The Ghosts of Lovely Women Read online

  I went to my podium. “I’ve made a start on the rough drafts for your research papers.” The class groaned, but Javier looked surprisingly cheerful. He had brought me his two pages the day before, and they had not been bad. He was going to make it, after all.

  I was the one, now, who was on a deadline. While some of their papers could be genuinely interesting, I always had to grade them rapidly so that the students could get to work on revision, and the grading took me forever. It was exhausting and time-consuming, and they could never understand why I couldn’t just return forty rough drafts the next day. They never thought about the fact that it was 400 pages of text which I actually read and made comments upon. This year, though, Derek had helped me.

  I introduced the new vocabulary words (they all got a big chuckle out of the word “brouhaha”), and spent half an hour on Crime and Punishment. The detective, Porfiry Petrovich, was closing in on Raskolnikov, using the good cop/bad cop technique that was such a torment to the murderer, who was himself a divided man. Porfiry, therefore, divided himself in interrogation. He adapted psychologically to the nature of his prey.

  I wondered if any police outside of fiction were actually that brilliant. Did Kelsey McCall know how to play the psychology game? Did she have any suspects as smart as Raskolnikov? Does someone strangle a teenage girl because they’ve plotted a brilliant crime, or because they’re angry? Afraid? Desperate?

  I was fanning myself, literally sweating over Russian literature, when the bell rang.

  *

  By lunchtime I sat grouchily in the big lounge, which was air conditioned, listening to twenty or so colleagues chat about the weather. “Isn’t it gorgeous today?” asked Ted Simpson from the math department.

  “Oh, just lovely!” said Brenda James, the drama teacher.

  “I’d be happy if it were like this all summer long,” added Chip Henders, the business chair.

  Derek smiled at me while he ate the sandwich I’d hastily prepared that morning. “Sorry it has no lettuce,” I said quietly.

  “It’s delicious. You have a special sandwich-making gift.”

  “I suppose you love hot weather, too?”

  “Not really. Seventy degrees is plenty for me. Sixties are my favorite.” Then he looked at me, surprised. “Did I just say something right?”

  “You have no idea. I think you must be a dream.”

  He finished lunch smugly, pleased to have earned points.

  I dragged myself out of the air conditioning and back up the humid stairwell. My classroom was now as moist as a Peruvian jungle. “Ms. Thurber, you look hot,” a girl observed as students filed in.

  By my last period I was also told that I seemed grumpy. Students had no qualms about making personal remarks. I routinely fielded questions about my love life, whether or not I dyed my hair, how I intended to vote in the next election. When I first began teaching I tried to tell them that their questions were rude, but then I realized that they were simply acting the way they were taught to act at home. I always answered politely that certain things were none of their business — but it didn’t seem to deter them from asking more. Or, I noted today, from commenting on my general mood and appearance.

  When I arrived home, I flipped on my air conditioner and guiltily made the long-delayed call to my mother. I had sent her a brief e-mail to say that I would call soon, but then everything had happened. I apologized for my lateness and assured her that the woman on Masterpiece Theatre was NOT Gwyneth Paltrow. “So tell Dad he owes you five dollars or whatever.”

  “Thanks, Sweetie. Dad actually figured out how to look it up on the Internet. He’s still mad about the fact that he was wrong.”

  I laughed. “And in regard to the ‘boy’ in the grocery store—”

  “Yes?” my mother asked brightly.

  “I didn’t see him again. But I am seeing someone. I like him a lot.”

  “Oh?” My poor mother was pulling hard on her own reins; I knew she was dying to fire questions at me, but also afraid she’d send me skittering off into my privacy, shuttering her out.

  “He’s a teacher at St. James. Just started a couple weeks ago. He’s also a psychologist.”

  “A man with degrees!” she said. “And the two of you are — what? Dating?”

  “Yes. We’re — kind of exclusive already.”

  “Well, that sounds very romantic! And what is the name of this mystery man?”

