Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

I just wanted you to know.

* * *

Alice did not come to class. There were only the six, and when I asked if any of them knew whether Alice was ill, Ashley volunteered that it might be allergies; she was quite allergic to any number of substances, and a titter spread among them, a minor contagion of humor, which gave me an opportunity. “Allergies are funny?” I said.

The girls went mum, and so we leapt into Stevens and Roethke and what it means to really look at something, anything, and how after a while, the thing becomes stranger and stranger, and I turned them all into phenomenologists and had them staring at pencils and erasers and my Kleenex pack and a cell phone and we wrote about looking and things and light.

After class, Ashley, Emma, Nikki, and Nikki’s second incarnation, Joan, imparted the news that Alice had been a little “weird” lately and had “made a scene just yesterday because she couldn’t take a joke.” When I asked what the joke was, Peyton looked sheepish and moved her eyes away from mine. Jessie said in her high small voice that I should know by now that Alice “is kinda different.”

I muddled forward, remarking that Alice was Alice, and I hadn’t been ticularly aware of any disturbing differences as such. We all had our idiosyncrasies and I ventured that she had seemed “up” during the last class (without letting on that I knew why), and she had written an amusing poem, so I was surprised that she couldn’t take a joke.

Ashley was sucking on a mint or hard candy, and I watched her mouth move as she pushed the lozenge around in her mouth, her eyes meditative. “Well, she takes meds for something about her mood, you know, cause she’s a little…” Ashley gestured as if she were throwing balls in the air.

“I didn’t know that,” Peyton said loudly.

“She’s got ADHD, you mean?” Nikki said.

“She didn’t say what it’s called; it’s something…” Ashley said, eyes clouded.

“Half of school’s on something, Ritalin or something,” Peyton announced. “That’s no big deal.”

I saw Emma give Peyton a hard reproving look. Emma was not subtle.

Enlightenment about Alice was not forthcoming. I smiled at the little group gathered around me and said very slowly, “It may be hard to believe, but I was young once, too, and moreover, I remember being young. I remember being exactly your age, in fact, and I remember jokes, too.” It was a cinematic moment, and I was fully conscious of it. I did my best to don my most all-knowing, authoritative, good-teacher-beloved-by-the-students expression, a cross between Mr. Chips and Miss Jean Brodie, and then I slapped Theodore Roethke shut, stood up, and made my exit. In the film, the camera would follow my back to the door, my high heels — sandals in reality — clipping smartly on the floorboards, and then I pause, just for a moment, and turn to look over my shoulder. The camera is now close. Only my face is visible, and on the screen, it is gigantic, perhaps twelve feet tall. I beam out at you, the audience, turn again, and the door shuts with a loud Foley click behind me.

* * *

Something seemed to be wrong with Abigail. My mother was sitting beside her on the sofa, stroking her back. Regina was making noises: high-pitched, staccato wails.

“She fell,” Mama said to me, her face white. “Just now.”

Abigail was examining her knees with a confused expression, and I felt a spasm of fear. I bent over her, took her hand, and asked all the usual questions, beginning with “Are you okay?” and moving on to particulars about pains and odd sensations. She didn’t answer but stared hard downward and then began shaking her head slowly.

Regina flapped her hands in the air and in a strangled voice said, “I’m going to pthe string for help right now. I’m going into the bathroom to yank it. She can’t talk. Oh my God. I have to call Nigel. He’ll know what to do.” (Nigel was the Englishman, and exactly what he was going to do in Leeds for Abigail in Bonden was a secret known only to Regina.)

Abigail turned her head toward her panicked friend and said in a loud even voice, “Shut up, Regina. Someone help me adjust my bra before it chokes me.”

Regina looked offended. She folded her hands and sank back on the sofa, a ladylike frown on her still remarkably pretty face.

Together, my mother and I managed to pull down the offending garment, which had slipped upward in the excitement, and settle our mutual friend on the sofa.

“Abigail,” my mother said. “I was so scared.”

Falling was a universal fear at Rolling Meadows. Some people, like George, never got up. Hips snapped, ankles cracked, and they were never the same. Old bones. That Abigail had not broken some piece of her frail skeleton struck me as supernatural. I discovered later that my mother, perhaps unwisely, had intervened with her own body and turned a crash into a slow tumble.

At some point during the conversation that followed, I understood that Abigail felt considerably better, because she began to signal me with her eyebrows, a gesture followed by peering down at her lap. I had no idea what she was up to until I saw that she had her hands in the pockets of her embroidered dress and was exposing small parts of their red linings. The woman was wearing a secret amusement. Concealed inside her pockets was some subversive message, erotic needlepoint, or other undie, no doubt created years ago. I telegraphed back my silent comprehension that the dress was loaded, so to speak, another hidden fabric in Abigail’s private arsenal, and this tacit knowledge between us appeared to give her genuine pleasure, because she smiled slyly and gave me some extra eyebrow lifts to confirm our complicity. Peg arrived then and, after hearing the story, took it in the vein most true to her nature, declaring Abigail “blessed” and my mother a “hero” (a designation my mother adamantly disavowed, but which she clearly enjoyed), and then she moved on to Robin Womack, a local television personality with abundant hair. She ended her eulogy with the phrase “He can put his shoes on my bed anytime!” Although I found the reference to shoes superfluous, this permission clearly imparted a fancy for Womack and his serious hair.

Exactly how we arrived at poetry I am not certain, but the Swans fondly recalled some loved lines from their earlier days. Peg wandered lonely as a cloud, and my mother read aloud Wallace Stevens’s “The Reader.” There are no words on his reader’s page, only “the trace of burning stars / In the frosty heaven.” And Regina recalled Joyce Kilmer’s immortal American “tree,” and I recited Ron Padgett’s poem “Haiku.” “ That was fast. / I mean life.” I had always laughed aloud at that poem, but not one of the Swans emitted even the briefest chuckle or snort. My mother smiled sadly. Abigail nodded. Peg’s eyes glazed over with what I gued were memories. Regina appeared to be on the verge of tears, but then she hoped aloud that I hadn’t given my girls “that poem,” to which I responded that it would be entirely lost on them because at their age life truly is long. Time is a question of both percentages and belief. If half your life ago you were six or seven, the span of those years is even longer than fifty for a centagenarian, because the young experience the future as endless and normally think of adults as members of another species. Only the aged have access to life’s brevity.

Regina then informed me, in a muddled speech of frustrating vagueness, that something had “happened” to one of the girls in my class. She simply couldn’t remember the name of the child, “Lucy perhaps, no, Janet, no, not that either,” but whatever the girl’s name was, Regina had heard from Adrian Bortwaffle’s brother-in-law, who was a close friend of Tony Rosterhaus’s (Tony’s connection to my class was completely unknown to me and to Regina), that there had been an accident of some kind, and the girl had spent a night in the hospital.