The Unfolding, page 9
“That’s okay.”
“You’re lying.”
“Not intentionally, I just hope that I’ll get used to it. That I’ll grow into it.”
He snuggles next to her. “You know even Cindy McCain went to rehab; there is no shame. I bet she’d be happy to talk to you about it.”
“I don’t need rehab,” she says tersely.
“You’re very unhappy.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why?”
“I forgot to have my life. I’ve been having your life for a quarter of a century. The last time I had my own life I was about eleven.”
“And what were you doing?”
“I was taking tap dance lessons,” she says without pause.
“Then sign up for tap again.”
“I just might,” she says, rolling over and putting out the light.
A pause.
“Have you gone through the change?”
“Pardon?”
“The change, that’s what they call it.”
“Why are you asking?”
“I was just wondering if it’s happened.”
“Yes. It’s long gone.”
He is thinking about Meghan and the horse getting lost and the wife asking if the horse is okay and not asking about Meghan. If he asked her, she’d say that she knew Meghan was okay, but they would both know there is more to it.
“Go to sleep,” Charlotte says.
The long glass windows are shiny black. In the glow cast by the night-light, he can see his own reflection in the glass.
He doesn’t hear her the first time because he’s too busy watching.
“Go to sleep,” she repeats.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
McLean, Virginia
8:00 a.m.
The day begins with a test in history. A few of the girls know that something happened yesterday because word gets around, but no one knows exactly what. For Meghan, the bigger question is not who knows about her but who knows about the murdered girl.
“Are you okay? I heard you got arrested last night.”
“I didn’t get arrested.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I heard the police were out looking for you. I’m surprised you’re still here and they didn’t kick you out.”
“I got lost in the woods. They don’t kick you out for getting lost.”
“Two years ago, a girl got kicked out just for going into the woods.”
“She didn’t get kicked out for going into the woods; she got kicked out for selling drugs to another student who also went into the woods.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” one of the girls says. “I thought you were so upset about McCain losing the election that you committed suicide.”
“Why would I commit suicide over an election?”
“I have no idea; you know how girls are,” the girl says.
“You are a girl too,” one of the other girls says.
“Exactly,” another girl says.
“I heard that Mrs. Webster from the admissions office was crying and couldn’t be consoled. She said that it was because of her you have a horse; she felt responsible for your disappearance.”
“You all sound hysterical,” one of them says.
“That’s what’s often said about women,” Naomi Widder says. She’s the smartest one in the group.
“Ladies, ladies,” Ms. Adams says, striding into the class. Ms. Adams is a twenty-three-year-old recent graduate of William & Mary with a double major in politics and women’s history. She is the first recipient of the Woolrich Capstone Scholar Award, which invites a recent college graduate to spend a year at the school as a scholar-in-residence, doing their own research, and teaching a senior seminar. Ms. Adams is “of the Adams family,” which gives her an edge, having grown up as a descendant and receiver of history. When the semester started, she presented herself to her students as someone who early in life “became mindful of the ways in which every family has a story. The story is identity. And those who don’t agree with the story are black sheep.” The course she is teaching is called Women’s Lives: Windows and Mirrors Looking Toward a New American History.
“Today marks our midsemester, and instead of having a test, you will present your research projects. Naomi, how about you get us started.”
The desks are arranged in a circle. Ms. Adams calls her teaching style the Harkness method, a unique model from which she benefited as a student at Phillips Exeter, where she “prepped” before college.
“Thank you, Ms. Adams,” Naomi says. “As you know, I am a poet, and to be a poet one must study other poets. I zeroed in on Emily Dickinson because when I first started writing poems my mother gave me a book of Dickinson, not because she was the best woman poet but because she was the only woman poet my mother knew of who hadn’t killed herself. What I am going to talk about today is what Dickinson didn’t say and the concept of stone memory. The book A Wounded Deer by Wendy K. Perriman uses recent developments in trauma theory to unpack the idea that Dickinson was sexually abused.”
“A wounded deer, just like you,” one of the girls whispers to Meghan.
“I am not wounded,” Meghan says.
Naomi continues. “What prompted me to explore this darkness in Dickinson’s life was an experience I had. Last spring I visited Dickinson’s house in Amherst, and once inside the house, I felt uncomfortable but couldn’t explain why. Around that same time, I discovered the idea of stone memory or place memory. This is a controversial idea first explicated in Charles Babbage’s 1837 The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, the idea being that buildings or objects store and can play back past events. Babbage thought that words leave a permanent mark on the air; even though one can’t hear them anymore, they linger. Having spent time rereading Dickinson’s work and visiting her home, I feel we need to reconsider Dickinson and the possibility that many women carry within their bodies a version of stone trauma that is passed down to future generations.”
When Naomi finishes, the girls all applaud.