  “Derek Jonas.”

  “Derek! Is he British?”

  “No. I mean, he might have ancestors—”

  “What does he do at St. James?”

  “He’s the Social Science chair. He—”

  “How old is he, honey?”

  “Uh— I don’t know. I’m guessing about thirty or so? Thirty-two?”

  “Well, you need to find that out, Teddy. Has he ever been married?”

  “No. I mean, he would have told me that. At least I don’t think—”

  “Teddy, you need to get to know this man.”

  “That’s what dating is, Mother.”

  “When will Dad and I meet him?”

  “Well, when can you come to visit? I can’t come down there until closer to the end of the year. I’m going to be bogged down with research paper drafts and then actual research papers. Plus my night class—”

  “My busy girl. What if Daddy and I just came up for lunch one day? Then we could drive over and have dinner with Will or Lucky afterward. We like to get all three of you in one trip.”

  My parents lived in the more distant suburbs of Chicago, and in the construction-plagued traffic it could take as much as two hours to drive there. “That would be great, Mom.”

  “But of course we’d want Derek to be there. You talk to him and pick a date you can both agree on, and we’ll come out.”

  “Mom.”

  “Yes, Teddy?”

  “I really like him. I’m pretty infatuated at this point.”

  “Was it love at first sight?” My mother did not believe in that phenomenon, but the closer I got to thirty the more she was willing to give it a shot.

  “For him, he tells me. For me it took a little while.”

  “How about if we come for your birthday? Then I can bring your cake and presents and everything.”

  “Mom, you don’t have to make a big deal.”

  “But Teddy, it’s your Golden Birthday!” My mother had always showered us with special gifts on our birthdays. But in my family the “Golden Birthday”—that is, having your age match the number of the date of your birth — was fodder for intensified celebration. I was to turn 30 on May 30th.

  “Okay. I’ll ask Derek and I’ll get back to you. Love you, Mom.”

  “Love you too, Sweetheart.”

  I hung up and took a shower; then I dug out the books for my graduate class. I still had to read about a hundred pages and write a response paper. I felt better after my shower, but my mother’s reminder of my birthday had depressed me. Whenever I thought of turning thirty, I thought of Nick Carraway’s famous speech from The Great Gatsby: “I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.… Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”

  Because of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I had never seen thirty in a very positive light. My mother wanted to celebrate it with trumpets and balloons, but I felt a strong desire to go into hibernation on the morning of May 30 and wake up refreshed and inevitably older on the 31st.

  I shook my head and forced myself to read. My reading matter was not much less depressing; Jessica Halliday had wandered back into my mind, and I wondered what she would think of Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today. This week’s reading, relative to everything that had been happening lately, was Feminist Theory. The reading pointed out several feminist assumptions, one of which was that “In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is marginalized, defined only by her difference from
male norms and values, which means defined by what she (allegedly) lacks that men (allegedly) have.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  The chapter, in order to exemplify the application of feminist theory examined some simple fairy tales—Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty—all Disney flicks I had really enjoyed as a girl. But Tyson had a point: “The plot thus implies that marriage to the right man is a guarantee of happiness and the proper reward for a right-minded young woman. In all three tales, the main female characters are stereotyped as either “good girls” (gentle, submissive, virginal, angelic) or “bad girls” (violent, aggressive, worldly, monstrous). These characterizations imply that if a woman does not accept her patriarchal gender role, then the only role left for her is that of a monster. In all three tales, the “bad girls”—the wicked queen in Snow White, the wicked fairy in Sleeping Beauty, and the wicked stepmother and stepsisters in Cinderella—are also vain, petty and jealous, infuriated that they are not as beautiful as the main character or, in the case of the wicked fairy, she wasn’t invited to a royal celebration. Such motivations imply that even when women are evil, their concerns are trivial.”

