age was supposed to flatter her; I’m surprised that she is almost sixteen. Mental note: mustn’t let her air of an orphaned street-urchin fool me.
“Do you mean the purity rings, or the blowjobs, or the hypocrisy?” I grin. “I’m sure there’s hypocrisy everywhere. But in a big city in the Northeast it’s less likely to be evangelical.”
She seems delighted with me for calling a spade a spade, and her rigid posture relaxes a little.
“I still don’t understand why you wanted to leave New York City. Why would anyone?”
There are a few things I could say in answer to this question, but since she clearly doesn’t know what she is talking about, I let it go.
“Well, I’m guessing that you can’t wait to leave home, either, right? So what’s not to understand?” I give her a meaningful look that has more to do with my mother and Irene than with this belligerent teenager.
“You ran away from home?” Her skin is like creamy caramel, smooth and flawless.
“I think so. But I call it ‘building a career.’ Sounds so much better, doesn’t it?”
The corners of her mouth twitch, but for some reason she is reluctant to laugh with me.
“Well, I won’t go to college.”
“Mmm. Why not?”
“I’m not exactly an A student.”
“You don’t have to be an A student to go to college.”
More sneering. “To get into the Folly?”
“Yeah, okay, to get into Ardrossan you need good grades. But Ardrossan is only one kind of college, and not necessarily the best one, depending on what you want to do with your life.”
“You’re a doctor.” She changes the subject from herself to me.
“Not a medical doctor.”
“Of…English?” She reproduces what she must have picked up at home, complete with doubtful frown.
“English literature is my subject, but I’m a Doctor of Philosophy, really. ‘Philosophy’ is Greek, it means ‘love of wisdom.’ And wisdom is preserved in books, because books live longer than people.”
She watches me closely during this little lecture.
“But you’re…pretty.” She can blush, too, and again she looks younger than she claims to be.
“Thanks. But you don’t actually have to be homely to like studying. That’s what people say who mistrust books and studying. It’s a slur, nothing more. Besides, if you—hang on, that’s my phone. I gotta take that, it may be the college.”
It is the college. They are looking forward to seeing me again, and one little office is waiting to have a nameplate attached to it that reads Anna Lieberman. Or, better still, Straunger, thou art now enteringe the realme of Anna Lieberman, she who hath prevailed! Taking possession of my new home and being lionized by the Cinderella of Calderbrook Farm are amusing pastimes, but they pall next to the unprecedented privilege that awaits me at college. Yup, after years of sharing tiny windowless holes with half a dozen other teaching assistants or adjuncts, having my own office is definitely a big deal to me.
“Jules, I’m sorry, I have to run in and see my—”
But the bench is empty. So is the bottle of cola. It is lying, empty, on the steps up to my porch, in a bubbling pool of sticky brown fluid.
Oh, for God’s sake!
I pour a kettleful of hot water down the steps of the porch, take a cold shower to clear my head, scrub my hands and fingernails, put on both my best summer college dress and my best behavior, and drive in to meet Elizabeth Mayfield, Professor of Renaissance Literature and parting Chair of English. According to the meter in my car it is only three miles from the farm to the edge of the campus, three and a half to the English department, and I am toying with the idea of adding a bicycle to the list of my new acquisitions. This is absurdly like a second date, or like finding yourself engaged to be married to someone you’ve only met once. We met, fancied each other, and made a commitment for a six-year try-out period. I’m the pretty young fortune-seeker; the college is the rich old guy setting up a detailed pre-nup to make sure it is I who will end up poor and homeless, if our relationship goes down the drain.
Chapter 3
THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT IS HOUSED in the old Observatory, a huge red-and-black building dominated by an octagonal tower with a decrepit-looking dome. The observatory for which the building was named was housed up there, but nobody goes up there now, I was informed on my campus tour. The tower contains the elevator and,