Meghan hears it all in the background while her mind is elsewhere. She’s replaying the events of the last forty-eight hours as if they were a movie. She is thinking about the look on her father’s face when John McCain lost. Fear. She was looking at him as the news broke; she saw color drain and a kind of cold white terror rise from his neck up. His eyes darted around the room, looking at the other men. “Game over,” someone said, she doesn’t remember who. Then her mind skips to the cab ride back to school from the airport and her conversation with Mr. Tooth. She had told him what she saw; she was almost afraid to say it, but she needed to tell someone. Mr. Tooth had nodded knowingly. “Like a bystander at the apocalypse,” he had said. “I saw that look myself only once, in November 1963.” “Election?” she had asked Mr. Tooth. “Assassination,” he had said. “President Kennedy was shot. My father came home from work in the middle of the day and he had that same look, cold white terror. And it wasn’t because my father liked Kennedy, he voted for Nixon, but because that kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen here. Reality and truth as he knew them were suddenly in question. And I can tell you that seeing the man I counted on for stability scared shitless, pardon my French, was something I never forgot.”
She is in class thinking of Kennedy being shot, the bullet cracking his skull, and she thinks of the doe in the woods and she feels it in her body, the sudden snap crack of the first shot, an immediate jolt through her body, and then the second shot. She closes her eyes, winces.
“Are you okay?” one of the girls asks.
“What?” Meghan says. “Sorry, I . . .”
“You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Take risks,” Ms. Adams is saying. “Face what feels uncomfortable. Find language for your experience. Those are a few of the first words I shared with you this September when I talked about what I hoped we would do in this course. Thank you, Naomi, for pushing us to think about Emily Dickinson. Ashley, remind us what your subject is.”
“My subject is women artists and the need for a women’s museum,” Ashley says. “When I was younger, my parents used to take me to museums all the time, and at first, I didn’t notice that there were no women artists represented, and then I began to wonder why.”
Nur presents her ideas on the luxury of being a housewife, cycles of the feminist movement, and does one have to hate men in order to support women. Haley discusses colonial brick and mortar and the dirt under a woman’s fingernails.
Meghan can only think about last night: the deer in the woods, the fawn without its mother, the enormously loud crack of the bullet. She is thinking about the murdered girl. Her head is spinning; maybe it’s not having breakfast, maybe it’s a hangover from the small glass of sherry the headmistress had given her.
“Meghan, are you with us?” Ms. Adams asks.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Ms. Adams says. “Women apologize too often.”
“Right, sorry,” Meghan says again, then takes a deep breath. “My project is called ‘Riding Astride’; it examines how ideas about women, horses, and power have changed throughout history. My subject was influenced by my experience growing up as an only child with a mother who is somewhat formal. I admire my mother enormously but she is not cuddly. Riding is how we spend time together and it is where I have seen her demonstrate both physical strength and intellectual fortitude, skills that she has passed on to me. I have memories of my mother’s eyes on me as I was cantering around the ring, the sense I had that I was pleasing her, seeking her approval, not a male gaze. The relationship of women to horses has been for the most part explored by men who see things as sexualized. Men believe that a woman on a horse is working out her sexual fantasies, her anxieties about men. I can tell you that my horse, Ranger, is not thinking about my butt or my thighs in sexual terms. My horse is experiencing the communication between my body and his; he is feeling my butt and thighs as command and power of body and mind. When I am riding my horse—I am empowered, confident, and free.” Meghan continues to read from her paper. “Horses are the stuff of dreams and fairy tales, but they also have a place in women’s historical narrative from Sacagawea to Annie Oakley and Inez Milholland. Deep and musky. Wise and gallant. Before the fourteenth century, women rode astride. Joan of Arc, burned at the stake at nineteen for the crime of being a witch, was a young woman ahead of her time. Joan of Arc rode astride. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, was rumored to have died after having sex with her horse Dudley. Asking one to imagine Catherine in a sexual exchange with a horse was meant to show how ‘unnatural’ it was for her to rule as empress. Her freedom to rule, to take many lovers, bothered people who saw her behavior like that of a man. Catherine the Great rode astride. Anne of Bohemia, sent from Prague to England to be wed to King Richard II, was forced to ride sidesaddle, strapped to a horse because her family wanted to be sure she arrived ‘intact.’ The advent of the sidesaddle was to prevent accidental rupture of the royal hymen, which would render her unmarriageable. Anne was packaged and delivered like a parcel. When riding in public, Queen Elizabeth often rode sidesaddle as she did in 1987 for the ceremonial Trooping the Colour, but more often, she is seen riding astride, such as in 1982 when she and President Reagan rode together at Windsor Castle. Horses brought women full throttle into the future. Inez Milholland, a suffragette, labor lawyer, and activist, led the March 1913 suffrage parade of eight thousand women down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, in a white cape riding on her horse, Gray Dawn. In 1916 Milholland collapsed while giving a speech and died in Los Angeles, having given her life so that we may ‘go forward into the light.’ ”
Meghan pauses, lip quivering, and begins to cry.
“What is it? What are you crying about?” Ms. Adams asks.
“Everything.” Meghan sniffles. “I am crying about everything. It seems that if one wants to ride astride, to be powerful and independent, one has to leave things behind.”
“Like what?” one of the girls asks.
“Like your family,” another girl says. “Like everything that people expect you to be.”
“Being a senior is hard,” Ms. Adams says. “You’re on the cusp of so much.”
