Morning.
Sara was brought to consciousness by a clock from the bedside radio.
“… a beautiful morning. The weather report for the Cape and islands in just a moment. But first a warning to all you turkeys out there, in case you forgot, tomorrow’s Thanksgiving!”
She reached over to her bedside table, moving as little as possible, and picked up the small plastic blue-and-white case that held the basal thermometer. She put it in her mouth, feeling the brief bite of cold glass under her tongue, then looked at the digital clock on the bedside clock radio. 7:01. She had to keep the thermometer in her mouth for exactly five minutes. The instructions that came with the thermometer specified that she use it before rising from bed, even before going to the bathroom, because any activity might raise her temperature a few crucial points and throw off her chart. So she lay still, obedient.
Beside her, Steve groaned and pulled his pillow over his head. A few measures of music blared from the radio, interrupted by the disc jockey’s jovial patter.
“The first caller to tell me the name of this song wins two free tickets to the Cape Movie Mart! Come on out there, you guys, this is an easy one.”
Mouth pursed around the thermometer, Sara drifted on the sounds of the music, an easy-listening tribute to an artist with a difficult vision, a man too beautiful for this world. The DJ shouted cheerfully the instant the record stopped. He must do cocaine or at least drink eighty cups of coffee to be so energetic at this time of day, Sara thought.
“Hello, dear!” the DJ said to his caller. “What’s your guess?”
“ ‘Starry Starry Night’?” a young girl asked.
“Sorry, hon, that’s close, but no cigar,” the DJ said.
“Just a moment,” the girl cried. Muffled shrieks came over the phone. “I mean ‘Vincent!’ ” she said.
“That’s right!” the DJ shouted, as thrilled as if the girl had just unlocked the door to eternal life. “You’re absolutely right! ‘Vincent,’ by Don McLean. You’ve won two free tickets to the movies, sweetheart. And I’ll tell you what. If you can tell me who the song’s about, I’ll throw in another ticket.”
Sara smiled, thinking of sunflowers, impressionism, severed ears.
“Vincent Price!” the girl replied triumphantly.
Sara took the thermometer from her mouth as she exploded into laughter. She looked at the clock—it was all right, five minutes had passed. Switching off the radio, she retrieved the thermometer from the blankets and rose from bed.
Tying her pink robe around her, sliding her feet into fleece-lined slippers, she hurried downstairs. By now she had a little ritual set up (and there was some comfort in rituals). She turned up the thermostat, started the coffee water perking, quickly used the bathroom, then took her chart from its special drawer in the kitchen and sat down at the table with it. Holding the thermometer to the light, as meticulous as a scientist with a test tube of radioactive particles, she squinted to steady her vision, and read the morning’s news.
98.4. Well, that was just fine. She rose to get a cup of coffee, then sat back down to complete the rite.
It was a beautiful morning, still warm, and foggy, the windows filled with a shimmering gentle silver light. From Brant Point the foghorn lowed slowly and long, like some great stupid animal lost in the mist. Sara smiled, liking this, liking the sense of something out there waiting in the unseen world. Spreading her chart before her on the table, she took a pencil and put a dot just where the date column met the temperature. She drew a line connecting yesterday’s dot with today’s. Her chart reminded her of a child’s dot-to-dot game, which, when finished, would reveal a picture of a duck or a Christmas tree. Would her chart, when finished, reveal signs of a completed embryo? Was this the ritual that would conjure up her child?
Certainly it had to be better than Julia’s latest lunatic suggestion, which had come in last week’s mail.
To Promote Breeding
Let the party take of the syrup of stinking orach a spoonful night and morning. Then as follows: take three pints of good ale, boil in it the piths of three ox-backs, half a handful of clary, a handful of nepp (nepata), a quarter of a pound of dates stoned sliced and the pith taken out; a handful of raisins of the sun stoned; three whole nutmegs pricked full of holes. Boil all these till half be wasted. Strain it out and drink a small wineglass at your going to bed as long as it lasts. Accompanying not with your husband during the time or sometime before. Be very careful and let nothing disquiet you. Take Shepherd’s Purse a good handfull and boil it in a pint of milk till half be consumed and drink it off.
“I’ve looked up these weird things in the dictionary,” Julia had written on an attached sheet. “Guess what? You can get them—or improvise.”
At first Sara had laughed, then frowned. Why not? If it worked well enough in ancient times that they wrote it down, perhaps there really was something to it. So, feeling like a witch or an escapee from the nearest mental asylum, she had made her own brew, using boiled ale, store-bought cans of oxtail soup, sage, dates and raisins Cuisinarted to mush, catnip, and nutmeg. It had tasted absolutely foul. She couldn’t even drink it, and its taste and smell discouraged her completely from trying to improvise on a “stinking orach.”
The thermometer was Ellie’s suggestion. Two weeks ago, when The Virgin snidely asked Sara if she was pregnant and she had gone home to discover that she was not, she had called her sister in despair.
“Get a basal thermometer,” Ellie ordered. “And use it for at least three months to get some idea of the day you ovulate.”
“Three months!” Sara cried, amazed. Three months seemed like an eternity to her. She wanted to be pregnant now.
“You see, a thermometer can’t tell you when you’re going to ovulate,” Ellie said. “It can only tell you when you have ovulated. When your temperature rises, you’ve ovulated. After you’ve used it for a few months, you’ll have a pretty good idea if you ovulate regularly and on just what day. Then be sure to make love on the day you ovulate, and bingo!”
