Pamela Dean (42 page)

"Don't you complain about the Bio Department?" said Kit, after a moment.

"Oh, well," said Molly. "We do, don't we, Tina?"

"Bio Department never takes us to Wisconsin, either," said Tina.

"Poor babies," said Nick. "Only to Bermuda, and California, and Alaska."

* * *

September cooled its mild, sunny way into October, and the asters blazed along the banks of the stream. Janet's Modern Poetry class was less trouble than she had expected.

Most of the poems were ugly and incomprehensible, or beautiful and incomprehensible, or so stark straightforward you wondered why anybody would bother to write them down at all. But Mr. Tyler had readily consented to her doing her term paper on Christopher Fry (she had asked for Bob Dylan just to see the effect—but Jack Nikopoulos, of all the unlikely people, had beaten her to it), and it was possible to skip classes, or dream through them, or pretend to be a spy from an alien planet trying to figure out American culture.

Greek 2, under Medeous's imperturbable guidance, was fussy and demanding. People who could read Herodotus handily might still gape stupidly at Euripides or trip over Homer, excerpts from both of whom appeared with increasing frequency in the homework assignments. The two dunces were still with them; Thomas was gone, which made the class feel rather flat. Odile was still there, giving a perfect example to everyone and causing the rest of the class to draw together in dislike. Janet, who was accustomed to either being or admiring and envying the best student in the class, hoped her own attitude had never been so smug.

Eighteenth-Century Literature was an unexpected amount of trouble. It appeared to Janet that she had read already, in English 11, every bearable piece of work any of the Augustans had done, and now wandered bewildered in a world that was artificially pastoral, unaffectedly nasty, and never, never said what it meant. She still loved Evans's lectures, but it was as if he were discussing some other literature altogether; she could never connect what he said with what she was reading on any except the most intellectual level—and while intellect was certainly necessary to an understanding of these writers, it was not sufficient. It all made her think of Tina's problem with writing interesting letters.

The journal was giving her less trouble than she had feared. The brilliant weather, the familiar but still, in many ways, mysterious company, their varying degrees of wit, loquacity, and patience, were a pleasure to record; it was like taking snapshots, only a great deal more rewarding, because the technical aspects of the matter were far more under one's control.

Tina was less pleased; Tina was, in fact, in despair. Half of what Janet saw going on she never noticed, and half of what remained she simply found boring. They had a number of frustrating and inconclusive conversations about it; the upshot of the whole thing was that Janet came back from an unsatisfactory session with Pope's "Pastorals," flung her books and notebook on the bed ("Hunting," remarked the notebook under today's date, "is the moral equivalent of war—young men will shoot something"), and called up Thomas on the telephone. He was living in Dunbar with Sharon's boyfriend Kevin, who as a Physics major was, perhaps, as far from anybody in Classics as Thomas could conceive of getting.

The telephone rang thirty-two times; a young woman with a slight Chinese accent answered, sounding resigned, and finally Thomas's reverberating voice said, "Hello?" in highly impatient tones.

"It's Janet," said Janet.

"Oh, sorry; I thought it was that moron who thinks Kev and I have got Schiller. What's up?"

"Have you been telling Tina she's ordinary?"

"What would be the good of that?"

"Well, that's what I thought; but she's all worked up about it, and you know everything just gets worse when she's worked up. Are you guys doing all right?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Thomas, discontentedly. "It's all very pleasant, but it's not going anywhere. And Tina wants it to, you know; she's got an amazingly puritanical conscience for somebody of her—well, anyway, I think she thinks the only justification for premarital sex is to get married when you can." He paused. "It's a very old idea, come to that," he said.

"This doesn't sound very healthy."

"Well, breaking up wouldn't be very healthy, either. I should have done it last summer, if I was going to do it; it has such an awful effect on people's studying, and it's bad enough to break the girl's heart without worrying if I'm going to keep her out of medical school too."

"She's only a sophomore."

"She needs four years of straight A's to—"

"Okay, all right, I don't know why I'm arguing with you anyway—I don't want you to break up with Tina. But she needs a new social group or something. We make her feel inferior."

