg, Jo-Jo, you guys said we would be our own family. How can we just not do the most important traditional family things?”
“I wonder what Janet and Lou are planning?” Joanna said. “Since Lou’s birthday is the same weekend this year. Not that it matters, I mean I don’t really care what they’re doing,” she added, too late.
“Oh, November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year!” Meg declared. They all looked at one another. Amy’s mouth was trembling and she roughly wiped the back of her wrist across her face as if to rub away her sadness.
“Since we’re all going up to Maine for Christmas, I don’t think Avery would miss me if I didn’t spend Thanksgiving with her,”
Teddy said quietly. “We always go to the Langdons down the road anyway, that’s what we do every year, so it’s not as if it would change her plan in any major way. They’re old friends and she and Diana Langdon have had a sort of competitive friendship for some fifty years, and I think George Langdon used to advise her on investments or something before he retired. Avery always makes the cranberry sauce from the directions on the bag of cranberries and spills sugar all over everything in the kitchen and then she presents it with great drama as if it was the most challenging part of the meal. And then George tells her the cranberry sauce is the best thing he’s ever tasted and Diana always humors her in a sort of condescendingly gracious way that’s pretty hilarious, considering the rest of the meal.”
“What’s that like?” Amy asked.
“The turkey is always desiccated, the stuffing is from a mix, and the gravy has lumps,” Teddy replied in fond tones. “I mean, I love these people, but everyone has been drinking George’s toxic eggnog for hours, waiting for the turkey to be overcooked, so body parts have started to go numb anyway, which is essential to enjoying the meal. It’s all part of the tradition. But I’ve missed it before. The Langdons have their own family, in New York and Boston, and some of them come every year, so it’s not like I’m essential.”
“Are you sure, T?” Meg breathed. “Isn’t that letting her down?”
“Christmas is really the more important holiday for Gran anyway,” he reasoned.
“It sounds as though Thanksgiving is hugely important to your family,” Meg said skeptically.
“I would love even that desiccated turkey,” Amy said sadly. “Maybe you could bring some back and I can listen to Pete Seeger while I eat a desiccated turkey sandwich or something.”
“Oh, please,” Joanna groaned, swatting her impatiently. “We can do better than that. Don’t be such a pathetic orphan.”
“So if I tell Avery I’m not coming,” Teddy persisted, “that way
we could be together here. I’d really like to be here with you three,” Teddy said. “It’s a very long trip up and back just for those days, anyway. I could definitely use the time here, working, too.”
“Would that really be okay, Teddy?” Meg asked. “Are you totally sure?”
“We can get a turkey at a supermarket,” Joanna said. “Not that we have a roasting pan big enough. And not that I have a clue about how to roast a turkey. Janet always chased us out before the big drama of stuffing it and trussing it with those weird spikes and putting in the oven.”
“Thanksgiving won’t be Thanksgiving, no matter what,” Amy said mournfully.
“Sure it will, Ames,” Joanna said consolingly. “We can divide up the responsibilities and make it just right. We can figure it out.”
“I was thinking maybe we should all volunteer to help serve Thanksgiving dinner at the downtown soup kitchen, if we’re going to be here, together, that day,” Teddy said hesitantly. “I mean, if that isn’t just too completely virtuous and depressing. And it would be another good reason to give Avery for my staying here with you guys.”
“No, it’s just right,” Meg said thoughtfully. “We could make our own Thanksgiving dinner the day before and make a lot so we have food to share.”
“What does Avery think of us, I wonder?” Amy asked. “She said it was okay for us to come for Christmas, but I mean, does she know anything about us? I wouldn’t want her to be mad that you were with us for Thanksgiving, but it would be so great if you can stay. I’ve been so afraid to bring it up until now.”
“She thinks I’m sweet on all three of you,” Teddy said with a grin. “Those were her precise words!”
Just then, the four girls who shared the apartment directly beneath theirs (it was very possible these four girls had actually met at a meeting of a support group for people with severe Joni
Mitchell disorders—one of them had told Joanna that the reason their front room, which Joanna glimpsed when she had carried up a package for them which had been lying in the front hall, was painted dark blue was in homage to the eponymous Joni Mitchell album) cranked up For the Roses for the fifteenth time that day and possibly the three hundredth time that week.
Joanna exclaimed with unusual vehemence to the floorboards, “Oh Jesus, again with the cold blue steel! So spike up and have your smack overdoses already, for God’s sake! The suspense is killing us!”