“Oh,” Sara moaned, cramping and dejected and indulging in her sister’s concern, “I wish I could just go bingo without all this stuff. I’m beginning to get all obsessed with it, you know. I don’t understand why I’m not getting pregnant easily, naturally, just like everyone else.”
“Give me a break, everyone else!” Ellie said. “Everyone else is having problems, too. Why do you think people invented gadgets like this thermometer in the first place? It wasn’t dreamed up yesterday just for you.”
“Thank heaven you’re there,” Sara said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. No one else seems to understand how I feel. Julia thinks I’m a complete can of mixed nuts for even wanting to get pregnant, and Steve has enough to deal with when I’m in my premenstrual madness without any added gloominess. And Mother—do you know what Mother said when she called and I was all upset because my period had started? She said, ‘That’s all right, dear, I’ve already got a grandchild. Don’t worry about it.’ ”
“Oh, Mother!” Ellie said, and both sisters burst out laughing.
Sara and Ellie’s mother, Monica, had never been interested in the nitty-gritty of mothering. When Ellie told Monica two years before that she was going to have a baby in January, Monica had hung up and scheduled herself on a three-month cruise around the Caribbean. Sara and Ellie didn’t mind—Monica had paid her dues, they knew; she had been a good mother and a devoted wife who had nursed her husband through a lingering and difficult death. She deserved some fun.
And it did help Sara to know that there was at least one person in her life whom she wasn’t letting down by not getting pregnant. Sara often envisioned herself as one of those insane seabirds squawking and flapping and splatting around in the unchartable seas of procreation, while Steve remained walruslike, lazily lolling around on the sand, content to let the sea of sexual chance wash up and around him as it pleased. He smiled through his mustache, grandly comfortable, watching Sara sputter and flip in her fury that she had failed once again. “Aren’t you sad that I’m not pregnant?” she would screech at Steve, and he would reply, affable and placid, “No, of course not. We’ll just try again next time.” But she was suspicious. She knew he wanted a child.
She knew her in-laws wanted a child, too. They had never said anything, but they didn’t have to, certain things in the world didn’t have to be said. Clark and Caroline Kendall, Steve’s parents, were as nice as humanized teddy bears. Now retired, they wintered in Florida and spent the five good warm-weather months in their house in Nantucket. They would never pressure Sara about anything: but Steve was their only child. No words had to be spoken.
Perhaps this was the month she would succeed. The thermometer was her magic wand. Today was the eighteenth day of her cycle, and according to her chart, she had ovulated on the fifteenth day. That was when her temperature rose from 97.5 to 98.2—a good, clear, obvious jump of seven tenths of a degree.
That morning Sara had been triumphant. “Hey, good for you, body!” she had said, her heart leaping with hope. She could almost feel that microscopic egg peeking out, looking for its lover. She had raced back from the bathroom into the bedroom and awakened Steve.
“Today’s the day!” she had whispered, snuggling close to her husband and caressing him.
“Every day’s the day with you, babe,” Steve had grinned, turning toward her.
Afterward, he had gotten up and dressed and left her there swooning under the covers. She was as lazily satiated as a bear who had just devoured a honeypot. Also, she didn’t want to move around; she didn’t want gravity to pull the semen down, away from her eager egg.
Today her temperature was still high, 98.4. The basal temperature dropped at the beginning of menstruation. But the eighteenth day was really too early for any indication of anything. Her temperature wouldn’t start to drop—if it was going to—for about a week.
Sara looked down at her chart. Dutifully, according to instructions, she had circled each point on the chart whenever she and Steve had had intercourse. Now those circled dots looked back at her like so many googly eyes, like groups of nippled breasts. She was nuts. She was obsessed. She was sleepy. She and Steve had stayed awake late last night, partying with friends, then sitting up watching and laughing at an old horror movie. She had had only six hours of sleep. She should go back to bed or she’d be cranky all day.
But first she sat a bit longer, in the silvery silence of the kitchen, studying the chart, as if it could tell her something now, as if she could read her fortune there among the leaps and dips of the penciled dots, which formed mysterious and meaningful constellations, like those of the stars.
Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, Sara’s temperature was still at 98.4. She kissed Steve good-bye, poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, then curled up on the sofa with the Seraphina manuscript. Poor old Seraphina was locked in a dark underground passageway, wearing only a see-through nightgown and the obligatory sweeping cape. Sara yawned.
My mother often said that she knew early on that I was lost to the farm, that she knew when I was only six years old. It was a winter day, when the snow was piled like walls around the house and school was canceled and the white air was filled with the lowing of hungry cows and the answering growl of tractors plowing paths to the barns.
I was in my bedroom, playing school. Four dolls were lined up on the floor and I stood across from them, wearing a flowered flannel dress my mother had handsmocked across the bodice, matching ribbons around my pigtails, and my mother’s high-heeled dress shoes over my thick white socks. I was writing on a chalkboard, pretending to be a teacher.
Mother stood in the door watching, unobserved, silent, until I wrote on the board: 1 plus 1 equals 4.
“Jenny!” she cried, interrupting me. “Why did you write one plus one equals four? You know better than that! Don’t you?”
I turned to her, exasperated. “Oh, Mother, of course I know that one plus one equal two. Everyone knows that. But I just get so bored with the same answer all the time.”
