A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 6

  She didn’t put a grade on his paper but handed it back with a note: Please see me. After class he approached her desk. “Not so good, huh?”

  “You don’t seem familiar with basic composition. Are you aware of that?”

  “I guess so.” He shrugged. He didn’t seem especially troubled by her criticism.

  “You’re going to have to improve in order to pass the course.”

  “OK,” he said mildly. “I do a lot better with multiple choice.”

  “Do you have a few minutes? Let me show you what I mean about your paper.”

  He hitched a chair next to her desk and Evelyn did her best to go through his writing and explain the problems. She drew diagrams and put arrows in the margins. Rusty followed along, nodding his head and seeming to agree. He didn’t seem able to stay entirely still, and kept shifting around in his seat. When she was finished he thanked her. “I guess I’m not much of a writer type either.”

  “You could get a tutor. I can help you find one.”

  “I do appreciate that, but tell you the truth, I’m kind of doing this at my own pace.”

  Evelyn put his paper, now bleeding red ink, to one side. “Do you care about getting a passing grade?”

  He looked embarrassed. “College was sort of my mom’s idea. She said, as long as they were handing out money. I told her it wasn’t my best move, but, well, mothers.”

  “You were in the service.”

  “Navy. Stateside. Just dumb luck we didn’t ship out. San Diego. We had ourselves a time there. You ever been to California? You should go see it if you can, it’s a beaut. I really like your class. You do a great job, you make it all interesting.”

  “Thank you.” You took your compliments where you found them.

  “No, I mean it. I’m supposed to be taking an English class but I quit going, it wasn’t nearly as good as yours. Honest? I don’t think I even knew there was an ancient Greece. Just the modern one.”

  She guessed she could stop worrying about having to give him a dismal grade. She asked him where he was from and he named a small town more than a hundred miles away. His family farmed, corn and beans and a few beef cattle. He’d go home and help out once he’d put in enough school time to convince his mom it wasn’t working out. It wasn’t a bad life, farming. The government was going to help with that too, with the new price supports. He was taking an ag course on soils, well, he was not exactly enrolled in it but he sat in the back and listened and that was just great. He was buying the textbooks so he could follow along. You could pick up a lot of things if you kept your ears open. “Man, I love the university. I think the smartest people in the country work here. I should have just stayed home and signed up for some ag extension courses but, you know . . .”

  “Mothers,” Evelyn finished for him.

  “She looks at me and sees a college man. Nobody else does.”

  Listening to him, Evelyn thought how at ease he was with the world, how confident that it would give him what he wanted. He was the history that was yet to happen. He talked about his idea for a side business. Farm implements, tractors, and such. He’d taken plenty of machines apart and put them back together. He had a knack for it. He figured there was good money in it, the markets were going to be wide open now. Watch how big it got.

  The war had made him. There were people she would never meet, that no one would. They had been trampled under, erased. But for those who were young enough and lucky enough, there would be opportunities. Windfalls.

  “How about you?” he was saying. “You seem real young to be a professor.” And she had to explain that she wasn’t a professor, only an instructor. “That’s just as well,” he said. “I don’t think I’d have the nerve to ask a real professor to come out for a drive with me. Especially one as pretty as you.”

  How long had it been since a man flirted outrageously with her? You took that where you found it also.

  Rusty had a GMC half-ton pickup, a farm truck, battered maroon, with bits of straw and other loamy debris in the corners of the homemade bed. Evelyn walked downtown to meet him since he was still her student, no matter how temporary or unserious, and she didn’t want to court trouble. He was younger than she was, twenty-two. She knew how it looked.

  He pulled up at the curb and got out to help her into the passenger seat. “Not exactly limousine service,” he said cheerfully. Evelyn settled herself in the cracked leather of the seat. He had made some effort at cleaning. A section of the dashboard had been wiped free of dust, and the ashtray emptied, although the smell of cigarettes hung on like a fog. “No radio,” he said. “You’ll have to talk to me.”

  He drove them out of town heading north on a two-lane. She could never get used to the flatness here. The horizon went on forever, with nothing to stop it. Here and there a tree line. The farm fields were laid out like a grid, cultivated right up to the edge of the road. She loved plants and flowers but this kind of growth had more to do with industry than nature. It was October and still warm. Rusty pointed out the things a farmer would know. The good or bad condition of corn waiting for harvest. The drainage problem with a particular acreage.

  The truck didn’t have much speed, but it went fast enough to kick up a breeze. She tried to listen to him, nodding along, but the noise of the truck drowned him out. She was so ignorant of so much. In the new world that had already begun, there would be no room for anyone like herself, anyone who looked to the past for answers, or who did not eagerly embrace change.

  The railroad tracks ran parallel to the highway. Little towns, some no more than a street or two deep, appeared at intervals. There was a depot, a water tower, a café or a tavern. In the larger ones, a bank branch, a church. One or two big houses, with shade trees and pillared front porches, then a string of smaller and frankly poorer ones, the town trailing off into sheds and grass lanes, an abandoned barn, a graveyard set inside a rail fence. On the side of a brick building now serving as a garage, a painted advertisement for a livery stable, faded but still visible.

