Moo (3 page)

It was true that Mary had a secret. Her secret was that she felt blue and not especially hopeful. The confidence and anticipation that had brought her here now looked like a series of misjudgments, and the
obstacles she had seen to going elsewhere, even to staying in Chicago and going to junior college, which she had disdained, now seemed flimsy and self-created. She lifted up her catalogue so the others couldn’t see her.

Diane’s secret, hidden behind a manner of energetic, practically electric friendliness, was that she would be out of here and into a sorority as soon as she could. Her very unpacking and arranging, which she accomplished with her customary organized alacrity, was a cover for how soon she would be out of this room, this dorm, this world of girlish uncertainty and unformed style. A sorority, particularly Phi Delta Pi, say, or Delta Delta Delta, was where you perfected your manners, where you learned how to talk to strangers, men and women, but especially men, with just the right mixture of enthusiasm, courtesy, and flirtatiousness, where you learned how to pass a tray without servility and to give orders without giving offense. In a sorority, techniques for pleasing men without giving in to them were part of a traditional wisdom that your very skin drank up like Oil of Olay. The right sorority, in short, was the first step to a successful executive career. Of course there would be classes and the acquisition of actual knowledge, but plenty of women had that and were still stuck in middle management. Diane didn’t intend to tolerate such a fate. Diane’s mother, who had gone to some experimental college in upstate New York in the sixties, had made living in Dubuque House a condition of Diane’s matriculation, and maybe it wouldn’t be so soon that she could find the money to live at a sorority house. But Diane knew very well that her mother, who majored in Techniques of Social Activism and Political Disruption, was remarkably susceptible to those charms of persuasion and intimidation that would be so useful in the future, that sorority girls knew all about. In the meantime, and while thinking all of this, she kept up a pleasant stream of conversation with the other girls and with Mrs. Johnson, who saw that this girl Diane was organized and outgoing but not pushy and self-centered the way so many girls were these days, and she thought what a nice friend Diane would be for Sherri.

Sherri thought Diane was going to drive her crazy inside of a week, she was just like her sister Patty, who was always sucking up to Mom so that you wanted to blow biscuits and Mom ate it right up until you wondered if the woman was of normal human intelligence, but she had to admit that Diane had a terrific haircut, very short around the sides, but long and springy on top. Her hair was something Sherri
worked on every day, and intended to color tonight or tomorrow, as soon as she could, because there was an ad on the radio that said in the nineties color was an important part of a good haircut and maybe her mother had never covered her gray hair and did look exactly like she had borne thirteen children, but an eighteen-year-old college girl had to establish high standards from the outset, and if that weren’t true, then why had she lost sixty-two pounds to begin with?

As for Keri, Mrs. Johnson pegged her as one of those very pretty but vapid girls who went to college because they didn’t have anything else to do with their time. She was sweet enough, the way she took the last bunk, though she had gotten there second, and she tried, rather ineffectually, to engage the black girl in conversation. She was the kind of girl with her future written all over her, just like so many women Mrs. Johnson knew, with well-to-do husbands and children who ran wild, women who never raised their voices, but always threw up their hands. They hid out at the country club and voted Democratic and seemed to think that keeping their figures was a sufficient lifetime accomplishment. Certainly it wasn’t their fault that they were like that—society LET them be like that instead of shaking them up once in a while—but it was a useless sort of girl, in the view of Mrs. Johnson, and at least Sherri, with all her sullenness and complaining and fighting with her sisters, had some gumption, and if she could keep her weight down, which Mrs. Johnson would NOT mention before leaving, because Sherri was right that it was her own business, but if she could keep her weight down and make the right friends, she would do well enough in college, though an intellectual she most assuredly was not, and maybe find herself, which discovery Mrs. Johnson hoped to God would happen soon, like before Thanksgiving, because another summer like this one would do her in.

Now Sherri’s dad had finished hanging her bulletin board, and she tacked up pictures of the enormous sibship one by one, Patty, sixteen, down to Lizzie, eighteen months, and silence fell over the six people in the room as she did this.

They were a pleasant-looking family, thought Keri.

To Mary, they looked like twelve pictures taken at different ages of the same white person with blue eyes and light brown hair.

Diane wondered if Mrs. Johnson had understood what was making her pregnant.

Mrs. Johnson had no general thought, except that it was time to get home, and Mr. Johnson was trying not to cry in front of all these
women, but really, leaving your oldest girl at college, a college as big as a small city, just leaving her there—he went out into the corridor.

