Every Day (3 page)

Then I was put in Fowler’s class. Advanced Placement. This is what my A in Greenaway’s class earned me. I knew I had no business in AP anything, but by this time I was
enamored of the notion of collecting experience for experience’s sake, no matter how painful it promised to be. I’d learned this not from the Lake Poets, but from Pam, my roommate of all three years. Pam had schooled me in the thrills of marijuana, alcohol, and shoplifting. I still didn’t believe her on the sex issue. I went into Fowler’s hardball English class in the fall believing that he could teach me about that at the very least, and maybe I’d learn something about poetry too.

I’d been on Martha’s Vineyard all summer, staying with Pam in her family’s lavish compound, by day earning minimum wage for shoveling French fries into waxpaper-lined baskets that also contained gourmet burgers and by night testing the limits of my tolerance for vodka and gin. We’d been sharing the house with an endless battery of male guests: bartenders, sailing and tennis instructors, the odd college grad enrolled in a business training program at a bank set up by Pam’s real-estate-broker mother. No night was predictable. There were no set sleeping arrangements. One morning I woke up in Pam’s arms. “He left,” Pam muttered, and then rolled over and slept until I got home from work. By Labor Day I thought I’d seen it all. My father, a Polish Jew who wouldn’t have been allowed to play tennis where Pam and I went to hit in the late afternoons, couldn’t understand why I’d wanted to sling hash instead of come with the family to Fire Island for the four hundredth summer in a row. My mother said, “Let her go. It’s a nice place. She’ll have fun there.” She knew. She used to summer there until she married my father.

“Nice bracelet,” Fowler said, tapping the gray rope bracelet on my wrist. “Let me guess: summer on an island, lots of people, you don’t remember a single name. Great stuff. You must be tired. Time to get down to brass tacks.”

He handed out a reading list no elderly person with time on his or her hands could have tackled in five years:
The Book of Job, Tristram Shandy, The Divine Comedy, Middlemarch, Ulysses, Moby Dick, War and Peace.
I looked up with glazed, tired eyes that begged to be impressed.

He was smiling at all of us, waiting for us to look up in horror. I steeled myself. No way. I’d drop the course in the afternoon. I’d laugh my way back to the dorm. As Pam had said so often, “Fuck him.” Mr. Nowhere doing his Nowhere thing in the middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts. Getting over his brilliance. Fuck him.

He took the roll, making checks as each student responded grimly to the reality of being present. Again he looked up, victorious.

“You’re here. Get ready. This is going to break all of your backs. But it’ll be good. You’ll all be as tired as Lisa over here.”

“Leigh,” I corrected.

“You should be as tired as Adelman over here. Don’t worry. She can handle it. So can you.”

I swallowed. My last name still rang out like the shofar in this bleak wilderness of pristine WASPdom. I watched him sift through a pile of Xeroxes, decide which to hand out first, start them around, give no instructions, assume everything of us, assume I hadn’t taken offense. And, oddly enough, I hadn’t.

•   •   •

“It was great,” I told Pam, who seemed eager to know. “You know, the kind of class everyone who has no life should take.”

We were in the snack bar, smoking, waiting for our group to assemble: Bill, Murph, and Todd, I could have died of boredom, were buying food. It was amazing what they could put away, not so amazing to me now that I see how much Isaac needs to sustain him for a mere morning. “Totally repulsive,” Pam had said the night before. She’d never met people who actually ate.

“You call
this
a life?” she said, indicating the panorama of students in booths stuffing their faces with grease and sugar.

“I know,” I said, my voice sliding like Pam’s. “I’d much rather be in the dorm reading
Job.”

“Look,” Pam warned, “at least he’s fun to look at. All I do in English is stare at Greenaway’s nose and try to figure out how many times it’s been broken.”

Todd and Murph slid their burgers onto the table. “Scoot over,” Murph told me. He hip-checked me. He was tall and beefy, like most of the boys at Hastings. He made a show of wanting me, but he always had to get to bed early because of a game the next day, thank God. He was from a town outside of Hartford. Todd, from Greenwich, was in the daily habit of pressing Pam to accompany him to the woods for drugs.

