The Year We Left Home (19 page)

As if she had only been waiting for him to finish speaking, she swung her legs over the windowsill and stood up. “OK,” she said from inside the room. “Thanks. I have to go home now.”

Ryan followed her. “I’ll walk with you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yeah, I do. What if somebody’s out there throwing wineglasses?”

A joke she didn’t laugh at. “I don’t want you to come with me.”

“Come on, Megan.” At least she didn’t seem drunk. But no way was she going to walk home alone through the dark in her child’s sundress, even if it was only a few blocks. “I’ll walk behind you. You don’t have to talk to me or anything.”

“If you try to do that, I’ll scream.”

Zev came out of his room then, sensed something unhappy going on, retrieved his bicycle and headed for the door.

“Hey, Zev? Want to do me a favor, walk Megan back to her dorm? As long as you’re going out? That all right with you, Megan?”

Zev said it would be no problem, sure. He gave Ryan a look on the way out. It said, You are big trouble.

He heard their footsteps and the soft bumping of the bike, all the way down.

He wondered if he should try and give her an A after all.

She wasn’t in class the next week and that was both a relief and mildly worrisome. He wasn’t going to call her, that would have been unwise, an escalation, an admission of complicity or wrongdoing. He’d honestly been trying to help her. Maybe he’d been dumb or naive about it, but aside from providing an underaged person with alcohol (not unheard of on this campus), he’d committed no actual transgressions. It was better to leave her alone to sort herself out. Besides, he had his other students, and his own work to do, and his adviser wanting to see a new chapter, and the new chapter had to be assembled from all the bits and pieces strewn around his carrel in the library.

The weather veered back to damp and cold, and all the campus buildings smelled of wet wool. Ryan spent most of his days and nights at the library, getting back into the rhythm of work, the satisfactions of actual work. It reminded him of running track, of the all-out grinding, gasping effort as he approached the finish line.

He typed up his chapter and put it in his adviser’s mailbox. His adviser was also the lecturer for the discussion section Ryan taught. The adviser called the next day and asked to see him. This was unheard-of promptness. It made him nervous. He wondered if he’d made some obvious, jackass mistake in his research or his assumptions, even plagiarized by mistake.

Ryan knocked on his adviser’s door and was told to enter. The director of graduate studies was there as well.

He hadn’t wanted to believe until now that this had anything to do with Megan.

They told him to sit down. There were two stapled pages on his adviser’s desk. Everything else around it had been cleared away. Go ahead, they told him. Read it.

WHY I WANT TO KILL THE PRESIDENT

Megan O’Brien
Poli Sci 150
Final Paper

In Mr. Erickson’s class he talked about how everybody in America is one of two things, either in or out. The people who are out are all the minority people including women. Also poor people. So all the in people are white men. Although
Mr. Erickson is a white man himself he thinks this is a problem.

In our system of government, the President is the most in of anyone in our country. Although we have other branches of government they are not as important and so people who are looking to change the government do not kill them as often.

I am of Korean heritage. This in itself is not a big deal. Although my being adopted sometimes is. Mr. Erickson has pointed out that this is not a normal situation and I would be expected to have a lot of problems. This is true but not for the reasons Mr. Erickson says. Korean people have a very strong sense of inferiority complex due to being occupied by the Japanese for fifty years. Although they have many sayings that are symbols of their endurance in the face of obstacles, such as “A living dog is better than a dead dignitary.”

Mr. Erickson said that it is only natural for the out people to dislike the in people and want to kill them. This is the basis for
political science. We are all a part of political science whether we want to be or not. Everything can be explained by it.

If I killed the President, people would probably think I was crazy, like the latest person who tried to. That person thought he would be good at it but he wasn’t. But it would really be because in our system of government we can never change who we are born as. If you kill the President, there will be another President in his place. The rest of us, it’s just the one person and nobody will miss them.

Ryan put the pages back on the center of the clean desk. They were waiting for him to say something. His silence buzzed and flattened in his ears. He said, “She was supposed to be writing about checks and balances in the constitutional system.”

His adviser asked what he made of this, then.

“I don’t know. Maybe she was having some kind of a breakdown.”

“Her parents called the Dean of Students office yesterday. They’re very concerned.”

He thought he should ask why, and if she was all right, but his adviser was speaking again. He seemed to be embarrassed at the necessity of asking such questions, the inevitable air of prosecution. “Why don’t you tell us about Ms. O’Brien. How was she doing in the class? I don’t suppose you brought your gradebook with you?”

Ryan had not. He noticed that the director of graduate studies was taking notes.

He told them that Ms. O’Brien had been an average student. No serious problems. But she had been very anxious about her grade. He had talked with her about it and tried to give her some guidance.

Just what sort of guidance?

Encouraged her to participate more in class. Helped her with her paper.

That part hadn’t worked out so well, had it?

No, sir. He couldn’t say that it had.

They had several decisions to make. Ryan should understand that these were serious matters. Killing the president, threatening to kill the president. They had to decide if the police should be involved, if other investigative agencies should be involved. This was not something to be easily dismissed, given the recent events. Even if Ms. O’Brien had only been trying to . . . what did he think she was trying to do, anyway?

Ryan told them he couldn’t say. He wondered where Megan was, and if they’d already talked to her. She must have turned in her obscene joke of a paper directly to the professor. That was enough to tell him that the paper was only
meant
to sound as if she were crazy. What she was really trying to do was wreck him.

