My Last Innocent Year(11)
“Yes, Isabel?”
“Do you have to tell my father about this?”
“Your father?”
“I really don’t want him to know…” My voice cracked, and I tried to imagine what I looked like to Dean Hansen, how desperate and sad. I wondered if he’d felt as desperate about anything in his whole life. It was hard to imagine.
He pursed his lips. “I don’t see why he needs to know about this. You just be sure to take care of yourself. Go and see Dr. Cushman. Or try the ski mountain! Nothing like a day on the slopes to cure what ails you.”
“I will. I promise.” At that point, I would have promised him anything.
“Stay warm out there,” he said as I pulled on my coat. “These are the days when it feels like spring will never come.”
I stumbled out of his office and into the bright winter morning. It had snowed overnight, a thick layer that covered everything, blotting out every imperfection. I wished it could do the same for me. I pictured Debra walking out of this same meeting, the one she’d assured me was no big deal. Of course she thought it was no big deal. Nothing was a big deal to Debra, who barreled through life with little thought to how her actions affected other people. Everything landed more heavily on me.
It was nearly ten. I’d have to hurry to not be late for Professor Maxwell’s class, or what used to be her class, but my heart was beating so fast I had to stop and sit down on the nearest bench. It was one of those memorial benches, the kind you saw around campus dedicated to the memory of someone who had died—in this case, according to the plaque, Walter “Binky” Ballard, Class of 1979. Abe and I hadn’t done anything to commemorate my mother, gone now almost four years. She’d been cremated, even though Jews didn’t believe in cremation, and her ashes were still in the box they’d come in, which was stashed in the back of Abe’s closet last I’d checked. “We look forward, not back,” Abe said, and so that is what we did. But sometimes the feeling backed up on me, the way it did now. Would I feel better, I wondered, if my mother had a bench like Binky Ballard?
After a few minutes, I stood up and started walking to class. I stopped when I heard someone yell, “Look out!”
Joanna Maxwell was crouched down on the snow a few feet in front of me. She had her arm around a small girl. “I’m sorry I yelled,” she said. “I didn’t want you to step in it.” She pointed at a puddle of vomit by my feet.
“Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “Are you okay?”
The little girl looked up at me, then back at her boots. This was Igraine, Joanna Maxwell and Tom Fisher’s daughter. She shared her name with the mother of King Arthur, and it seemed a heavy mantle for such a little person. Igraine was around four—I didn’t know anything about children, but remembered she’d been a baby when I first came to Wilder. Tiny and delicate like her mother, Igraine’s coloring was all Tom: fair skin, green eyes, strawberry-blond hair. Igraine was quiet and serious. She wasn’t one of those kids who worked for your attention or approval, and I admired that about her.
“You’re okay, aren’t you darling?” Joanna said, wiping her daughter’s face with a tissue. “You just drank your hot chocolate too fast.”
Joanna had on a long down coat that looked like a sleeping bag and a thick plaid scarf. Her worn tennis shoes were wet with snow, her gray eyes framed with eyelashes so pale they were almost invisible. My Aunt Fanny had eyelashes like that, which she coated with thick layers of mascara that always ran down her face. “What a shame to be fair like Fanny,” my mother used to say, as if she had an incurable disease.
“Professor Maxwell,” I said as she fumbled in her bag. “I wanted to tell you, I reread Birdbrain over break. I think I’ve read it half a dozen times now.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said. “That’s so kind.”
“I read somewhere you’d thought about telling the story again, from the grandmother’s point of view? Is that true?”
Igraine was tugging on her mother’s sleeve. “I’m looking for it, sweetheart. Oh, people used to ask me that and I think I said that once, to be nice. I did consider it, but not anymore. Other stories got in the way. Ah, here it is!” She held up a pacifier triumphantly, then cleaned it with her own mouth before handing it to Igraine. The child relaxed instantly, her eyes drooping as she leaned against her mother.
“Oh well,” I said. “Then I guess it’s perfect the way it is.” Joanna rested her knees on the ground and loosened her scarf. When she did, I saw a dark bruise at the base of her neck.
The clock on the bell tower began its ten o’clock descant.
“I have to go,” I said. “Or I’ll be late for class. I’m so sorry you won’t be teaching this semester.”
“Yes,” she said, and I thought I heard a catch in her voice. “Have a lovely day,” she called after me, and I promised her I would.
4
I’D wanted to get to class early, but my meeting with Dean Hansen and the encounter with Professor Maxwell had slowed me down so I ran in just as the professor started taking attendance. I slid into an empty seat at the far end of the seminar table, pulled out a spiral notebook, and wrote my name and the date at the top: “Isabel Rosen. January 7, 1998.” It was the same way I’d been heading papers since the first grade. It occurred to me briefly that this might be the last first day of school I’d ever have.