Kinflicks (32 page)

I stared at Miss Head with fascination. It was as though she'd just done a psychological strip tease for me. Her Oklahoma accent was as heavy as my Tennessee one by now.

‘So you see,' Miss Head concluded briskly, ‘I made it. I got away from all that nonsense. And so can you. It's simply a matter of choosing how to parcel out your energies, as it were.'

Suddenly I understood Miss Head's interest in me: She identified with me. I was the daughter she'd never have. She wanted to mold me into her image every bit as much as her parents had wanted to mold her into theirs. I couldn't decide whether I felt flattered or threatened. The key question was whether or not I wanted to be a professor at an Ivy League women's college and spend nine years writing one book. At least it was decent of her to level with me about her intentions — if she was aware she'd done so.

‘Yes, but there's a difference,' I insisted. ‘You wanted a college in the East, and I didn't. I had to be dragged here by my father. Though I
do
like it now.' The other difference, which I decided not to mention, was the fact that the Major was filthy rich, and that presumably I would be too one day if I outlived him. I didn't have the Dust Bowl in the Depression to escape from. Nor were my parents' sadomasochistic tendencies quite so overt as those of her parents.

‘Sometimes converts make the most ardent adherents,' she said quietly, looking into her cup as though reading my future in her tea leaves.

Following this exchange, I devoted myself with ardor to my studies. My typical day began at seven with a breakfast of boiled eggs and orange juice and coffee at the dorm cafeteria. I had classes all morning. I returned to the cafeteria for lunch. And then I studied all afternoon at the library. Two afternoons a week I had physiology and chemistry labs. After supper, I went to my room and studied until midnight, and then I went to bed. On most weekends I allowed myself to sleep until nine, but then studied until bedtime, with time out only for dinner. I was like a nun. This was my novitiate.

I was very strict, allowing myself few recreational lapses. One I did allow, however, was trips around Boston with Miss Head to various cultural activities. I could rationalize taking time out for this because they were didactic exercises.

Once we went to the Museum of Fine Arts. Identical in our green loden coats and wool suits, we stood in one of the echoing marble hallways reverently inspecting some paintings.

‘Why'd that guy paint so many pictures of the exact same haystack?' I asked indignantly.

Miss Head looked at me with reproof, to indicate that I was once again displaying my hillbilly origins. ‘You must try not to look at them as “haystacks.” Regard them as studies in the relationship between form and light, as it were.'

I nodded and studied the paintings again. I squinted and turned my head back and forth, but try as I might, I still saw them as haystacks.

‘What a wild jug!' I laughed, pointing to a glass case that contained an earthenware pitcher with intertwined serpents for handles — ‘606
B.C.
,' the tag said.

Miss Head sighed wearily. ‘My dear Miss Babcock,' she intoned, looking out at me over her glasses with her eyebrows raised in disbelief,
‘try
not to think of it as a “jug.” Regard it as symbolic of a lost civilization. Think of it as — ah — a Rosetta stone to the soul of a vanished race, as it were. Read its form and lines as a template, so to speak, to the minds of an alien species.'

I shook my head doubtfully.

‘Shall we have a bite to eat?' Miss Head suggested in an exhausted voice.

‘Sure. I saw a hamburg place one block over — Steer Haven or something.'

She lowered her head and looked at me over the top of her glasses again and shook her head sadly. ‘Steer Haven
indeed.'

‘No?' What did people in Boston eat then?

There was room for only eight Formica tables inside the Acropolis Grill. We took the last empty one.

‘Good evening, Demetrius,' Miss Head said, nodding her gray-bunned head to the corpulent waiter who handed us our menus.

I scanned mine, looking for the hamburger and hot dog section.

‘Shall I order for you?' Miss Head offered.

I nodded numbly.

Without enthusiasm, I scooped up mashed eggplant and chickpeas on unleavened bread. I gritted my teeth and dug into sauteed squid, washing it down with a strong wine that smelled and tasted like the creosote Clem used on fence posts.

‘Delicious,' Miss Head notified me.

‘Yes.' In fact, it was pretty good, but when your heart is set on French fries, carp roe salad won't do.