“Don’t rush off, Hal. Sherri, go give your dad a kiss good-bye, he’s taking this kind of hard. Then come back here and find that sweater of Patty’s because I know you took it.”

Keri thought her secret was safe. No one from her high school had come to this university—they’d all stayed in Iowa. So, for one thing, she could tell everyone she was from West Des Moines, and for another, she would never have to refer once to her year’s reign, now just ended, as Warren County Pork Queen.

T
IMOTHY
M
ONAHAN
, associate professor of English and teacher of fiction writing, had never returned to the campus more than twelve hours before the beginning of his first class, and often cut it closer than that, to two hours, or even ten minutes. His profession as a novelist, he thought, gave him that kind of leeway for eccentricity, and although he was not in fact as eccentric as he might have wished and as certain writers he knew actually were, what did not come naturally could be cultivated, as he often told his students to their everlasting benefit.

This year, it happened that the beginning of the semester overlapped Bread Loaf by three days, so that he had to cut it very close, both to give as much of himself to his Bread Loaf students as he could and to begin his university students on the right foot, which he didn’t trust any of his colleagues to do for him. He had spent the entire summer on the East Coast, and had left Vermont about four the previous afternoon. His foot heavy on the accelerator, he had stopped for only two hours just before dawn and taken a short nap.

That nap had, in fact, been rather eerie. He had pulled into some parking lot just off the interstate when it was still the “dark night of the soul,” as Fitzgerald had called it, and stretched out as well as he could across the bucket seats of his perfectly maintained ’79 Saab. He had awakened suddenly, uncomfortably, and with a sense of urgency. The first thing he had seen upon lifting his head was two cars across the lot, pulled up side by side, the driver’s windows adjacent. A package was passed. Tim lowered his head. The cars sped away in opposite directions. A drug deal, fair enough, that wasn’t the eerie part. The eerie part was the way something pinkish gray, some blanket-like, bowl-like thing arched above him, and met the ground very low down on every side. He could not for the life of him figure out what this was, and his heart began to pound, until he realized it was the sky meeting the flat of the land. He sat up. He was back in the Midwest. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and noted this sensation
for later inclusion in a book. He reached between the seats and started the car, but his heart was still pounding.

Even so, the summer had gone well, carrying him from writers’ conference to writers’ conference, the best known being Bread Loaf, Wesleyan, and Warren Wilson, but it was not for him to disdain the others, as they had supported him since the tenth of June with only a one-week break at his mother’s house on the Cape. Wesleyan was the exposition, followed by Maine, Nantucket, Virginia Beach, Sea Island, Asheville, Camden, and Vassar as the rising action. Then Bread Loaf was the climax, his first time there, and he dared to think he’d made a pretty good impression on both students and administrators, drinking enough, but not too much, flirting enough, but not too much, getting discreetly laid but sticking to one person, and one who was nearly his own age and nearly his own rank in the Bread Loaf hierarchy. Discretion was, perhaps, the lesser part of eccentricity, but then at Bread Loaf, discretion was eccentricity. He’d found the atmosphere markedly invigorating.

And distinctly different from the atmosphere of the revered agricultural and technical institution of higher learning that had turned out to be his employment fate. Not Yale (where Hersey had been), not Princeton (where Oates still was), not the University of Michigan (Delbanco), or of Wisconsin (where Lorrie Moore got to enjoy the fabled pleasures of Madison), not Duke (Reynolds Price), or Iowa (Frank Conroy). Even so, a good job, an enviable job, two courses a semester, little committee work. The advertisement that had attracted his application eight years before had attracted 213 other, unsuccessful applications. Seventy-two from writers who had one book, as he had had, twelve from writers with two books. These were figures he was always cognizant of, never mentioned, but also never forgot. Reciting them to himself was his charm against his besetting sin of envy.

He stopped off at the house he had rented for the eight years, a two-bedroom bungalow of some charm across from the campus, carried in a suitcase, showered, changed, and emerged. An hour till class, time enough to walk. He cut through the student union, where the dishes offered for lunch were bar-b-qued beef w/ sauce on bun, scalloped potatoes w/ ham, pork loin sand., and vegetarian steamed vegetables w/ rice. No clams, bluefish, duckling, or crabcakes in sight. As he neared Stillwater Hall, the numbers of people he knew and greeted thickened, until he had, in fact, spoken to ten or twelve friends, two
women he had dated, and one woman he had lived with for two years. Such as it was, this was home. He accepted that.

