I slipped the class schedule into my bag. I had a fifty-fifty chance that it was her.
Minutes later, the class ended, and most of the students quickly stood up, gathered their books and calculators, and headed for the door. The professor swept the board clean with an eraser and shuffled through papers on his desk as the dark-haired woman slowly organized her books, slid them into a gray backpack, then made her way to the door. She had a nonchalant walk, her eyes seemingly looking at things that weren't there, her feet pointing outward slightly. When she walked into the hallway, I stopped her.
"Excuse me," I said. "Are you Elizabeth Valdez?"
She stopped suddenly as if roused from sleep and looked me over. "Yeah," she said while smiling and narrowing her eyes.
"I'm—"
"Milton Conroy. Recognize your picture from the paper. You got my letter."
"I did."
"Do you track down the sources of all your fan mail?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," I said. "First piece of fan mail I've ever gotten."
"Any angry letters?"
"None yet. Lots of angry phone calls to the paper and my advisor, though."
"But you expected that, right?" she asked. "You know, people don't like to be called sexist or racist, even if they are."
"I'm figuring that out," I said.
"So what brings you here?"
"Are you busy?" I asked.
"No," she said, shaking her head.
"Could I ask you some questions? About the department, your experiences, rumors on what you might be hearing? Off the record, of course. I don't want to get anyone in trouble."
"You can use my name," she said, "I don't care. I've been fighting this battle for too long now and dealing with nonsense like this since the start of high school. Some boys don't like girls playing in their sandbox, I suppose."
"Can we go somewhere to talk?" I asked.
"You're not one of those creepy guys who's going to start asking all kinds of personal questions and then start stalking me, are you?"
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out for a few seconds. "Some people might think I'm creepy, I guess," I said. "I usually don't talk to people much."
"Don't you think reporters should?"
I nodded. "I'm working on it. But I don't stalk. Stalking sounds like too much work."
She smiled, her small teeth bright white, her lips dark red. "Okay, Mister Conroy, non-stalker, let's go."
Elizabeth walked alongside me, her backpack hung loosely over her shoulder, her hair shining in the afternoon sun.
***
The groan-inducing name of the coffee shop was called the Campus Grounds. No one seemed to mind the name as long as the coffee was cheap and plentiful and that the owners didn't mind students completing projects for hours on the benches and tables inside and outside the building. Elizabeth and I found an empty booth in the back. We sat under the low amber light, our backs and legs cramped by the high-backed wood booth. We each ordered a coffee every half hour. We didn't realize that thirty minutes stretched into three hours, that the late afternoon was now the early evening, and that the sky had begun to rain a light drizzle, transforming the roads into black mirrors.
***
Milton, when I was a girl, my days were just days of getting by. My family was never much beyond poor. We kept clothing until they became cheesecloth, kept our old home until enough was saved for a new one, and even then the new house wasn't much bigger than the old one. We kept our family car until the front axle broke during a left turn on a drive to the supermarket. I think that was the first time I consciously viewed the world from an angle. Not a metaphorical angle, but a literal one. When I saw the tilting street, I added a second line to it in my mind and created a right triangle. I guess that's how I got started in math and physics: a hypotenuse and two legs.
Our lives were static and frozen. I guess that's what happens when all you do is sit around and watch a life instead of creating one.
Dad worked repairing televisions until people stopped spending time and money to have them repaired. Mom stayed at home vacuuming the same rug with the same dark stains on it, the same rug that we used to place near the front door with these tears on it that seemed to get longer and wider with every month. I spent the days looking out a window that overlooked a street in south Scranton where the same old ladies sat on the same front porches or the same roadside curbs. They only time the scene would change was when one of the old ladies stopped appearing on her porch or on the curb, mainly because she died.
I had this boyfriend once. He loved magic, disappearing coins and cards, that sort of thing. He loved jazz and 70's rock. He once performed a wonderful magic trick. Would you like me to tell you about it? Okay. He made himself disappear. Nice trick, don't you think?
I lived at home for a little while after high school, kind of like you, but not like you. You have a home that's yours, one without parents, but I had no money to move out, and, also, I'd never been anywhere and didn't know where to go. I stayed close to what I knew: that same house, that same Scranton street. It felt safe and familiar.
You know what I noticed watching that street? When people walked down those sidewalks at night, they avoided the spotlights that streetlamps cast on the ground. They'd just walk around the edges of small pools of light, like they were afraid the light would stick to their shoes and they'd wind up dragging it all over the carpeting when they got home. I wondered why for the longest time, but finally it made sense. No one wanted to be seen, except the porch ladies. No one wanted the world to see that, though they could be anywhere on this planet, they were still walking down that dark inconsequential street in that insignificant neighborhood.
I remember the first time I got home just as the sun was rising. It was a Saturday morning. The previous night I didn't want to go home after class, didn't want to see those old ladies on those porches or on those curbs. Didn't want to see people dancing around sidewalk spotlights like cats jumping around puddles, so I just pointed that junky Beetle of mine south and hit the Turnpike with no destination planned. Just wanted to drive and outrun the night. That morning when I got home, the sky was on fire, and the birds were singing and shrieking their heads off. I walked up to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. And I wanted to talk to someone.