We wound up this gastronomic exploration, undertaken for my edification (because surely Miss Head didn't eat here because she actually
enjoyed
it?), with a licorice liqueur.

Another time Miss Head took me to hear the Boston Symphony play Beethoven's Second. I settled back for a relaxing evening with this middle-aged woman, my teacher and my friend — even if she did persist in calling me Miss Babcock. My
only
friend at Worthley, in fact, since I'd been too busy studying to make more than passing acquaintance with anyone my own age.

The director strode out and we all applauded, for reasons that were unclear to me since he hadn't done anything applause-worthy yet. He raised his arms, and I snuggled down in my seat.

Miss Head gouged me with her elbow and whispered sternly, ‘Concentrate, Miss Babcock. Notice how Beethoven will transform and reintroduce themes throughout the first movement in a standard sonata form.'

I sat straight up and stared at the orchestra, my ears straining like an awakened housewife listening for burglars. I wasn't sure that I'd caught the themes, that I'd know a theme if it were served to me on a platter. Aha! There was one. I was sure of it. No. That tune? Yes! No? The orchestra hurtled along, unsympathetic. I glanced at Miss Head in agony. She was nodding in time, serenely, and was shifting her focus from one part of the orchestra to another.

As the expansive second movement swept in, I settled back with a sigh of relief.

Miss Head leaned over and hissed, ‘Be alert, Miss Babcock! Notice the devices Beethoven employs to achieve this illusion of peace, hedged in by the intricate construction of the first movement and the lively pace of the third.'

I shot back up in my seat and concentrated on the concept of repose, how one achieved it in melodic form without violating the rules of symphonic construction.

I was exhausted by the time the scherzo lurched in, but its lively rhythm soon had me perched on the edge of my seat. I leaned over and said to Miss Head, ‘Kind of makes you want to leap up there and dance, doesn't it?'

She looked at me with a frown, to indicate that nothing could have been further from her mind.

By the end of the fourth movement, the armpits of my high-necked blouse were drenched with sweat.

As we drove in Miss Head's Opel sedan back to Worthley, I said, ‘Well, thanks, Miss Head. That was neat.'

‘Neat?'

‘Uh, interesting. Elevating?' I hadn't yet mastered the adjectives of academe. ‘I particularly savored the mellifluous second movement,' I tried tentatively.

She looked at me strangely.

‘I mean, I found it very sonorous.' I decided to forget it.

She took me back to her apartment and poured me my nightly fix of tea and played on her cello the themes and some of the variations. She illustrated the features of a good theme and the transformations one underwent in symphonic treatment.

At some point, she must have looked up to discover me sunk deep in a sleep of intellectual exhaustion on her horsehair loveseat.

The next day in her class, she called on me to discuss the ways in which Descartes's ‘necessarily true propositions' were used in the construction of his proofs. I parroted what she'd told me the night before about the qualities of symphonic themes — their clarity and simplicity and intrinsic necessity, the ways in which they were and were not susceptible to modification and adaptation. She nodded with satisfaction. Apparently I was progressing well as her mouthpiece. The thought left me vaguely uneasy. I was gaining Worthley, but was I losing Hullsport in the bargain?

Marion, a girl on my hall whom I vaguely knew, was concerned about my lack of social life and invited me to go to Princeton with her for a weekend. She was meeting her boyfriend Jerry, and he had a roommate who needed a date. Please would I go?

My immediate gut reaction, which I should have honored, was to refuse. I had an important physiology paper due the next week, and I hadn't even picked a topic. Out of curiosity to see firsthand the famous Princeton, I agreed to go (strictly as a didactic experience, of course).

The two boys met us at the bus station Friday night. Marion's man was tall and dark and debonair. Mine was short and acned. He was also surly when he discovered that he'd been paired with a pituitary giant for the weekend. We smiled sickly at each other, having both lost out at the potluck supper of weekend blind dates.