“Hopeless,” she called him.

Our intolerance for these boys had magnified since I’d begun Fowler’s class and our discussions about him had become regular. I thought Pam might have been miffed that she didn’t have a daily crack at getting his attention.

“Hey, nymphet, where are your wings?” Todd said to Pam between bites of burger.

Pam sucked hard on a Parliament. She spoke before exhaling. “Come again?”

Todd chuckled to himself, and Murph waited respectfully for the other shoe to fall. Bill, our wrestler, was unwrapping a Hostess fruit pie.

“I thought all angels had wings.” Todd smiled, his eyes red, dopey slits

“I can’t deal,” Pam said. She looked at her watch, which was intricate enough. “Time for my enema. Bye, fuzzy-wuzzies.”

She got up. She waited for me to get up. I stubbed out my cigarette on the top of a Coke can.

“This is so where I don’t want to be,” Pam said as we
walked across the golf course, knee-deep in mist, the lake, still and silver, to our right. To our left, the library lights were being shut off, window by window. Ahead, downhill, was our dorm. My sandals were wet from the grass, and I was sliding a bit as I walked.

“Have an affair with the guy, would you?” Pam said.

“You have an affair with him.” Of course I didn’t mean this. I was close. I’d been going for extra help. He’d suggested Saturday morning coffee elsewhere. He’d probably never met a girl who was half Jewish.

“No can do,” Pam said.

“Why not? You’ve got a better shot at him than I do.”

Pam was languorous, blond, ready. I was thinner, more nervous, smaller in almost every way. She dropped a whole, burning cigarette into the grass and laughed self-consciously.

“I don’t want to get near the guy. He might find out how dumb I am.”

“So?” We laughed.

“It’s not like it’s a government secret,” Pam said. “All you have to do for people to figure out you’re brainless is to get yourself sent to a school where at least one building bears your family name.”

We stopped at some trees near the north entrance

“Fucking amazing moon.” Pam said.

“God, will you look at it? I might puke,” I said. I was referring to a dorm meeting I could see taking place in the common room. A lot of the girls were already in sleepwear. Pam and I wore T-shirts to sleep, even if it was below zero out.

“Could I have a camera over here?” Pam yelled loud enough to be heard through the open window. “Is this an ad for Lanz?”

I stayed under the trees. I watched Pam, for once not envying her, thinking there was something sad and off-balance about this beautiful rich girl yelling to no purpose
in the New England wilderness, and wondering what my connection, a girl of very different social and economic bearing, who was actually in love and not just playing at it, to her really was.

•   •   •

That my truancy, and not Pam’s, became public, has left me very sour on the subject of her. Although I have no cause to see or speak to her now, and the only news I have of her is that she lives in Newport with her husband and a pair of stunning twin daughters (their picture was featured in an alumni bulletin, which amazed me, as the Pam I knew would have torched such mail before responding to enclosed questionnaires), I sometimes imagine a reunion. We have lunch somewhere ludicrous for my budget, cheap for hers, and she tells me how bored she is and that she’s having her house redone at great expense. I show her my children’s pictures, one of Isaac in his sky-blue baseball jersey ready to swing, a young Fowler with his eyes typically narrowed to focus on any place other than where you stand beholding him. One of Jane ready for a birthday party on the front steps, looking ever so pleased with herself. One of Daisy in a sunhat, a wondering smile directed at our tiny garden. She shows me a clipping of her twin beauties, each holding up a tennis trophy. We eat, laugh a bit, and then I tell her I haven’t forgiven her for telling whoever it was that I was pregnant, for forcing me into hiding, for making a fiasco out of what could have been seen simply as a misfortune. Of course, I was the obstinate one, wanting to go through with Isaac. But I can’t think of anything without him in focus, and Pam is only guilty of having a bigger mouth than I thought she had.

