Autobiography of Us (16 page)

I thought for one awful moment that I might cry. I fixed my gaze on the paperweight balanced on the corner of his desk. It was an ugly thing of glass and wood; I stared at it as though I’d never seen anything more fascinating in my life. “And Holly Stevens?”

“Pardon?”

“I’m asking if Holly Stevens is on your list. Sir.”

“A fine mind.” He tapped his pen against his desk and rearranged a few sheets of paper; his left eye had begun to twitch. “I’m afraid Miss Stevens is not on the list either, though of course I’ll be recommending St. Joseph’s to her as well. Unfortunately, she neglected to meet certain qualifications for the medical degree programs.”

“Which qualifications would those be?”

He sighed. “Of course you understand I’m not at liberty to disclose that information.”

“May I have an example?”

“Example?”

“I’d like to know who among us had what you’d call exceptional talent.”

“Exceptional talent,” he repeated. He rocked back and forth in his chair, his eye twitching madly now. “Eugene Price was in your class, is that correct?” I nodded and he brought the chair down with a thump, clasping his hands in front of him on the desk. “Eugene Price scored an eight hundred on the MCAT at the age of nineteen. His paper on James D. Hardy’s work regarding live lung transplants was among the finest I’ve seen in my twenty years of teaching at this school. Dr. Price—senior—is himself one of the top neurosurgeons at Pasadena Presbyterian.” He looked me directly in the face. “Eugene Price is the number-one candidate on my list. I expect him to matriculate to Stanford. Does that answer your question?”

I stood, lifting my bag to my shoulder. “Thank you for your time, Professor.”

“Rebecca,” he said quickly. “Miss Madden. You’re a bright girl. Nursing really is—”

“Rewarding work,” I interrupted. “I understand perfectly, sir.”

He stood then as well, rubbing his eye with the palm of his hand. He was several inches shorter than me, and in his tweed coat and rumpled shirt he looked oddly elderly, fragile almost, someone’s doddering grandfather forced to deliver unwelcome news. “I expect to hear wonderful things about you down the line.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” I said, rudely.

I came down the stairs slowly, digging my nails into my palms; when I stepped outside into the dazzling sun, the girl with the long hair was still standing by the door. She turned toward me with that same expectant smile.

“Here,” I said. I thrust out my hand and the girl stared as I opened my fist, letting the paper fall to the ground. “You have a goddamn beautiful day.”

* * *

I don’t believe it was more than a few weeks after my meeting with Professor Potts that Alex passed me on the path one morning—early October, no later than the second week or so. I remember that the heat had broken days before, the wind picking up one afternoon with an audible sigh. Cooler weather in that part of California has always seemed to me to have a particular effect on the light, a kind of tempering that fades the sun from glare to shimmer. That morning it hit some small pin or jeweled barrette in Alex’s hair, and I looked up, distracted by the brightness. She was wearing a pale-green blouse and smart black heels, a sweater buttoned carelessly around her shoulders in a way that would have looked sloppy on anyone but her. I’d never seen the girl she was with before, a blonde with a glossy bob doing most of the talking while Alex listened or did not, heels clicking, the dark mass of her hair pinned back on one side with a clip.
Clack-
clack
, clack-
clack. I slowed as they got closer, clutching my books to my chest. The girl turned to watch Alex when she caught sight of me, chattering all the while. But Alex’s face didn’t change. She kept her gaze focused straight ahead, her red mouth set in a line straight as the horizon; it was the other girl who colored as they passed, her eyes carefully avoiding mine. We were both so engrossed in making a show of indifference, the other girl and I, I don’t think either of us noticed when Alex reached for the end of my scarf. It was a small movement, no more than a twitch of her fingers.

“Hey.” The word came out as a croak. But she kept walking, gone by the time I felt the air moving across my skin. When I stopped and turned, there it was in the distance—my favorite scarf, the only one I owned that was pure silk, fluttering behind her like a small orange sail.

* * *

But I’m wrong about the time of day. It must have been late afternoon by the time she passed me, the sun already beginning to sink down behind the row of gum trees that fringed the main quad. Five or six at least, long after classes were done for the day. I wouldn’t have dared go into any building on campus otherwise, for fear of running into someone I knew, and no sooner had she passed me than I turned and walked over to McCarren Hall, the building where Professor Potts held his class and where I had sat crouched over my desk as recently as the spring before, working out a set of formulas. Where I had seen for the first time, my freshman year, the honeycomb network of a fly’s wing under the scope.