Then Mother knew I was lost to the farm. For although nature plays her tricks on farmers to keep them in a state of constant and anxious uncertainty—will an early frost kill the crops, will a drought kill the crops, will a flood kill the crops?—the daily life of a farmer is based on repetition. The cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, must be fed twice a day, at regular times, or there will be no milk, no eggs, no bacon, no lamb: those animals are the farmer’s household gods and offerings must be made regularly, sacrifices in the name of life. There are days when the work seems holy, the simple act of scattering corn filled with a pagan and Christian grace, when the cow’s steamy breath rises out hot and high on a snowy day like ghosts, like the Holy Ghost. But there are also days when the same acts seem only drudgery, dulling to the spirit and senses and the stupid cows knock against each other greedily and shit on the clean golden straw you have just pitched down from the loft. Then the doves fly cooing upward across the shaft of light and their cry is a knife in the heart, a reverberating yearning: There must be more. But where? But where?
Sara turned the page; there was no more about Jenny. Just sexy Seraphina calling out for Errol.
“Oh, no!” she cried aloud, for it was Jenny she wanted to know about. She flipped through the manuscript, skimming over the pages until she found what she wanted: another section about Jenny.
Heat hurts. If you put your hand on the red burner of an electric stove, the heat hurts so much that you instinctively draw that hand away. When I was sixteen, we had a summer in Kansas that was as hot as the burner of a stove, and the sun coiled red above us every day, relentless in its burning. It hurt to go outside, and air-conditioned tractors had not been invented yet—not that we could have afforded one. Our farm unraveled around our weathered house, rows and rows of plowed and planted land turning to dust, the hidden seeds crumbling. Even the messy cottonwoods, planted along the fencelines to act as windbreaks for the fields, began to wither and dry up, their leaves turning cracked and then brown. The grass around the house crackled and exploded with angry grasshoppers and crickets as we walked on it, and the well went low, so that what water we rationed out tasted old and rusty.
The coolest place in the house was the basement, where we had several cots, a card table with a shortwave radio, and stacks of canned foods, all in preparation for an imminent tornado or Russian bombing. We owned one old pickup truck and couldn’t afford to drive frivolously, so I wasn’t able to visit friends—but then, I had no friends to visit. At sixteen I had become both “intellectual” and sexual, in ways my classmates were not prepared for. I didn’t want to get married and have babies and my own farm like the other girls at my four-county school—I wanted to get out and travel and drink champagne and write novels. I liked learning. I wanted to go to college. I had become a freak in my own town.
So when I wasn’t helping with chores I was alone, in the cool dark basement, reading. Until the middle of July, when I put on my best clothes and packed my mother’s cardboard suitcase and was sent to the “camp for academically talented children” to which I had won a scholarship. When the principal had called me into his office at the end of the school year to tell me I had won the scholarship, I had thought: this is the beginning of my real life.
And I was right, although not in the way I imagined.
The camp was in western Massachusetts. I hadn’t been out of Kansas before, I hadn’t even been to Kansas City. I had spent weekends or summer days at various Girl Scout camps in the area, and so my idea of a “camp” included sleeping bags, wienie roasts, and hiking boots to protect you from snakebite.
The “camp” was on the campus of a boys’ preparatory school that was not in session in the summer. The buildings were more beautiful than anything I had ever seen. It all looked like what books had told me castles were like. The rolling grounds with groves of green hardwoods and pastel-flowering bushes were as amazing to me as miracles. As I walked to the room I had been assigned, I tried to adjust my expectations to fit this idea of a “camp,” but no one had explained it to me and I was only sixteen—there was only so much I could imagine.
I shared the room, at first, with Olivia DeWitt, from Connecticut, the tiredest girl I had ever seen. Her face had no animation. She moved languorously, dropping her clothes here, there, dropping herself finally onto the bed.
“I like your necklace,” I said in my midwestern friendly way, wanting to make her like me.
“Why do you call it a nicklace?” she asked, so bored she could hardly speak the words.
Olivia had brought her tennis racket. I had not. I had never played tennis. She had brought her black riding boots. I had not. I rode, but western style, on heavy roping saddles on farm horses. Olivia’s parents were at their “summer home”—so were mine, but theirs was the same as their winter home, it was their only home, and they were working like slaves there, sweat and dirt drying in brown lines in my father’s red burned neck, into my mother’s chafed hands. Olivia sailed. I did not.
I walked with Olivia to the auditorium for orientation; we didn’t speak. I was afraid to be ridiculed again for my accent. I don’t know why she didn’t speak. She seemed too tired to have anything to say, but once inside she waved to some girls she knew, and she hurried off to sit with them, leaving me alone.
Thus openly abandoned, I walked down the aisle, telling myself that everyone here must feel uncomfortable this first day.
“Hi,” someone said. “Sit here.”
I looked to see the green-gold eyes of Jeremy Gardner smiling upon me. He was the tallest, handsomest, blondest, most magical boy I had ever seen.
I sat down next to him, my heart thumping so hard I was afraid he’d hear it. He told me he was in the math section, I told him I was in creative writing and literature. He said he was from Connecticut; I said I was from Kansas. He asked me if I’d like to take a walk with him after dinner. I said I would. Then the headmaster started speaking and we had to stop talking, but we kept looking at each other sideways, then smiling. For the first time in my life, I was in love. So many new emotions, so fast.
That afternoon the entire group had to trail around with the athletic director to see the camp. The mornings were given over to classwork in our various specialties; the afternoons were free for study or sports. There was a pond, a stable, a tennis court, a soccer field. After lectures on good sportsmanship, we were sent to our rooms to get ready for the evening meal.
Olivia moved slowly, but was gone from our room before I was ready, and when I entered the dining hall, she was already seated at a table in the middle of the group of girls from the auditorium. I moved toward the table.
