Carrie Pilby Read online

  That was around the point that Professor Harrison began to express a more-than-academic interest in me.

  I fold Dean Nymczik’s letter and balance it in the alley between my computer and printer. Dean Nymczik doesn’t understand. Few people do. There are a great many people who believe themselves to be smart—in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t—but none of them are smart enough.

  And this is my father’s Big Lie.

  The exact lie—let me see if I can remember it correctly—was this: “When you get to college, you’ll meet people who are just like you.”

  He’d say, junior high is tough, high school is tough. In college, they’ll be just like you.

  Just wait until you get to college.

  They were not. And they are not. I went through four years, and now I’m out. On the rare occasions I meet people now, I find that they consider snowboarding a cultural activity and that their main reading material is TV Guide. And I don’t know how to respond to that.

  So mostly I stay in bed.

  Chapter Three

  There’s a good reason that I don’t have any friends in the city. Most people’s friends are people they met at college. And most people they became friends with at college are people they met freshman year. And most people they met freshman year, they met during the first few weeks of school.

  I did start off with a few friends freshman year. My roommate, Janie, was my friend. But she dropped out of school in November. Another friend I had was a girl named Nora, who was a prodigy, like me. The week before the start of classes, they kept having receptions for prodigies. At one of them, I was standing by the window, staring outside and holding a cup of 7UP, and Nora came over to me. “You look bored,” she said. “Do you know anyone here? I don’t.” Then she dragged me over to other groups of people and we stood next to them until we were included in the conversation. It took Nora only a little while to be the leader of the conversation. Unfortunately, the fact that she was so friendly meant she quickly became friendly with a lot of people. She started organizing all kinds of things, especially during the first few weeks of school. She’d get an idea for something to do, like walk around Boston or head to a movie, and she’d e-mail a bunch of people including me, and we’d meet up and go. But people like that never stay friends with me for long. They’re so outgoing and loud and popular that they get swept away by people who are more like them. I shrink in that kind of competition. Nora contacted me less and less. I think she also got a boyfriend. I saw them on campus together. At first, even after we stopped doing things together, when Nora and I would pass each other around Harvard, we would wave to each other. After a while, we just nodded. After another while, we started pretending we didn’t see each other. It’s weird how once you dip below a certain level with people, you’re no longer above the say-hello threshold and you have to pretend not to see them so that it’s not awkward. Maybe it happens because it starts getting too risky. You’re not sure they’ll say hello back, and if they don’t, you’ll feel embarrassed. I remember that it was also that way with certain professors on campus. Students in a huge lecture class would definitely know the professor, but we wouldn’t know if they really knew us. So saying hi to them on campus would put pressure on them to figure out who we were, but if they did recognize us and we didn’t say anything, they might think we were being snobby. It was a real quandary.

  When I think back to Harvard, I get mixed feelings. I remember the beginning of each semester, when the air would turn cool and I’d look out my dorm window at all the students strolling in their hooded crimson sweatshirts through the fallen leaves. I’d get excited because there were new classes and new possibilities to come. But my hopes would fade quickly as the semester wore on. No one would talk to me in class. I’d eat alone in the dining hall, and I’d spend Saturday night looking out my window at everyone else, just like the previous semester. And it wasn’t that I wanted to be doing what they were doing, but that I wanted them to be doing things with me that I wanted to be doing. And what hurt most was that I was on a campus that students around the world would give their eyeteeth to be at, so I should have been absolutely thrilled, but instead, it seemed like it was everyone else’s place except mine.

  And now I’m in New York, in a hip part of town that people around the world would give their eyeteeth to live in, and I feel exactly the same way.

  The only period during which things were different was when I was with Professor Harrison.

  I don’t remember thinking much of anything the first time I saw him. It was English 203, The Modernists, second semester of sophomore year. There were twelve of us in the class; they’d broken it into two sections. The other section just got a grad student, and mine got a full professor. We were lucky.

  Harrison was average height, about forty years old, with brown hair that was starting to gray. He had a tendency to wear soft V-neck sweaters. He told us the first day that he didn’t want this to be a typical English class where we just read the novels and competed to give the best deconstruction. He said that, once or twice, he’d ask us to write our own modernist pieces. I was a little nervous because I’ve never been as good at writing as I am at other things. Most people like writing to be intimate and revealing, and I resent having to tell the most private details of my life in order to interest people. Plus, writing isn’t as exact as other subjects. In high school, I would sometimes start a creative writing assignment and feel like I was skating into the middle of the ice with nothing to hold on to. My best subjects were math and science. I was also pretty good in philosophy and literature, but not at writing my own literature.

  Harrison went around the room and asked each of us to tell where we were from and what our major was. I found myself wishing that most professors did this, since people in many of my classes didn’t really get to know each other. This was my chance. I said that I loved reading and observing human behavior. When I finished, Harrison smiled, nodded and said, “Welcome to the class.”

  We left that day with a writing assignment: to introduce ourselves and then talk about something we disliked about our personalities. Harrison said that plumbing one’s own flaws was a characteristic of modernist writing. I wanted to impress Harrison right away, so I had to do this properly. In my dorm room, I lay on my stomach on my bed, cooled by the chilly air that blew in through a crack in the window. I agonized for an hour over the opening line.