The halls were dark and empty, the classrooms cleared of students. The door to the lab was closed but unlocked. The university held night sessions for high school students from time to time, and someone had likely left it open for that evening’s class. I flipped on the lights and stood a moment in the narrow aisle between two islands, the beakers lined up in their drying rack at one end, the sinks scrubbed clean. I had always found the order in that room soothing, not to mention the quiet in which we worked, the silence broken only by the clicking of metal against glass and the constant hum of concentration. The whole thing put me at ease. In that still, cool room I forgot to slouch, forgot to worry about the cut of my dress or the look of my shoes, the small talk I found so tricky to navigate suddenly, blessedly unnecessary.

I don’t know if I can describe what came over me as I stood in my old classroom that afternoon, fiddling with a bit of glass tubing someone had left out to dry. I was thinking, oddly enough, not of Alex or my mother or even Professor Potts but of Bertrand Lowell. No doubt sitting in his father’s office building at that very minute, I thought, reclined in a desk chair with a scotch and soda at the ready, his feet propped up on the windowsill as he let his cigarette burn down to a nub. I suppose in that moment I blamed him for all of it, for the great ruin I understood my life to be. I was surprised to see that my hand stayed steady as I swept my arm across the counter, the sound of glass breaking like the noise of a sudden downpour. I think I broke every bit of glass in the room. God knows I tried. I walked up and down the narrow aisles with rage shooting out from every limb—the beams of it, I imagined, extending outward until the entire room shone with the bright white light of every way in which I had been wronged.

* * *

She must have slipped in through the door right behind me. I don’t know how else she would have found me in that building, McCarren a warrenlike configuration of rooms with which she would have been entirely unfamiliar. I walked right past her when I came out of the lab, my footsteps loud against the tile.

“Brava.”

Her voice boomed in the darkness, and I whirled around. “You scared me.”

“That was some show.” She came into focus slowly—her shoulders, her face, the gleam of her arms. “Really—
brava, bravissima.
I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“What do you care?” It was a shock to see her standing there in the hall, my scarf knotted loosely around her neck.

“
I
said it all sounded like a bunch of nonsense. French literature, that was your thing—I was sure of it. I said to Bertie: Listen, you don’t know her like I do. You don’t have a clue.” She stopped. “What—haven’t you heard? We’re like two little lovebirds.”

“But I’m still being punished.”

“I don’t know what that’s got to do with anything.”

“I thought that was the whole point.”

She sighed. “And here I always said you were the clever one.”

“Looks like you were wrong.”

“Looks like it.”

There was silence for a moment and then I half-turned away. “If that’s all—”

“Did you ever stop to think how it might feel?” she said loudly.

“How what might feel?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Being lied to, for starters.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Shut up.” She said it almost affectionately. “Please, just shut up.” She was squinting in the dim hallway light as though she could hardly see me: She’d been drinking, of course, though as I said it couldn’t have been much past six at the latest. No matter. I could see right away she’d had more than a few—it was in the looseness of her body, the way she swayed side to side as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Honestly, I could care less. I’m just wondering what you did with it. Your
moxie
, darling.” She arched one eyebrow. “Your so-called
spine
.”

“What’s the point?” I said sharply. “Apparently I’m not one of the top candidates. I fall well below the cutoff of extraordinary.”

“According to whom?”

“Dr. Xavier Potts.”

She put her hands over her mouth. “No.”

I felt a smile tug at my lips in spite of myself. “He happens to be head of natural sciences.”

“Xavier Potts,” she repeated. “Head of natural blowhards.”

“He’s a brilliant man.”

“Oh, I’m sure he is,” she said airily. “They’re all brilliant, aren’t they? Still—seems a shame, you giving up like that. But then you always did lack what my dear departed grandfather called the strength of one’s convictions.”

I stared down at my shoes as though I saw something fascinating there. “I don’t know what there is to have conviction in anymore.”

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. The tale of a thousand important little men.”

I glanced up. “Humpty Dumpty?”