“Sorry,” a dark-haired girl said, pushing the chair so it slanted against the table. “I’m saving this for a friend.”
I moved to the end of the table.
“Sorry,” a blonde said. “I’m saving this for a friend.”
I turned, feeling my face reddening, and looked as well as I could with my downcast eyes around the dining hall. There were two other tables; one full of boys, Jeremy Gardner included, all of them horsing around. And the other table, which was obviously where I belonged.
Obviously, because at that moment Mr. McCausland, the headmaster, touched my arm.
“Why don’t you sit at that table, Miss White?” he asked. “That’s where the other midwesterners are.”
The other “midwesterners” were Trudy, a shy pretty girl from Indiana; Allen, a boy with bottle-opener teeth from Nebraska; Larry, a boy from Oregon, who could have been handsome were it not for a case of red-and-black screaming acne; Odessa, from Mississippi; George, from Arizona; and Hilda, a terrified, six-foot-tall cornfed Amazon of a girl from Iowa.
Sitting down next to them that first day, introducing myself, I thought in a panic: My God, we’re all Outsiders. This is the Outsiders’ table. I babbled and smiled and hoped that perhaps we could somehow all find a way to cohere into a group as happy and superior as those at the other tables. But this was not to happen; we were doomed from the start. We knew we were Outsiders. Hilda and Trudy were sitting next to each other, already partners against the world; they formed a bond early and never let anyone else in. Odessa, whom I sat next to and tried to be friends with, was, I soon came to discover, a real intellectual, also poor, also ambitious, and she had little time for fun. We Outsiders always ate together, but other than that were not a real group—which was really all right with me. I only wanted to be with Jeremy.
My life quickly fell into a pattern. Classes in the morning, swimming with the Outsiders in the pond in the afternoon—we didn’t know how to play tennis, and I didn’t like to ride because I didn’t do it properly, the English way. Dinner with the Outsiders, and then the evenings, which were sometimes filled with lectures on wildlife or astronomy walks, and sometimes left open. Then all the students would gather in the cleared dining hall to watch a movie or dance or just talk.
That was when I got to be with Jeremy. I will always believe that he really did like me, liked me. He liked hearing me talk about our farm and the animals, cows, horses, dogs, cats, hens, geese. My pet rabbits. His parents had an apartment in New York City, but he had lived most of his life at boarding schools and summer camps. He loved animals but had never been able to have a pet. It was an old story about a rich boy: his parents never spent any time with him. They sent him away as much as possible. Much later, I was to think back on that time and wonder if Jeremy had been drawn to me because in my voluptuousness I seemed maternal, and certainly I was more responsive than the other girls there. More corny. He was a handsome rich boy but he needed something from me. And God knows I needed anything he could give me during those six weeks when I lived among strangers.
It was on the very first night that I knew I would always be among strangers there. During our painful dinner I tried to chat and laugh with the other Outsiders, tried to pretend that we hadn’t been ostracized, that we weren’t different. I heard my silly voice trilling out far too loudly, carrying raucously through the dining hall, and I knew I was overdoing it and couldn’t stop myself. The girls at the other table laughed low, as if humming. The only person at my table who tried to join in my pitiful ruse was acned Larry, and he was very nice. Still, there was at our table such an aroma of sweating misery that it tainted the food we ate. Now I suppose we were only victims of some adult’s theory of “geographical distribution,” just as black children were victims of busing twenty years later.
Jeremy Gardner left the dining hall, punching another guy in the shoulder as he went, but not without looking over at me and mouthing, “See you later!” I threw him a smile, pretending that I was having a wonderful time. At last, when I had sat through the meal for what I considered a decent amount of time, I sprang from my untouched food and my untouchable clan and headed for the bathroom.
The girls’ rooms were on the second floor of the building, and so was the large many-stalled bathroom we all shared. I raced for a stall and entered, locking the door, grateful for privacy. I was cramping with a fierce attack of diarrhea brought on by nothing I had eaten. As I sat there, racked with every kind of torment, I heard the doors open and the eastern girls came in, their assured voices floating unabashed in the air.
“… Jeremy can’t possibly like her. It’s just her big tits.”
“Tits, my dear, udders!”
A scream of laughter. “She is such a cow.”
“I think she’s beautiful. Like Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Oh, God, I suppose, but her ‘beauty’ is so tacky.”
“I think you’ll discover, darling, that what you call tacky is what men like.”
“Exactly.”
More laughter.
I was bent double in my stall, trying not to make any noise that would embarrass me and make them aware of my presence. All around me doors slammed, toilets flushed, girls laughed.
“I don’t think Jean has anything to worry about. I can’t imagine that he’d ever be unfaithful to Jean.”
“Still, perhaps we should write her?”
On this note, they left. I sat in my stall, paralyzed, really ill. I tried to console myself, to do what my mother would tell me to do: to “be sensible.” It wasn’t that those girls disliked me, it was that they were championing a friend, I told myself. And no one likes a girl who steals someone else’s guy. I tried not to take it personally.
But it was a very personal summer. Everything came close, too close. All the other Outsiders were in math or sciences; I was the only literature Outsider, and so I walked from my room or the dining hall to the classroom and back to my room alone; and while the group of eastern girls who walked in a cluster just in front of or behind me were not within touching distance, their presence pressed in on me like the Kansas heat. My face burned. I would shrivel into myself, wishing I could pull my ears right into my head so that I wouldn’t hear the low hum of their laughter, their whispers, which I was sure were all about me. I would carry my books against my chest, my arms crossed over my books hard, trying to crush my offending bosom flat. Olivia DeWitt spent every evening until lights-out in the other girls’ rooms; at lights-out she’d run into our room, jump into bed, and go to sleep without a word to me. Her absolute avoidance of me was as vivid and visceral as insults or blows, and I lay quaking in my bed, sick at my stomach, as if physically attacked.
