… and all our proudest lore
Is but the alphabet of ignorance.
—LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY
KAREN, THANK GOD YOU’RE HERE! This time I think she’s really dying!” Jill had her apartment door wide open before I’d even set a foot on the bottom step of the wide, wraparound porch. Eloise was screaming bloody murder. I’d heard the shrieks the second I opened my car door. I’d groaned, then scooted around the Jetta to retrieve the sausage-and-eggplant pizza, still blistering hot in its flat white box.
It was five o’clock Tuesday, and I’d dropped by to lend Jill a hand. Eloise was braced against her mother’s shoulder, body stiff, face red and scrunched, mouth a wide orifice of fury. Any human being who could expend that much energy on making noise was nowhere in the same universe with death.
“It’s just colic, Jill. She’ll live.” I set the pizza box on the kitchen table, shifting aside bright pacifiers, plastic baby bottles, and an electric breast pump to make room. “The question is—will you?” I took the baby from Jill and held her facing outward with both my arms around her midsection. Then I strolled around the room, jiggling her gently up and down. Her howls subsided to sobs, then ceased. She craned her little head like a turtle, trying to get a fix on the lights, the colors.
“How’d you do that?” Jill queried, wide-eyed. She appeared exhausted; the shadows of sleep deprivation were imprinted under her green eyes like etiolated bruises. “She’s been screaming half the afternoon. I was about to go out of my mind.”
I shrugged, looked wise. Truth is, I was lucky. With colic, it’s a crapshoot—so to speak—sometimes a simple change of scene will help, sometimes you’re doomed to hours of perdition.
Jill showered while I changed Eloise and snuggled her down in her crib. Then Jill and I sat at the kitchen table dispatching pizza. “I’m soooo tired, Karen. And I’m getting to be soooo boring,” she confided. “All I want to talk about is Eloise. All I think about is Eloise. All I dream about is Eloise. I eat, sleep, walk, talk baby. Me! I can’t believe it! And now I’m turning into a cow; every time she makes a peep, I spurt at least a gallon of milk. Nobody ever comes to see me anymore, except for you, of course—and Kenny. And I don’t blame them; I am a cow. Does it ever get any better? Am I going to be a cow for the rest of my life?” Jill actually had tears in her eyes.
“Don’t be silly,” I said, and gave her hand a squeeze. “By the time you go back to teaching next semester, you’ll be your old sexy self.”
“Ha!” she exclaimed. “I’ll never be sexy again!” Despondent, she dropped her head into her hands, rested her elbows on her knees. Then she peeked up at me. “Really?”
“Just ask Kenny,” I replied. “We’ll see what he thinks.” I slid the last slice of pizza across the table to her and pushed back my chair. “I’ve got to go now, or I’ll be late for the study group. I’m so beat, I’d skip the damn meeting, except I’m scheduled to give a presentation on the plans for the Center.” I sighed, thinking about the hassle that was bound to ensue. “It’s at Elliot Corbin’s house, and I’m not looking forward to that. You know he’s a guy who really pisses me off.”
“I think Elliot’s cute,” Jill said. “For an old guy.” Jill is twenty-six. Elliot is, oh, maybe fifty. That didn’t seem so old to me anymore.
“Handsome is as handsome does,” I replied with a prissy little twist, then laughed. I couldn’t believe such uptight words had actually come out of my mouth. “I don’t know what it is about him, Jill. Maybe I’m just envious. My life is so—messy—” Jill sighed in agreement. “And Elliot seems to have it all together. Neat little boxes—that’s what his mind is like, anyhow: row upon row of neat little analytical categories that theorize the hell out of everything. And I’ll bet anything his life is exactly the same way: row upon row of neat little personal relationships, secure little tenured job, comfy little balance in the bank account, witty little postmodernist house. I’ll bet his brain cells are lined up in neat little rows—”
“Life is messy,” Jill said with the hard-won wisdom of the new mother, dabbing at a milky stain on the left side of her green sweater. “It’s the nature of the beast. Don’t let anyone theorize you out of that.”
• • •
I was wrong: There was nothing either neat or postmodernist about Elliot’s place. The house was large, a mustard-colored, three-story mid-Victorian, with tall windows and a mansard roof. On the outskirts of town, it was set back from the street behind a wilderness of overgrown cedar and rosebushes. When no one answered my knock on the dark green door, I tried the ornate brass knob, and it turned in my hand. The hall was two stories high, featuring a massive mahogany staircase and a huge wrought-iron chandelier with only a third of its two dozen or so flame-shaped bulbs functioning. Although the hallway was dimly lit, I had the distinct impression of sparse furnishings and extremely dusty corners. This is a house that needs a woman’s touch, I thought, then automatically ran my thinking through the feminist p.c. machine: This is a house that needs the administration of a unionized, equitably reimbursed, affirmative-action-sensitive, domestic-maintenance service.
