She was in graduate school when the sexual revolution hit, and she found it immediately relaxing. She did not lose her own virginity—how could you lose something that you didn’t really have?, was what she wanted to know—but it seemed as if everybody else did, and in the wake of that she found that men began to leave her alone. She had never been a pretty girl or a pretty young woman. Her features were broad and flat. Her hair was dull. Her body was thin enough but of no particular shape. She thought that there were many girls across the country exactly like she had been who did what her own mother had wanted her to do. They “did something” about themselves. They went on exercise programs. They used makeup. To Edith, it had all seemed a colossal waste of time. It wasn’t that she knew it wouldn’t work anyway, although it wouldn’t. It was that she knew she didn’t care enough to keep it up. She would put in this enormous effort. She would primp and pump and spend. She would have a curious half hour in front of a mirror somewhere, checking out the changes the dyed hair and Elizabeth Arden lip gloss made. Then it would be over. She would have work to do. She would forget. Everything would go back to being the way it was. She would be out a lot of time and money, and maybe be less of a person than she had been before.
Once she’d started thinking about it, Edith decided that, for many people, sex had to have an ulterior motive. They didn’t fall into bed because they wanted to fall into bed but to get something else, not sleep, not ecstasy. At least that was true of women. With men, Edith was never quite sure. She got along well with men. She always had. If they weren’t intent on doing something physical, they were straightforward and uncomplicated. They didn’t worry overmuch about their emotions or take things personally. She liked boy students better than girl students, too. It was hard to get boy students to do any work at all; but when you did, what they gave you was likely to be risky and original. Girls worked hard, and diligently, but they stayed within the lines. They played by the rules. They would hand you a twelve-page paper that had absolutely nothing new to say.
Like me, Edith thought, because it was true. She had always been a good student and a conscientious one, but she had never had that spark of originality that would have made her a brilliant one. She had never failed to get a grade below an A in any course she had ever taken anywhere, but she had also never failed to do the expected thing. She had gone from a small town in upstate New York to Wellesley. She had seen immediately that there were belles and swots, and that she was a swot. She had looked with some curiosity on the girls who were a third thing nobody was ever willing to label with a word—the ones who were expected to explode into fame or significance once they graduated—and known immediately that she was not what they were and never could be.
It didn’t really matter, in the end, because she was what she wanted to be; and now, in her early sixties, she had what she had wanted from the start. She read five languages other than English and spoke three. She had spent sabbatical years in Rome and Paris and Salzburg. She had this lovely, large apartment looking out on the quad and the rising neo-Gothic spires of Ridenour Library, just a few steps from Main Street in Windsor, which was the kind of place she’d only been able to dream of in her childhood. It was a wealthy place, but intellectual, too, full of people who liked to go into Boston to hear Beethoven and walk through the museums, who valued excellent tea and quiet contemplation as much as other people valued trips to Disney World. She had never been to Disney World herself. She had never even seen a Wal-Mart. What she liked best were nights like tonight, when she could sit in her big club chair near the vast multipaned window in her living room drinking Double Bergamot Earl Grey that she’d ordered from the Stash Tea Company, reading Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in German for the fifth or sixth time. All her correcting was done. She always got her correcting done early in the day because she hated to clog up her evenings with too much bad news about human nature. She had her accounts done, too. Every single student in her House had had her allowance money and drawing account checked and rechecked until there was no possibility of an error of even a penny. The Lytton House outlays for Letitia Markham’s birthday party and the pajama party they’d given for Valentine’s Day had been totted up and reconciled with the bills. She was a lot of things, but she was not one of those women who got a good education and did not put it to use.
She had been thinking about that—all those debutantes at Wellesley in her era, going out with the same Ivy League boys they’d gone out with when they were still at Miss Porter’s or Madeira—when Alice Makepeace had come striding out from around the other side of the library and then onto the quad, that ridiculous cape streaming out behind her in the cold February wind. Edith had always found Alice Makepeace oddly comforting. Not only was she just like all those debutantes Edith had once known at Wellesley, but she so obviously indulged in sex for ulterior motives, and ulterior motives that were easy to discover and discern. Power, Edith thought, watching Alice make her way back to the headmaster’s house, that bright red hair whipping and flashing under each of the security lights in turn. What Alice Makepeace wanted was the sense of power she got from the boys whose lives she made a misery year after year, that and the thrill of the exotic, of the vicarious experience of poverty and want. Of course Alice romanticized it all. Alice romanticized everything. Edith had known that the first time they’d met. Under the romanticism, though, there was a simple need, naked and raw. Edith may not have spent any time in bed with men, but she knew that need as thoroughly as she knew the difference between Single and Double Bergamot Earl Grey tea.