Girls

You can't say once upon a time to tell the story of how we got to where we are. You have to say winter. Once, in winter, you say, because winter was our only season, and it felt like we would live in winter all our lives.

I was awake in the darkness and the sound of wind against the house when the dog began to retch at 5:25. I hustled 90 pounds of heaving chocolate Lab to the door and rolled him onto the snow that looked silver in the fading moonlight.
        
"Good boy," I said because he'd done his only trick.

Outside he vomited, and I went back up, passing the sofa Fanny lay on. I tiptoed with enough weight on my toes to let her know how considerate I was. She blinked her eyes. I know I heard her blink her eyes. Whenever I told her I could hear her blink her eyes, she said I was lying. But I could hear the damp slap of lash after I made her cry.
        
I got into bed to get warm again. I saw the red digital numbers, 5:29, and I knew I wouldn't fall asleep. I didn't. I read a book about men who kill each other for pay or for their honor. I forget which, and so did they. It was 5:45, the alarm would buzz at 6:00, and I would make a pot of coffee and start the woodstove. I would call Fanny and pour her coffee into her mug. I would apologize because I always did. Then she would forgive me. We would stagger through the day, exhausted but pretty sure we were more or less all right. We would probably sleep that night. We would probably wake in the same bed to the alarm at 6:00, or to the dog, if he'd returned to the frozen deer carcass he'd been eating in the forest on our land. He loved what made him sick. The alarm went off, I got into jeans and woolen socks and a sweatshirt, and I went downstairs to let the dog in. He'd be hungry, of course.
        
I was the oldest college student in America, I sometimes said. But of course I wasn't. There were always ancient women with parchment skin who graduated at seventy-nine from places like Barnard and the University of Alabama. I was only forty-four, and I hardly qualified as a student. I patrolled the college at night in a Jeep with a leaky exhaust system, and I went from room to room in the classroom buildings, kicking out students who were studying or humping in chairs -- they do it anywhere -- and answering emergency calls with my little blue light winking on top of the roof. I didn't carry a gun or a billy, but I had a heavy black flashlight that took three batteries and I'd used it twice on some of my overprivileged northeastern-playboy part-time classmates. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would waken at 6:00 with my wife, and I'd do my homework, and then patrol at school and go to class at 11:30, while thirty-five stomachs growled and this guy gave instruction about books. Because I was on the staff, the college let me take a course for nothing every term. I was getting educated, in a kind of slow-motion way. It was going to take my something like fifteen or sixteen years to graduate. I predicted to Fanny I would no doubt get an F in gym in my last semester and have to repeat. There were times when I respected myself for going to school. Fanny often did, and that had served as fair incentive.
        
I am not unintelligent. You are not an unintelligent writer, my professor wrote on my paper about Nathaniel Hawthorne. We had to read short stories, I and the other students, and then we had to write little essays about them. I told how I saw Kafka and Hawthorne in a similar light, and I was not unintelligent, he said. He ran into me at dusk one time, when I answered a call about a dead battery and found out it was him. I jumped his Buick from the Jeep's battery, and he was looking me over, I could tell, while I clamped onto the terminals and cranked it up. He was tall and handsome, like someone in a clothing catalogue. He never wore a suit. He wore khakis and sweaters, loafers or sneakers, and he was always talking to the female students with the brightest hair and best builds. But he couldn't get a Buick going on an ice-cold night, and he didn't know enough to look for cells going bad. I told him he was going to need a new battery and he looked me over the way men sometimes do with other men who fix their cars for them.
        
"Vietnam?"
        
I said, "No way."
        
"You have that look sometimes. Were you one of the Phoenix Project fellas?"
        
I was wearing a watch cap made of navy wool and an old fatigue jacket. Slick characters like my professor like it if you're a killer or at least a onetime middleweight fighter. I smiled like I knew something. "Take it easy," I said, and I went back to the Jeep to swing around the cemetery at the top of the campus. They'd been known to screw in down-filled sleeping bags on horizontal stones up there, and the dean of students didn't want anybody dying of frostbite while joined at the hip to a matriculating fellow resident of our northeastern camp for the overindulged.
        
He blinked his high beams at me as I went. "You are not an unintelligent driver," I said.
                                        
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Fanny had left me a bowl of something made with sausages and sauerkraut and potatoes, and the dog hadn't eaten too much more than his fair share. He watched me eat his leftovers and then make myself a king-size drink composed of sour mash and ice. In our back room, which is on the northern end of the house, and cold for sitting in that close to dawn, I sat and I watched the texture of the sky change. It was going to snow, and I wanted to see the storm come up the valley. I woke up that way, sitting in the rocker with its loose right arm, holding a watery drink, and thinking right away of the girl I'd convinced to go back inside. She'd been standing outside her dormitory, looking up at a window that was dark in the midst of all those lighted panes. They never turned a light off; they would let the faucets run half the night. She was crying onto her bathrobe. She was sockless in rubber-bottomed boots, the brown ones so many of them wore unlaced, and for all I know she might have been naked under the robe. She was beautiful, I thought, and she was somebody's red-headed daughter, standing in a quadrangle how many miles from home and weeping.
        