“Please, Jo-Jo,” Meg said lightly. Although she trusted their sensible judgment, Meg hated how casually her two younger sisters now spoke the lingo after just a few weeks at Duncan. “But speaking of addictive substances, coffee, with caffeine, before studying, everyone?” Meg offered (Joanna brought it home from work in little unmarked brown sacks; Meg preferred not to think about how it came into her possession), and, after all that, everybody seemed more relaxed.
Reader’s note: I hate this feeling I have of being an unwelcome guest at my own party with every critical remark I make, but the way you depict Amy seems condescending to me. You make her sound babyish and silly. Should an author condescend to her characters in this way? Doesn’t that keep the reader from sympathizing adequately? AG
Reader’s note: I don’t agree. I think Amy seems adorable and touchingly young at certain moments. Meg, on the other hand, seems like a generic character, a grim and humorless older sister who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. MG
Author’s note: Is it remotely possible that neither of you is able to read objectively in general and specifically when it comes to these characters? Just a thought.
That evening, as was the case most evenings, all four of them worked diligently for hours. Meg had fallen a bit behind in her reading in the past three weeks, because of time devoted to the first task Mark Frank had given her, which consisted of going through his most recent essays and lectures, in anticipation of publication, and not only fact-checking in general but also specifically researching all the details of his quoted material in order to obtain legal permissions for the song lyrics, which was quite timeconsuming, particular work. Meg was always conscientious about her work anyway, but she especially wanted to do a good job for him. She wanted to live up to Professor Baldwin’s esteem, she was eager to keep this job for as long as she possibly could, and the time she spent with Mark was more important to her than she really wanted to admit to herself. And of course, there was the hourly wage.
Mark always had time for her. After they reviewed the work at hand, alone in his office on the fourth floor of Linsley-Chit—where he occasionally smoked unfiltered Camels, in complete insouciant violation of the campus-wide prohibition on smoking, which he had deemed “silly”—they talked about everything in the world, from Bill Clinton’s effects on gender issues in the culture to the more subtle allusions in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to some thoughtful moments considering the nuances of the Green family estrangement. She could tell him anything and he would really listen, he would take her seriously (the thing we all crave the most), and then he would challenge her assumptions. When she felt herself fixed in the gaze of those intense blue eyes, Meg knew that Mark really saw her for who she was.
This was attraction. An adult attraction, not at all like the first and only serious relationship of her life that she had had with a boy on her Putney trip, Rob Chatfield, a self-assured lacrosse player from Baltimore who had promised all the way across France (she had finally slept with him in a youth hostel in the Dordogne)
that their love would be undiminished by the miles between them once their summer idyll had ended, but who had almost instantly and predictably broken her heart just two months into freshman year when he wrote to her from Bowdoin to tell her he had become involved with a girl he had met on a squash court.
Teddy really saw her for who she was too, of course, and he understood her as well as anyone ever had, outside of her family. Teddy really had become family. Various of her Yale acquaintances and even one of the Joni Mitchell girls downstairs had, in fact, assumed they were a couple, she had recently learned. But Teddy was just good kind safe Teddy. Mark Frank was the exciting dangerous real world in which anything could happen.
Reader’s note: This is infuriating and painful. I just wanted to make sure you knew. MG
Author’s note: I had hoped that with the passage of time, you would be capable of taking a step back. Can you do that? Can you try to read this through the eyes of a stranger?
Reader’s note: Why would I want to do that? MG
Author’s note: Why wouldn’t you be willing to do that? In the interests of comfort and harmony.
Reader’s note: There is little evidence that comfort and harmony are any concern of yours. MG
Meg’s basic work, they had agreed, would average out to about two hours every day in the library, or about ten hours a week spent on research tasks, plus another six hours, three afternoons of the week, with the Frank children after school. Any child-minding responsibilities beyond that would be negotiated as they came along, including those which might involve Joanna or Amy.
Time spent with his children was the exhausting part of the
job. Alice and Wills had taken to her so quickly Meg had found it worrying. Why were they so eager to consider her their intimate after just one meeting? Whenever she was with them, they crawled all over her. Wills would burrow into her lap like a puppy, while Alice would run her not-unsticky fingers through Meg’s hair in nearly hypnotic fashion until Meg would finally, in a gentle way, ask her to stop. But Meg was sympathetic to them, and she felt that for whatever reason they really needed her in their lives.