But what came closest that summer was Jeremy Gardner. That summer I wrote for my class a short story about a woman who wore around her neck a heart-shaped locket with an intricate design like an arabesque on the front. If one looked closely, he could see that the design was really a keyhole, and in truth the locket was her heart and she was living her life waiting to meet the man who carried in the lapel of his jacket a small gold key. That key would unlock her heart and the man and woman would know they were meant for each other, had been sent to each other by fate. But no one came to the town where the woman lived, and no one wore jackets, let alone anything extraordinary in their lapels. So the woman traveled, saved her money, took jobs that would enable her to travel and to live among men who wore jackets. Still she did not meet the man with the key to her heart. And it embarrassed her so, as she grew older, to wear that heart-shaped locket, and it kept her from knowing other men. Finally, when she turned thirty (which to me at sixteen seemed infinitely far away), she gave up in despair and went to a jeweler to have the locket and chain broken, and her neck was free. As she turned to leave, a wonderfully handsome man entered. He had a gold key in his lapel. The woman cried “Oh!” and smiled at him. She almost threw herself on him. The man looked at her face, then looked down at her neck, and, as it was bare, his face went blank and he walked on past her without speaking.
It was a foolish story but not without its humble truths, and no one knows how it is that with one glance a boy can break through into a girl’s heart. Jeremy and I might as well have worn locket and key, for we responded to each other on sight and when we were together we were complete and satisfied. In spite of our different interests, we were intellectual comrades, and I told him about the symmetry of poetry; he told me about the symmetry of math. We both felt separated, apart from our families and peers, different. We could put on a good show, but we were lonely most of the time, even with others. Together, we were blissfully content.
Every night after lights-out we would sneak out of our rooms and walk down to the pond together. It was really the only way we could be together for any amount of uninterrupted time. We would hold hands as we walked, and we would talk about everything, and finally we would lie on the grass by the pond and hold each other and kiss. That was all. We did not make love. Jeremy didn’t insist, although we lay on top of each other and pressed against each other, wanting to make love. He told me he loved me and that he wanted to work out a way so we could see each other after camp ended. I told him I loved him. Jeremy Gardner came closest to me that summer of all the things in the world, and I could bear the daytime, when I was with the Outsiders or walking alone, surrounded by the hot whispers of the eastern girls.
The third week I was at the camp, an eastern girl named Dottie Collier became friendly with me. She was in the writing and literature class and she wasn’t stupid; after I had read aloud my story about the locket, she approached me, smiling. “That was a really good story,” she said. She left the classroom with me, and walked and talked with me as we went down the hall to lunch. She asked me to sit next to her at the table with the eastern girls. The others ignored me, but Dottie kept talking to me—we were telling each other about our favorite novels, and in that were caught up in a spell.
Dottie wanted to be a writer, too. When we had a chance, we told each other the plots of the novels we would like to write, but there was never enough time, camp was always so regimented and busy, with classes in the morning and sports and homework in the afternoon. I was surprised but thrilled when Dottie suggested that she trade rooms with Olivia so we could talk to each other during the free part of the evenings and after lights-out. Olivia was glad to trade, and from then on, how delicious camp was! Still I swam in the afternoon with the Outsiders or played bumbling games of volleyball with my breasts thumping against my chest; but I had the nights to look forward to, talking in my room with Dottie, then sneaking out much later to meet Jeremy.
“Jenny?” she would whisper, when I came sneaking back into the room. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes,” I would sigh. “Did I wake you up?”
“No, no, I’ve been awake. I worry about you, you know. You know how boys are—you aren’t letting him do anything, are you? I mean—you aren’t doing it, are you?”
Dottie’s voice was so warm, she was so concerned. I was wrapped in bliss.
“Of course we’re not doing it,” I said, sliding out of my clothes and into bed.
“Well, girls can get pregnant so easily, and boys just slip away,” Dottie said.
“That won’t happen to me,” I promised. “I’m not a fool.”
But I was. I lay awake, in my joy telling Dottie everything, telling her that Jeremy was going to help me find ways to apply to eastern colleges, to get scholarships, that he was going to write me, that he was going to try to come to visit me at my farm on his school vacation that fall. The night after Jeremy told me that, and I in turn confided it to Dottie, I met Jeremy at the pond as usual. We lay together, wrapped in each other, rapt in each other, and so we did not hear Mr. McCausland, the headmaster of the camp, approach.
“Mr. Gardner,” he said. “Miss White.”
We rose awkwardly, adjusting our clothes, shaking, the warmth of our bodies disappearing in the sudden numbing cold of fear.
“You will follow me back to the hall,” he said.
We followed in silence, walking back through long grass that tickled my legs as foolishly as it had done when we walked earlier, arm in arm, down to the pond.
“Mr. Gardner, you will go to your room. I’ll deal with you later.”
Jeremy obeyed. He was pale, looking down, and so our eyes did not meet.
“Miss White, you will go to your room and pack. Tomorrow morning our van will drive you to the airport. You may consider yourself expelled. You know our policies. We do not allow girls who let themselves behave wantonly to remain at our camp. I will of course of necessity write to your parents and your school authorities about your actions here.”