He thought he could convince them that he had not spoken approvingly of political assassination or urged his students to practice it. It was everything else that stung.
We are all a part of political science whether we want to be or not. Everything can be explained by it.
How easily he had been made to sound like an idiot.

They kept him there for more than an hour. The matter of her visits to his apartment. He didn’t deny that they had happened, did he? Extremely poor judgment on his part. As for what he had said in class. Of course they knew he had been misunderstood. (It was beginning to feel to Ryan as if he himself was accused of trying to kill the president.) Of course he had the absolute right and freedom to express his own views. The university supported and protected that right. But there was the possiblity that the student’s parents might make difficulties. He should be prepared to answer questions, give some sort of statement if necessary. For the time being, that is, for the rest of the term, it would be best if his teaching duties were assigned to someone else. They were not passing judgment. It was for everyone’s protection, including his own.

Ryan said, “If I’d had sex with her, and given her an A in exchange, like she wanted, none of this would be happening.”

Further embarrassment on their part. They had been hoping to avoid anything unpleasant. Hoped that he would be mortified enough to go along with everything and allow them to be the chickenshits they had decided to be. He was only a graduate student. His insignificant
rights and freedoms more easily dispensed with. Megan’s parents must have made some first-rate threats. Sue the university for indoctrinating students in violent anarchy? Sue him for either molesting their daughter or failing to do so? Ryan said, “You know, we were talking about this the other day in class. The difference between stated ideals and actualities. Lip service, it’s called.”

Their faces hardened. Ryan stood. “Would you excuse me?” And then, because he needed something else to propel him out the door, he said, “Personal experience and personal grievance inevitably expand outward into the public sphere. Boy, do they ever.”

He left the professor’s office and climbed the two flights of stairs to the office he shared with four other graduate students. No one else was in and he closed the door behind him and sat at the desk.

The self he had created was dissolving along with the life that had sustained it.
In our system of government we can never change who we are born as.
Now he would be neither teacher nor student. He would begin again, in perfect ignorance.

Before you
got married, before you had any idea of who it would be, or how it would all come about, there was curiosity but also a kind of dread, in case you might not be able to pull it off. That happened to people sometimes; they held out too long, or got their hopes set on someone who disappointed them, or maybe they lost their nerve. Anita had known that when it came to marrying, something remarkable was expected of her. It was a small town, and girls like her were burdened with everyone’s admiration and spite. And so it was a relief to choose, to be chosen. It calmed something in her, but as time went on, she began to wonder why it had all seemed so important.

Mornings were her mother’s favorite time to call, no matter how often, or in how many ways, Anita let her know it was inconvenient. Either Anita had just arrived home after taking Matthew to kindergarten, and the baby had fallen asleep in the car, and it was her one chance to go back to sleep herself. Or else, since Matthew only went to school three mornings a week, she had both of them home and needing one thing or another, a snack or a diaper change, or Matthew attempting to bury his sister in stuffed animals, as he was doing now.

“Stop that,” Anita told him, removing a plush frog from the screaming child’s face. “What are you trying to do, smother her?”

“We’re playing.”

“Well she doesn’t want to play like that. Go watch
Ninjas.
”

“They’re over.” Matthew, sulky now. He never had any fun.

“Well go watch something.” The phone rang. The baby’s face purpled with new, redoubled fury. Anita found the pacifier and tried to get the baby to close her mouth around it. “Go!” she said to Matthew, who was hanging in the doorway to see if he could get into further interesting trouble.

On the third try she got the baby to take the pacifier and dove for the phone just before it went to the answering machine. Her mother didn’t like the answering machine and refused to leave messages. She would either keep calling back or, if Anita really wasn’t there, she might start calling the neighbors, as she’d done on a couple of occasions.

“Hi Mom.”

“Now how did you know it was me? Someday you’re going to answer the phone that way, and it’s going to be somebody else, somebody important, and you’ll be sorry.”

“Nobody important ever calls here.” The baby was quiet, chomping down on the pacifier. Anita walked into the TV room to check on Matthew. At least she could do things while she talked, try to put the house back together.

“Are you all right, honey? You sound upset.”

Her mother always said something solicitous. If Anita ever tried to sound normal, neutral, happy, her mother asked her if she was mad about something. “No, it’s nothing. Marcie was pitching a fit, but she stopped.”

“Mar-cie!” her mother sang through the phone. “Marcie monkey!”

Anita and the baby looked at each other. Anita thought it was a sad, wised-up look. “She must have heard you, Mom. She’s smiling.”

Her mother sighed. “You have to bring them up here. It’s been so long.”

“I will, Mom. Some weekend when we can see Dad too.” It was always easier with her father there. He helped keep the lid on things.

“We could—,” her mother began, but somewhere in the background
a racket started up, a voice without words, high, harsh, changing pitch like a siren, breaking into a sustained sobbing. “I have to go, honey. It’s one of her bad days. Love you.”

“Love you,” Anita said back, but her mother had already hung up.

Anita put Marcie in her crib and wound up the teddy-bear mobile. Tinkly music played as the bears went round and round. She told Matthew that if he got out of his pajamas and put his clothes on, he could have more juice, and that he should take the clothes out of his dresser, not the dirty ones on the closet floor. Then she sat down at the kitchen table with that morning’s
Des Moines Register
spread out in front of her. Her mother had not yet read the paper, or else she would surely have called with something to say about it. Anita lived half an hour away from the town where she’d grown up, and usually this was far enough, but not always.