Mark spoke fondly of Alice and Wills but didn’t seem to spend very much time with them. Their mother was strange and reticent. Meg had at first supposed Kelly Howard to be his contemporary, but it was hard, really, to tell how old either of them were. She had wild hair and wild eyes and always looked as though she had a headache or was just waking up. Meg was never sure if she was dressed or not. (“I never know if she’s coming or going, and I mean that literally!” she told her sisters.) Meg thought at first that Kelly was as British as Mark, based on the few syllables they exchanged, but then after the next encounter she decided that Kelly was, in fact, American. She couldn’t figure Kelly Howard out at all. There was clearly a problem. She was supposed to be brilliant at something, everyone seemed to know this, but nobody Meg knew seemed to know what it was. Meg saw no evidence of brilliance or even basic productivity.
Several times, when Meg had arrived at the appointed hour in their dark warren of rooms on the third floor, Wills and Alice would have been home from school for perhaps an hour. But they would be waiting for Meg to make them something to eat, although their mother was there, lying on her bed reading, or, sometimes, just lying on her bed. Kelly would greet Meg languidly, with a slightly vague and confused look, as though she neither had been expecting her nor could quite remember who Meg was. Meg had begun to worry about Alice and Wills on the days when she wasn’t with them.
The late arrival of the Frank children in New Haven had been
problematic, but places for them in kindergarten and second grade had been found at Hand, a nearby private elementary school, to which they were driven every morning by a part-time art history lecturer whose daughter was in the kindergarten with Wills. A different Hand parent would inevitably drop them home after school. Apparently there was some sort of committee of parent volunteers that planned and scheduled to make this a certainty every school day, as though it were beyond question that Kelly could not be expected to take responsibility for the transport of her own children. Meg suspected that Mark’s celebrity plus his charming English accent had gotten them quite far in their New Haven life. People were willing to do things for the Franks, and the Franks seemed quite willing to have those things done for them.
As there was never anything to eat in the kitchen, Meg would take the children down to the JE dining hall for a very early dinner. There was rarely evidence in the grim little apartment kitchen that anyone was planning to eat a real dinner or any other sort of planned meal. The kitchen cupboards contained little more than a few cans of soup and a depressing assortment of items pilfered from the dining hall—packets of crackers, small plastic tubs of apple sauce, and individual servings of cold cereal in little boxes. There were always dirty dishes and glasses in the sink when Meg arrived, and it seemed to Meg that Kelly never did the washing up, and instead simply counted on her to clean up.
Twice Meg had taken the children out for a snack at the counter at Atticus, the bookstore and café right on Chapel Street, which they enjoyed so much it was both gratifying and embarrassing. The expense was problematic and would have been very awkward to bring up to Mark, and Meg couldn’t afford to take them to Atticus regularly. Perhaps she would ask him for some money to stock the kitchen with snacks for the children. Mark’s lack of engagement with his family was not the most appealing thing about him, Meg would have admitted.
Wills had Mark’s mouth and jaw, and the startling dark blueness of his eyes. The second time Meg was with the Frank children, she had been sitting on the big floppy sofa in their apartment when Wills settled into her lap with an almost heartbreaking sort of confidence, proffering a picture book, and Meg started to read it aloud. It was from the Hand school library, so someone must have picked it for him to take home for bedtime reading. It was one of Meg’s favorite Little Bear books. She hadn’t seen this book since Amy outgrew it.
Kelly was behind a closed bedroom door, perhaps taking a nap. The children seemed to know not to bother her or make noise. Alice was on her knees on the floor beside them, intently crayoning a castle she and Meg had been drawing together while Wills had been building a towering city out of books from one of the many packing boxes that were stacked through all the rooms. Meg had spent almost an hour brushing out Alice’s hair, which had, beneath the outer layer of silky curls, been tangled in hard knots that had clearly been there a long while. Alice had been very good, though she cried softly for a moment when Meg had inadvertently yanked very hard on a particularly bad knot. Now she wore a red barrette of Meg’s in her hair and seemed very pleased with her new look, interrupting progress on her castle every so often to scramble to her feet and check on her appearance in the bathroom mirror. Wills snuggled in more deeply and nuzzled his face into the notch above Meg’s collarbone. The top of his head gave off a puppyish tang she quite liked.
