Pamela Dean (54 page)

"Thomas, yes, you're right. No. Why should we both go quietly crazy?"

"Misery loves company."

"Would you tell Robin?"

"No," said Molly, "but that's a different kettle of fish. Why don't you go call the Women's Caucus?"

"I don't think they should have to pay for my sins, when my parents are perfectly capable of it."

"Well, they don't think you should have to apply to your parents if you don't want to.

Do you think you've sinned?"

"I didn't—but it feels as if Nemesis has come to live under the bed. You remember the last Laura Ingalls Wilder book, the one about her marriage? I knew she'd had a daughter, and I wondered, when I bought the book, how Laura would ever talk about sex. You know what she thought, when she found out she was pregnant? She tho ught, Ma always said that those who dance must pay the fiddler. Well, I've danced, and now I'm paying."

"At least she seems to have enjoyed it."

"At least she was married."

"If you're going to go on like that, I think you should talk to Thomas."

"No. If I'm not pregnant, I don't want to force all those issues. It's only been three weeks."

"If you mean you and Thomas, it's been three years."

Janet stared at her. "That's a very interesting theory, Miss Dubois," she said, in her best imitation of Evans's manner. "Would you care to support it from the text?"

"I leave that," said Molly, imitating Professor Davison back at her, "as an exercise for the student. Come and have lunch with Robin and me."

"Robin won't like that."

"Nonsense. He can't talk about anything but New Testament Greek, which he hates for being different from Classical Greek; he'll love having a knowledgeable audience. I keep trying to compare all the verb changes he's raving about with mutations in the typhus bacillus, and it drives him crazy."

"The Elizabethans are supposed to like weird metaphors."

"Well, Robin doesn't imitate them in every one of their strange ways. Come on, he's got a class at one."

Janet moved through the next two weeks feeling as if she were carrying a large, ill-balanced tray of priceless china. It was easier than she had expected not to tell Thomas that she might be pregnant. She had thought of no good way to explain why she was no longer on the pill, and it would have been the height of idiocy to get pregnant because she thought she was already. But Thomas was not importunate, and did not seem surprised that she was not, either. He called or dropped by or suggested walks and movies as often as before. When she called him, he was agreeable to her own suggestions. His attitude, while it made matters easier in the short run, filled her with a certain dread when she thought about the future.

What was far more difficult than she had expected was refraining from telling him about the list of the Principall Actors in All the Plays. He was the best person to tell: the best person to talk the issue into its component parts if it were true, and the best person with whom to discuss its beauties and flaws if it were a fantasy. But she felt that by telling anybody she would somehow disturb the balance of the universe; and she did not want to do that, not now, when she might, still, not be pregnant. Thomas did ask her once if she was all right; she said she was still depressed about leaving Blackstock next spring, and as a result they took even more walks.

She did start attending all her classes, a move Thomas approved of and also undertook himself, being, as he told her, unhappy at having missed Professor Evans's initial remarks on Swift, which seemed to be the key to all later lectures. Janet lent him her notes from her own sojourn in Eighteenth-Century Literature; but Thomas said Evans had been using a different set of metaphors then.

American Literature was not as annoying as she had feared it would be. Mrs.

Simpson, a tall, thin woman with a great deal of gray hair braided and wound around her head so that she looked rather like a statue of Athena that Professor Ferris had shown a slide of in Greek 33, was a delight. Like Evans, she was as sharp as a razor and had apparently memorized every work with which the class had to deal; like Fleisher, she was gentle and patient with all but the most obdurate stupidity. Janet would have preferred to take Chaucer from her, but she made American literature interesting if not entrancing.

Janet did look forward to what she might have to say about Mark Twain, the only American author (of those commonly taught in college English classes) Janet had any use for.

The homework for Math 10 was tedious in the extreme, but Mr. Brunner had not only announced his intention of explaining calculus in metaphors, with no mathematics higher than high-school algebra, he seemed in a fair way to achieving it. His class was peculiarly complementary to Medeous's approach to Aristophanes as a series of linguistic puzzles that included prizes for those discovering the greatest number of (linguistically and culturally verifiable) dirty jokes.

Janet was still puzzled by Medeous. Only in her enjoyment of the more salacious aspects of Aristophanes did she demonstrate any characteristics in conformance with Nick's assessment of her. She was so dignified that it was three weeks before anybody laughed in class, a class on one of the greatest comic dramatists of all time; nobody would have dreamed of taking any liberties of any sort with her; she did not abuse the powers vested in her as professor or treat any student with other than impersonal courtesy. It made no sense. Nick made no sense. Too much cogitation in this area always led Janet back to the list of Principall Actors, from which even
The Rise of Silas Lapham
provided a welcome relief.

Janet did in fact dream one night in the middle of October of Silas Lapham's daughters, who had turned up as Celia and Rosalind in a production of
As You Like It
that was set in Elsinore Castle and also included Pekuah from Dr. Johnson's
Rasselas,
solemnly reciting the first paragraph of Johnson's Preface to his
Dictionary,
and adding, after Celia had spoken a few words in New Testament Greek, "Inconsistencies cannot both be right, but imputed to man, they may both be true." This all seemed natural at the time; but Janet woke from it, slowly, to a sensation of vast interior discomfort.

"Oh, hell," said Janet, sitting up and wishing she had not.

Amoeba made a querulous noise from Tina's bed. Janet's roommates slept on. Janet groped her way to the door, blundered down the hall to the bathroom, and stayed there the rest of the night because she was too depressed to move.

