The Professor and Other Writings (26 page)

As I climbed into the first of many buses later that day, I confronted a ruddy, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked older man, happily perched, like a bouncy six-year-old, on the plastic banquette seat behind the driver. As soon as I'd paid my fare and taken the seat across from him, he gave me an enchanting smile and held out his arms in greeting. He wore a pair of ancient high-top sneakers and despite the heat, a long, flowing muffler. These sartorial accoutrements gave him a certain resemblance to the eccentric tapir-like protagonist of Edward Gorey's
The Doubtful Guest
—a mysterious furry creature who arrives inexplicably at one's front door, politely takes a seat on the living room sofa, and then, without ever saying a word, proceeds to stay on forever.

With the swift unerring friendliness of the truly mad, the smiling man got right to the point:
would I be his
PEN PAL? I must have appeared startled because he suddenly looked mournful and frightened
and said being pen pals would actually be
wonderful
: his name was Dick, after all. I was even more disconcerted by this last statement and still wondering what to say when he broke into an excited and chummy gabble.
What's your name/who are you/where are you going?
He was feeling so so happy, he squeaked:
You remind me so much of my daughter!
He had a poem by Edgar Guest he wanted me to read, he exclaimed, and here he actually started to pull a piece of grubby paper from his pocket. By this time, however, I had already lurched off down the aisle and found another seat as far from him as possible. I watched him warily for several blocks. He got off soon enough, though not without a last wistful look in my direction. Yes, disbelieving readers: Dick
is
my father's name. (
Oh, THAT explains everything!
) Oh, shut up.

To judge by the diary entries I kept those first months I went a bit cuckoo myself. I wrote in my journal, indeed, with the enthusiasm of a Victorian onanist—usually no fewer than five or six times a day. My solitariness—in the new place, and more broadly, in the world—seemed absolute and intractable, the sort of thing one can't shake even when one somehow
does
, miraculously enough, get to know a few people. It's true that on one level I was functioning more or less adequately: I found an apartment (a somewhat dilapidated one) in an ugly yellow brick building near the campus. And though the term had yet to start, I met some of my fellow graduate students in the English department and recorded my impressions of them. (Rather censoriously, I'm afraid, in a sort of warmed-over Mitford-Sister idiom: “
Last night I attended the grad student beer bust, and it was quite dreadful. Full of young men with beards, older sullen professors. Revolting scenes
.”)

One piece of good fortune (though not one I would really be able to cash in on for a while): my first week in the new place, I met a young woman of my own age—now my oldest and truest friend. (Elsbet's coming out for the B & T Wedding Party later this month.) We met by a fluke. A few days after my arrival the couple across the hall in
my building invited me to the movies with them and their friends. Elsbet was there—the just-tagging-along roommate of one of the friends. I gave her a splashy journal write-up right away: “
Elsbet: large humorous person in a leaf-green suede coat, whom I met last night. Takes voice lessons and sings opera and Tammy Wynette songs
.
From Eau Claire, wherever that is, and about to start an M.F.A. in Sculpture at the University
.” She was bosomy, robust, comically Norwegian American, and oddly determined to befriend me. I was shy and a bit nonplussed but I liked her at once.

And to the extent that anyone could that autumn, Elsbet managed to lift my spirits in the midst of my disorientation. I reveled (as did she) in her broad Wisconsin accent; she was a gifted raconteuse. I heard all about her crazy old Norwegian aunties and what growing up in Eau Claire was like. So many Bengts, Eriks, Sigrids, and Ingrids: it was like an Old Norse saga. She taught me how to say “you bag of shit” in Norwegian:
Du Drittseck
. Everyone in her family was cultivated, musical, and high achieving; Elsbet, the decidedly non-academic baby. She'd fixed on an art degree, she told me, in part to distinguish herself from her annoyingly talented older siblings. She enjoyed music too, though, and one weekend we drove out of town to see a bearded Garrison Keillor, then still in his twenties and a local radio announcer, do his new live show,
A Prairie Home Companion.
The Red Clay Ramblers were his guests, I think—plus some primitive-looking Viking types (from Tröndheim?) who played Hardanger fiddle. Elsbet kindly explained all the local jokes to me—Powdermilk Biscuits, Norwegian bachelor-farmers, the Chatterbox Café, and all the rest of it. It was corny and fun, but also, like the rather alarming Snow Plow Emergency signs on every street, somewhat alienating to a San Diego girl.
A Prairie Homeless Companion
might have been more appropriate.