He picked up his class lists and sorted the summer’s first-class mail from flyers, memos, and brochures.

He spoke in a friendly but not fawning way to the chairman.

He flirted with the secretaries, all of which, he knew, were on to him.

He made a lunch date with the woman he had lived with for two years, who had followed him into the office, and with whom he was on very good terms, especially since she was married now, to a guy in Soils Science, and, by the look of her, about three months pregnant (he could always tell, but he would let her tell him).

At last he strolled down the stairs toward his classroom in the basement and the sixteen strangers he would know far too intimately by the end of the semester.

Here it was that he gazed upon a sight he had never seen in Stillwater Hall, the sight of a beautiful dark-haired girl with the natural exotic grace that midwestern women never had. She was replacing a pin in her hair, then she was picking up her briefcase, which students never carried, so he deduced that she was some kind of faculty member, then she was putting her hand on the knob of the classroom door right next to his classroom door, and then he was saying, “Can I help you?” and she was saying, “No,” and he was saying, “I’d certainly like to,” and she was throwing him an amused glance, and he was thinking that forty-five classes in the semester were forty-five chances to make a favorable impression, and he had better take his time, and if she heard his class through the wall laughing that would be a good start, so he went in and told a joke and they did laugh, and it did reach the ears of Cecelia Sanchez and she did smile.

Cecelia Sanchez, assistant professor of foreign languages and teacher of Spanish, too found the Midwest eerie, but it was not only the flatness that threw her. Each day of the past two weeks she would have picked a different source of dislocation. Right now it seemed eerie to look out on twenty-one blond heads, in rows of five, unrelieved by a single brunette. Last night she’d thought the humidity was going to suffocate her. A few nights before, her rented duplex had seemed uncannily muffled by trees. Sometimes it seemed that everyone she saw, everyone in every room, was determined to be very very quiet. In the almost empty streets there was no shouting, no music. When she went into stores, the customers seemed to be gliding around on
tires. Salespeople appeared beside her, smiling significantly, murmuring, apparently ready to flee. No one wanted to negotiate or even talk about a purchase. You were supposed to make up your mind in some kind of mysterious vacuum. The smiling itself made Cecelia uneasy, because it didn’t seem to lead to anything, and whatever the distinctions were between types of smiles, they were so fine that she couldn’t make them out. On all sides, her neighbors were dead quiet, the hum of air conditioners substituting for conversation and argument. She saw men in gas stations exchanging sentences a single word long and understanding what they were getting at.

This was her second class today. In the first class, a second-year group that met at eight a.m., the students sat silent and attentive, their faces straight, their posture excellent. They raised their hands and waited to be called upon. The girls wore so little makeup that the one set of plum-colored lips, and perfectly outlined and filled in they were, belonging to a heavyset girl in the front row, throbbed like a beacon. Cecelia had not been able to take her eyes off them, and that, too, made her feel weird.

Though only twenty-six, Cecelia had never thought herself provincial—her parents were from Costa Rica and Mexico. She had lived in L.A. and San Francisco. She had been married to an Anglo and spent time with his family in Oregon, and that white family had talked and argued plenty. She had even known transplanted midwesterners—now that she thought about it, it was they who had rolled their eyes in amazement when she’d revealed the location of her new job. But she’d been so relieved to get a good job, a job like there used to be in the old days, before the era of a course here and a course there, all for little money and no benefits, that she hadn’t paid any attention. A job away from Scott, the Former, and her parents, who’d had less sympathy with her divorce than with her marriage, and little enough with that. Anyway, what could be bad about a town with low rents and no crime? And it wasn’t exactly bad, it was just quiet and dreamlike; except for the humidity (which did give her hair a wonderful bounce), it was a cool, Anglo, keep-your-distance-and-we’ll-all-get-along kind of heavenly vision, where, as she had overheard in the departmental office, someone’s wallet had been found on the street and turned in to the police, who called and said they’d send it over in a squad car, the officers didn’t have anything better to do at the moment. It was true that no one had asked her more than the most perfunctory questions about herself and that even good friends at
parties she’d gone to talked to each other about the weather, their gardens, and the athletic teams with a detailed interest that dumfounded her, but the blankness of this was maybe a fair exchange for the anxieties and conflicts of home.