An Uncommon Education (19 page)

“Jesus, Ruth,” Julie frowned. “Please. She doesn’t want to hear all about it.”

“Sure she does,” Ruth said cheerfully, sitting back. “Wait, your jacket is soaked!” She had glanced down and now leaned forward, grabbing my left arm. “What the hell? Is that from the lake?” Her face fell, her lower jaw jutting out.

“Of course it is,” Julie interrupted. “Here, you can’t wear that outside again. It’s going to snow.” She reached back to pull her coat from the back of her chair. “Take mine.”

“No,” Ruth said. “It’s too small.” She pulled her own jacket off and thrust it on my lap. I left mine on and held hers to me, the down warm, too warm by far for the heated room. It gave off the subtle, sweetly unfamiliar scent of Ruth’s soap or shampoo or perfume; I felt like I was holding an exotic cloth, unsure of what to make of it.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”

“You’re wearing that home,” Ruth said. “Now listen.” She sat back again. “So you won’t worry,” she winked. “It’s an annual ritual, much to Abrams’ disappointment.” She waved Julie off, not looking at her. “Have you ever heard of Frederick Wiefern?” she asked, leaning forward.

Julie rolled her eyes. “Of course she hasn’t,” she said to neither of us.

Ruth wouldn’t look at her. “Wiefern,” she began. Julie looked down at her notebook, pretending to work. Ruth was leaning back into her chair again, one elbow on its top rung, the hand suspended in air, “was a German immigrant. Had a dairy farm up near the Canadian border. Anyway, he was an intellectual back in Germany but couldn’t afford to continue his studies out here. Would have been a professor, a great professor, I’m sure.” I settled my hands around my hot chocolate. I felt comfortable, like a child not caring about the story, only caring that it is being read to her.

“Undeniably,” Julie said without looking up.

“Anyway, Wiefern’s theory was,
is
, that the human body evolved into its present form of, shall we say, buoyancy, because”—she rubbed her hands together like a fly before a meal—“now get this—it needed to establish an emotional equilibrium.” Her hands stopped. She was looking directly at me, waiting for something. “Can you guess what that means?” she prompted.

I had a feeling that I didn’t need to say or do much of anything for Ruth to be satisfied. I shook my head. Julie was tapping her pencil on her notebook. Ruth pressed her palms together, as if readying for silent prayer, though her eyes were wide and full of light. “Emotional equilibrium is obvious, but this idea of physical buoyancy is intertwined with emotional buoyancy; the two go hand in hand.” She clasped hers together again, completing her point.

“Wiefern knew that the body and the mind needed padding, both of them,” she continued. “That they worked together and didn’t function at their best unless both,
both
”—she leaned forward, delighted—“had extra reserves.” She sat back. “The whole body needs to be flush, otherwise it struggles, it fights itself and ultimately,” her voice dropped, “ultimately, it saps the mind.”

“In other words”—Julie held the pencil tip she’d been tapping to the page in front of her—“Chris Farley should be the halest man alive.”

Ruth was still looking at me, smiling, waiting for my reaction. “Don’t mind her. She just refuses to get the subtleties of the theory. If a preexisting self-loathing exists, as is the case with our poor Mr. Farley, any theoretical models will be compromised. Also”—she studied Julie amiably—“she’s just bitter because she’s got no reserves. She’s built like her mother.”

“Who was fat, may I say, until after she had kids. Watch out. You could have her genes.” Julie looked weary, unable to resist the argument.

“Maybe.” Ruth had her arms folded over her chest, looking smug, as if I’d stood up and cheered for her theory. “We’re cousins, on the German side. Our mothers are sisters.” She leaned in. “My mother kept her name.”

Julie jumped in. “They hate each other,” she remarked.

Ruth shook her head pleasantly, as she might at a beloved pet. “Anyway”—she reached out and touched her fingers to my wrist, confidential—“I walk out onto the lake every year. It’s a familial celebration. I know I won’t drown; never have. Julie won’t do it because she says it’s crazy, but she’s only afraid because she’s so skinny.” Ruth sat up straight. “I’m the Wiefern model: plump and sharp. I don’t fear the water or the cold. And I haven’t been depressed a day in my life, have I, Jules?”