"Well—"

"I've got an idea."

"Splendid."

"Why don't you take Tina folk dancing? They meet every Wednesday, and you know perfectly well she doesn't really want to come with the rest of us and watch arty foreign films."

"Sounds like you're the one who doesn't—"

"Oh, I hate 'em, but I like seeing what makes Robin laugh." There was a pause while Janet considered the implications of this and Thomas said nothing. She said, "Well, why don't you take Tina folk—"

"Because I've got two left feet."

"All the better."

There was another pause.

"I suppose it can't hurt to try," said Thomas.

Janet felt obscurely guilty. "You're being very lamblike about this," she said.

"You have a talent for nonoffensive interference," said Thom as, politely, and hung up.

The folk dancing was a great success. Tina talked about it endlessly, checked out records of the music from the library, and began getting together with two other girls from the dancing group, including Susan from last year's Fourth Ericson, to sew her own costumes. She was no more tedious than anybody else going on and on about an obsession; and she was far, far easier to live with. And in the middle of November, the day before Winter Term Registration, she broke up with Thomas.

Janet found out about it not from Tina, who had (as Tina explained later with a certain pride) accomplished the breakup in the interval between Introduction to International Relations and an appointment to sew skirts with Susan, but rather from the spurned Thomas, who was disposed to blame Janet. It was almost the first gray day of that autumn.

Janet was sitting at her desk, looking out over Bell Field instead of reading Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot." The rich colors of grass and yellow willow and red maple lay under the dark sky like some unreadable illuminated capital.

Janet had just turned back to the beginning of the poem, and was reading with a certain sympathy the exhortation, "Shut, shut the door, good
John!
fatigu'd I said, Tye up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead," when there came a tremendous pounding on the door, followed by Thomas.

Janet twisted around in her desk chair and stared at him.

"Thanks a lot," he said bitterly.

"Shut the door if you're going to yell. What did I do?"

Thomas sat down on Tina's bed, as he always did; then he shook himself and got up in a hurry and sat on the edge of Janet's desk. "Tina just broke up with me."

"Well?"

"Because I can't partake of her interests—which means solely that I am not completely absorbed in folk dances."

"And that was my idea. Are you really upset?"

Thomas glowered at her. He had let his hair grow all summer and all fall, and seemed to have no idea what to do with it. He looked a great deal like Janet's idea of an angel, except for the scowl, and the fact that he bit his fingernails.

"I wouldn't put it past you to do it on purpose," said Thomas.

"Thank you so much. Why the hell should I? You think I want a repetition of last year's behavior, when you disappeared for two weeks? No thanks."

"She's not unhappy, she's as pleased with herself as she can be."

"Well, what's the problem, then? You didn't break up with her because you didn't want to ruin her grade-point average. So now you're free, and you still won't ruin her grade-point average. What is the matter?"

"I need to find somebody else—oh, hell," said Thomas, and grinned at her. Janet received the uneasy impression that, rather than suddenly seeing that he was being absurd, he was simply sitting on his anger. "I just wonder who I'll have lunch with on Mondays.

Silly of me."

You can eat with us," said Janet, "Peg and Nick and me, I mean—but I do know what you mean. You feel kind of cast adrift." She had meditated on breaking up with Nick, more as an exercise in imagination than out of any major dissatisfaction, and had experienced a remarkably strong disorientation and panic at the mere notion.

"I certainly do," said Thomas. He pushed his long hands through his bright hair, and jumped off the desk. "Sorry to barge in on you like this. I guess I'll see you Monday—where?"

"Dunbar—look, we're used to having you around, you know—are you going to disappear on Molly and me?"

"I don't know. I don't know how awkward it's going to be. I did yell at Tina; she probably doesn't want to see my face for a while. Let me get used to being a bachelor, all right?"

"Well, call if you need anything."

"A good dose of self-esteem, that's all—no, don't look so alarmed, I was just joking.

See you later." He went out, banging the door.