No, depressed was not the word. It was a cold panic that paralyzed every nerve but left the mind free to concoct the most horrible scenarios it was capable of. Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee. Oh, get hold of yourself. You're not Tess; you're not Hester; you're not Mary Hamilton in the ballad, who slept with the King and had his baby and put the baby in a little boat and sent him out to sea, and was hanged for murder and the only satisfaction she got out of the whole thing was being able to tell the King to hold his tongue and let his folly be.

You're not Victoria Thompson. I suppose she thought her parents would throw her out in the storm. You're lucky, Janet Carter, that's what it is, lucky. You are the beloved daughter of tolerant parents with plenty of money, living in a society that has just declared it's none of the government's business if a woman has an abortion in the first trimester. I wonder if it's their business if you have the baby? Well, they can't put you in jail for it.
Is
it illegal to have a child out of wedlock, the way it still is in lots of states for unmarried people to have sex? But oh, God, why me? There are people around here who sleep with somebody different every night of the week, and
they
don't get pregnant.

There was a crack in the tiled wall behind the toilet. Somebody had written in large black letters on the plaster wall above it, "I read [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all: it is very tiresome, and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention."

No attribution, despite the businesslike and scholarly use of those square brackets.

Janet spent a relatively pleasant fifteen minutes trying to remember the source of the quotation, and finally tracked it to
Northanger Abbey.
Catherine, who was so silly, and read only gothic novels, had said it, which meant perhaps one was not supposed to take it seriously; and yet it would be exactly like Jane Austen to put something like that in the mouth of a character like Catherine; it gave her the pleasure of saying it and the probability that nobody would take her to task for it.

It was an odd thing to put on a bathroom wall, which might explain why the people whose job it was to remove such effusions had not cleaned it off. How long had it been here? This was the first time she had been in this stall, which was the farthest from the door.

Her primary feeling, running into the bathroom, had not been to accommodate her rebellious stomach so much as to hide herself.

Which was impossible, of course. Janet got up slowly, flexing her cramped knees. It was five-thirty. A dull gray light was beginning to suffuse the bathroom and drip into the hallway. Janet went back to her room, fetched her toothbrush and paste, and spent some time brushing her teeth. Then she took a shower. Out, damned spot. Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. Without gold and women, there would be no damnation.

I wish I'd read some modern poets, thought Janet, rinsing shampoo out of her hair.

Some of them might have written about being pregnant out of wedlock, at the very start of your life, just when you began to think you might be a good critic—the most moral job in the world, if you can believe Pope—and thought of going to graduate school to see about it.

But no, they're all men, too, except Sylvia Plath—and if I read
The Bell Jar
right now I

would
kill myself. How in the world did I get into this? I was so sensible. I wonder if one could sue the drug company for maintenance of the baby? Oh, God, what's Mom going to say? Well, she already said it: no form of birth control is completely reliable. I know just how those medieval monks felt about the treachery of the body—except theirs never did

this
to them. Men, men, always men. Not that it's fair to blame Thomas; the woman tempted him. He can go
away,
that's what's so galling, while nowhere I can go would be far enough. Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell.

I don't believe it. Birth-control pills don't fail like that; they just don't. My lord, the chances of conceiving from
unprotected
intercourse are only about one in four. Something has gone all wrong with the world, Elizabethan actors attending colleges, people getting pregnant while on birth-control pills. Maybe if I go out I'll see the sheeted dead all squeak and gibber in the American streets. No, that doesn't sound at all likely. Victoria Thompson never squeaked or gibbered; she just threw books.

Good God, Victoria Thompson. Is that it? Am I doomed to relive her tragedy, because I lived in her dorm? What was that Tina said about the girl who killed herself and made Nora buy a copy of the
PDR
—in consequence of which, I mean, Nora did it; there are less drastic ways to make people buy books, I'd hope. Oh, God, I'm going crazy. Though Mr.

Evans would just say it's the damage caused by too early an exposure to thought. I wonder how much exposure to thought would have prevented this mess?

She went back to the room with her ears full of water and got dressed in her dearest old smock and green denim pants. Luckily Tina woke up before Janet had to decide whether to wake her. For the first time in their acquaintance, she was glad that Tina was a morning person. She put her question while Tina was shrugging into her bathrobe.

"I can't remember. You could ask Sharon."

Sharon lived with Peg. "Think."

"You shouldn't get up so early," said Tina, "it's bad for your disposition. I'll think in the shower, okay?" She made a dignified exit, but came tearing back ten minutes later, wearing a pink towel and a great many soapsuds in her hair. "Margaret," she called in the door, so loudly that Molly rolled over. "Margaret Roxburgh. I remember somebody going on and on about how Roxburgh was the same as Rochester, and then they got on to talking about
Jane Eyre.
Nobody around here can ever stick to the poi nt. Can I take my shower

now?"

"Go, go," said Janet, rather in the manner of Lady Macbeth.

Tina vanished; Janet ran to the door and yelled, "Thanks!" down the hall. The bathroom door swung in answer.

Janet grabbed her old green jacket and ran to the library, which was of course closed until eight-thirty. Janet sat down on the low brick wall in front for perhaps twenty seconds; she could not seem to keep still. She slipped between the library and Masters Hall, skidded down the dewy hill, ran across the field and the highway, and trudged up the highway until she came to the gravel patch and the wooden bridge, where she stood dropping sticks into the water and trying to think of something cheerful, like Lewis Carroll or the wonderful habits of Dr. Johnson's sentences.

It was a curious thing that, while bad prose was invariably maddening (unless it was funny), good prose was not invariably cheering. She said aloud to the burbling water and the dragonflies: "'That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard that is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.'"