Pamela Dean (24 page)

Neither of them was at all good at remembering to take the things. Janet ascribed this to the fact that both of them, having meekly taken the first pill after dinner as recommended, spent the entire night in the bathroom, being sick, and walked around hollow-eyed from lack of sleep all next day, refusing to walk in the woods in the most beautiful weather imaginable.

Molly was sick the first three nights and then felt fine; Tina was sick every night for the whole month of October, and refused to stop taking the pills. She also refused to go to the college Health Service, which, given that the doctor in charge had persistently declined even to do pregnancy tests, let alone any gynecological work, was perhaps not completely unreasonable. Tina lost ten pounds and took to having an afternoon nap; Janet and Molly nagged at her and got nowhere. Molly gained ten pounds, all around the waist, and grumblingly offered to trade metabolisms with Tina. Tina just smiled. She was still a nice pink, except that on her thinner face the color looked more hectic than healthy.

Janet finally lay in wait in the lobby for Thomas one late-October evening before dinner, and asked him if sex, however wonderful, could possibly be worth all this. "Do you realize Tina's throwing up every night? It's not good for her."

"
I
didn't make her do this," said Thomas, scowling. "She can stop for all of me. And she has to take the bloody things for a month before we can have sex, wonderful or not—and as you may possibly have noticed, there is no privacy in this damned college anyway."

He stamped up the stairs. It was the first time he had showed his temper since she had met him in the library—even in the face of chronic provocation from Nick. Janet sat down in the lounge, where a mixed group of students was watching the news on television, and wrestled her own temper back where it belonged. She had in fact noticed. Whatever provisions Nick had or had not made against the intrusion of a third party into their proceedings, there had been no occasion on which it was necessary to inquire, except in a purely academic sense.

The problem was not really privacy, it was time. Janet was carrying a normal term's load, three ten-week courses with their accompanying reading and writing. Nick was contemplating a double major in English and Classics, and was accordingly taking an extra course—and it was beginning Latin with Medeous, who was extremely demanding. He also kept thinking of dropping either the English or the Classics, depending on which was giving him more trouble, in favor of a Music major, and was taking piano lessons, as well as singing with a group of people who had not been able to get into the Chamber Music class this term. And he had his own projects: arguing with Robin and Thomas over
The
Revenger's Tragedy
they would produce winter term, setting poetry to music, writing an opera of
Cyrano de Bergerac,
writing a sonnet a day "to keep his hand in." Janet had not written a line of poetry or a word in her journal since she got here; she suspected him of never sleeping.

As far as she could tell, studying at Blackstock was a full-time job, and nourishing a beginning love affair was a job and a half. And yet it would be quite impossible to disentangle oneself. Staring at black-and-white images of the carnage of the war in Viet Nam and listening to the unimpassioned voice of the television announcer recite horrible statistics, Janet found herself thinking of Claudius's words near the end of
Hamlet.
"It is the poisoned cup; it is too late." The audience, for some inexplicable reason, had laughed at the line. Thomas said they always did, people in theaters thought death was funny, probably because they had seen too many movies. Even in the midst of that laughter, Janet had felt cold, clear through, at that line. It seemed to describe not the complex and foolish and only half-believable situation the supposedly canny Claudius had gotten himself into, but the sum of wrong choices and irrevocable actions. Nick was not a wrong choice; but associating with him seemed to have been an irrevocable action. Four years, Janet told herself again. You have four years. There will be lighter terms, Thanksgiving vacation, summer, something.

Was it possible that when people objected to coeducational colleges, it was this sort of problem, and not an impertinent and disgusting desire to police other people's morals, that really moved them? No, probably not. Morals had very little to do with this, not the kind of morals that people who wanted to police other people's were most concerned with, anyway.

Whether this affair was ever consummated or not, it required patience, attention, energy, wit, and generosity.