  Eventually, I decided on, “Of the three grades I skipped, second grade seemed the most abrupt.”

  There. I’d put the most salient thing about me first. And it was a little revealing. Surely he’d like that.

  I added, “Suddenly, I’d gone from pencil to pen, from printing to script, from oral show-and-tells to oral reports, from running from boys to watching classmates chase them. Skipping fourth and eighth grades was a breeze.”

  Yes, this was good.

  I told some more about myself, but finding something I disliked about myself was hard. I thought of the first quasi-modernist book I’d read, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, when I was nine and my French lesson had been canceled. The protagonist had to, it seemed, try and say every extreme thing that came into his head to see what happened. I didn’t have a similar quirk. I thought some more. What could I write about that would make a good modernist essay? I could invent something. Sometimes I feel…like a cockroach. Sometimes I feel like a swing set. Nah. I decided to write about being too studious. It wasn’t very intellectual, and it wouldn’t incorporate much symbolism. But what the heck. It was just one assignment.

  During the second and third classes, Harrison didn’t mention the essays we’d turned in. We dissected various modernist authors. One kid in the class, Brian Buchman, was the biggest kiss-up I’d met yet, and at Harvard that was quite an achievement. If he’d been sincere, I would have admired him, but he had a tone that was clearly false. Half of what he was spewing was stuff I’d learned in high school, but he made it seem like he was d
iscovering nuclear energy.

  When the third class ended, and everyone was shoving their books into their natty black backpacks, Harrison called me up to his desk.

  I stood there while Brian Buchman said goodbye.

  “Do you have a few minutes, or are you in a rush?” Harrison asked me. “Do you have time to come to my office?”

  “I have time.”

  We walked down the hall to a pentagonal cul-de-sac with a wooden door in each wall. A few of the doors had yellowing newspaper cartoons taped to them. Harrison’s door was blank except for his name. We entered his office and he sat at a rusty metal desk. He had a few newspaper clippings taped to the painted-white cinderblock walls, and there were papers piled high on a broken chair. I’d heard before that academics got no respect, and the size of Harrison’s office proved it. He was a well-regarded professor, and this was what he had to work in.

  Harrison leaned back. “I found your introduction very interesting.”

  “Thanks.” I noticed there were no photographs on his desk.

  “You said in your essay that you study too hard.”

  “Well, maybe there isn’t such a thing,” I said, trying not to be nervous. “But some people say that.”

  I remember noticing that he had a maroon sweater on and suddenly thinking it looked good on him. He had slightly wavy hair and intense brown eyes. He said, “Starting college at fifteen doesn’t sound easy.”

  “Well, it’s not so hard academically. But…”

  “Socially, it could be hard.”

  I nodded.

  “You sure you don’t have somewhere to be right now?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yes. This is my last class on Thursdays.”

  “You the oldest in your family?”

  “I’m an only child.”

  “Mmm,” he said. “I had a younger brother. It created some tension when I got so much more attention in school.”

  “Did you skip grades?”

  “I only skipped one grade. But I found it hard. For you to have skipped three…that must have been quite an adjustment.”

  I nodded again.

  “How are you finding school?”

  He looked straight at me. I hadn’t found anyone that interested in me since back when I had interviewed for college in the first place.

  We ended up talking for more than an hour. We got to things I hadn’t told anyone. I told him about sitting in my dorm room freshman year, after my roommate had moved out, feeling miserable even though everyone kept saying how lucky I was to have the room to myself; I talked about the earliest smart things I’d said to adults that had made their eyes widen, like going up to a woman in the library when I was seven and pointing to her copy of Call It Sleep and saying, “That’s a good book.” I talked about figuring out how to play “Für Elise” on the inside of the piano when I was five. I stopped several times for fear I was boring him, but he kept urging me on. At times, he would reciprocate, telling a story about something smart he’d done as a kid, or a time he had felt out of place, and I almost felt as if he thought he needed to impress me. That was strange.

  “One day, the boy who lived next door to me was reading a comic book on his stoop,” Harrison said. “He wouldn’t show it to me, so I stood in front of him and started reading it upside down, out loud. He was amazed, even though it’s not so hard to read upside down. He thought I was a genius. Then he ran and got a bunch of his friends, who kept giving me things to read upside down. They made me feel like some sort of superhero.”

  I told him about something that had happened with a neighbor of mine.

  “When I was in first grade,” I said, “this sixth-grader who lived on my block came up to me on the playground at school and told me he was doing a report and he needed an example of a case in which the First Amendment wouldn’t apply. All the kids used to ask me for help, even the ones who picked on me. I told him that yelling ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater was an example, even though we have the First Amendment right to free speech. Then, the next day, in the lunchroom, he ran up to me all out of breath and said, ‘Carrie! Carrie! You’ll never believe this! I looked in the encyclopedia, and they took your example!’”