And there were limits to what even Elsbet could do. (That our own relationship would not be a romantic one was somehow clear
from the start.) You would not have guessed it from her unflappable demeanor, nor indeed the immense good humor, but the very month I met her she had been dumped—somewhat summarily—by her college girlfriend, a tall and gloomy cellist named Amelia. Amelia—vegan and woodswoman—was earnest, judgmental, and reeked of garlic. She was about to decamp for Cremona to learn violin making in the celebrated Guarneri workshop. I met her a couple of times and thought Elsbet well rid of her. (Amelia's notion of bacchanalian excess: to light a candle, brew a mug of chamomile tea, and eat a single square of organic dark chocolate very slowly.) But she'd undoubtedly left grief in her wake—Elsbet seemed pained and put off by Sapphic romance. One result was that when the chaos with the Professor began, I was hesitant to tell Elsbet about it for some time, partly out of a sense of delicacy, shame, embarrassment.

Looking back at my journal entries from those first months I am struck above all by their tone: dismal, tedious, curiously deadened. So Terry-versus-the-Conqueror-Worm. At first it was simply the shock of a drastically new place—one so stark and flat, as I noted for posterity, “you can see everything in a straight line from wherever you are standing”—all the way out to the “pale silver water towers and grain elevators.” I missed the blue promise of the Pacific Ocean somewhere over the next hill. (I missed hills, period.) Not to say my sense of geography was any less vague than it had been: Elsbet went away to Chicago one fall weekend and I realized that I didn't know in what direction it lay. (Though the city's magnificent skyscrapers and adjoining natural bathtub, Lake Michigan, would later provide a dramatic backdrop for my checkered romance with the Blakester, I never visited the place until the mid-1990s.) I felt islanded. Meanwhile the late summer heat bore down and my apartment became dank, close, and oppressive.
Wizard of Oz
–style thunderclaps startled me on muggy afternoons; and the resulting cloudbursts, while fierce and cooling, never lasted long enough. Everybody had warned me
my new home would be cold; no one had told me it would also be unbearably hot. The Midwestern mosquitoes were another novelty. They viewed me with undisguised glee and took to feasting indoors and out on my pale, easily irritated, all too Anglo-Saxon flesh. Sometimes they came in pairs or trios: well-padded mosquito-matrons lunching at the Four Seasons.

I tried to keep a lifeline going to Karen and the mist-shrouded Pacific Northwest with letters and phone calls, but these on the whole failed to satisfy. The phone calls were expensive, and besides that, Karen, now in her own Ph.D. program in Seattle, had already begun to morph into someone about whom I knew less and less. She seemed to be dating an mysterious unnamed man; I had a creepy suspicion it was my friend Davy—he of Nijinsky and the bird feet.
Arghh!!!
The Invert's Lot Is Not a Happy One. (I had introduced them.) And even at a distance Karen remained dry and intransigent in her refusal to mother. I see from one journal entry—characteristically maudlin—that I asked her over the phone if she “loved me” and her Wittgensteinian reply was
I love this salami I'm eating.
Yes, true enough—sometimes she added a brief, mollifying comment or two, and I, in my fallen-angel exile, made mopey attempts to cultivate a more mature philosophical outlook:

Yet in the only sense that mattered to me, she had vanished forever. That I might have some misery-free future in store struck me as highly unlikely, and her willingness to imagine one for me as a hollow (and hardly palliative) fare-thee-well.

