My Last Innocent Year(9)

“Shit, are you okay?” Andy asked, but I didn’t answer him. I ran back down the stairs and out of the stacks, pushing my way outside, where an icy rain had started to fall. I stopped under a streetlamp and waited a minute before looking at my hand. The skin was pink and shiny, but not broken or blistered. I watched as the color slowly faded, then squatted down and held it against the snow. The cold felt good, the heat rising from my hand with a sizzle. I held it there until it hurt, then held it there a little longer.





3





WEDNESDAY morning, I sat on a tufted green settee outside Dean Hansen’s office. Debra had had her meeting with him the day before.

“Honestly, it wasn’t a big deal,” she’d told me the night before, climbing into the top bunk with me. “He didn’t even ask about the rape. He was mainly concerned about the spray paint. Like that’s the biggest problem here. Then he was all, ‘I’m going to have to put a note in your file.’ And I was like, ‘I’m about to graduate, fucker. What do I care about some note in my file?’” She took my hand and rested it on top of hers. Our hands were practically the same size, except hers was mostly palm and mine was mostly fingers. “You’ll be fine,” she whispered. “I promise.”

I stood up and studied a picture on the wall across from the settee, a black-and-white photograph of the Wilder green taken in 1897. If you looked out the window now, you’d see almost exactly the same scene. Wilder lived for continuity and tradition; any change, no matter how small, like updating the font on the school stationery, was endlessly debated to be sure to preserve Wilder’s “character.” Debra hated what she thought of as Wilder’s inherent conservatism, but I found it comforting to know things here would always stay the same.

“Honey? He’s ready for you now.” Dean Hansen’s receptionist, a small woman in a Fair Isle sweater, nodded toward a heavy wooden door.

Dean Hansen’s office looked like a hotel room, albeit the nicest hotel room I’d ever been in. Floor-length green-and-gold curtains, leather sofa, an oriental rug so plush I wanted to curl up on it and take a nap. Dean Hansen was sitting behind a wide embossed desk, empty except for a folder, a set of matching leather accessories, a Rolodex file, and a photo of his blond weak-chinned family standing on top of a snow-covered mountain.

“Still windy out there?” Dean Hansen said as he held out a hand. It was dry and papery. “Please,” he said. “Have a seat.”

Bill Hansen, Wilder’s dean of students, was a small man with thinning blond hair and watery blue eyes. He appeared around campus at various ceremonial events, and his signature was on the letter informing each student of their acceptance to Wilder College. Other than that, he was a shadowy figure, rarely seen except for when he handled disciplinary matters. He was best known for the bow ties he wore every day. Today, it was a yellow one with whales.

“Have you made it up to the ski mountain yet?” he asked.

“Me? Um, no.”

“Back when I was a student, we used to schedule all our winter classes for Tuesdays and Thursdays so we could spend long weekends skiing.” I smiled, not wanting to tell him I didn’t ski, never had, and that I’d come to Wilder not knowing it had its own ski mountain.

“Let’s see what you’ve been doing instead of skiing.” He opened the folder in front of him with one finger. His nails were pink and shiny, the cuffs of his sleeves monogrammed, like the labels my mother used to sew on my mittens.

“Well, well,” he whistled. “You’ve done very well here. No wonder we haven’t met before. English major, French minor. Member of Young Democrats, writer for The Lamplighter and bitch slap. You even played percussion in the marching band.”

“For one semester,” I said. “They needed someone to play the triangle.”

He closed the folder. “So tell me a little bit about yourself, Isabel. Where are you from? What do your parents do?”

“I’m from New York. My father owns an appetizing store. My mom was a painter.”

“An appetizing store? What’s that?”

“It’s like a deli, except delis serve meat and appetizing stores serve fish and dairy—cream cheese, smoked fish, herring. The kind of stuff you’d put on a bagel. Observant Jews don’t mix meat and dairy, so the stores are sort of, you know, separate.”

Dean Hansen nodded. I wasn’t sure why I’d gotten so specific. Most of the time, I said my father owned a deli and left it at that. No one here ever knew what an appetizing store was, and Dean Hansen didn’t seem like someone who spent a lot of time around smoked fish.

“Any plans after graduation?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I want to be a writer.”

“Tough business.” He leaned back in his chair. “I was a bit of a scribe myself when I was younger. Had my own column in the Wilder Voice.” He talked for a while about what Wilder was like when he was a student in the early 1960s. It was the kind of conversation I would often find myself in later, when I was a writer, and someone, usually an older man, would corner me at a cocktail party or wedding and tell me the story of his life in case I might want to write about it, as if coming up with ideas was the hard part. And every time I found myself in that situation, I would think of Dean Hansen, by that point long dead of a rare cancer of the pituitary gland, and the morning I’d spent in his office.