There was no compassion in his voice. I did not argue. It was the best I could do not to weep before him. I walked, stiff-backed, to my room. How could I tell Dottie? I was so ashamed.
But Dottie was not in our room when I entered. It was after lights-out, and she was not in our room. There was not a trace of her, all her clothes were gone, and she had not left me a note.
I did not go to sleep that night. I sat up all night long, packing, smoking every cigarette in the contraband pack I had hidden under my mattress, which Dottie and I had often shared during our late-night talks. It did not take an “academically talented” person to guess how it was the headmaster knew why and where to look for Jeremy and me.
The cabdriver came for me the following morning. He carried my luggage, and I followed behind him, walking down the dormitory halls and into the foyer of the school. Wide double doors gave off the foyer to the dining room, and clustered in that doorway were a variety of students. At the front, lounging against the doorframes and each other, arms folded, eyes drooping with smugness, were the eastern girls. Dottie was with them and she looked right at me with a triumphant smirk on her face. She would be the heroine with her group now; first a spy, then the instrument of my departure, saving Jeremy for Jean.
Behind the eastern girls, weaving and jumping and looking like general fools in order to make themselves seen by me, were the Outsiders. They called and waved; Larry, who was tall, called that he would write me.
I did not wave back. I did not cry or smile or let any expression cross my face. I had learned how to do that at camp. I just kept walking, through the foyer that expanded with Einsteinian magnificence, until it almost echoed around me. All those eyes burned me so that I felt I was walking through flames. But I did not faint. And I did not catch any sight of Jeremy.
Later, the film The Wizard of Oz would capture with bizarre accuracy just what it was like for me to return to Kansas after my stay at the eastern camp: it was like going from dazzling Technicolor back to black and white and gray. Dust and heat and empty spaces, loneliness. My parents and the principal of the school were incredibly kind and understanding. They blamed Jeremy Gardner as much as me for our escapades, and took a compassionate view of what we had done—and really, we had done so little. The principal of the school did not enter my scandal onto my school records, and he kept the information to himself, something of a miracle in our small gossiping community.
I spent the rest of the summer in our basement, reading and writing. Jeremy Gardner wrote to me when camp was over; he had been allowed to stay at camp, because his father knew the headmaster. At first his letters were passionate and full of promises, and he did try to help me get back east; he sent me catalog after catalog about eastern colleges and scholarships. But we were so young. I was so poor. The distance between us was so great. Once school started, our letters tapered off and finally stopped.
What I learned on my summer vacation. I could have knocked my English teacher’s hat off with an honest essay. For this is what I learned on my summer vacation that year: that I had some power over boys because of my looks and my body. That if I was to get anywhere in my life—away from the dust and emptiness of our Kansas farm—I had to use that power, for there was little charity in the world, and no equality. And finally, most important, that I could trust men, to a certain extent, because of my power, but never females: females betrayed, smiled and lied and conned and betrayed worse than any man. I knew I never would have a female as a friend again in my life.
Sara rose and carried the manuscript box to the dining room table. Turning on the chandelier so that its light would blend with the sunlight to illuminate the pages clearly, she carefully went through the manuscript, page by page. Two hundred and five pages of Seraphina and Errol (Errol had turned out to be the hero, after all, and the author had left them in a passionate embrace waiting for the priest to arrive to marry them). Only about fifteen pages of Jenny. Yet it was Jenny, not Seraphina, who sprang alive from the paper. Where had Jenny come from? Who had written about Jenny? Those pages had a ring of autobiographical truth about them—but so did any good novel written in the first person.
Sara gathered together the fifteen pages of Jenny material and studied them. She compared them to the Seraphina story—almost certainly the two stories had come from the same word processor. At least the typeface was the same, the margins, the weight and color of paper. It seemed that the same person had written them both and somehow gotten the two stories mixed up. Sara looked back at the title page. Could someone who called herself Aurora Dawn actually have written the Jenny material? God, Aurora Dawn.
Sara went to the kitchen phone and dialed Linda Oldham, the senior editor and president of Heartways House. Linda was an older woman, brisk and businesslike, who had been placed in charge of the publishing firm three years ago and had methodically and efficiently drawn up the plans that she thought would make the company a financial success. Basically, her motto was: Give the public what it wants. The public of Heartways House was women, women longing for romance, and Linda had set forth guidelines for romantic novels that would bear the heart-shaped HH insignia, and ruthlessly saw to it that her authors stuck to those guidelines. During the past two years that Sara had done editing for Heartways House, she had never before had occasion to discuss anything as maverick as these pages with her boss. Sara realized her heart was thumping as she began to speak: all her editorial instincts told her that the Jenny book could be good; she must handle it with care.
“Linda, I’ve got a question,” Sara said cautiously, when Linda’s brusque hello came over the phone.
“Shoot,” Linda replied.
“It’s about an author of yours. I’m editing one of her romances now. Desperate Dangerous Desire. Aurora Dawn.”
“Oh, yes, Aurora Dawn,” Linda said. “She’s one of our old-timers. Turns out one of those babies every six months. People gobble them up like candy.”
“Well—well, have you read anything else she’s written? I’m asking because there’s some other material mixed up in the romance manuscript I’m editing now. It looks like material for another book, a memoir perhaps, or a realistic novel. It’s really good stuff, and I’d like to see more of it.”
“Heartways wouldn’t be interested in a memoir, honey,” Linda said. “You know that. Don’t waste your time.”
“Oh, I know Heartways wouldn’t want it,” Sara pressed on. “But it’s so interesting—I’d like to read more of it. Perhaps encourage her to finish it, to take it to another house.”
