“That your’n?” He points his thumb at my battered ol’ Subaru.
I shrug. “Sorry that I’m not driving my VW Beetle Cabrio today. Or some other fancy European car—you know, a Peugeot or an Audi—like all the other snooty Yankee women.”
The verbal slap does not even make him flinch.
“No, ma’am,” he says slowly and scrapes something off the hood with his fingernail. “I was hoping you came in a Mini Cooper.”
At home in Queens, my report about house-hunting in Virginia produces mixed reactions.
Mom and Nathan stare at me as if I had announced I was going to live under a bridge. Dad gives an incredulous little snort, but Jessica, Nat’s wife, beams at me.
“I love that! A cottage! Cottage, or cabin? Is it in the mountains, this place?”
“No, not quite. Shaftsboro is sort of halfway between the coast and the mountains. But it’s on the river. The college, that is. Not the farm.”
“Like Brandeis,” Mom informs nobody in particular.
I shouldn’t have told my mother that I withdrew from the shortlist for a job that would have been half as far away as Ardrossan.
“What do they farm?” Nat wants to know. “Tobacco? Pigs? Chickens? I thought you were a vegetarian!”
“No, not like Brandeis. It’s directly on the river. There’s a sort of…promenade, esplanade, a riverside walk, and the campus is right next to it. It’s beautiful. Come and visit!”
“So you fork out eight hundred bucks a month to share a cramped little apartment in Manhattan because the ’burbs make you heave,” Nathan scoffs, “but move away four hundred miles, and the suburbs are, like, the green belt of heaven?”
“Listen, bub, I’m not moving to the suburbs, I’m moving into the country, and the farmer grows tomatoes and all sorts of berries. Totally vegetarian.”
I know why Nat is giving me a hard time, though. With me out of reach, Mom will turn her maternal searchlight onto Nat and his family, and he hates that.
“Six months, and you’ll be a Bible-thumping Republican,” he predicts with brotherly brutality.
“Have you been talking to Irene, or what? Anyway, on the farm I’ll have lots of space, a forest to walk in, and peace and quiet to do my writing. And that’s all I want, Mom.”
My mother turns to the lunchbox she is packing for me and does that thing where she raises her eyebrows and purses her lips. An allegory of doubt, with a bit of don’t-say-I-didn’t-tell-you-so-when-this-goes-wrong thrown in.
“You may not like living on your own,” she tells my sandwich. “You think you will, because Sheena has been getting on your nerves, but you may find you don’t actually like it.”
“Only one way to find out.” I shrug.
“I’m just worried you will turn into a recluse if you live at the back of beyond all alone in a cabin!”
“Mom, what you’re really worried about is that I might find that I do like living at the back of beyond all alone in a cabin.”
“You should be worried, too. How will you ever find a man down there?”
“Not my problem right now. I want a job, not a man.”
“I don’t see why you can’t have both!”
“I’m a one-trick pony, Mom. One trick is all this horse can do.”
Chapter 2
MY FIRST TWO WEEKS IN THE SOUTH are the first holiday I have had in three years, and I am determined not to open a book to do with teaching or research, nor to write anything at all except a few emails. Instead, and to my deep satisfaction, I have acquired new kitchenware, a faux-suede three-seater sofa and an armchair for my living-room, a rocking chair for my porch (because I want to do this in style), and six wooden bookcases in a chestnut finish. I have been scrubbing, wiping, dusting, unpacking, and sorting, going to work on my new nest.
Here’s a house-warming resolution: I will lug books and paper into my nest but no new man. Men leave me in a mess. The kitchen windows and the living-room windows change from grubby to invisible while I revel in the determination that I will not allow anything or anyone to distract my attention from the project ahead, and that is to press on toward my first tenure review in three years’ time. “Publish or perish!” is the war cry. I intend to publish.
I get a soda from the fridge, sit down in the shade of the porch, and watch the harvest activities on the farm while behind me Bruce Springsteen is singing of the simple life