I was late for the meeting—I’d had trouble finding the house—and from a room to the right of the entry hall, I could hear voices. To the left was a formal dining room whose mahogany table was cluttered with books. Following the increasingly louder tones, I wove my way through a stuffy formal living room, then came to a large chamber which appeared to run the full width of the house. My colleagues were gathered there, in a room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases that had obviously been built as a library. At the moment, though, it seemed to serve as a combination office and recreation room, exercise equipment in the front of the room, and at the back a wide oak desk, surrounded by a conglomeration of mismatched couches and chairs in a ragged seating arrangement.
“Ah, Karen. Finally!” Elliot exclaimed when he saw me in the doorway. “Now we can begin. Please bring us up to date on the status of the Northbury Center.”
I glanced around. I was acquainted with everyone in the room, a scattering of scholars from the state university, Amherst College, Williams, Enfield, and other schools in the area. We gathered monthly to share research and ideas. At the last meeting, Miles had brought in a copy of a newly discovered sermon by Henry Ward Beecher. The month before that, Harriet had shared an essay on hegemonic masculinities in nineteenth-century literary culture. Tonight was my turn, and I had the biggest show-and-tell of all.
“Karen?” Elliot wanted to get this over with. I looked for a seat. There were none available. “How about a chair, Elliot? I’m too tired to do this standing.”
“Oh, right.” Elliot scurried into the dining room, as Miles Jewell, always the gentleman, jumped up from his armchair. I waved him back into it, and accepted the straight chair Elliot ungraciously plunked down next to me. Elliot returned to his seat on a black-and-white-striped couch and ostentatiously took up the pen and the lined yellow notepad he’d had to abandon in order to play host. Miles poured a glass of red wine and handed it to me.
“As most of you know,” I said to the small group, “a recent bequest to the college of ten million dollars and the Meadowbrook estate in Eastfield—” I sipped my wine and told the group about Edith Hart’s will.
I’ve always thought of myself as a teacher first and foremost, so I’d initially been reluctant to take on the administration of the Northbury Center. Eventually, however, I’d become enthusiastic about setting up an archival center where women writers would receive the same kind of loving attention that the major libraries have always paid to the canonical men. Because Edith’s will had been contested, no one had any idea when Meadowbrook and the money would become available so the center could get under way. It could take years, but that didn’t abate my zeal.
“A reading room,” I told my colleagues, “a conference room, book stacks, archives of personal papers, classrooms, bedrooms for visiting scholars, perhaps even a fully restored nineteenth-century kitchen,” I said, really getting into it now, “so that researchers can reproduce material conditions of early-industrial domestic life.”
“Poppycock.” Miles shook his head. “Great minds transcend mere household concerns. Literature has nothing to do with kitchens.” Translation: Men’s literature is the only real literature. He popped a cube of stale-looking Swiss cheese into his mouth.
“It certainly does,” Harriet retorted, knitting needles clacking irritably, “if you’re an exploited woman trapped in domestic discourses—” Translation: You men don’t have a clue about the real world.
“No, no, no,” Elliot interjected, jabbing his pen into his notepad. “A postmodernist theoretics demands the elision of such irrelevant biographical trivia as domestic life—” Translation: There is no real world. It’s all just language.
“Ahem, Elliot, I was speaking!” Harriet asserted. Translation: You neosexist trend slave! Her needles clattered faster. “Unpaid domestic labor is an integral factor of hard and fast economic reality. Nineteenth-century marketplace conditions excluded most women from literary production. What we need here is not so much a center for the study of literature, as an Institute of Material Feminism. Karen, do you think—?”
“That’s the problem with you feminists!” Elliot jabbed at the yellow pad again, and the rickety table on which it rested tilted to one side. “A slavish adherence to outmoded cultural materialism. What this money should be used for is an International Library of Epistemological Studies. Karen, when I become Palaver Chair—”
“Palaver Chair!” Harriet croaked, and Miles jumped in hotly.
“Epistemology be damned, Corbin! Puritan Spiritual Narrative is the wellspring of American Literature. For an Institute on Puritan Studies, ten million dollars would purchase numerous—”
“But … but … but—” I interposed. “What about women’s literature? It’s supposed to be a center for the study of women’s literature.”
In the next hour the battle raged. I left the meeting as soon as I could. Classes were suspended for the Thanksgiving vacation, and after the heated debate of the evening, I was more ready than ever for a few days away from colleagues. On my way out of the house, I glanced around once again at the shadowy, sparsely furnished hallway, bemused by the grimness of the place. Once again I thought, This is a house that needs a woman’s touch. Then, curiously, I noticed Amber Nichols, in the dining room, pawing through the collation of volumes on a table that looked as if it hadn’t hosted an actual meal in decades.