Mark came home not so long after, when they were on their second reread of Little Bear. When he saw the cozy tableau, he murmured, “Lucky lad,” and Meg pretended not to have heard him, though she lost her breath as she kept reading, and she sounded to herself like someone who had just run up a flight of
stairs. She read to Wills with extra tenderness, in a voice she knew his father could hear as he walked about the apartment frowning, looking at the mail and glancing about at the mess. The world was larger than it had been the moment before.
Reader’s note: I have a real problem with this whole development. I feel like a voyeur reading these scenes. Are they necessary to the novel? It seems so private. Why isn’t the narrative staying in the point of view of the middle sister, after all, that paragon of sensitivity? Why isn’t this novel more Joanna’s story? AG
Author’s note: The novel’s about what it’s about. It’s not about what it’s not about.
Kelly, it turned out, was a former student of Mark Frank’s. Meg had learned this fascinating news from one of her favorite teachers from freshman year, Claire Shipman, whom she had run into at Starbucks.
“I hear you’re working for Mark Frank!” Claire had exclaimed, by way of greeting. “How is that going for you? He’s quite the wild man!” They had ended up sitting together for a few minutes to chat. It was the middle of the day, so Joanna was at school, which was good from a privacy point of view, but bad because Meg had grown unaccustomed to paying full price for her coffee. Professor Shipman had taught Meg’s section of English 120, and she had been such a dynamic teacher, especially when they were reading Dickens, that Meg had written “Claire Shipman rocks my world!” on her course evaluation form.
Although they touched on other subjects briefly, including Meg’s current schedule of classes, Claire Shipman, who urged her to drop the “Professor Shipman” and just call her Claire now that Meg was a former student, seemed eager to return to the subject
of Mark Frank, whom she had known when she was a graduate student at Duke and he was just making a name for himself with a series of provocative essays in Rolling Stone.
“Kelly was my student her first semester at college,” she told Meg. “I was teaching my first class, too, so we were both neophytes. It was a section of the big introductory class Duke’s English department prides itself on, something not unlike our own 114, and she was utterly original in a way that stood out, from her first paper, which was on existentialism and Beowulf. I was totally intimidated by her. She took Mark’s seminar the very next semester, which was rare in itself, for a freshman, given what a hot ticket that class was, with juniors and seniors fighting for a place at the table, but apparently she had gone to see him in office hours to plead her case and he had been struck, as we all were, by her potential. Or by something, anyway.”
“What was the seminar?”
“‘The Interior Worlds of Henry James.’ It was a nice class. Don’t give me that funny look, the boy wonder of hermeneutics did start out on a traditional path before he reinvented himself. He was in transition when I knew him at Duke. You can probably look up some of his publications from that period. The seeds were already being sown if you know where to look. He wrote something quite good about James’s fascination with vulgarity that in some ways was one of his first High Art-Low Art pieces. Mark also used to dress in a jacket and tie for class, if you can imagine that, like the Oxford intellectual that he was, before he started in with the bad-boy leather jackets and Mickey Mouse T-shirts.”
“What was Kelly like when she was a student?” Meg was curious. “She seems very depressed now. Have you seen her since they’ve been here? She would remember you, don’t you think?”
“You know, I feel bad about it, but I’ve been sort of avoiding both of them,” Claire admitted. “I really shouldn’t be telling you any of this.” She burst out laughing as Meg leaned in with animation
as she uttered these last words. “I suppose anything preceded by a statement like that sounds pretty juicy, doesn’t it?”
“I really do want to know this,” Meg admitted. “But only tell me if you want to,” she added insincerely.
“Kelly was just brilliant. You know she was very successful for a while, when they lived in New York when he was lecturing at Columbia, right after they were married, doing these odd sort of performance readings?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, she would write these monologues that weren’t exactly poetry and she would sort of inhabit them. She dressed up in weird clothing she found at the Salvation Army and had bizarre props. It was all very tongue-in-cheek sort of glosses on surrealism. It was performance art, very strange, but very funny and original and very, very intelligent. Full of arcane references to all sorts of texts. You know Harold Bloom laughed until he wept at one of those performances, when nobody else could ever figure out the joke. He told someone it was a pun in Greek about Walter Pater that made reference to James, Ovid, and Wittgenstein. But then he didn’t want to explain it. ‘My dear,’ he said, you know, the way he always does, ‘you simply had to be there.’ That sort of thing. People say she was just amazing. I’ve only read small parts of those performances, in reviews. Everyone thought she was going to publish a collection but nothing has ever come of that.”