  They stopped at one of these towns and sat at a lunch counter and ordered pie and coffee. No one knew them here. Rusty got on with the waitress like they were old friends. He understood small-town small talk, which might begin with the weather and progress into accounts of children and grandchildren, national politics, and local scandals. He left a dollar tip by his plate and they went back out into the fading afternoon.

  “You get along with everyone, don’t you?” Evelyn asked as they started out again, this time heading south and home.

  “Maybe not everybody. Ask my lieutenant. He thought I was a, well, a horse’s patoot.”

  “Everybody you want to, then.”

  “You know who I get along best with? Pretty women.” He leaned over the gearshift and kissed her.

  They took three such drives, and each time afterward they went to his rooms. Evelyn was not inexperienced, thanks to the mathematician. They were awkward with each other at first but that didn’t last. She said, “It’s probably against all sorts of rules. Teachers and students.”

  He had been dozing, his arm around her, and now he roused himself. “I’m only an accidental student. Besides, people are people.” He would be leaving school soon to help his family with the harvest. There was no point in saying much more about that part of things.

  What point, indeed, in saying more about anything? But she couldn’t help herself today, when the perfect strangeness of her situation overwhelmed her. She said, “Do you ever miss the war?”

  “What? What brought that on?”

  “I don’t know.” But she did know. “I don’t mean, I miss people fighting and dying. I miss the way it was for us here. Everything was for a good cause. A purpose. Even teaching my classes was important, because it meant somebody else could serve. Now they don’t need me. It’s not their fault.”

  She could tell he was considering his options. Sympathize or try to talk her out of it. “Well, don’t they still need you? Here you are teaching. Here
I am, your ace number one student.” He reached down to give one nipple a friendly tweak.

  Evelyn allowed his hand to stay there, exploring, teasing, then going lower to tickle and spread her, and then they were both breathing hard again, and trying not to make the kind of noise that would carry beyond the thin walls.

  Then it was time for her to leave. Rusty went out into the hallway first to make sure no one was there, and they went quickly down the hallway and out to the street. “Would you do something for me?” Evelyn asked.

  “Sure,” he said after a beat. After considering what kind of inconvenient something she might have in mind.

  “Teach me how to drive.”

  “Yeah?” He was relieved. “Of course. If that’s what you want. How come?”

  “I don’t want to be . . .” She might have said “left behind,” but she didn’t want him to think she was talking about him, complaining about his leaving. “ . . . unprepared. Now that so many things are going to be different.”

  “Why sure. Lots of girls—women—drive nowadays. My chance to play teach, huh?”

  The next time they went out driving, which turned out to be the last time, he stopped the truck at a crossroads with nothing and no one else in sight. “Your turn,” he said. He put her behind the wheel and showed her the starter, accelerator, and brake. How to work the clutch when she shifted gears. “Feel that little whine at the top of the gear? That means you shift. There you go.” She was a natural, he said.

  No she wasn’t. She was terrified to feel the engine rev or falter every time she hesitated or made some inexpert move. The size and weight of the truck made it feel like a large and wayward animal with a mind of its own. “Take your time,” he said. “You got it! Now you’re cooking with gas.”

  It took her a while to get a feel for it. She stalled out twice and had to restart the engine. Nobody would have called her a natural. Still, Evelyn managed to wrestle the truck into reluctant compliance. Rusty joked about giving her a grade.

  Evelyn had managed almost four miles when he said, “Looks like we got a little weather moving in.”

  It was far enough away that it seemed like a curiosity. A dark patch you could cover with a thumbnail, off to the west. The darkness glinted. “Oh, lightning.” Everything was so flat, it was like viewing a giant map, a battlefield map, perhaps, where generals had planted flags and moved toylike troops from one place to another.

  Rusty said, “You want me to take over now?”

  “No, I’m all right. Really.”

  “Then you might want to go a little faster.”

  At first it seemed they might outrun it. But the storm was in a hurry, as if it had a mind to catch them. They watched it take up more and more of the sky. Lightning froze a moment’s view of the dark lowering underside of clouds. Soon it was close enough for them to hear thunder.

  “Oh my God,” Evelyn said, not in panic but with a kind of awe. Wind was shredding the dry cornstalks and blowing the long, papery leaves across the windshield. The sky ahead darkened. The steering wheel shook and her hands along with it.

  “Don’t stop now. You stop, we could get hit from behind.” He told her how to work the headlights. They rolled the windows up and the inside of the truck turned stuffy. “Slow down a little. You don’t want to overdrive your lights.”

  The storm was straight ahead. Sheets of lightning turned the fields white. Rain hit the windshield in hard bursts. Rusty leaned over to turn the wipers on. Were they still on the road? It was hard to tell. Rain streamed over them. The wipers couldn’t hold it back. She hit the gas by mistake and the truck jumped. “Sorry,” Evelyn said, or tried to say, but the thunder spoke an awful word.

  And then it was over. The rain slackened and turned to mist. They looked at each other, both talking at once.