Linda was silent a moment. “What’s it about, this other book?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Sara began. “About a young girl growing up on a farm in Kansas—”
Linda’s laughter exploded over the phone. “Honey,” she said, “the last thing anyone in publishing is interested in is a farm in Kansas. Good God. You know what people want. They want Dynasty. They want castles and diamonds and yachts. Jesus, not a farm in Kansas. I suppose she writes about cows?”
“Well, yes,” Sara said.
Linda laughed again. Then, calming down, she said, “Now what was your question?”
Sara paused. “Well, I wondered if you could give me Aurora Dawn’s address or phone number. I’d like to get in touch with her. I’d like to read the rest of the farm book and encourage her to publish it—with another house, of course—if the rest is as good as this.”
“All right,” Linda said. “I’ll tell Maxine to give you the author’s phone number. She lives in Cambridge. But listen, tell her not to get so carried away with her cows that she forgets to write her romances. She’s a moneymaker for us, you know.” Linda laughed again, then said, “I’ll put you on hold a minute, then transfer you to Maxine. By the way, are you through editing Desperate Dangerous Desire? We’ve got it scheduled to come back from you this week.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll have it in the mail today,” Sara promised.
A moment later Maxine came on the line and gave Sara Aurora Dawn’s name, address, and phone number in Cambridge. The writer’s real name was Fanny Anderson. Fanny, Sara thought, it was not so far a change from Fanny to Jenny. Fanny was an old-fashioned name. Dialing the number, Sara wondered how old Fanny Anderson was, what she was like—if she was the original beautiful Jenny from Kansas or only her creator.
A woman with an Irish accent answered. “Mrs. Anderson is not at home,” she told Sara. “May I take a message?”
“Yes, please.” Sara was frustrated, so near to talking to the author of Jenny, and yet so far. “Tell her that Sara Kendall called, from Nantucket. Tell her that I’ve been editing her book and I want to talk with her about the Jenny pages. Tell her I used to work for Donald James. Tell her—oh, perhaps I should just call her back. When will she be in?”
“I’m not sure,” the woman said. “I’ll take your number and have her call you.” Her voice was cold.
Discouraged, Sara gave the woman her number and hung up.
She went back to the dining room table and stacked the manuscript neatly back in its box, keeping the Jenny pages out. She stretched and looked at her watch. Just after one o’clock—and here she was, still in her robe. What a luxurious way to work. But now was that wrenching time of day when she had to pull herself away from the enveloping fantasy of the books she edited into the messy reality of life. She wandered into the kitchen and turned on the oven.
Dutch apple pie, she thought, yum. Tomorrow was Thanksgiving and she had been assigned to take dessert to the party at Carole Clark’s house—where everyone in the group would be gathered, including Mary.
Well, she had this much to thank Mary for—The Virgin’s “innocent” question about her weight had spurred her into action and for two weeks now she had been dieting and exercising again. Already she looked different: better, slimmer, tighter. She could get back into some of her favorite clothes. And she’d found a new way to style her hair. She brushed the bangs forward and the sides back; it was a pretty look, less punk. She was pleased with her hair now, and with her temperature, with everything. Everything in the world seemed possible.
Sara turned the radio on to the classical music station and sliced apples and rolled pie crust dough to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. While the pies baked, filling the house with the fragrance of cinnamon and sugar and apples, she showered and dressed—the size-fourteen jeans were too loose for her now. Hoorah. She took the pies out of the oven and admired the perfectly fluted crusts, then, on the spur of the moment, picked up the phone and once again dialed Fanny Anderson’s number. It was just after three-thirty in the afternoon, a decent time to call.
Again, the Irishwoman’s cold hello. But this time, “Just a moment, please, I’ll get Mrs. Anderson for you.”
And then, softly, “Hello? This is Fanny Anderson.”
“Oh, Mrs. Anderson,” Sara said. “This is Sara Kendall, calling from Nantucket. I’m a freelance editor for Heartways House. I’ve been editing your Desperate Dangerous Desire. But I worked for several years as Donald James’s assistant at Walpole and James, so I’ve had quite a bit of experience in editing—all kinds of books. And I’m calling because I found some pages in your romance novel that didn’t fit. The pages were about a girl named Jenny …” Sara let her voice trail off. Before she plunged boldly into suggesting that Fanny Anderson work on a Jenny novel, she needed to hear more from that woman than just hello.
“Oh, yes,” Fanny Anderson said. Her voice was soft and lilting, with a slight drawl that Sara assumed had lasted from her Kansas days. “I was wondering where those pages were. I didn’t realize—” She didn’t finish her sentence.
“Well,” Sara said, “I called you because I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the Jenny pages. I thought they were wonderfully well written, and Jenny is fascinating. I’m so curious about what happens to her. And so I thought I’d call and see if perhaps you are working on this as a novel, and if so, how far you’ve gotten, and if you need an editor, and also, perhaps, well, it’s possible that Donald James might be interested in seeing the story. Although I haven’t of course talked with him about it yet.”
For a long moment there was silence. Then Fanny Anderson spoke, her voice softer than before. “I didn’t intend for anyone to read my Jenny pages yet,” she said. “Not just yet. This is all most confusing. I’m not sure just what to say. I really hadn’t meant for anyone to read that particular piece yet.”
“Oh,” Sara said, disappointed. The woman seemed so hesitant, so unsure. “Well, there were about fifteen pages mixed up with the romance novel,” she said. “And I couldn’t keep from reading them—as I said, they were wonderful.”