The source of these requirements banged through the front door of Ericson, whistling

"Sweet Baby James." Janet ran out of the lounge and intercepted him. Since Molly wasn't around to complain, she kissed him. The kiss became complex. Somebody came in the front door, and they let go of each other.

"What's up?" said Nick. "Has something happened that you're lying in wait for me?"

"I was lying in wait for Thomas, actually, but he's in a terrible mood."

"Don't tease him; they just told him he couldn't graduate this year."

"Tina will be delighted. Between bouts of nausea. I'm
not
sure I think much of a method of birth control that mimics pregnancy."

"I've got something better than that," said Nick. "It just came in today." He dug in all the pockets of his shabby brown jacket, finally emerging with a little white box stuck shut with a blob of red wax. "An old herbal remedy."

"Are you sure it works?"

"If it doesn't, I will pay the fee."

"What does
that
mean?"

"You decide."

Janet weighed the box in her hand. "Does it have side effects?"

"My sister said it made her ears itch."

"Does it really work?"

"Word of honor."

All right, thought Janet, let's find out just what that means. "When?" she said.

Nick sighed. "I think it must be after the end of the term. Robin is going home, but I'm not; I'm going to paint Ericson Little Theater for the College, and they're going to let me stay in my own room during vacation."

"Why aren't you going home for Christmas?"

"My family's in England."

"They've got lousy timing. You can have Christmas dinner with us."

Robin came in the front door then, and the three of them went upstairs to collect the other three. They had an engagement to go see Zeffirelli’s
Romeo and Juliet,
this weekend's offering by the college. Janet was afraid Robin would laugh at it, but he was very quiet. He did abuse the music afterwards.

As October disappeared in piles of leaves, Janet felt her classes drift out of sync with her preoccupations. Fencing was all right; but the philosophical problems in classical science became foggier every class, and Anthropology was only a little better. English class had by slow degrees attained the sixteenth century, marched with wary smiles through
Volpone,
gazed with horror and guilty laughter upon
The Duchess of Malfi,
and run aground on the enormous rock of
King Lear.
There was love poetry behind and before them, but
Lear
blocked their path like a broken statue in a narrow pass of the mountains.

Evans had cheerfully explained to them that
Lear
was for mature tastes and they were reading it for his pleasure, not for theirs.

Janet read the loveless squabble of Regan and Goneril for the favors of Edmund, and felt distinctly sick. The main movement of the play seemed to her completely chaotic; her only comfort was that Evans would probably not compare it to
Squirrel Nutkin
or
The Story
of a Fierce Bad Rabbit.

She sat in class the Thursday before Hallowe'en, listening to a discussion of Albany's inability to move quickly and its effect on the play from Act III onward, and contemplated with pleasure the beginning of Fall Term Recess at five o'clock this afternoon. Friday and Saturday were free of classes. She wondered what anybody would be doing for Hallowe'en.

Nobody had so much as mentioned it, though carved pumpkins had appeared in some of

the lounges. Her habit had been to go trick or treating with Danny Chin, who had finally written her a postcard informing her that his Christmas vacation began on December 20th.

Janet thought she would see what Nick and her roommates had in mind.

Nick, asked after class, said, "Lock my door and cower under the bed." Janet poked him and he kissed her and that was the end of the discussion. They went off to Eliot and settled at their corner table with Molly and Robin and Peg. Janet had made sure to get a seat facing the windows. It was a cloudy day. The gray lake was dotted with mats of yellow leaves. Every little bare maple along the stream had a circle of red leaves on the ground beneath it, as if it had gotten undressed and left its clothes on the floor."What is anybody doing about Hallowe'en?" said Janet generally.

Robin said, "Lock my door and cower—"

"Under the bed," said Molly, not patiently. "You can't get under your bed, you dodo, it's packed full of boxes."

"Lots of room under mine," said Nick with his mouth full.

"I thought we could have a party," said Janet to Molly. "Hot cider. Cookies. Pumpkin bread."

"Invite Nora," said Peg. "She's working too hard."

"And Sharon," said Janet. "Maybe she could bring Kevin."