Janet sat on her desk and looked straight down at the sidewalk, and in a few moments Thomas came trudging along it, his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket and his head bent—probably against the wind, Janet thought, but he looked dejected. She got up and went from the eastern window to the northern, and watched him slither down the eroded gully below Eliot, walk onto the wooden bridge, and pause in the middle to lean on the rail and throw bits of something brown, probably bread, onto the water. A collection of ducks gathered out of nowhere, clucking and wanking at him. He went on leaning on the rail long after he had run out of bread and the ducks had drifted away complaining. Janet leaned also, on Molly's desk, and watched the wind whip his hair over his face. Finally he turned and went, very briskly, across the bridge, up the hill, and in the nearest door Dunbar afforded. Janet straightened up, and discovered that her wrist was numb and the edge of the desk had made a white mark on her palm. She had wasted twenty minutes.

She sat down to Pope again. She had just got into a mood where she could admire his very great technical skill and be mildly entertained by the paragraph beginning, "Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in ink, my Parents' or my own?" when there was another knock. This was a nervous brushing of knuckles across the door panels, rather than Thomas's pounding; but like Thomas, the caller then opened the door—so violently that it crashed into the stop provided against just such hasty treatment—and skittered into the room.

It was Robin. Janet's first thought was that he was coming down with the flu. He was as pale as paste and his eyes looked feverish. He came straight up to her where she sat gaping, twisted sideways in her desk chair. "Tina's jilted Thomas," he announced in the tone of a man delivering the news that the besiegers have breached the walls and there is nothing to do out die bravely.

"Yes, I know," said Janet, "he was just here. Don't you have a class?"

"I met Thomas just before; he told me, but he would not stop. You must talk to Tina."

"What's the matter with you people? What have I got to do with it? I can understand Thomas coming to talk to me—but if you think Tina should reconsider, you tell her so."

"What makes you think she'd listen for a minute? It's you she listens to. You need but mention there is such a thing as a folk dance," he said the phrase scornfully, as Janet's father was accustomed to say bits of critical jargon he despised, " and she's consumed with it on the moment."

"Don't be ridiculous," said Janet. "Besides," she added, putting aside her indignation and getting to the really puzzling matter, "what's so bad about Tina's breaking up with Thomas? He's done nothing but agonize about how to break up with her since they met.

Why should everybody mind so much that she did his dirty work for him?"

Robin stared down at her for an instant, his lips parted, then, as was his irritating habit, he burst out laughing, slapped his forehead, and reeled over to Janet's bed, where he crouched, making wheezing and choking noises and snorting repulsively. Janet tossed him her box of Kleenex. She thought of going on with her reading, but it would hardly be fair to Pope, for whom she was conceiving a tardy sympathy.

Robin eventually blew his nose, smoothed down his disordered brown hair, and gave Janet a winning look. She hoped he didn't know just how winning it was. "I cry you mercy," he said, predictably. Janet wished Shakespeare had never invented the phrase.

"Thomas mopes when he is without a lover. After a week or a month of it, you'll be pleading with Tina, I warrant you."

"After a month of it," said Janet, coldly, "I'll be taking my examination in Eighteenth-Century Literature and considering switching to Classics. I shall be far too busy to—"

"Don't do that!" exclaimed Robin, sitting straight up and giving her a nakedly earnest look that made it seem likely he did know how winning the other one was.

"Why the hell not? You've all been after me to for a year."

"It's too late for that."

"Will you talk sense for once!" said Janet, losing all patience.

"Sir," said Robin, in uncanny imitation of the Korean actor who had played
Hamlet
a year ago, "I cannot. Cannot what, my lord?" he apostrophized himself sharply, as Rosencrantz had spoken to Hamlet. "Make you a wholesome answer," he said mournfully, as Hamlet. "My wit's diseased." He reverted to his own expression, and looked hopefully at Janet.

"Oh, go away!" said Janet. "You're enough to try the patience of a saint. Leave me alone. I'll see you at supper.
Don't say it!
" she added furiously, as Robin seemed about to add some of Hamlet's observations about Polonius and the worms, which would, to a grasshopper mind like his, have been amply suggested by the word "supper."