“Not a day.” Julie was reading her notes.

“Wiefern was our great-grandfather,” Ruth went on. “I’m writing my thesis on him.” She smiled at me warmly. I wondered if she thought we shared something. She had a way of reengaging as she spoke, each time making me feel anew that she was glad to see me.

“Wow,” I said, wondering which professor, which department, which unknown corner of the college she came from, “is this a psych thesis?”

She waved her hand away at me. “Psych doesn’t have enough imagination. Milton Fried,” she announced, “in philosophy, is sponsoring me.” I had heard of Fried. Incisive, adored, near retirement. “Does he know you throw yourself into the lake?”

Julie looked up suddenly, a smile beginning to creep through her exhaustion. Ruth didn’t answer my question. She leaned forward and pulled the top off my cup. “Hot chocolate,” she grinned, setting it back. “Bad day, right? I rest my case.” I was beginning to enjoy the rhythm of being asked questions that needed no answer. Still looking at me in a satisfied way, she said again, “You like Shakespeare? I mean, if Pope weren’t involved?”

I had liked it well enough to throw my best effort into the essay. “I guess,” I tried to look casual, to at least pretend I didn’t care as much as I did that someone was showing such interest in me. “He’s a great teacher. I thought I’d written a good paper.”

“Then come tea.”

“Tea?”

“Oh, it means nothing. Nonsense. We put out tea for new recruits and call it tea-ing. Brilliant, right? It’s one of those ridiculous college verbs. Like we need our own private language. God, the tea-ers are boring this semester.” She looked at me wryly, as though about to make a joke. “They all think it’s a sorority. I’ve never seen so many buttons and pearls in one place. And I doubt one of them has read a play outside of class. How many things do you own that have buttons?” she asked Julie. Julie shrugged.

All of a sudden I remembered how much I’d enjoyed the end of
The Winter’s Tale
, which I’d skipped ahead to read earlier that week, how unexpectedly surreal and hypnotic it was. I thought about how Hermione had been mistaken for a statue before she revealed herself. For some reason I thought of Teddy, too, the sod nest we’d helped repair for the ducks. “I’m not sure I’ll be much more interesting,” I said.

“Oh, you just have the Wellesley blues”—Julie looked up from the paper she’d reentered. “The best of us get them the worst. We’ll cheer you up in no time.”

Ruth nodded. She dropped her voice, her grin a broad echo of her cousin’s slight smile, “We like to think of ourselves as part of the Wellesley underground. I think the college does, too. They leave us pretty much alone.” She leaned in confidentially. “A lot of people leave you alone if you put Shakespeare on the letterhead.”

Fifteen

T
he second tea for that semester was scheduled for the following week. Posters covered with the iconic Shakespeare mask and quill appeared all over campus a few days before: gray and white, imposing but familiar. There was a hint of something else in them too—a sarcastic wit, or subversiveness; or perhaps it was just that such free sarcasm on our otherwise earnest campus was itself subversive.

I fell asleep hard the night before but woke up a few hours later. I opened the window a crack to see if the storm the local meteorologist had threatened us with was picking up, the ambient light outside making it difficult to see. I put my hand out; it was raining, lightly. I suddenly wanted it to be spring even though winter was just starting. I had a lab report due and decided to get out of bed to work on it, but thought better of it once I turned on the small desk lamp and Amy stirred. I put on a jacket and scarf and packed my bag for the library. It was almost midnight and it would be open all night, a strange schedule demanded by the Wellesley constitution. Some wealthy founder had thought modern women should be liberated from everything, including conventions of time. The others had made only one concession to her: the library would never close.

Once downstairs I pushed the heavy door to the dorm open and stepped into the cold. A wind I hadn’t expected hit me, but I wrapped myself tighter in my things and decided to take the long way there. After a while it didn’t feel cold anymore, and the drizzling rain felt good on my face after the overheated dorm. It was not the first walk I’d taken at night. Before I had arrived on campus, I would see the name Wellesley and know, for a brief instant, that it was a place inextricably connected to my sense of who I could become; the intimacy with which I knew and had thought of it creating an association that felt personal. And yet it excited me, too, the name both intimate and unsettling—the essence of a sure-to-be-realized promise. I sometimes liked to walk the grounds when they were virtually deserted to dredge up the old excitement, to reflect on the fact that I was in a place and position that Rose Kennedy, the nearest thing to an American matriarch, had longed for. Sometimes, in the right lighting, the false comfort of achievement still worked for me. The Wellesley grounds are receptive to such wanderings. Its founders knew that a woman aware of her own intelligence will be given to the pathos of it all, the romantic and tragic qualities of being a female thinker.

