“Jack doesn’t believe any of that stuff.”
“Everybody else does. You know that old cat in the office thinks you’re spending your free time in half the rent-by-the-hour motels in eastern Pennsylvania.”
“Evie.”
Evie shrugged. “If you’re not going to listen to reason, I can’t help you. And please try to remember it’s not just my reason you’re listening to. It’s Jack’s.”
“I know.” Chessey stood up. She had come to Evie to “talk it all out,” fully expecting to be made to feel better. Instead, she felt worse. It hardly seemed fair. “I just wish I knew where they were,” she said, “Jack and Dr. Steele both. I wish I knew what they were doing.”
“Unless you know something I don’t know, they’re not doing it together. Lighten up, Chessey. Go pat Susan Ledovic on the head. She’s dying for your attention.”
“Mmm,” Chessey said. Evie had gone back to her clipboard, and Chessey could see Susan Ledovic, the fat girl with the pimples, ripping out a seam with the thread in her teeth. Evie was right. It was time to stop fretting over what she could do nothing about, and go back to being the Perfect College Coed instead.
What nagged at her, though, was that she did know something Evie didn’t know. She knew that Jack had intended to see Dr. Steele today, and have it out once and for all.
5
DR. KATIIERINE BRANCH SOMETIMES wondered what would have happened to her if she had been brought up in another time, or another country. When she was a child, she had read a roomful of books on Great Women Pioneers—Elizabeth Blackwell, Maria Mitchell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marie Curie—but she had known immediately that she was nothing like them. Stuck in a situation that offered her any kind of real resistance, she would yield. By the time she was seven, she had yielded on a number of important issues, including Leggings, Lavelieres, and Sean Cassidy. If she found the strength to defy her hyperconventional, hypercritical, chillingly emotionless mother, it was only because she was desperate not to defy that small group of girls who represented Everything That Mattered at John F. Kennedy Memorial Elementary. Katherine Branch had always had a very fine eye for distinctions of status and a consuming passion of shame at the fact that she had been born worthy of belonging to none of the first-class categories offered for her inspection. She had figured out early that Women Didn’t Count, and that all the things women did—nursing, teaching, raising a family—were irretrievably second-rate. She had figured out even earlier that, among women, being pretty was not enough, unless you had something else to back it up. Katherine had always been pretty enough, but the other things—wit, maybe, or that school-skewed form of intelligence that is so important in grades K-6—eluded her. She was a fairly attractive, moderately bright, nondescriptly pleasant child of the early sixties. From the day she started kindergarten to the day she graduated from high school, she was destined to fade into the woodwork.
At the moment, she looked like anything but part of the woodwork. Her red hair fell down over her back in a cascade of body-permed curls. Her bright orange sweater, chosen deliberately for shock and contrast, reached nearly to her knees, not quite hiding the black stretch pants she was wearing under it. Also under the sweater was a bright white, 100 percent cotton turtleneck, meant to save the skin of her chest from the scratch of ramie and wool. Ever since Katherine Branch had committed herself to wearing only natural fibers, she had had a great deal of trouble with chafing and rash.
She caught sight of her reflection in the side of her toaster, made a face at it, and walked on past, to that small stretch of her cramped kitchen counter where she kept the instant coffee. Behind her, at the tiny round table, Vivi Wollman was sitting over a plate of Betty Crocker carrot cake and staring out the square kitchen window at the quad. Vivi Wollman was Katherine’s best friend at Independence College and the only other person who really hated the fuss that got made around her about Halloween. Vivi had even been an ally in Katherine’s one attempt to put a stop to it all, that year that Katherine had called the Pennsylvania EPA and reported the bonfire as a “pollution hazard.” Unfortunately, that foray into common sense and political correctness hadn’t turned out the way Katherine expected. The bonfire was so famous, people simply couldn’t think rationally about it. The Governor had issued a proclamation blocking the EPA’s attempt to shut the bonfire down, the state legislature had passed a special law to allow Independence College to go on making bonfires until the final blast of Gabriel’s trumpet, and someone had sneaked her name out of the EPA’s files and given it to the press. It was a good thing she’d already had tenure, because if she hadn’t she would never have gotten it. For the next year, with the exception of Vivi, not a single person spoke to her—except to call her a bitch.