Admission (45 page)

He smiled. “Like hungry grass. In Ireland. You know?”

Portia didn’t know.

“Wherever someone died in the Irish famine, if you walk over that spot, over the earth where they died, you feel weakness
and hunger. Or so say the bards.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “Like that. I would be walking across the Green on my way to class, or talking with friends. Or even later,
when I was supposedly a grown-up, professional woman, on my way to the Hanover Inn to talk to an alumni group, or one of our
Ivy League conferences. I’d regress, totally, to that moment.” She laughed. “Remember the final scene of
Carrie
? When the hand shoots out of the earth and tries to pull her down? That was me. Minus the Amy Irving curls, alas.”

“And the gore, I hope.” He cut the last egg roll and placed half democratically on her plate.

“Oh, there was gore,” she said, sounding cryptic. “Lots and lots of gore. But not in the beginning. In the beginning it was…”
She faltered. She shouldn’t be able to remember how it was, so far back, through the bitter fallout and the long years with
Mark, not to mention the more recent history and reverberating presence of John Halsey. Pinned to earth by the long arm of
the first man she had loved, so long ago, and never able to quite get upright, let alone truly walk away. It was pathetic,
she knew, but it would be more pathetic if she had not made such a facsimile of continuing her life. She sometimes tested
herself by conjuring Tom—on her airplane, in her restaurant, sauntering into an information session in Clio Hall with Ivy
or Courtney or Thomas-known-as-Trey. He would be frowning at her as he tried to place her features or, worse, skim past her,
completely blank. And she would always be shocked and speechless, her pulse rattling and her face shamefully wet. She was
never ready for him, never once. She would never be ready.

“Hearts and flowers?” John said after a while. “Every girl’s dream?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Except I wasn’t supposed to be a girl. I was supposed to be a warrior. I wasn’t at Dartmouth to fall in
love or find a husband or any of that stuff. I wasn’t there to party. I wasn’t there to get good grades so I could go to law
school. I was supposed to be building a postfeminist utopia on the Hanover Plain, where evolved women and men could create
their highest selves in fruitful, nonsexist communion.”

“Oh, wow.” He laughed. “I am completely lost.”

“My mother didn’t want me to go to Dartmouth. She thought the college was a lost cause, and she hadn’t raised me in the highest
principles of gender-blind self-actualization to go off to some retro school where the women were fraternity playthings and
potential future wives.”

“But…” John frowned. “Dartmouth was full of amazing women.”

“Which is exactly what I told her. I told her how wrong she was. And even if the men really were back in the dark ages, I
told her that preaching to the choir was a waste of my talents. Like Simone at Oberlin or Antioch. What was I supposed to
do on a campus where everyone already
had
a Rosie the Riveter poster and Cris Williamson in the tape deck?”

“Who?” said John.

“My point,” she said, “exactly.”

She got up and went to the fridge. “I think I will have that beer,” she said. “If you truly don’t mind.”

“I truly don’t,” he said amiably.

She found the bottle and opened it, then sat down again.

“My mom… ,” Portia began. “Well, here’s the thing. My mother wasn’t a mom in the June Cleaver mold. That was fine. She raised
me alone, for one thing, and that was also fine. But I wasn’t just her child, I was her project. There was a point to me,
do you see? I was supposed to make her make sense.”

John was trying hard to follow. Portia saw that he couldn’t quite. “You mean, she lived through your accomplishments? That’s
far from unusual.”

“Oh, I know. In my work? Absolutely, I see that all the time. But in the case of my mother, it wasn’t just that I made up
for her having no traditional work. I was the work. I was what happened when you never allowed one speck of sexism or racism
or homophobia into the presence of your precious child. I was supposed to be this brave new female, right? I was never supposed
to know that there were people who thought I couldn’t be president or cure cancer or climb Mount Everest on my hands.”

“This is sounding like a Skinner box!” John said. “What did she do, raise you in a cave?”

Portia nodded. “More or less. She raised me in Northampton, Massachusetts. The Pioneer Valley. They call it ‘the Happy Valley.’
Remember
Heather Has Two Mommies
? We
all
had two mommies, or we had one mommy and a turkey baster. Heterosexual couples were few and far between in Northampton.
Married
heterosexual couples were almost unheard of. America was the control. We were the experiment. You see?”

He shrugged.

“And the experiment was not supposed to culminate in Thomas Wheelock Standley, the umpteenth male in his family to attend
Dartmouth, captain of the rugby team, president of his fraternity, future attorney, and, incidentally,
Mayflower
descendant.”

“Really?” said John. “I never knew that.”

“Well, you didn’t date him.” She laughed. “Or you would have. It was quite the aphrodisiac for those potential future wives.
And, for certain other reasons, for me.”

“Okay,
now
I get it,” said John. “This isn’t about principles. This is about plain old rebellion. You brought home your mother’s version
of a Hell’s Angel.”

“He was
dying
to meet my mother. He was convinced she was this big, butch, man-hating dyke. I told him she wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?” said John. “Big? Butch? Man hating?”

“A dyke. She was actually a failed lesbian, and that was really hard for her to accept. Of course, the women my mother tried
to be with knew right away, but she absolutely believed she could will herself into homosexuality. Enough tofu, enough Meg
Christian.”

“Meg—?” John said, looking addled.

“Exactly.” Portia drained the last of her beer. “I hope I don’t seem ungrateful. Do I seem ungrateful?”

He frowned. “Why? Just because she gave you life? Scrimped and saved? Put aside her own dreams to help you achieve your own?”