The girls look at Ms. Adams as if to ask, Is that the best you can do?
“We pretend things have changed, but have they? Really?” another girl says.
“She’s crying about the dead girl,” Ashley says matter-of-factly.
“What dead girl?” Ms. Adams wants to know.
“The one no one talks about,” Ashley says. “A girl from here vanished and was found murdered in the woods.”
“What do you mean, vanished?”
“You know the crappy school bikes that we ride downhill but never ride them back up? The bikes they put in the back of the truck and drive uphill?”
The girls all nod.
“One day, after chapel, this girl went off on her bike and no one noticed she was gone until dinner. The next day they found her body in the woods.”
“Are you sure this is a true story?” Ms. Adams asks.
“My aunt knew her,” Ashley says. “She said she was a very nice girl, among the nicest of the girls.”
Naomi pats Meghan on the back as if she were burping her.
Meghan is still crying. She can’t go back to things the way they were. None of this can continue.
“Are you crying for the dead girl?” Nur asks.
“I’m crying for all the girls,” Meghan manages to say. “I’m crying for everyone.”
“It didn’t happen here,” Haley says.
“It happened,” Naomi says, and Haley begins to cry.
“Somewhere in the woods there is a fawn without its mother,” Meghan says. “And there is a dead girl missing out on history.”
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Palm Springs, California
5:00 a.m.
What Comes Next? He’s scratched the question in large letters across the middle of his desk blotter with a blue Paper Mate Flair felt-tip pen. These are his favorite pens: blue, black, red, and green. Blue is for new ideas; black is for notes and signatures; red equals corrections or emergency; and the green, well, the green is for money, adding it all up. The Paper Mate Flair was first made by Frawley Pen of Oak Brook, Illinois, later acquired by Gillette.
He’s got his stack of cocktail napkins from the Biltmore bar next to him and is working his way through them, deciphering his notes, some of which are stuck together with egg yolk.
He draws on the blotter paper, “sketching,” he calls it, but really it’s a map, a tree of ideas. He uses a set of symbols he’s invented, including what he calls a “mental paper clip” and various marks that exist somewhere between logic notations and copyediting marks. It’s a code understood only by its author—dots, dashes, squiggles, and a few newer familiar faces, :). He learned that one only recently from his daughter.
“What did your teacher used to put on your papers when you were a kid?” Meghan had asked, showing off her ☺ A+.
“Gold stars,” he said. “She used to put gummed gold-foil stars on our papers. And what did we talk about most? The idea that Mrs. Worth had licked the back of the stars, that our papers had her saliva on them.”
“When was that?” she asked. “The 1920s?”
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t even born in the 1920s. This was in 1950s Connecticut.”
He uses his blue pen to put a couple of ☺s on the thick white blotter paper next to the ideas he’s particularly fond of, watching each of the lines grow wider as the thick white paper stock drinks up the ink; the • • in the ☺ expands like pupils dilating.
His idea is focused on what he sees as the failure of the Republican Party. Inspired by what he and the man in the bar discussed, he draws a series of large bubbles echoing the structure of the government and writes inside them: Executive, Legislative, Judicial. Then a series of smaller bubbles: Military, Finance, Health, Media. Coming off each of those in squiggly lines like small waves or a wake from a boat, he scrawls: choir, footslogger, pawn, man on the ground.
With his map before him, he spins around in his chair, opens his filing cabinets, and begins to dig. He has a row of three wooden cabinets that have been retrofitted with serious locks. He has three sets of the same cabinets, one in each of his homes, each with the same contents. He calls them the vaults. Everything in the vaults is filed in chronological order, oldest in the back, newest up front.
When he’s trying to figure something out, he works the vault. It’s like his own Rubik’s Cube; what he’s looking for are the right elements, the recipe. The common ingredient is money, a lot of money. What is in the vault? Everything. Lists of the meetings he’s had every year, the business deals he’s been offered, what he’s taken, what he’s turned down. He has files on his friends. “Your own little FBI,” Tony once called it.
For this endeavor, he makes a chart of men who are connected to one another through business, where they went to school, where they play golf, their wives and families. He’s trying to figure out what he can build where the parts can act both synchronously and asynchronously without the workings being exposed, something operational and yet scrambled well enough so the identity of those pulling the strings can’t be traced.
He knows this idea is not unique; he is well aware men far greater than he have made plans of their own in the past—but where are they now?
In general, it’s best not to tell the Big Guy what can’t be done because he will find a way; a wall or the word impossible is not a barrier, it’s a source of excitement, a challenge in a life that has otherwise become far too routine.
By this point, he’s pulled out files, notes, and stacks of business cards, and is connecting the dots. As he works, he’s reminded of the tools of childhood: Erector sets, plain wooden blocks, scraps of wood, old bricks he used to find in the yard. He always enjoyed building a world of his own design. He knows that kids still do that, but now the Lego kits come with instructions and contain only the pieces to build the thing in the picture on the front of the box. He knows that kids build worlds on their computers and play virtual war games, but whatever he’s making, he likes to be hands-on, to feel it, to touch it.