Wellesley’s gothic architecture is echoed perfectly by its layout: there are dozens of winding passageways just on the outskirts of buildings. Several of these are extensions of the buildings themselves, arched and covered walkways, a few of which have balconies or windows, so that those on foot may take fantastical breathers along their way. On any given day I could have taken one of several paths to the same destination. That night I chose to weave around and through the covered walkway near Founders Hall, the home of most of the humanities departments and Mr. Pope’s office. It was slightly chilling to know it was entirely empty and dark as I walked beside it. As I emerged from the covered path onto the academic quad, I had my head down in anticipation of the rain before I lifted it, startled.

There was someone standing there.

She saw me almost as soon as I saw her. The hood over her head shadowed her face. There was a little light from the buildings but most of the space between them was dark.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I replied, catching my breath.

She nodded, almost as if she’d been expecting someone—not me, necessarily, but my presence didn’t seem to jar her. “It’s hard to find a private spot on this campus,” she said eventually, staring into the middle distance.

“It seems there’s nothing but privacy here, sometimes.” I was surprised that I would admit this to a fellow student, particularly one I didn’t know. She looked at me for a minute, taking me in. She didn’t smile, but her face relaxed. “We must go to different schools. Do I know you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Naomi,” I said. I cleared my throat and tried to sound more confident. “Naomi Feinstein.” She squinted. “Do you play tennis?” “No,” I said quickly before correcting myself. “I used to.” I decided to quit for good earlier that year, telling myself that a surgeon would need to protect her hands.

She looked away again. “We played together once,” she stated matter-of-factly. “At Longwood.” She looked back at me and pulled off her hood so I could see her face. “I’m Jun Oko. Do you remember?” she asked. I saw her face, and then the match, and the storm.

“Oh,” I said.

She smiled a little. “Yeah. Nice to meet you again.” She held out her hand.

I shook it, a little surprised by her formality. “What are you doing out here?” I asked, trying, unsuccessfully, to dispel the awkwardness between us.

She looked me in the eye but didn’t answer. It struck me that she might suspect I was policing her. I remembered how she had waited for her father’s signal that day before getting out of the rain. “What are
you
doing here?” she asked sharply. I thought I saw the hint of a mocking smile, but she was looking straight ahead, not at me.

“I’m on the way to the library,” I said, my tone implying that I had nothing to hide. All at once I wished I hadn’t stopped. Although our match was a distant memory, there was something about her that made me want to irk her, or, at the very least, not offer any concession.

“How studious of you,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. If I gave her an answer, the least she could do was give one in return. “I’m standing here, staring at absolutely nothing,” she announced, articulating every word for emphasis. But then she suddenly covered her face, and just when I thought she was about to cry, she began to laugh, haltingly at first, and then gratefully. Or maybe it was I who was grateful for the chance to laugh, grateful for the near-freezing clean air it forced into my lungs. I had the sense that we had each been still holding the tension of that match on our separate ends for some time, that she knew what it was like to hold tension for too long.

Her laugh was stilted and infectious, as if she were trying to stop herself from brimming over. “I’m sorry,” she managed finally. “But you came through here so quietly, like a ghost. Jesus. You scared the hell out of me.” She sobered up. “I’m working on
Hamlet
,” she explained, shaking her head.

“Are you in it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m Hamlet.” I took that in for a second. We both cracked a smile at the same time.

“I really was just standing out here, staring at nothing,” she offered. “I thought I’d practice my lines, but I got stuck out here. Have you ever noticed how staring at something you thought you knew really well makes it start to change?” She was smiling like she knew I’d understand. “Let’s get out of here. You still need to go to the library?” I shook my head. “Come with me. I’ve got a little errand to do. If it’s still a good night for it.” She looked up at the sky, starless and black with clouds.