“Aim high—isn’t that what they always told us?” Her voice was tight. “Incidental breakage be damned. Be
great
, Eleanor said.”

“Per aspera ad astra.”

“Exactly.” She looked at me. “I expected more from you. I expected the goddamn stars.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“Not half as sorry as I am.”

I rubbed my arms as though I’d caught a chill; the anger that had overtaken me in the lab had yet to disappear, and I felt warm from it, feverish. “I should be going.”

“You’re always in a hurry,” she snapped. “I’d like to know when everyone started being in such a goddamn hurry.” There was a brief silence and then she seemed to remember something. “I could have helped, you know. If you’d bothered to ask. Or did you think you were the first girl around here to find herself in a sticky situation?”

I stared. “You don’t mean—”

“God, no. Not
me,
stupid.” She lifted her chin. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss the details. Let’s just say you’re not the only one to disappear for a few days and come back—how to put this?—
unburdened
.”

“I really do have to go,” I said, turning. My hands ached where I’d hit them against the counter, the skin there itching like crazy, bits of glass no doubt buried beneath the flesh.

“It’s called reality, Rebecca,” she called after me. “You might want to acquaint yourself with it one of these days.”

* * *

What did it mean to call something real? What was not real? It was 1965 and the world was in an uproar, but every day in Pasadena, morning broke on an exact replica of the one before. President Johnson had been reelected that previous fall, and under him the war in Vietnam began to escalate—the details of which I mostly learned later, understand, years after the events of that decade had come and gone. Oh, there were names that floated in and out of the classrooms at school: Operation Starlite or General Westmoreland. A handful of murmurs about the protests under way outside the White House. There were even a few among the younger students who left school for precisely that, boys and girls younger than us by no more than a few years but already angry, furious—their world, as it turned out, a different one entirely.

But they were by no means the norm, the ones who left or got themselves kicked out. They were, in a word,
unusual
. Unusual was Bobby Pierce, a Browning boy we all knew as Lindsey’s younger cousin but who remained until that year otherwise unremarkable. I don’t believe I’d thought twice about him before that fall, when he grew his hair long and dropped out of high school—simply stopped going one day, refused point-blank. Mrs. Pierce, it was said, at her wits’ end. Unusual was Bobby Pierce and the crowd he began hanging around, boys with beards and girls in long dresses, who drove in from small towns along the coast to gather downtown and do God knows what. Unusual was Bobby Pierce getting thrown in jail for splashing red paint across the steps of city hall that next spring, his father leaving him there the full week before paying bail. He washed his hands of Bobby, he told anyone who would listen. He would not have a coward for a son, no, sir.

JUST before Christmas there was a scandal at school involving one of the English professors and a first-year; I’m afraid that sort of thing was just as common back then, though this case in particular attracted an unusual amount of attention. It seemed the girl had been discovered in the professor’s bed, the wife returning home unexpectedly after a visit to an ailing aunt. The professor in question was a Shakespeare scholar. Of course, the headlines in the school newspapers made all the expected jokes:
CAMPUS ROMEO’S OTHER NAME NOT AS SWEET.
Or:
OUT, DARN FROSH!
Point being that in the aftermath of that scandal, I was more or less forgotten about. By the time we came back for the winter term, I found that most people simply ignored me, a few girls going so far as to give me vague smiles when I passed them on the path or sat down next to them in class, as though they remembered my face but couldn’t for the life of them place it.

In retrospect, I wish I’d worked up the courage to speak to Holly Stevens. I spotted her on the path from time to time over the course of that year, her mud-colored hair held back from her face by a headband too wide for her narrow face; I might have stopped her one day and walked with her a ways or asked if she might like to sit down for a cup of coffee. We might have found we had more in common than our names gone missing from Professor Potts’s list, though I learned later that Holly went ahead and applied anyway, that she was rejected by every school but Wisconsin—because, I can only assume, she lacked the appropriate references. I can’t say we’d ever exchanged more than a handful of words, Holly and I. The truth is that I felt a greater sense of kinship with the boys who were in Professor Potts’s class with us. They at least had shown a little enthusiasm for the work we did there, exclaiming and swearing under their breath while she went about her experiments with her unflappable calm, jotting things down in a black thick-tipped pen no doubt chosen to draw attention to the irreproachable accuracy of her notes.