I don't know to whom or what about, just wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. So I picked up the phone and tried calling a former high school friend. Her name's Colleen. Wore this big blonde beehive hairdo. Big retro fan. Retro music, retro hair, retro eyeglasses, long skirts, Mary Janes. Come to think of it, I don't even think she needed glasses.
So I call her number, a number she'd given me when she went off to college in Louisiana. All I get is this computerized voice. Or is it a recording? I don't know. But it says the number's been disconnected. Just—poof—gone. I couldn't believe that, someone just dropping out of your life and only leaving behind these electronic impulses. You dial a number, and up pops this empty, spooky voice like a ghost that's been waiting for you for the longest time.
(And is it true about Blackbridge? The ghost stories? The weird lights and sounds? Science tells me it's bunk, but, even so, I think leaving behind a ghost is better than leaving behind a recorded voice saying your number's been disconnected.)
When Mom and Dad died a year ago on the Interstate, there was nothing there for me. Everyone had fallen away: Colleen, my friends, my parents, even my parents' house. I couldn't afford the remaining mortgage payments. Everything was just stripped away so fast. For so long everything was the same and then, suddenly, it changed. Before, I didn't know what I was going to do if my parents died, but now here I was throwing out or selling whatever they left behind, racing the clock set by some bank in New York. The day I had to leave, I remember just locking up the house, dropping the keys off at the bank branch, then pulling into a parking lot with my car packed with whatever I owned, cryi
ng so hard.
Everything in my life loaded into that sputtering mess of a car. I wished it was night so no one could see me in that parking lot. I drove past the house one last time, its doors and windows all locked up. I wanted to see Mom or Dad waving to me from a window, but all I saw were dark rooms. When I turned off that street for the last time, the sunlight looked different. It had a depth to it, and that depth just filled the world around me. I knew that even though everyone had left me behind, in my own selfish way, I needed them to have done that. I had to grope along in that dark room and find my own way out of it. It hurt a hell of a lot, you know? Of course you know, you've been there yourself, but you've pushed forward, lived life on your own terms.
Right?
I could have walked away from my physics degree, Milton. I could have run with my tail between my legs and just gotten a degree in, hell, fashion design, from some upstate college in New York. I could have let all the sneering jokes made by professors in the physics department, all the ignored questions, all the jokes behind my back, the sabotage during group assignments, the conveniently forgotten internship and co-op offers, the comments about my buttocks and breasts, all of it, just wear me down. And they almost did, but you know what? Where would I go or do? I had a lease with three roommates, a car barely alive, and a bank account barely breathing. If I'd left, I'd had been exactly where I was before, right on some old Scranton street, watching the old ladies sit and die and the people avoiding the streetlights until I eventually became one of them. I didn't walk away, Milton. I won't. I'll only walk away when it's my time.
That's why your piece was important to me, Milton. I really felt like I was on my own until your article came out. That girl you wrote about had enough problems in her life, and it didn't take much to wreck her. No one stood up for her, no one helped her hold on to her dream before it was ripped away from her. I'd never heard of her before your article, and that's what certain people in that department wanted. But you conjured up her ghost and sent it down the college hallways. When I read that article, it was almost like reading my own bio: a girl with parents who had almost nothing, growing up in some drafty, decaying house and finding peace in math and science, as if using equations to quantify the messiness of life; fighting the high school gauntlets of girls ignoring you and boys—when they're not trying to bed you—belittling you; then, having to deal with all this at Coxton.
The situation at Coxton didn't kill her, Milton. But it took away that one thing that brought her peace and a sense of actually mattering to the universe. Without that, what's the sense of anything? Equations can't solve that. We all use something to keep us alive, Milton. What's yours?
Tell me, Milton, what's yours?
***
We finished talking and agreed to meet the next day.
I watched her walk to her car as I walked to mine, the neon signage and streetlights painting her with electric rainbows.
I drove home, opened the windows of my house, and let in the cold air and the misty drizzle. It was past eight o'clock, but I began dusting furniture and window sills, sweeping out corners and mopping floors, vacuuming carpets, washing laundry and curtains, and throwing old clothes into boxes and books. I finished at three in the morning, as the air became colder and swept over the hardwood floors inside while blue-white wisps floated over the forest floor outside.
I slept in my parents' bedroom, wisplight setting the billowing curtains aglow, the sad call of cemetery voices mixed with the spring song of wind-blown trees. I slept with Elizabeth's dark hair and dark eyes all a-swirl through my dreams.
And though the house was still hollow, it began to feel, for once, less empty.
***
Summer was coming. We could both feel it in the warmth in the air and the color of the sunlight, when it becomes whiter and seems to have less weight. Liz and I watched the white light fall onto the greening grass alongside the student union. The metal bench was becoming warmer the longer we sat on it, and I felt sweat seeping under my thighs. We'd been meeting daily on and off campus for weeks. Today, she wore tan slacks and a brown shirt, and she'd been letting her hair grow a bit longer.
"I don't want kids," I said.