  “Huh,” I said. Jessica would have had so much to say about this. I wondered what Will would say. I put a bookmark at the page, determined to show it to my brother so that we could have a discussion. Derek would like it, too, I thought. How lucky I was to know men who would resist the sort of categorization detailed here.

  I finished my reading in about two hours — mostly because I didn’t fall asleep over it — and began to write my paper. Our instructor had asked us not only to summarize the theory but to find applications in real life and in our classrooms (most of us were teachers). “I find that the critical thinking of students today is intact, and I’ve had many students in the past — one in particular — who applied the precepts of this theory without ever studying it,” I wrote. And then, in an instant, I got angry.

  Jessica had been a girl, just a girl!

  I finished typing, packed my course things into my graduate school bag (I had bags for every category of my life), and put on a solemn black pantsuit for Kathy’s wake.

  Twenty-Four

  “Tis a villain, Sir, I do not love to look on.”

  —Miranda, The Tempest

  It was almost more depressing than Jessica’s wake had been. Kathy had a big family, and they were all devastated, of course, by her death. I expressed my condolences, said a brief prayer at the coffin, and made my way back into the sultry dark. Without the intensity of the sun the heat was more bearable, but somehow my mood had grown worse, especially since a light rain was falling. Two funerals, two bursts of rain. I had expected to see Derek at the wake, but when I looked into the guest book I saw that he’d signed on a previous page — probably hours earlier. I walked to my car, feeling moody but alert. I looked around me in the dim lot, my fingers wrapped defensively around my keys. I approached my car, squatted to look under it, then carefully walked around it, peering through the windows looking for a crouching assailant — the one I’d heard about in endless nightmare stories on the news, and in urban legends spread by people who thrived on fear. I’d once had a professor— a man — who said that this very sort of action was a sign that the genders were not equal. “When’s the last time you heard of a man having to search his car? To hold his keys at the ready when he walks alone? To beg for an escort after a party? A man has confidence in the reality of his size, while a woman’s size becomes her liability.” A man could pick her up, whether jokingly or threateningly, and either way, my teacher asserted, he was seizing power for himself, and reminding her that she was light, lesser, something to manipulate.

  *

  Now I locked myself into my car, feeling vulnerable, feeling somehow betrayed by Derek, even though we hadn’t made plans to meet here. My phone rang and I jumped. I put my key into the ignition and said “Hello?”

  “Teddy!” my sister was there with me, her voice miraculously reaching me from Vail, Colorado.

  “Hey, Lucky! How are things going?”

  “Oh, okay. I mean, they’re great. Matt and I just had a tiny fight, but up until then things were terrific. It was a great flight and a gorgeous hotel, and we’ve had lots of alone time—”

  “Ah, yes. The sex you spoke of.”

  “Yes.” She giggled suddenly. “Matt is holding up a white flag. He surrenders.” She giggled some more, treating me to the sound of what was probably their foreplay. Still, I felt comforted by her voice, and by the fact that whatever little conflict she had, she was going to work it out. “Stop it!” she yelled, then came back to me. “Sorry, Teddy. I really wanted to talk to you but Matt was distracting me. Is everything okay over there?”

  How to tell her everything? Jessica’s death, Kathy’s death, Derek’s arrival in my life. The horrible night I thought I’d lost him — this man that Lucky had never met. “Everything’s fine. Well — I’ll catch you up when you get home.”

  “That sounds mysterious. Any man stuff?” Lucky asked. My sister was a romantic.

  “There is some man stuff. But I think your man would like to show you his stuff.”

  She giggled again. “He would. Suddenly now he would, even though we’ve been glaring at each other for twenty minutes.”

  “You go back to him. Call me back when he’s on the slopes and you’re sipping hot chocolate.”

  “Are you okay? You sound sad.”

  “I just left a funeral.”

  “Oh, no. Who died?”

  “Someone I work with. Long story. Anyway — we’re all bummed after funerals, right?”

