Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Please,” Shelly said.

Josie yanked her arm away, looked around, exasperated, and, under her breath, said, “What do you want?”

“I have to talk to you.”

“You’re not supposed to harass me.”

“I’m not harassing you. Josie. Please. I’ll leave you alone, I swear, I won’t”—Josie took a step back as if in anticipation of the word touch —“but I have to talk to you. Please.”

“No.” Josie was shaking her head emphatically, but then she stopped, seemed to think briefly, but seriously, about something, and then, to Shelly’s great relief and surprise, she was nodding her head. “Okay,” she said, sounding more annoyed than reluctant or frightened. “Okay, okay ,” she repeated, as if in defeat, and then she lifted her chin and pointed it toward an empty table in the back corner, and Shelly followed her to it.

Josie slid behind the table and leaned back, tossing one leg over the other and crossing her arms over her chest. Shelly sat down hard in the stiff wooden chair across from her, doing everything she could not to slump. (That was something her ex-husband had accused her of: “You don’t sit in a chair, Shelly. You slump in it.”) Josie didn’t hesitate to look her straight in the eyes when she was seated, or to lean forward with her hands folded on the table between them. Shelly had expected an awkward silence, but right away, Josie was talking:

“Look, I know you’re probably pissed as hell at me, but I have to tell you this is really not my fault. I can’t help it if we had this… involvement , and maybe I should have, yeah, kept my pictures where no one else could see them, but you’re the older one here, you’re the authority figure . You were supposed to—” Here, Josie seemed to search for some word she’d memorized and couldn’t find. Instead, she went on with some thoughts about the nature of the student/employer relationship, which seemed both scripted and poorly delivered, and for the first time Shelly began to wonder if it had all been an act.

She reached across the table, put a hand on Josie’s wrist to quiet her, and said, “Why?”

“Why what ?” Josie said, looking startled to have her monologue interrupted.

“Why any of it?”

“I was just explaining that,” Josie said. “There are certain perimeters in student/employer relations at the university—”

“Parameters?” Shelly asked.

“Whatever,” Josie said. “But, being your work-study—”

“Why me?” Shelly interrupted. “Is this some kind of hazing thing?”

Josie didn’t laugh.

She didn’t even blink.

She held Shelly’s gaze long and hard enough that Shelly didn’t need an answer to the question, and then she finally said, “I told you, Omega Theta Tau doesn’t participate in hazing.”

“What about the underwear?” Shelly asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You told me. You said you had to wear the same panties for a month, and—”

“Oh, that .” Josie swatted her hand through the air as if to clear it of an annoying insect. “That’s not hazing.”

“Well if that’s not hazing, maybe this isn’t either.”

“What’s ‘this,’” Josie said, making quotation marks in the air around her own face.

“You know,” Shelly said, her voice sounding automated even to her, “an affair. With a woman. Photographs. To prove it. Maybe getting someone in trouble, getting someone fired.”

“No way. We’d get kicked out of the National Pan-Hellenic Council if—”

“No,” Shelly said. She realized that she was shaking, but her words came out of her passionlessly, as if she were reading them, and what she was reading was already familiar to her, had been read and reread a hundred times. “I was in a sorority, too, Josie. We did all the same stuff, knowing full well we’d never get kicked out of the National Pan-Hellenic Council. We knew, just like you do, that if the National Pan-Hellenic Council ever heard about it, they’d just help cover it up. People who’ve never pledged might be fooled by that, but not me.”

“You can’t prove anything,” Josie said, and the way she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair made it clear to Shelly that Josie was right.

Jeff chewed on hard cinnamon candies as he drove, and the sound coming from his closed mouth was so loud and chaotic it occurred to Mira that he was splintering his teeth, but when she looked over at him, and he looked back at her and smiled, she was relieved to see that his teeth were intact. “Would you like some?” he asked, pointing to the bag of candies between them. “Help yourself.”

“No, thanks,” Mira said.

After they’d left Godwin Hall, and before they’d gone to get Jeff’s car from the university parking garage, they’d gone back to Mira’s apartment so she could get her credit card. (Despite Clark’s protests that she was treating him like a two-year-old, Mira had insisted on keeping their joint card at home, in a box at the bottom of their bureau, since they were already so deeply in debt that it could only, in her opinion, be used in emergencies.) But when she’d gotten to the bureau, to the bottom of the drawer, and then to the bottom of the box, it wasn’t there.

Clark had taken that, too?

She’d called to Jeff in the other room, “I’ll be right out!” as she pawed through a few other drawers, and even looked under the bed, and went to the closet to check the pockets of Clark’s jackets.

Not there.

She could hear Jeff in the living room humming to himself as he paged through some of the books on her shelf.

Now what?

It was two hundred miles, at least a couple of tanks of gas there and back. She’d had the ATM withdrawal maximum lowered to fifty dollars a day (again, so there would be no temptations), and she certainly didn’t want to make Jeff stand around in line at the credit union as she tried to get money out of hers and Clark’s savings account.

“I’m sorry this is taking so long!” she called, mostly to buy herself some time to think about what to do.

“It’s not a problem, Mira,” Jeff called back. “I’ve got forty hours before anyone will notice I’m missing, and that’ll just be a dozen relieved undergrads. That’s the great thing about being a bachelor. Nobody files a Missing Person’s report for at least a week. Hey, I see you’ve got a whole shelf of Camille Paglia. Are you a fan?”

Later, Mira thought, she would tell him about her interest in Paglia’s popularization of literary criticism, and how she hoped, herself, to emulate something of it in her own anthropological studies—but at the moment she was back on her hands and knees feeling the carpet under the bureau for the credit card. She sat for a few minutes on the floor before she stood, went into the living room, and said to Jeff, because she had to, “I don’t have any money. Except what I can get out of the bank. My husband took the credit card.”

Jeff was holding Sexual Personae in his hands as if it he’d never held an actual book before, as if he had no idea how to open it, both hands wrapped around the edges like a plateful of potluck food. He looked over at Mira, shrugged, and said, “I’ve got cash and a full tank of gas. And now I know where you live. I have people who can help me get the loan repaid if I have to.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows ridiculously, without bothering to smile, and Mira understood instantly, physically (although she couldn’t muster the energy to feel it) why, if the rumors were true, so many girls and women allowed themselves to be used by him.

“Thank you,” she said to him for the tenth or fifteenth time that morning, and he acknowledged it with another shrug, turning back to the book. She offered him a cup of tea, or a sandwich, but he said he’d rather hit the Wendy’s on the freeway if she didn’t mind.