She was out cold, not even under the covers of her twin iron bed, after a brutal field hockey scrimmage, the night Fowler knocked once and blew into our room. I was at my desk, my Bible open to
Job,
my mind on Fowler as an undergraduate at his Southern college. I’d been reading up on him
in the orientation handbook for the fiftieth time, mulling over his credentials and trying to picture him in a pair of ripped jeans and sandals, fine hair to his shoulders, in the middle of some campuswide protest. Impossible. He didn’t waste time on politics. He probably tore around that campus as he did ours, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, tie loosened to accommodate his whirlwind, leaving trails of people dazed or irritated or swooning or all three. He probably hadn’t even waited around to attend his own graduation.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going to the movies.”

I didn’t say a word. I turned off the desk light, grabbed my school sweatshirt and some loose dollars from the bureau, and followed him out.

•   •   •

We drove into New York State and saw a double feature of
Jules and Jim
and
The Four Hundred Blows.
I tried not to read the subtitles. He sat with his elbows on the armrests and his hands pressed together under his chin as if in prayer. Occasionally he’d turn and whisper, “Watch,” then “See?” as if there was something more of note than the characters’ expressions or gestures could communicate and I’d be privileged to pick up on it. I’d seen both movies before, could have lived without
The Four Hundred Blows,
but I didn’t mind seeing
Jules and Jim
again, which has always struck me as the happiest possible portrait of a
ménage à trois.

“Can I ask you why we just did that?” I said when we left the theater

“You may,” he said. “But first, I think, a hot beverage.”

We drank coffee at a diner, three cups each. He wasn’t eating anything, so I didn’t push for food. He said, “So?”

I felt like saying, “Noo?,” which is what my father would have said.

“What about those movies?”

“What about them?” Truffaut would have been disgusted.

“They’re the first movies I ever saw. My mother took me. I was nine.”

I did the prayer thing with my hands that he’d been doing as we watched the movies. “Are we doing sob stories? Because if we are I’ll have to remember my first movie too, and I’m not sure I can.”

He laughed. “You’re tough. You’re not used to being up this late, are you?”

I sprayed coffee all over the table, some on his shirt. “You can’t be serious.”

“I wasn’t,” he said. “I know you and Tillinghast” (that was Pam’s last name) “never go to bed. Thus the coma when I came in to get you.”

Pam did have a way of looking terminal when she slept, as if she’d never snap out of it.

He went on, despite my sarcasm. He said he’d been writing for the movies, between four and six every morning. “I start just about the time you and Tillinghast come oozing up from the lake after the night’s dissipation. You look wonderful at that hour, like some undiscovered species, slow but undeniable.”

It seemed he never stopped, never let his guard down, always saw and knew everything, was never without his arsenal of commentary and prediction.

“Why are you telling me this?” I said, trying to sound bored.

“Because you want to know what I do.”

“Like fun.” I smiled. I’d given myself away.

We talked about movies. I told him about seeing
The Sound of Music
three times in three days, first with my grandmother Liza, who somehow earned the nickname Pussy, then with my mother, then with a friend of Liza’s, Holly Butterfield, who loved taking me places because she had no grandchildren of her own. I told him about leaving the theater after the first time, spellbound, on a late fall afternoon, during the
season he and I were in now. It was cold. Somehow the excitement continued, I said. I tried to describe the clarity of color, of happening, in the movie as I saw it that day, how these seemed extendable to the sharp beauty of an early winter night, how this was a kind of love I hadn’t known before, this love for a movie, for all movies. He watched me. He put money on the table, then stood, and reached for my hand.

“Where are we going now?” I asked, giving it. My questions had sounded unforgivably childish to me all evening.

“Driving,” he said. “Continue the excitement.”

•   •   •

We drove through towns whose main streets were pitch black, reminders that we were out at the wrong time—had we no shame? We rattled through some covered bridges. He talked about ideas for movies, reasons to make them, what they meant, in terms of livelihood, for him.

“Some teacher,” I said, too tired to care what I was saying.

“It’s possible, Adelman, to do more than one thing at a time.”

I didn’t like his instructional tone just then. “Good,” I said. “Take me back to campus, in that case, because I’d like to continue this conversation while I’m sleeping.” I had given up on sex for the evening.

He stopped the car just shy of the two brick pillars that marked the front entrance to Hastings Prep. He was staring straight through the windshield at the brightening sky.

“Two things,” he said, “that matter. Movies and you.”