“Oh, Karen!” she blurted, startled by my presence. Then, after an almost infinitesimal pause, “What a feast of books. I never can resist books.” Uncharacteristically, she was babbling. “How about you?”
“No,” I replied, “I can’t.” But I didn’t find this bland-looking collection of what appeared to be scholarly tomes at all appetizing. In addition, I was suddenly struck by Amber’s docility so far this evening; I’d forgotten until that very moment her implied threat to Elliot at Sunday’s poetry reading. What was it she had said? Something about a revelation at the Tuesday night meeting? But she’d remained totally silent during my talk, her tight little smile stitched ineradicably in place, no shocking disclosures forthcoming at all. And thank God! After all the tongues hanging out and teeth bared for a bite of the Northbury Center, I don’t think I could have tolerated any further skirmishes at knife point.
I went right from Elliot’s to the supermarket. Turkey, cranberries for sauce, bread for stuffing, potatoes for mashing, onions, yams, parsnips, peas, pickles: I was ravenous just thinking about it. I’d filled my cart and was rounding the dairy aisle, hustling toward the checkout counter, when I ran into a familiar-looking kid. I mean, literally ran smack-dab into him. It was the dark-haired little curly-head who had knocked me down with the skateboard on campus the day before. Now here he was, pawing through a sales display of sugared cereals. Unable to slow down fast enough, I bumped him hard with my grocery cart.
“Ufff,” he said as we collided, and he staggered, sending a pyramid of Sugar Pops and Froot Loops boxes crashing to the ground.
“Watch where you’re going, lady!” an irate mother-type voice commanded. A heavyset woman descended on me. “What d’ya think? Ya own the place?”
I pivoted toward her, automatically defensive. “He shouldn’t have been—” Then I did a double take. “Monica?”
“Karen?” Our department secretary seemed flabbergasted to see me, as if I had no right to a life off campus. Monica was dressed in gray sweatpants and a dark blue quilted jacket open over a gray sweatshirt. Around her neck she wore an odd pendant, a star enclosed in a circle, dangling from a black leather cord. Her short brown hair was rumpled, as if she hadn’t taken a comb to it all day. Her cart was piled with the same holiday fare as mine—turkey, stuffing, cranberries—only a great deal more of it, as if she were cooking for two or three dozen instead of the measly six I was expecting.
“This is your kid?” I picked up a box of Sugar Pops and set it back on the display, bent over to snag another. The boy followed suit, glancing skittishly at his mother.
Monica recovered her usual irascible aplomb. “Yeah, this is Joey.” She paused, and a complicated set of expressions flitted across her round face: pride, exasperation, wariness. The latter won. “Ya got a problem with that?”
“No, it’s just that—” I was about to tell her how I’d met him on campus. But, behind her, Joey was frantically signaling to me, jumping up and down, shaking his head, desperately mouthing, Don’t tell her don’t tell her don’t tell her. I remembered how upset he’d been about his skateboard.
“—that I didn’t know you had any children,” I finished. It was a smooth save. I could easily imagine what it must be like to have someone as overbearing as Monica for a parent. Behind his mother’s back, Joey took a histrionic breath of relief and mimed wiping the sweat off his brow. It was clear to me that a significant part of this child’s life was going to take place behind his mother’s back.
I could see now that the boy did indeed look a great deal like Monica. He shared the close set of her dark brown eyes, the pugnacious jut of her jaw. That must be why he’d seemed so familiar to me when I’d first met him. But still, there was something else.…
The three of us, Monica, Joey, and I, picked up cereal boxes and restacked them in an approximation of their original formation. A store manager bustled toward us, officiously ready to chastise these careless shoppers, but one glare from Monica was enough to send him on his way. As I was the tallest of the three, I replaced the final box of Froot Loops at the apex of the pyramid.
“Looks like you’re cooking for a crowd.” I gestured at Monica’s overflowing cart.
She shrugged. “Just the usual,” she grumbled, and I realized that, whereas the secretaries were privy to all sorts of information about the professors—from phone calls and personnel files—I knew absolutely nothing about this woman’s life. I hadn’t even known she had a child. Was Monica a local woman, I wondered? Did she come from a large family? Did she have children other than Joey? Why was she buying all that food?
As I pushed my bag-laden cart through the supermarket’s automatic front doors, Monica and Joey were loading their groceries into the back of a rust-eaten white Ford Bronco parked as close to the door as you could get and not be in a handicapped-parking zone. The car’s bumper was plastered with tattered slogans: SONIA JOHNSON FOR PRESIDENT; GODDESS RULES; I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE; WILD WOMEN DON’T GET THE BLUES.
“Enjoy your holiday,” I called inanely as I passed them.
Monica rolled her eyes. Enjoyment obviously had nothing to do with it. Enjoyment was for people like me—privileged people. For Monica, it looked like, Thanksgiving was just another day of work.