Nor, needless to say, could my real mother bolster me across the miles. We talked every week or so but she and I were entering a lengthy period during which we would see one another for perhaps two or three days every
other
year. (I saw my father even less often.) My teenaged stepbrother Jeff had begun his stupefying spiral into chaos and brutality, and Dee Dee, one of my stepsisters, barely out of high school, had become seriously addicted to coke and pills. The prissy aesthete in me shuddered even to hear about these step-relations—so tacky, macabre, and fantastical their doings. Nor would the problems end anytime soon. Later, after moving to Wyoming, Dee Dee would have three babies in quick succession—all, according to my mother, born crack-addicted. Her boyfriend, Frankie, weedy and feckless, was a supermarket bag boy, and once after Dee Dee kicked him out, tried to set their mobile home on fire with kerosene and old rags. (She and the kids were asleep inside.) Luckily this homicidal scheme came to naught: Dee Dee woke up, and she and Frankie got back together soon after. Not long ago, my mother told me Frankie had died fairly horribly. While driving around drunk—a quaint Wyoming custom—he had careened into the back of a parked big rig. As in a sick John Waters sight gag, his head was found some distance from the wreck.

Whenever I spoke to my mother, she and Turk were at war, usually about his kids. From my distant and secretive perch I would urge her to divorce him. She would cry over the phone in the heartrending way I remembered from my early childhood. Her health was poor, she would say; she didn't know how she would ever support herself; she was afraid to leave. So on it all went. Even after Turk stopped drinking in the late seventies (cold turkey, so as to feel less of a bad example to Jeff), the doom-laden atmosphere never lifted. He abruptly lost whatever minimal relief and
joie de vivre
the booze had once granted him.

Granted, I dreamed about Mavis fairly often—zany, running-amok dreams, filled with Daliesque, sometimes alarming details:

Bing Crosby? Maoris? Denny's?
Alors
? Thirty years on I have no memory of this dream or what—don't ask—it might have betokened.

I counted on the start of the new school year to stabilize me and to some extent it did. However confused I might feel inside, I knew that I could still study—that I Was Now Getting My Ph.D. Homework might be burdensome, but it was a familiar, even cherishable, yoke. I couldn't wait to
have some
, in fact, even if it turned out to be harder than anything I'd faced before. In a neurotic frenzy of overpreparation, I had already bought all the books for my upcoming courses (a Chaucer survey, An Introduction to Irish Literature, and Literary Research Techniques) a good month ahead of the first week of classes. When that week finally arrived I'd ploughed through huge great wodges of the stuff—a cultural history of medieval England, Wellek's
Theory of Literature
, the complete essays of W. K. (“Mr. Intentional Fallacy”) Wimsatt, the entire
Táin Bó Cúailnge
in Thomas Kinsella's translation, and enough Lady Gregory poems to last several lifetimes. I was already plotting out possible seminar papers. Thus the Crazed Good Student in me revved up to warp speed: she whose deepest, maddest wish was to astound her teachers with her
unprecedented brilliance (and thus win their love) and stun fellow students into a state of admiring, if not joyful, subordination. Why I thought trouncing my classmates in every academic task set before us would prompt affection in them for me is beyond me. (
True or False? The delusion that doing well in school will win me love has disfigured my life. Discuss in 5–7 pages
.
)
Yet throughout my graduate career I made a habit of writing at least one of my “final” research papers the very first week of the quarter, and then announced the feat to all and sundry. I was ferocious—and to my contemporaries no doubt a particular horror.

Which is not to say I found much pleasure in these torrid bouts of cerebration. On the contrary, once classes began I became a quivering ball of school-related anxieties. I worked hours at a stretch; I fretted; I found it difficult to sleep. Perhaps from sitting at my desk so much, I developed, humiliatingly, a painful rectal fissure. (That Auden suffered from the same affliction has always been of curious comfort.) True, as the new term unfolded, I managed to learn my way around, made my first foray to the library, and got to know several of my fellow grad students, if only to say “Hi” to. Yet compared with what I had been used to at my tiny undergraduate college, my courses were huge and impersonal. The campus itself was vast, gray, and anonymous, the trees increasingly bare, and the blank looming presence of the prairies all around hardly a visual or imaginative solace. How I would make myself known to my lofty-seeming professors was unclear to me, and by the time the piles of dead leaves began to disintegrate, a subtle polar nip made itself felt in the air, and the first tentative snowflakes drifted down, my days had become clouded with self-doubt.