“You really liked them?” Fanny asked.
“Very much. Very much.”
“Well, my goodness,” Fanny said. “This is just so very—perplexing. I don’t know what to say. I think I need to have some time to think about all this. You see, I was really writing the Jenny pages just for myself, although of course I can’t say I didn’t have the thought of a novel about Jenny in my mind. But I really wasn’t ready for anyone to read it. Yet here it turns out you already have read some of it—and liked it—it seems just a little bit like fate, doesn’t it?” Fanny laughed, huskily, softly. “We writers are so superstitious, you know. We rely on fate so much it’s really foolish. But it does seem—I was trying to decide what to work on next. Whether to start another romance novel, or whether to really settle down with Jenny … and now here’s your phone call. And you say you worked with Donald James?”
“Yes.”
“Well. My. That’s quite impressive. Oh, dear, I don’t know what to do.”
After a moment Sara asked, “Well, do you have any more written about Jenny? That I perhaps could see?”
Silence. A long silence. Then, softly, “Yes. Yes, in fact I do have quite a lot more written.”
“I’d love to see it,” Sara pressed.
“I just don’t know,” Fanny replied. “I just don’t know. I hadn’t even thought about showing it to anyone yet. You see, I care about this novel, quite a lot.”
It was then that Sara felt certain that the Jenny pages were a memoir as much as a novel. But she said, “I can understand that. Writing this kind of a novel must be much more difficult than writing a romance novel where it’s easy to stay within certain limitations. The Jenny novel is much more risky.”
“Yes,” Fanny replied, her voice warm with approval. “Yes, that’s it, you see.” Then she was silent again.
“I wonder,” Sara said, “I wonder if I could come up to Cambridge and see you. Perhaps meet you for a drink or take you to lunch or somehow just sit and talk with you about this.”
Silence.
“Please understand,” Sara said, “I’m a freelance editor. I can’t promise anything. And I don’t have any hidden motive for doing this, I just really am intrigued by your Jenny. I would like to see it become published, and, well, all my editorial instincts have been aroused. I think the Jenny book could be very exciting.”
“I just don’t know,” Fanny said. “It’s lovely of you to say all these things, very kind of you—”
“Oh, it’s not kindness—” Sara interrupted.
“—but I just don’t know,” Fanny finished.
“Well, I’ve got to come up to Boston early in December—to do some Christmas shopping,” Sara said, inventing an excuse on the spot. “Nantucket’s so small, you know. No big stores. Perhaps when I come up I could come see you for just a little while and we could discuss this.”
Silence. Then, “Tell me about yourself,” Fanny said, her soft voice firm.
“Oh,” Sara said, thrown by the question. “Well. I’m thirty-four years old, I’m married to a carpenter, we’ve lived here on Nantucket for two years and lived in the Boston area before. I went to Williams College and then worked with Donald James for about eight years.… I have no children. I love editing, but my husband was raised on Nantucket and wanted to live here, and so we thought we’d try it. I like editing romance novels, but I also like editing, um, more serious work.”
“Are you very pretty?”
Surprised, Sara said honestly, “Well, I suppose so. Well, perhaps not very pretty, but certainly pretty.”
“Beautiful?”
“Oh, no, not beautiful. Well, my husband thinks I am, I suppose, at least I hope he does, at least he says he does, and that’s what counts.…”
“And when you go out of the house, when you walk down the street, when you meet people?”
“Yes?” Sara said, not sure what the woman was driving at.
“Do you always find you make an impression?”
“Why, no, I don’t think so,” Sara replied. She was puzzled. “I suppose sometimes I do. But most of the time I think I look just like anyone else. You know, we’re pretty casual down here.”
“You don’t seem overly burdened with vanity,” Fanny Anderson said.
“No,” Sara replied. “No, I don’t think I am.” She laughed. “I’ve never had any reason to be ‘overly burdened’ with it.” Then, suddenly flashing on what it was Fanny wanted to know, she said, “I’ve never been as beautiful as Jenny, for example. I’ve never had to give any care about a gift of beauty. But I’ve had enough so that I could understand her, I think.”
“Yes,” Fanny said. “I see. What, more precisely, do you look like?”
“Well—I’m about five foot seven. I have blue eyes, blond hair—which I’ve just had cut very short. I never was ‘cute’ but I suppose I always was pretty. I think I look more intelligent than anything else in spite of the fact that I’m blonde. I mean blondes are supposed to look cute and sexy and dumb, the stereotype, that is. And I’m a little overweight now, I find I go up and down with weight.”
“Yes, weight can be a problem, can’t it,” Fanny said.
Sara waited. She wondered if she had somehow passed whatever test it was the other woman had just given her.
But Fanny only said, “Well, my. This is very interesting. I must say I am pleased that you like my Jenny pages. It encourages me. Still—”
“I would love to come talk with you about it,” Sara said, determined to pin down this elusive woman.
“Let me think about it,” Fanny Anderson said. “Why don’t you give me your phone number, and your name again so I can write it down, and I’ll think about it and call you back.”
Sara tried to keep the disappointment from her voice as she gave her the information. Yet when she finally hung up, she found she was smiling with anticipation. She had found something, the real thing, she was sure of it, she had found a true eccentric who was writing a truly good book. She felt like Sherlock Holmes on the trail of a culprit, Madame Curie in her laboratory—she was close to a discovery of some importance, and now waiting was a necessary part of the process that would lead to a triumph in her life. She felt sure of this, as if she had been granted a vision.