"No?" she said. "Why's that?" She took in a deep breath as if inhaling sunlight.
"And put them through a life like mine?"
"You saying you have your father's personality?"
"No," I said, biting my lower lip. The sun was warm, but sitting next to Liz, I felt even warmer. "Maybe I have my mother's. She was—passive. She had excuses for Dad, she had the house clean and the table ready, even though she worked all day. She did anything to keep everything stable."
"She was scared of your Dad," Liz said.
"Maybe. I thought about that. But after Dad died she was just lost. For all his rage, I guess he gave her life a purpose of some sort. Not much of a purpose, but a purpose. First she gives up on being an artist, then she accepts a life with a perpetually angry man. I guess it's true what she said to me."
"What's that?"
"That it's amazing what people get used to when it's all they know."
Very true, Milton.
I thought about the essay sitting on my writing desk. What started as twenty-five pages grew to over three hundred. I'd plumbed all I'd known about Mom's life then began to plumb my own. It was on its fourth draft, and with each draft the piece expanded or contracted like a bellows, but I found it easy to discuss my life when I wrote it down. Maybe because with an essay I didn't have to look someone else in the eye as I wrote out my life's details. Distance can be a gift.
"Keeping the peace is a tough job," Liz said.
"I suppose. You know, Liz, we didn't have much peace or happiness in that house, Liz, but Mom did do this one thing that made me happy."
"What was that?"
One year, around Christmas time, she drove me down to Wilkes-Barre on one of those nights where rain's mixed with snowflakes. Drove me to one of those Hess gas stations, you know the ones with the green signs? They sell these Hess toy trucks every year, and I'd mentioned a few weeks before how great I thought they looked, these big tanker trucks with plastic hoses attached to them and these bright functioning headlights, the whole deal. So she takes me on this ride to this station. Didn't even know that's where we were going until we drove over that bridge with the eagle sculptures at the ends of it—the one that looks like something out of the Third Reich—and pulls over into the gas station. She gets out of the car, and it's so cold outside that I'm afraid that the roads are going to ice over before we get home, but she gets out, walks into the gas station, and walks out with one of those toy trucks. It wasn't a Christmas gift, just a gift. I turned on the truck lights, and it looked so beautiful."
I paused. I didn't realize that I'd fallen silent for almost five minutes until I felt something soft and warm on my right arm. Liz had her hand on it, fingers gently rubbing my skin. I reached over, placed my hand on hers.
She said nothing, just smiled.
We sat, looking at each other, sun warming our bodies, trees budding with spring leaves.
***
That night, Elizabeth and I drove us along the Susquehanna River, then west on Route 6. The towns became fewer and fewer, and the forests became deeper and darker. We'd pull over and look up at the sky, the stars shimmering with icy light and the Milky Way white like haze. Her eyes glimmered in the starlight, and her lips tasted of the mint gum she loved to chew.
Outside a small town, we stopped at a twenty-room motel that sat alongside a small pond.
As we shifted under the bedcovers, blue sparks of static erupted over our skin.
As we lay in bed, my arms around hers, the stars rose and set over a tree-jagged horizon.
Chapter Seven
When writers send a nonfiction book to publishers with no agent, they are rolling dice. When college seniors whose only writing experience is on a small campus
newspaper do the same, they are hoping to be struck by lightning while standing in an underground cavern and holding a winning lottery ticket. The advantage the college senior has is ignorance of those odds. The other advantage the college senior has is having no expectations. The manuscript is sent with cover letter, is dropped on a slush pile desk in some glass-towered city, is lost forever, and the universe is unmoved.
Low expectations were all I had when I slid the first four chapters of my book along with a cover letter in ten large padded envelopes and mailed them through the Coxton Clarion mail desk to avoid paying shipping charges. Ten partial manuscripts sent to the four corners of the nation, hoping to find a home. As the envelopes dropped into the mail bin, I thought about my final exams, a needed visit to the campus Career Services to find a job, and a final review of my graduation checklist. One month to graduation, and I'd yet to look for work. Liz thought it'd be a good idea if I started looking soon, and I agreed.
I left the Clarion offices and walked out into the college commons, the stone path sun rays freezing me in place as I wondered which path to take.
***
"The master's will take another two years," Liz said.
"And that's what you want to do?" I asked, my arm draped over her waist as we lay in the small bed shoved into a corner of her small room. Her room was cramped with furniture: a folding desk loaded with books and computer, a folding chair covered with clothes, an assembled bookcase densely packed with science and math textbooks, a small office refrigerator in the corner that her roommates couldn't raid. The walls were thin, and we listened to her roommate's television blaring a few feet away as my eyes rested on a book on the nightstand: Applications of Geometric Optics.
Liz nodded, her thick hair brushing against my nose. "It's where all the research jobs are," she said.
I kissed the back of her head. "It's so noisy here," I said.
"It can be."
"Have you thought about staying with me?"
"I'm thinking about it."
"You won't have to pay rent."
"I know."
"It's a lot quieter."
"I can imagine."
"How so?" I asked.
"Isn't your house next to a cemetery?"