“No, that would be Stella Dallas.” Portia laughed. “Susannah Nathan was no Stella Dallas.” She looked down at her plate. It
was wiped clean. How had that happened? “Would you like some coffee? I definitely have some. I don’t know about milk.”

“Coffee would be nice,” he said genially.

She cleared their plates and braved the fridge again to find the coffee, which she finally discovered in the freezer. There
was some long abandoned vanilla ice cream, which she likewise removed to use in place of milk, necessity being the mother
of invention. She felt, vaguely, good, suspiciously light, which was itself odd, given that she had just put away her most
substantial meal in weeks. It might be the beer, of course, or the residual light-headedness from that transformative bath.
It might be John.

With the coffee descending into its carafe, she led him to the living room and sat on the too deep couch, awkwardly folding
her legs alongside her on the cushion. He sat, too. He was taller, and he did not seem to share her difficulty. He looked,
actually, comfortable, with his arm along the back of the sofa, his hip disappearing into one of the cushions. The house was
warm now, and though the disarray remained in the room, it also felt very nearly peaceful. She did not know what would happen
or what it meant, or what she wanted it to mean. She did not know what he wanted from her, at least in the long term, or if
there even was a long term. Portia had reached her present age with a list of sexual partners so abbreviated, it bordered
on humiliating. Another counselor at soccer camp, the summer before college. Tom, who’d made off with some valuable thing
she’d never been able to replace. Mark, her life partner, supposedly. And John. These men had nothing in common. They were
not uniformly intelligent, attractive, even nice. They had not loved her. Or they had not loved her enough. From these few
she had not gained the tools to understand casual sex and was ill versed in its attendant lore. And as a result, she couldn’t
really glean the meaning of what had happened in Keene or what might be happening now.

“What are you thinking?” said John.

“I believe that’s supposed to be the woman’s line,” Portia said, smiling.

“And I thought we were beyond all that in the gender-blind postfeminist utopia. So what are you thinking?”

She shrugged. She had no intention of letting him know what she was thinking. “Nothing.”

He shook his head. “You are a woman who’s never thought nothing in her entire life.”

And indeed, she thought about this and decided it was probably true, which gave her no pleasure.

“All right. I was thinking… I’m not really sure where we’re going with this.”

To John’s credit, he did not pretend to be confused.

“Where would you like it to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that: I really don’t know? Or: I do, actually, know, but I don’t want to tell you?”

“I really don’t know. I’m glad you’re here. I know that.”

He nodded. “I want to be here. Actually, I want to be over there.” He nodded at her end of the sofa.

She reached for him. His hair was soft. His mouth, on her skin, also soft. The couch, it turned out, was the perfect size
after all.

When I was a child, I was given a gift of Legos. I don’t remember ever playing with another toy. Over the years, I built buildings
of Legos, and ships, and bridges. Then I started building robots, and helicopters that flew. When they didn’t fly very well,
I would pull them apart and try to figure out what was going wrong. That was actually my favorite part. By this time, my parents
knew to lock up all the mechanical devices in the house, because I had a strange habit of taking them apart, too. I was in
high school before I figured out that there was a name to describe the sort of thing I was so interested in doing: engineer.
When I first heard that word, I thought: that is the most interesting word in the English language. And I thought: that’s
what I’m going to be.

T
he scar was still there, just where she had left it. It gave off an air of profound imprecision, haste, and severe pain. It
had a metallic taste, too, and though this might have been her imagination, a faint but identifiable smell: yeast and seawater.

“Appendectomy,” he told her, his hand on her shoulder.

“It can’t be,” she said, looking up at him. “Appendectomy scars don’t look anything like this.”

“Ah,” he said sardonically. “I meant appendectomy, Ugandan style.”

“Jesus.”

“It could have been worse. I could have died.”

“John,” she said, laying her cheek against it.

“It was my own fault. I should have gone to the hospital as soon as I started feeling bad, but I honestly didn’t think it
was anything unusual. My gut was full of exotic flora the whole time I was in Africa. I was always getting intestinal things.
So of course when I finally did drag myself into the emergency room, I played doctor and told them what was wrong with me,
and they just sat me in the corner with a bucket and let me get on with it. I was pretty checked out by then. Luckily, one
of the nurses noticed the way I was holding my right side. When I woke up, I was minus an appendix. And all I got was this
lousy scar. It’s quite the turn-on, isn’t it?”

“No,” she said honestly. “But it isn’t a turn-off.”

“You’re just being nice,” he said.

“I’m not that nice.” She lifted her head and looked at it carefully. The scar was not only long, it was ridged and clumsily
made, asymmetrical in both width and depth, as if someone had gouged his flesh with a primitive tool and slipped in the process.
She lay curled against him, one hand beneath his shoulder, the other stroking that ragged scar.

After a while, he said, “You didn’t say anything about your father. Before.”

“Mm-hmm,” she agreed, closing her eyes.

“So… was he a turkey baster?”

Despite herself, she laughed, fluttering the hair on his chest. “No. Not at all.”

“So your parents were together.”

“No. I mean yes. But no. You and I have already been together longer than my father and mother were. Not,” she said quickly,
“that you and I are together.”

“Are we not?” he said.

“I meant, in the physical sense. Together. As in, we are undoubtedly together right now.”

“We are.” He smiled. “Undoubtedly. Right now.”

With that understood, she stopped, hoping he wouldn’t pursue it.

“Then… ,” John said a moment later, “this was a one night sort of thing.”

“Oh, not a whole night. Not a night at all, from what I’ve been told. And I was actually told everything there was to tell.
My mother believed in being excruciatingly open about the whole thing. Lots of inappropriate details. Especially for an eight-year-old.”