  Professor Harrison threw his head back and laughed. I realized then that the story was funny, and I laughed, too. He laughed some more, and that made me laugh more. The more we laughed, the more it seemed fun just to laugh, even after the joke had gotten stale. It was a good feeling that something that I’d merely considered strange in my childhood was now amusing, an experience to look back at and laugh about with someone. There were plenty of bad things that had happened—oh, if only I could recycle them into amusing stories! And Professor Harrison would understand.

  But our time had to come to an end. Harrison looked at me and said, “Well, I know you have to move on.” I said, “Not really, but…” but he just laughed and got up. He shook my hand. His hand felt warm. I said I appreciated the discussion, and then I left.

  As I walked back, my mind raced a million ways.

  He was smart—no, brilliant.

  He liked to hear me talk.

  He encouraged me to talk more, and always had a response.

  I felt more excited about the conversation than I had from any in years. But I also knew that this was probably the last time we’d spend that kind of time together—probably he was having those sorts of meetings with every student to discuss their essays, and probably they were all as enchanted as I was. And just like with my outgoing friend freshman year, I’d quickly move out of Harrison’s scope, overshadowed by people who were louder and more “fun.” Besides, surely, Harrison already had a throng of people outside of class that he belonged to. Former students, relatives, colleagues. He was great. How could people not swarm around him?

  There was still relatively little I knew of him, but what I knew was terrific. I felt like I wanted to back him into a corner and quiz him for hours. And of course, I also wanted him to ask more things about me. I had been saving things up for years to tell someone who was interested, who cared.

  Harrison hadn’t made fun of one thing I’d told him. He hadn’t said “whoosh.” He hadn’t barked “SAT word!” when I’d used a big word. He’d agreed with what I’d said and sometimes built on it. The most amazing discovery in the world is someone who understands what you’re about without your having to go through your entire life history to explain it.

  But my time was over.

  During the next class, my feelings were confirmed. I got no wink or knowing smile from Harrison. He didn’t single me out in any way. I was disappointed. I still thought I should mean more to him. Hadn’t we shared secrets? Weren’t we friends now, whereas everyone else was just a student to him? He had told me about feeling alienated and lonely as a boy. Were those things you told everyone? Had he told everyone?

  I kept looking at him. He was so handsome, so smart, so steady. I doubted he’d ever been into getting drunk at parties.

  The person who got the most attention in class that day was Brian Buchman. Not that Harrison had a choice. Buchman went on and on, and Harrison ate it up—one genius to another. I was filled with jealousy. I wanted to say something equally brilliant, but neither I nor anyone else in the class had a chance to get a word in with motormouth running.

  Buchman talked about “The Stranger.” He said, “Not that, by the way, the English translation can even come close to the French…” and Harrison nodded in agreement. Buchman called Camus “superb” and made the “okay” symbol with his thumb and forefinger as he said it. I wondered if vomiting would cost me an A. An airheaded girl in our class, Vicki, stared at Brian the whole time, cocking her head to the side like an attentive terrier. Brian wasn’t bad-looking. But what a phony.

  Harrison didn’t look at me once. I felt miserable.

  When the class ended, Brian and the professor were still talking. Neither of them glanced up as I went out.

  I left in a foul mood.

  I walked towa
rd the Square, and it looked like everyone on campus was having fun. Two people in down jackets pitched a Frisbee back and forth. A gaggle of fraternity guys was horsing around with a lumbering Saint Bernard. A girl and her boyfriend were fake-fighting in front of the library.

  In my dorm hallway, I smiled when two girls from my floor passed me, but they kept talking and didn’t smile back. That was embarrassing. I opened my door, dropped my books on my dresser and climbed into bed.

  I lay there for maybe half an hour in a fetal position, racked with malaise. It was almost a month into the semester, and already, everyone had crystallized into groups.

  I listened to the end of a branch scrape repeatedly against my dorm-room window.

  The phone rang.

  “Carrie?” a voice asked. “It’s Professor Harrison.”

  “Hi.” I sat up.

  “I just was wondering if you’d be up for dinner tonight. I know you probably have plans…”

  Something inside me seized. A one-on-one dinner? Would this count as a date, or just a discussion? Would there be other students there? What had inspired this? How should I act? What if I said something stupid? At least I had already read half of the books on the syllabus, so I could hold my own in that respect. Besides, Harrison had enjoyed talking to me that first time, right? I shouldn’t be nervous.

  “Sure,” I said. My voice probably cracked.

  “What kind of food do you like?”

  “Uh, whatever you want.”

  He laughed. “You ever eaten Moroccan?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll do Moroccan.”

  He seemed to like it when I hadn’t tried something. I would soon learn that. He liked being a teacher.

  I hung up and thought about what to wear. I didn’t know if you were supposed to look good for a man who was asking you to dinner but who was a respected elder and not someone who could potentially have a romantic interest in you. I didn’t really know how to look good, anyway. Looking good involves trying to look just like everyone else, and I don’t spend a lot of time looking at everyone else. I pulled on a blouse that I’d worn to a formal dinner with my father a year earlier. I did have an adult-type wool coat. I trotted down the stairs, glad to be joining the other people who had somewhere to be. A chilly wind blew. I felt excited and nervous at the same time.