“So then what happened?” Meg demanded, sounding to her own ears like a spoiled child who had to hear the continuation of a bedtime story.
“Well, then, having married her for her brilliance, he did his best to annihilate it, which he has done before apparently. Basically he proceeded to keep her barefoot and pregnant.”
“Literally? And what do you mean, he’s done it before, done what?”
“Well, you know what I mean. It’s an expression. Found a
bright woman for a wife and kept her pregnant and on the sidelines. He does tend to marry the competition. There’s a bitter first wife—have you ever heard of the mystery writer Joan Ritter? That’s the one. And there are adult children who don’t speak to him.”
“How old is Mark?” Meg tried to seem curious in an impersonal way, though Claire didn’t seem especially aware of Meg’s avidity for information on this topic.
“Mark is fifty-one.”
“Seriously?”
“I only know this because at Duke someone very close to me was involved with him. She was the person he left his wife for, and then he dumped her for Kelly. Believe me, I know more than I could ever want to know about Mark Frank, and he is definitely fifty-one.”
“I’m really surprised,” Meg tried to say this as mildly as she could. “I mean, about all of it. I mean, this just wasn’t my impression—”
“Well, but aren’t you minding those cross midgets?” Claire interrupted. “How are you managing? I hear they’re a terror. You know they crawled out a window onto a roof the first night they were on campus? Mark and Kelly seemed somehow not to notice they weren’t in their beds—it was a student walking through the quad who happened to look up and see them scampering around on the slates. I know, it sounds impossible, but it happened,” Claire added, as Meg got the meaning of what she had just said and put her hand to her mouth to stifle her gasp of disbelief.
“Nightmarish, isn’t it? What are they, on the fourth floor?”
“Third.”
“Well, that’s high enough.” Claire looked at her sympathetically. “Nobody told you about this? Somebody should have warned you if you’re responsible for those children. Who knows, they might think of doing it again. Although those are sort of tricky window latches on the old windows in those colleges. I hear they’re replacing them in the next big round of renovations.”
“Wills could probably undo those casement latches,” Meg said. “In fact, I know Alice can. I’ve asked her to open a window myself.”
“So now you can be on your guard. I am so glad we ran into each other! I feel much less guilty telling you all this now that the roof escapade has come up,” Claire said. “I can’t believe nobody warned you about that specifically. Are they little horrors to mind?”
“No, they’re really sweet with me.”
“Well, maybe they’ve begun to settle down. Anyway, from what I hear, after each pregnancy Kelly’s gone into a serious depression, and maybe she wasn’t too stable to begin with, you know? Though now I am sounding like a bitch on wheels. She hasn’t done any work in years is the one thing I know for a fact. Not since before the first one was hatched. She’s basically just disappeared professionally. There’s a certain element of schadenfreude for my friend, as you can imagine, which is why she keeps track. Sometimes I tell her that if it weren’t for Kelly Howard coming along when she did, those would have been her babies and her non-career.”
“So how old is Kelly?”
“Well, if she was a freshman the first year I taught at Duke, she would be, what, twenty-eight now.”
Meg thought this through. “Alice is seven!”
“And your point is … ?” Claire looked at her knowingly. “Yes, she was twenty-one when she had Alice.” She looked at Meg again. “That’s right, she didn’t graduate.”
Meg plowed through pages of English (Canterbury Tales) and history (the Crusades had been going on for what felt like an eternity), and she made a good start on her astronomy reading. She was taking an introductory astronomy class in order to fulfill a science requirement. It had been either the geology class known as Rocks for Jocks or this one, which was sometimes called Stars for Poets. Meg
had opted to study the stars because word had it there were diverting nighttime field trips to the Yale Observatory out in Bethany, but so far the trips had been canceled because of bad weather.
She had left for very last some revisions on the ongoing draft of her independent English project, a hopelessly ambitious paper devoted to the impact of captivity on the narrative voices in The Catcher in the Rye and The Diary of Anne Frank. She didn’t have another meeting with Clayton Linton, her tutorial supervisor, until the following week. Professor Linton was known for his hair (a mysteriously achieved upsweep of the type Amy called “soufflé hair”) and for his passionate lecture style. Meg had never gotten over the time in her sophomore year when he burst into tears in the middle of a Dante lecture. He had fled the room, with an apologetic, “Oh, I just can’t go on, I just can’t go on!”