"He doesn't love anyone," the kid told me. "He doesn't love his wife. I mean his ex-wife. And he doesn't love the ex-wife before that, or the one before that. And you know what? He doesn't love me. I don't know anyone who does!"
        
"It isn't your fault if he isn't smart enough to love you,", I said, steering her toward the Jeep.
        
She stopped. She turned. "You know him?"
        
I couldn't help it. I hugged her hard, and she let me, and then she stepped back, and of course I let her go. "Don't you touch me! Is this sexual harassment? Do you know the rules? Isn't this sexual harassment?"
        
"I'm sorry," I said at the door to the truck. "But I think I have to be able to give you a grade before it counts as harassment."
        
She got in. I told her we were driving to the dean of students' house. She smelled like marijuana and something very sweet, maybe one of those coffee-with-cream liqueurs you don't buy unless you hate to drink.
        
As the heat of the truck struck her, she started going kind of clay-gray-green, and I reached across her to open the window.
        
"You touched my breast!" she said.
        
I said, "Does it count if it wasn't on purpose?"
        
She leaned out the window and gave her rendition of my dog.
        
But in my rocker, waking up at whatever time in the morning in my silent house, I thought of her as someone's child. Which made me think of ours, of course. I went for more ice, and I started on a wet breakfast. At the door of the dean of students' house, she'd turned her chalky face to me and asked, "What grade would you give me, then?"
                                                
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It was a week like this: two teachers locked out of their offices late at night, a Toyota with a flat and no spare, an attempted rape on a senior girl walking home from the library, a major fight outside a town bar (broken wrist, probable concussion), and variations on breaking-and-entering. I was scolded by my vice president of nonacademic services for thumping softly on a student who got drunk and disorderly and tried to take me down. I told him to keep his job, but he called me back because I was right to swat him a little, he said, but also wrong, but what the hell, and he'd promised to admonish me, and now he had, and would I please stay on. I thought of the fringe benefits -- graduation in only sixteen years -- so I went back to work.
        
My professor assigned a story called "A Rose for Emily," and I wrote him a paper about the mechanics of corpse fucking, and how, since Emily clearly couldn't screw her dead boyfriend, she was keeping his rotten body in bed because she truly loved him. I called the paper "True Love." He gave me a B and wrote See me, pls. In his office after class, his feet up on his desk, he trimmed a cigar with a giant folding knife he kept in his drawer.
        
"You got to clean the hole out," he said, "or they don't draw."
        
"I don't smoke," I said.
        
"Bad habit. Real habit, though. I started smoking 'em in Germany, in the service. My C.O. smoked 'em. We collaborated on a brothel inspection one time, and we ended up smoking these with a couple of women." He waggled his eyebrows at me, now that his manhood was established.
        
"Were the women smoking them, too?"
        
He snorted laughter through his nose while the greasy smoke came curling off his thin, dry lips. "They were pretty smoky, I'll tell ya!" He was wearing cowboy boots that day, and he propped them on his desk and sat forward. "It's a little hard to explain. But -- hell. You just don't say fuck when you write an essay for a college prof. Okay?" He sounded like a scoutmaster with a kid he'd caught in the outhouse jerking off. "All right? You don't wanna do that."
        
"Did it shock you?"
        
"Fuck, no, it didn't shock me. I just told you. It violates certain proprieties."
        
"But if I'm writing it to you, like a letter ..."
        
"You're writing it for posterity. For some mythical reader someplace, not just me. You're making a statement."
        
"Right. My statement said how hard it must be for a woman to fuck with a corpse."
        
"And a point worth making. I said so. Here."
        
"But you said I shouldn't say it."
        
"No. Listen. Just because you're talking about fucking, you don't have to say fuck. Does that make it any clearer?
        
"No."
        
"I wish you'd lied to me just now," he said.
        
I nodded. I did too.
        
"Where'd you do your service?" he asked.
        
"Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland."
        
"What's in Baltimore?"
        
"Railroads. I liaised on freight runs of army materiel. I killed a couple of bums on the rod with my bare hands, though."
        
He snorted again, but I could see how disappointed he was. He'd been banking on my having been a murderer. Interesting guy in one of my classes, he must have told some terrific woman at an overpriced meal: I just know the guy was a rubout specialist in the 'Nam. I figured I should come to work wearing my fatigue jacket and a red bandanna tied around my head. Say "man" to him a couple of times, hang a fist in the air for grief and solidarity, and look worn out, exhausted from experiences he was fairly certain he envied my having. His dungarees were ironed, I noticed.