THE FINANCIAL aid director laid my father’s tax return out on his desk, to show me an “adjusted gross income” in the minus six figures. A man who had lost two hundred thousand dollars in a year had once possessed that same amount. Did I understand?
I did not. My father only borrowed that money, I insisted, it had never really been his. But, this forbearing man asked, setting a box of Kleenex discreetly before me on the desk, could I see that this showed my father had spent two hundred thousand dollars in the last year?
At the sight of the Kleenex I, who always tried to do as expected, began to cry.
“Has there been trouble? An illness maybe … or…?” Was there some other reason my father couldn’t have spared a bit for my tuition? He looked at me with bafflement and concern. He was a ruddy WASP in corduroy trousers, whose handshake and ringing voice had come down to him through generations of wealth and confidence—such blessings can cramp a man’s imagination. I went over the possible answers: Teddy had climbed up the ladder-back rocking chair, and when it started to tip, had clung to the television set, which came over on top of him. He needed twenty-two stitches. (Why does one boast of one’s sutures? But one does.) The white pine that had towered beside the house, which Pop had been meaning to cut down, had come down of its own accord during an ice storm, smashing out the whole bedroom window. Days later Ma found a perfect bird’s nest on her dresser top among the scarves. And the demand for ping-pong balls was not what they had expected, but Pop insisted sales would “bounce back.”
That was the important thing, after all—to meet the vicissitudes with a smile. The sob that shook me arose from depths unfathomable. We were poor, poor, I insisted—my mother cooked on a single burner because mice had taken over the rest of the stove, Sylvie did without orthodonture though her teeth were crowded into her face so that, in just the moment of perfect delight when a woman is most beautiful, she seemed to turn into a vampire. After all, it wasn’t as if I were an only child; the others needed things—shoes, for instance. A struggling ping-pong ball company absorbs cash like a sponge, everyone knew that. My God, if losing two hundred thousand dollars in a year didn’t impoverish a family, what on earth would? Did he really think it was so important that I have the opportunity to explicate Sexton’s “Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” that I should take the bread out of children’s mouths?
He sighed, he checked the clock, he began again.
* * *
“IT IS, in fact, a lot more sensible for you to study ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’ than for you to give up and go home,” Philippa said.
“We can’t afford this. They need me there.”
“Water safety!” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Water safety, ever studied it? What do you do when someone is drowning? Or, no, what would you do if you saw a number of people, all drowning together in the middle of a lake?”
“Sit on the bank reading ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’?”
“Well, better that than jumping in to join them!” she said. “They are drowning in American anti-intellectualism!”
“God, I thought it was debt.”
“Same, same!” she said. “You could get a student loan. You should go forward, Beatrice.
“You should not go home. If you want to understand the disintegration of the WASP tradition, you’d do better to read Robert Lowell.”
She was my thunderbolt; I loved to watch her teaching, her eyes darting as if thoughts were pinging back and forth in her head like badminton birdies, while she lit each cigarette from the last until there were too many birdies, and too many cigarettes, in play, and she blinked and shook the head to clear it, and rapped her pointer on the blackboard and asked, “Miss Wolfe, may we assume your full attention is focused on the text?”
It was, it was! “Okay,” I said, and rushed to the library to get Life Studies, and to the bank to get a loan.
* * *
I’D STARTED sleeping in Sid’s bed, since he was always with someone else. It was strange comfort, the smell of his shampoo on the pillow, the warmth of the down quilt he’d brought from home. But it was the best I could do. There, at 3:11 one morning, I was awakened by a full, soft kiss. I knew, I had always believed that a kiss like this would come, and that when it came, I’d be ready to give myself over completely, courageously. It was almost exactly what I’d imagined, this gentle responsiveness, a will to shape one mouth to the other again and again. I reached up tenderly, taking the dear head in my hands, eyes closed, lips parted to inhale the other, whose lips were cool and whose woolen coat smelled of the night air. Night air? I shook myself awake and pulled away, and the kisser stood bolt upright in alarm.
“Who are you?!” I asked.
“Who are you?” she replied.
It was Cindy Crowe, the girl from the bathtub, the one who was so free of the scourge of jealousy—I suppose Sid was spending the night with the sensual type. Cindy stalked out of the room and I heard her door slam shut—I pictured her taking Sid by the neck and smashing sense into him—in, of course, an utterly nonjudgmental and jealousy-free way. I turned over and pulled up the blanket. Philippa was going to love this story.