  “I never—”

  “—that was some—”

  Evelyn said, “I think I would like you to drive now, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “You are something else. Courage under fire!”

  “I think I was too scared to stop.” It was going to take a little time for her to catch her breath and decide how to feel about it. Terrified? Exhilarated? Probably both. The sky behind them was purple, lit by sunlight. Water shone in the ditches along the road. The storm moved east, still complaining to itself. She pulled the truck over into a muddy lane and when they got out to trade places, her legs sagged and she leaned against the hood.

  “Hey.” He went to help her and she turned and they kissed for a long time and he said they should probably get a move on. Head on back to town. But first he gave her backside a squeeze, and then let his hands do other things. Right out there in the open, in front of God or anybody else who came along, but no one did.

  By the time Evelyn suspected she was pregnant, he had gone back home to be a farmer again. Day after day, she trod a circle of worry and panic and blurry disbelief. They had been careful. They had not been careful enough. She had to do something. Or she could do nothing at all and her life would become unrecognizable. She would lose what was left of her teaching job and they would remove her from the doctoral program. They could do that. How would she live, how would she raise a child? Her parents had their own problems of declining health and declining fortunes and anyway she could not present her shameful self to them when they had made such a proud point of boasting of her.

  There were ways in which you would not have a baby, but she knew nothing about these, nor even whom she might ask.

  Or she could leave and find somewhere that would take her in, some grim Catholic or Lutheran institution where the girls were the object of a lot of disgusted prayers, and they took your baby and gave it to people who would be better for it than you would be.

  She would have to get married. Wouldn’t she? She didn’t trust her own thinking. There was a hole in her brain and she kept shoving possibilities into it, then watching them erupt like geysers. Married to Rusty? Would he have her? Wouldn’t his mother weigh in and tip the balance? And say they did marry. She would be a farmer’s wife and she would be no good at it, no good at all, useless and feeble when it came to wrangling calves or canning vegetables, complaining about dirt and flies and bad-tasting well water. She would be just as big a mistake for him as he would be for her. An educated girl, she knew, was not always a welcome thing.

  Andrew invited her to a reception at the home of one of the law school faculty. Evelyn understood that this was an important occasion for him, one where he hoped to present himself as a logical, inevitable choice for a greater presence at the school. And she would be a part of that presentation.

  She had a good dress that he had not seen (because he had not taken her anywhere that required it), a full-skirted blue taffeta with a waterfall bow at the back of the waist. She fixed her hair with care and did what she could with rouge and powder. She’d been feeling sick and wretched most mornings. Now she hoped to look blooming and pretty. Although Andrew’s offer of marriage was still on the table, so to speak, it was important that he repeat it, and that everything should be his idea.

  She was too desperate to feel guilty for trying to deceive him. Andrew both was and was not stupid. He believed it was reasonable to propose marriage to a woman he had not known very long, or very well; he believed it was reasonable that she might accept him. But if they did marry and if she had a baby too soon, a healthy, full-term, red-haired baby who would grow up to take an uncanny interest in tractors—she didn’t know what he would do. Unleash the power of the law on her, cast her out.

  She would have the baby in secret, put it in a basket, and leave it at the farmhouse’s front door.

  Waiting for Andrew to come get her, she felt her stomach churn and heave and had to run into the bathroom and drape a towel around her as she retched.

  “Don’t you look nice,” Andrew said when he arrived. Evelyn murmured a thank-you. She had a roll of Stik-O-Pep Life Savers in her handbag and she kept one under her tongue to settle her stomach. Andrew steer
ed her outside. “It’s only a few blocks,” he said. “I thought it would be all right to walk.”

  He had a car but he was stingy about using it. And so they set off through the early darkness. The weather had turned frosty and the sidewalk had patches of thin glaze that she had to pick her way around carefully. Her shoes were low-cut shell pumps and no good for walking. Why were they walking? She knew where the host lived; it was a neighborhood clear on the other side of campus. And at the end of the evening, she would be expected to walk back. What was the matter with him? Why wouldn’t he spend enough on gas to take her out in decent fashion? Had he even looked at her shoes? Of course not. He didn’t think about such things. They would have to be pointed out to him. Again and again.

  Her ankles were cold; they were making her steps clumsy. Andrew had to slacken his pace to keep from bounding away from her. He often walked for exercise and was a believer in the curative powers of fresh air. It was another of his principles, maintaining good health. Wasn’t that admirable? Yes, but it was also infuriating, as were the entirety of his thought-through notions, his reasons for distrusting soft-cooked eggs and voting for Hoover, some number of which she had already heard and some unknown number of which she had not, at least not yet. This would be her life with him, or some portion of it: the receiving of opinions.

  But you could not entirely dismiss such a man, or entirely resent him, or even make fun of him. He was too upright, too serious and substantial. When he said a thing, he meant it. If he had any dark or conflicted thoughts, any bad wartime memories, he would put them in their place and move on. If she married him, he would always be himself, a pillar of certainty. She might rage against him and argue, but he would not be moved. And that would be exasperating but also a relief, to have someone so close at hand, who could be so reliably contradicted, scorned, denied, and who would always, always be there to accept more.