Peg shook her head. "Kevin's family lives in the city; he's going home." Nobody asked the obvious question; Peg smiled at them and added, "They don't get along with Sharon."

"There's a fine recipe for disaster," said Nick. Janet wondered if she should be glad or sorry that his family was in England.

"You know who else we should ask," said Molly. "Those two kids in the triple at the end of the hall—the ones Nora calls the foolish children. Their freaked-out roommate's moved across the hall with Odile and her cronies, and I think they feel kind of lost and abandoned. That was their whole social group, along with Barbara and Jen from Third."

"What are their names?" said Janet. "They never come to floor meetings."

"Neither do you," said Molly.

Peg said, "Rebecca and Susan."

"Could you ask them, then?" said Janet.

"Sure," said Peg. "What time?"

"Afternoon or evening?" said Janet, mostly to Nick.

"We should make sure it's okay with Tina," said Molly.

"True," said Janet guiltily.

The conversation turned to other matters: the obligatory appearance of Schiller at Homecoming, which none of them had witnessed, Homecoming at Blackstock being a thing that "nobody went to," which, as Molly remarked, meant that there were a great many nobodies at Blackstock. They then considered a rumor, proffered by Peg and heatedly denied by Nick and Robin, that Professor Medeous was getting married; and concocted theories of how the Food Service got its broccoli to behave as it did.

When Molly ran off to her biology lab session and Robin went away to wrestle with Aristophanes and Peg departed to commune with Homer, Janet and Nick held hands under the table and talked about
The Duchess of Malfi.
Janet was indignant about it—by Aristotle's standards, which she had first encountered in high school and read again in Professor Soukup's class, it was not a tragedy of any good sort.

Professor Evans had told the class to beware of Aristotle because they weren't ready for him yet, and referred darkly to "students who have had their minds permanently injured by too early an exposure to thought." Janet had scrupulously kept Aristotle out of her paper on
The Duchess of Malfi,
but Evans had evidently discerned some injury in her mind just the same, and scribbled scathing comments all over the margins. The fact that he had then given her a B + had not soothed her in the slightest.

Nick, who had gotten an A and the single remark, "I will suffer a great deal from someone who presents me with original and rational ideas—but tame your semicolons,"

was, Janet thought, much too full of himself. She had presented the play as a failed tragedy; Nick thought it was a black comedy, and kept reciting speeches he thought were funny. He held that the only rebuttal would be the recitation of the same passages in such a way that they were
not
funny, which was perfectly impossible, especially for somebody who had never been trained for the theater and whose main dramatic accomplishment as a child had been the lugubrious recitation of "The Raven" to the accompaniment of her sister on the bongos. Janet explained this to Nick, and had to be content with the minor triumph of making him laugh too much to continue the discussion.

Nick had an afternoon class, and Janet walked him to it and then wandered aimlessly back across the campus. The grass was still green, but that would not last much longer.

Now that most of the leaves were gone, the shapes of the buildings were clearer. Chester Hall really did sneer at you. It was the same red brick with limestone windowsills and limestone toothing stones that comprised Masters and the old Chemistry Hall, not to mention Ericson. But while Masters seemed to peer anxiously out from behind its four white pillars, Chester looked at you with its twelve-paned windows in their lancet arches as if you were a blot on the earth. Janet chose to pass it on its chapel side, and proceeded absently over the brick crazy quilt of the Music and Drama Center's plaza, and so to Ericson.

There were no classes tomorrow, and none Saturday. When Evans's class met again Tuesday morning, it would be to discuss
Paradise Lost.
There was reading to be done for Monday, too, but Janet pulled the red Dover edition of the poem off her shelf and lay down on her bed with it.

She rapidly made the discovery that Milton's notion of an English sentence was as erratic as those held by the authors of her most obtuse anthropology texts.

The infernal Serpent, he it was whose guile,

Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived

The mother of mankind, what time his pride

Had cast him out of Heaven, with all his host