Their neo-Gothic stone dormitory looked very similar to our own neo-Gothic stone dormitory except that it was filled to the rafters with male sexual psychopaths rather than female ones. Their entry was having a party. Thirty of us were crammed into a small dark third-floor room. Everyone but Marion and me was already drunk, and we were well on our way, guzzling gin and orange juice. The din from the records and the shouting was deafening — blessedly so, because it meant that my date, Ron, and I didn't have to try to converse civilly. Clutching my paper cup of gin and juice, I stood crushed against Ron in the packed room, swaying back and forth in time to the music. Ron's head came to my chest level. If we had been so inclined, he could have chewed my nipples without moving a muscle. As things were, though, we merely swayed to the music

After a couple of hours, people started disappearing, and enough space developed for some heavy breathing. Someone put on the Beach Boys singing ‘Surfin' Safari.' I hadn't danced in years. It had been out of the question with Clem because of his leg. And Joe Bob and I had had too many other things to attend to. But at one time I had loved it. Under the influence of that forgotten love, and of the dozen or so cups of gin and juice I'd tossed down, I leapt up from the sofa on which we were sprawled, grabbing the stunted young Ron by the hand. We stood facing each other like David and Goliath. We worked our way into the beat, and soon we could have joined any burlesque show in the country, with our obscene thrustings and gyratings and shudderings. My befogged Miss Head-trained brain tried briefly to explore the thematic material of ‘Surfin' Safari' and the ways in which those themes were being developed. But soon, these efforts were swamped by the hungers of my neglected flesh.

Ron and I were not alone on the dance floor. The music, the people, the time of night, the gin and juice — everything was converging to trigger an orgy. We were all writhing in the grip of the Beach Boys. A dateless boy was standing on the couch exposing himself. He supervised the scene with satisfaction, a Priapus at a garden party.

‘Surfin' Safari' ended with a crash. We dancers slumped like puppets whose strings had been cut, breathing fast and sweating. When ‘The Little Old Lady from Pasadena' began, Marion stumbled over and slurred, ‘You and Ron wanna come downa Jerry's room and relax?'

Jerry locked his door from inside. The furnishings consisted of two beds. Jerry and Marion sat on one, Ron and I on the other.

‘Some party,' I suggested brightly.

No one answered. They were all breathing heavily.

‘Yup, I can see that you Princeton men are real hellers,' I said amiably to Ron, who had been at great pains to convince me of that earlier in the evening.

Again, no one replied.

Jerry fell back. He reached up and pulled Marion down beside him. Kissing her ravenously, he began working his knee between her legs. He reached over and turned out the light.

I sat in the dark, trying not to eavesdrop on the gasps and slurping sounds coming from the other bed. This scene was strangely familiar to me. Before I had a chance to put my finger on exactly why it should be, I felt myself being dragged down onto my back. Before I could say Tom Thumb, nimble Ron had ripped the cameo brooch from my throat and laid my nylon blouse open to the navel. Now he was trying to reach around me to unhook my bra. Recalling reflexively my football skills, I straight-armed him, and he fell off the bed with a crash.

However, I underestimated his perseverance and cunning. The next thing I knew, he was crawling between my legs, forcing my tweed skirt up to my waist. I heard a zipper unzip and then felt him plunge into me.

Unfortunately for him, I was wearing a girdle. He shot out of me as though on a trampoline. I felt like a cow with a gnat buzzing around my tail.

Suddenly I found myself pinned spread-eagle under his small frame; his hand was groping for the top of my girdle.

I'd had enough. In fact, I'd had more than enough. Miss Head was right. One had to make a choice as to how to expend one's limited energies. I chose to expend mine at Princeton's Spring Fling no longer. I brought one of my pinned knees up sharply between Ron's legs. With a scream he rolled off me and crashed to the floor.

Snatching up my brooch, I sprinted for the door. Finding it locked, I raced for the light and threw it on.

‘May I have the key please?' I asked Jerry.

By the time my eyes were used to the light, I had figured out that Jerry was no longer on the bed. Nor was Marion. But I heard her voice, emanating from somewhere in that room. She was gasping, ‘Dear God, I'm dying!'

I looked around frantically. What was happening to her? What was her Princeton sex deviant doing? I knelt down between the beds and looked under them. Marion shrieked, ‘Yes! Mother of Jesus, yes!' Under the bed I saw a disembodied limb twitching through the folds of the bedspread. Good grief, I had to help her!