Unsure of her ideas, and unsure that Professor Linton was going to be able to help her especially, as the material was outside his usual range, Meg was becoming apprehensive about getting the paper done. She decided she would ask Mark if he had any advice for her when she met with him in the afternoon. She wondered if there was any possible way he was related to Anne Frank. She tried not to think about Claire Shipman’s intelligence on Mark’s family life, but failed.
Teddy finished his philosophy reading (Sartre), and then made some inroads on the vast quantity of Milton he had to finish before the next lecture if it was going to make very much sense to him. Schoolwork always came easily to Teddy, and it was common practice for him to let his mind wander a bit while he read, as he could still be confident that the material at hand had been sufficiently absorbed by some adjacent part of his brain. Pondering Milton’s blindness and its effect on the reading before him, Teddy also pondered the Green sisters’ stubborn rage at their parents, about
whom he was, naturally, quite curious. Though he felt that Meg was the least self-indulgent with her anger, he wasn’t sure she was any less certain of it. And Joanna and Amy were so brittle on the subject. Their insistence on the absoluteness of the situation was intractable! It was, in a way, Teddy realized (having at this moment one of those tiny ridiculous epiphanies one can have when reading a profound work of literature while simultaneously addressing a surprisingly parallel matter in one’s life), another form of blindness and another paradise lost.
Joanna struggled a while with some irregular French verbs, with which Teddy was, as always, a tremendous help. She also dashed through some absurdly simple essay questions on The Great Gatsby for her English class. (Why does Nick Carraway think Jay Gatsby is “Great”? What is “the valley of ashes” and what does it symbolize? What is the symbolic meaning of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg’s sign?)
Joanna had loved Gatsby when they read it the year before in her advanced English class at Warren Prep. She had written a paper on the meanings attached to Fitzgerald’s depictions of honesty and dishonesty throughout the novel, for which she had been given an A, as well as an honorable mention for an English prize.
These irritatingly simplistic homework questions in front of her now could have come directly from the CliffsNotes she had seen openly displayed all around the classroom that day. Study notes such as those had been banned from classrooms at Warren.
Maybe the dour Mrs. Jacobson was relying on some teachers’ version of crib notes as well. Her classes were just deadly, and they seemed to move at a glacial pace through the novel, which Joanna had taken to reading over and over while the so-called discussions droned on, which meant that she had practically memorized whole passages. She still loved it. Her copy of Gatsby was a tattered
and coverless specimen, one of the last left on the shelf by the time she found her way to the class. (They had been spoiled by Warren’s tradition of providing each student with fresh copies of books read for English class. When Amy saw the poor object, she had exclaimed, “Ew! Think of all the eye-tracks on that book!”)
This Gatsby was heavily annotated by previous scholars with ballpoint-pen emendations on the text. Where Myrtle says of her poor husband George, “He wasn’t fit to lick my shoe,” an enormous tongue lapped across the page. Jordan Baker’s being a “slender, small-breasted girl” had provoked an obscenely enormous pair of cartoon breasts, which drooped all the way down the margin of the page, and then again, at the end, a single specimen illustrating “the fresh green breast of the new world” had been literally rendered in green marking pen by the same generous hand.
Many of the other students in Joanna’s classes seemed to her as if they were in some kind of trance. For the first couple of weeks of school, Joanna felt as if she herself were not in a trance but in some sort of never-ending improvisation for some very lame drama workshop exercise of the sort devised by desperate substitute teachers. Her days were nothing at all like any of her previous school experiences and everything like certain movies and television programs about high school life. Joanna played her part as best she could—the good kid trying to make her way under extenuating circumstances.
There was a dirty-looking boy who sat behind her in pre-calc who actually put his head down on his desk and slept, day after day. Sometimes the slight buzz of his snoring had a soporific quality she had to work to resist. In her history class, most days the teacher would hand out photocopied workbook sheets and make them sit quietly answering endless multiple-choice questions on the material they were supposedly covering, while he sat behind the desk at the front of the room, flipping through the
sports pages of the New Haven Register, and, unbelievably, listening to his Walkman.
Mrs. Jacobson was the worst, or maybe it just seemed that way because Joanna had always loved English class until now. A cranky old burnout with halitosis and varicose veins who was clearly counting the days until her pension kicked in, Mrs. Jacobson seemed not to notice what anybody did in her classroom, just so long as they were quiet. She didn’t seem to care, really, if anybody was paying any attention at all, just as long as nobody made sudden movements or unexpected loud noises before the bell rang.