  “Right.” Lucky didn’t sound convinced. “Have you talked to Will? Is he in town?”

  “Yeah. We had lunch. He loved Sweden.”

  “Okay… listen, I think I’ll be paying you a visit the minute I get back. My antennae are up. Do you need me? Do you need me to come home?”

  “No, Luck. All I need is a good night’s sleep, okay? Have fun. Tell Matt I said hi.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  I clicked off the phone and stared at my windshield, now fogged with condensation— from what? My breath from a short phone call? The rain outside versus the hot air inside the car? I wondered about this, watching the shadow of some branches as they moved against the windshield. Slender and elegant against the fogged pane, they reminded me of a Japanese painting. They clicked and clacked in the breeze, and for a moment I was caught up in their simple beauty.

  Then I became aware of motion to my right. I turned my head to see a different shadow at the passenger window, a hulking form, seemingly waiting to be let in. Except there was no sound; no knocking, no calling my name. Just a form there, and then, suddenly enough to make me cry out, a wrenching of the door handle. I had locked the door; I thought I heard a grunt of frustration.

  I started my engine; horrifyingly, this did not make the figure go away. There was more wrenching at the handle. I could lean over and wipe away the condensation, I knew. I could face my intruder.

  Except that I couldn’t. I was too frightened.

  I threw the gear shift into reverse and began moving the car; I put on my wipers to remove the condensation, then remembered it was on the inside. I flicked on my defrost, wiped a tiny hole of vision on my windshield, and threw the car back into drive. No one was in front of me in the parking lot. I sped forward, shaking, my eyes on my rearview mirror. The rear window had not yet defogged, so everything I saw through it was vague, hazy, like an alternate world. Behind me, in the spot where I had been, it seemed there was nothing. I scanned for lurking figures, but saw nothing, no one, except some people leaving the funeral home, their arms around each other. Through my fogged lens they were unfamiliar creatures.

  I trembled all the way back to my house. Nothing specific had happened, and yet I read a world of menace into that moment when an unknown presence had stood behind my fogged pane and refused to reveal itself to me. One moment I’d been contemplating the poet
ry of a slender branch clicking against my window, the next I’d been frightened for my life.

  I parked my car in my usual spot, afraid, suddenly, to get out of the car. I looked all around the parking lot once, twice, three times. It was well-lit, and I could see one of my neighbors sitting in his first floor living room. If anything happened, I could call for Charles. Surely he would hear me screaming?

  Stepping out took all of my courage; I made my trembling way back to the building. I went to the front entrance, because I’d forgotten to check for mail, and when I turned the corner I came face to face with Richard, who was smiling at me.

  “Hello, Teddy!”

  “What are you doing here?” I could barely focus on him; his strong cologne was like an assault, as was the odor of smoke on his coat. I felt as though I was still shaking; perhaps I was only trembling inwardly.

  “I told you, I want to talk. Let’s go inside.” He put his hands on his hips and loomed over me.

  “You need to go.”

  “Teddy, for God’s sake. How long is this going to go on?”

  “Not one moment longer.”

  “Teddy—” he said, grabbing my arm, and I hit him. I hauled back my arm and punched him as hard as I could — not on the nose, which I instinctively feared would hurt my hand, but in the eye, which hurt my hand anyway. I felt as though his skull had been imprinted on my knuckles, and I felt something wet, as well.

  To my immense satisfaction, he staggered under the blow, cursing me and grabbing his face.

  “What the hell, Teddy? Are you insane?”

  “Don’t ever contact me again. Don’t ever come here, don’t ever call me. You have no right, Richard.”

  Charles came out of the building — he had heard me after all — and I ran to the door, glad that I didn’t have to struggle with my key. “Thanks,” I said. I went in and didn’t look back.

  I called Derek; when he arrived about fifteen minutes later, he found me pacing and raving, furious about the man in the parking lot, Richard, Kathy, Jessica.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me when I’d talked myself out.