The Nix(134)

“Okay. And?”

“We were all sort of intertwined—in Chicago, in college—me and the judge and your mom.”

“That’s information you maybe should have led with.”

“You have to get your mom out of town, like immediately.”

“Tell me why.”

“Maybe even get her out of the country.”

“Help my mom flee the country. That’s your advice.”

“I wasn’t entirely honest about why I moved out here, to Indiana. The real reason was because of him. When I heard he was back in Chicago, I moved away. I was afraid of him.”

Samuel sat down with her in the grass and they stared at each other a moment, shell-shocked.

“What did he do to you?” he asked.

“Your mom is in trouble,” Alice said. “The judge will never yield. He’s ruthless and dangerous. You have to take her away. Do you hear me?”

“I don’t understand. What’s his grudge against her?”

She sighed and looked at the ground. “He’s like the most dangerous species of American there is: heterosexual white male who didn’t get what he wanted.”

“You need to tell me exactly what happened,” Samuel said.

About three feet past her left knee, she noticed a small and heretofore unseen patch of garlic mustard—first-year shoots, a smattering of clover hiding under the grass. It wouldn’t go to seed until next summer, but when it did it would race up above the surrounding plants and kill them all.

“I’ve never told this story,” she said. “Not to anyone.”

“What happened in 1968?” Samuel said. “Please tell me.”

Alice nodded. She ran her hands along the grass and the thin blades tickled her palms. She made a mental note to come prune this spot tomorrow. The problem with mustard is that you can’t just chop it down. The seeds can last for years. It will always come back. You have to cut it out completely. You have to cut it out by the roots.





| PART SEVEN |


CIRCLE


Late Summer 1968





1


HER OWN ROOM. Her own key and mailbox. Her own books. Everything was hers but the bathroom. Faye hadn’t considered this. The dorm’s clinical foul-smelling community bathroom. Stale water, dirty floors, sinks strewn with hair, trash cans thick with tissues and tampons and balled-up brown paper towels. A smell like slow decay that reminded her of a forest. Faye imagined, beneath the floor, earthworms and mushrooms. How the bathroom bore the evidence of so much appalling use—soap slivers now fused to their trays, fossils. The one toilet that’s always plugged. The slime on the walls like a brain where the memory of each girl’s cleaning lived. She thought if you looked deep enough into the floor you could find there, embalmed in the pink tiles, the whole history of the world: bacteria, fungus, nematodes, trilobites. A dormitory was a hopeless idea. Whoever thought of encasing two hundred girls in a concrete box? The narrow rooms, shared bath, massive cafeteria—the comparison to prison was unavoidable. It was a dark and creepy bunker, their dorm. From the outside its concrete skeleton looked like some martyr’s flayed chest—all you could see were the ribs. All the buildings on Circle’s campus looked this way: inside out, exposed. Sometimes walking to class she ran her fingers along the walls where the concrete resembled acne and she felt embarrassed for the buildings, how an eccentric designer had taken their guts and put them on view. A perfect metaphor, she thought, for dormitory living.

Take this bathroom, where all the girls’ private fluids commingled. The big open shower with sour puddles of water like gray jelly. A vegetable smell. Faye wore sandals. And if her neighbors were awake they would know it was Faye walking down the hall by the flop flop flop. But they weren’t awake. It was six o’clock in the morning. Faye had the bathroom to herself. She could shower alone. She preferred it this way.

Because she didn’t want to be here with the other girls, her neighbors, who gathered nightly in their small rooms and giggled, got high, talked about the protest, the police, the pipes they passed to smoke with, the medicines they expanded their minds with, the electric songs they screeched along with: “Looks like everybody in this whole round world / They’re down on me!” they cried to the record player like it bled from them. Faye heard their wails through her wall, a litany to a terrible god. It seemed disallowable that these girls could really be her neighbors. Freaky beatniks, psychedelic revolutionaries who needed to learn to clean up after themselves in the bathroom, was Faye’s opinion, looking at a glob of tissue near the wall, now mostly liquefied. She took off her robe and turned on the spray and waited for the water to warm.

Every night the girls laughed and Faye listened. She wondered what made the girls able to sing so unself-consciously. Faye didn’t talk to them and looked at the floor when they passed by. They chewed on their pencils in class and complained about the teacher, how he only taught the old straight shit. Plato, they said, Ovid, Dante—dead men *s with nothing to say to today’s youth.

That’s how they said it—today’s youth—as if college students these days were a brand-new species totally disconnected from the past and from the culture that spawned them. And as far as Faye could tell, the rest of the culture pretty much agreed. Older adults complained about them endlessly on CBS News’s nightly examinations of the “Generation Gap.”