No other teacher activated Joanna’s indignation so strongly as did Mrs. Jacobson, who had so far remained both totally immune to Joanna’s obvious intelligence and uncharmed, as well, by her obvious eagerness to be engaged with the material. She seemed to feel that Joanna’s comments and questions on the text, requiring deviation from the lesson plan as they did, were just one more obstacle between her and her retirement, just another form of trouble in her already burdened life. Mrs. Jacobson acted as if she had been sentenced to teach English at Duncan, Joanna thought, though for what crime? Callous indifference to young minds and great literature, perhaps.
But what crime had the students in the class committed, what had any of them done, even the potheads in the back of the room, to deserve such punishment as being taught by Mrs. Jacobson? “Let the punishment fit the crime! Let the punishment fit the crime!” echoed in Joanna’s head sometimes during especially tedious moments in class—though not as badly as it would if she were Amy—as the Green sisters had over the years performed a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan in their living room musical entertainment repertoire. She couldn’t exactly foresee an improvement in the classroom atmosphere when they moved on to their next required text, either. If Mrs. Jacobson could make The Great Gatsby stultifying, then
The Scarlet Letter, which Joanna had also read at Warren, back in ninth grade, held the promise of even greater desolation.
Joanna very much missed the feeling of loving school these days, but it couldn’t be helped. Because she and Amy had registered at Duncan after classes had already begun, and though they were both qualified, according to their Warren transcripts, for placement in honors classes, there had been no room for them in any honors English class. Joanna was in an honors French section that wasn’t bad, though the teacher had an atrocious accent and resented her for having actually been to France, and Amy had been admitted to a special studio art class, which also met so early in the morning that it still had a space.
Reader’s note: At last, we learn something of the inner workings of the middle sister. MG
Author’s note: I’m not sure what point you’re making with that note.
Reader’s note: I’m merely commenting on the way you have finally turned the novelizing machine on yourself. MG
Amy’s homework was a snap. Every night, she could just zip through it and then draw and do some watercolor sketches or write in her journal. She didn’t even want Joanna to know how little time her homework took her to complete, for fear that Joanna and Meg—and Teddy, too—might take it upon themselves to devise some more challenging work for her. Often, Amy lied and said she had worked all afternoon before anyone else came home, or she claimed she had used study periods to do homework assignments.
Amy felt as though she were just gliding through her classes every day at Duncan. She always knew all the answers, in every subject, and had recently begun to hesitate when called on in class, so as not to be the object of derision by the core clique of popular tenth-grade girls—at least, not any more than she probably
already was. Her uncoolness had been identified on the first day, in her history class, when Amy had been able to rattle off the Seven Hills of Rome. This alone had probably labeled her as a suck-up freak right then. Anna Scriven, the popular girl who seemed to be the crucial social arbiter, the one girl in the class whose approval or disapproval meant everything, had murmured an undisguised, “Oh my God.” But Amy had liked the startled look on the teacher’s face. She enjoyed feeling smart.
A haphazard student at Warren, which was a highly rigorous school, Amy had always coasted somewhere in the bottom third of her grade’s class rank. Here, she was automatically the star of every class in her schedule. Maybe the momentum from Warren would wear off sooner or later, but at this point she felt not only very brave and independent, but also almost magically empowered, as if she had somehow become some kind of genius on the trip up to New Haven from New York.
At sudden little moments, though, particularly on the long walk back to High Street at the end of the day, when lights would be going on everywhere and the billowing detritus of rubbish and leaves swirling around lampposts and newspaper vending boxes in the evening gloom would take on a sinister cast—during what their mother always called “the blue hour”—Amy would sometimes feel a terrible pang, a sweeping feeling of panic and loss that would just wash over her. It was a feeling that made her feel inexplicably fragile and sad and old. She knew she didn’t just simply hate her mother and father. She blamed them for the way she missed loving them, the way she missed a much younger version of herself. She blamed them for the way she missed being the Amy Green who loved her parents so much and felt so loved by them that it filled up her whole world without taking up any space at all.
Reader’s note: I feel that I should make a comment here, but I have nothing to say. I’m actually touched that you know me so well. AG
Reader’s note: Beware. She doesn’t know any of us as well as she thinks she does. She knows the characters she has made out of all of us very well. Don’t confuse yourself with the character that is based on you. Don’t let her revise your memories so that this novel takes the place of the actual events and experiences. MG
Reader’s note: Give me some credit for having a brain, please. AG