I was fourteen: I assume they will one day happen to me, but they would be unthinkable right now. While my mother went from dread that her daughter might get knocked up in college to the explicit appeal Not To Leave It Too Late, my own feelings on the subject have not changed at all. Have not matured at all, Mom would say if I gave her half a chance. Maybe she is right.
“Hey!”
A breathless form materializes in the dusk just as I’m about to step up to my porch.
“Jules! You startled me!”
“Sorry, sorry!” She is quietly panting. “I just wanted to say sorry about the other day. About the soda.”
“That’s okay. No harm done.” I feel sorry for her, but the last thing I want is to encourage her to make me her Agony Aunt. I briefly touch her shoulder to make up for the neutral tone of my voice, and her face clears.
“So we’re okay?”
“Yes, Jules, we’re okay. Don’t worry. Good night!” I leave her standing in the dusk and firmly shut the door behind me.
For the first time since I fanned them out in a corner of the study, I go to squat over the medical textbook illustrations that I will talk about at a conference on Medieval and Early Modern Iconography at Notre Dame University in November.
My subject is drawings included in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works on anatomy; the first verisimilar images of dissected human bodies ever to be made in Western Christian culture. Nearly everyone who first sees them goes “Ewww!” because these are no naïve, symmetrically schematic drawings. These are the walking dead who display the functions of their bodies with a lack of self-consciousness that is both grotesque and graceful: a muscleman who—the better to show off the play of his limbs—has flayed himself and is holding the knife in one hand and his own skin in the other; a skeleton that leans nonchalantly against a pedestal, its ankles crossed and elbows bent to allow the viewer to see its joints. Naked females, depicted in the pastoral or urban settings of classical antiquity, their legs lasciviously spread and their abdominal walls peeled away like negligées, who display their reproductive organs complete with little mannikins huddling in their wombs.
These dissected pregnant ladies—and the web of iconographic codes and biblical symbols in which they are embedded—are my main focus of research at this moment. I have a feeling that Pop Walsh, if I tried to explain my fascination, would laugh me out of town, and Karen would smile politely and count the weeks and days of her own term. We do live in very different worlds, but that does not mean we cannot share a tomato salad and a beer occasionally.
It is still warm, and I go to bed with the window open to the forest’s sounds of silence.
Chapter 8
“DEAD WOMAN WALKING!” Tim cries under his breath as he guides me along the hall into the classroom wing.
I’m too jittery to be distracted by his ribbing. It took me half an hour to get dressed this morning, only to end up with the same clothes I had put on first: a silk-and-cotton A-line skirt in a dark reddish-brown, a floral print blouse with three-quarter sleeves, and—the secret’s in the shoes—red leather strap sandals with heels. In New York, I would have made sure to wear at least one black item of clothing, not because black is the New York uniform but because black exudes authority and makes you look older. But for some reason this morning I felt that black wouldn’t be the right choice for my Ardrossan students. Now I wish I was dressed in the armor of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales.
“Hang on, this is me.” Tim compares the number on the classroom door with the note in his folder. “Good luck! Oh, and Anna? You have to be gentler with our freshpeeps than with the scholarship kids from Brooklyn.”
“Oh, c’mon, Tim! Give me a little credit here.”
Walking into my classroom is like walking into an oven. The room has big south-facing windows that we will be glad of during the winter months but today, the thermometer by the main entrance of the Observatory already showed eighty-one degrees Farenheit when I arrived two hours ago. It is one of Murphy’s laws that central A/C invariably breaks down in the first teaching week of the semester.
Thirty-three young people are lounging in their chairs, some openly curious, whispering with their neighbors as I arrange