The Raising

  “She looks like a milkmaid.”

  Perry didn’t respond to this. He supposed it was intended as an insult. He might not have been Nicole Werner’s biggest fan himself, but he couldn’t help feeling protective. For one thing, he was pretty sure any insults Craig Clements-Rabbitt was going to think up for Nicole—hick, nerd, etc.—would eventually come around to him. When Perry had asked him about his last name, the hyphen, Craig had rolled his eyes and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a hyphenated name before. Are the womenfolk in your town allowed to vote yet?”

  In truth, Perry hadn’t ever known anyone with a hyphenated name.

  “I have two parents,” Craig had said. “A Clements and a Rabbitt.”

  “I thought your dad was the Clements,” Perry said.

  “So you have seen hyphenated names—enough to know that my parents are so hip they decided to put my mother’s name last.”

  Really, Perry hadn’t figured that out himself. A guy on their hall had speculated that Craig’s mother was actually R. E. Clements, because of the order of the names. His girlfriend had said, “No way. Have you read those books? No woman would write anything so stupid. That’s testosterone-inspired schlock.”

  “So,” Craig said, plunging his spoon into the chili, spilling more onions around the bowl, “in this town of yours, this Bad Ass, do all the girls look like that?”

  “Like what?” Perry asked.

  “Rosy-cheeked? Sunny blond? Strong but slender limbs? Big hooters?”

  Perry thought about this for a minute, and then said, quite honestly, “Pretty much.”

  “Fair enough,” Craig said. “So, when you go with your family to this”—he waved his free hand in the air—“this Dumplings, do you see Nicole Werner there?”

  Perry had to think again, but then remembered that, yes, she’d started working as a waitress the summer before last. She was there, it seemed, mostly on Friday nights and some Saturday afternoons, moving quickly from table to table in her bustley skirt and frilly top. But usually his family went to Dumplings on Sunday, after church, with Perry’s grandfather, who loved the sauerbraten, and although Perry saw Nicole in church, he never saw her at Dumplings those afternoons. Sundays must have been her day off.

  “What’s the uniform like?”

  Perry described it. The wide blue satin belt. The—what’d-ya-call it?—peasant blouse. The pinstriped skirt.

  “Oh, man, stop.” Craig put up his hand and shook his head. “You’re going to make me come.”

  Perry cleared his throat, and when Nicole looked over at him and gave him her usual polite (apologetic?) smile from across the cafeteria, Perry could feel himself blushing from his Adam’s apple up.

  “How’d you get so fucking idealistic, man?” Craig asked one night a few weeks later, after their relationship had become openly hostile. Perry had come back from the library once again to find his roommate lying on his back in bed on top of the covers (he’d rolled up the high-tech sleeping bag he’d arrived with and put it in the closet), wearing boxer shorts and headphones. He had a paperback open on his bare stomach, a novel his father had published a few years ago and which, according to Craig at least, had been a big hit. Brain Freeze, by R. E. Clements. A lot of the other students in the Honors College seemed to know who Craig’s father was, and not to hold him in very high regard, but Perry had never heard of him.

  It was an achingly beautiful autumn. Clear and dry, skies so blue day after day that somehow it was possible to see the moon hanging there above the library, as if all the atmosphere had been scoured away. And the brightness of the changing red and gold and russet leaves of the big trees that lined Campus Ave seemed more like cinema than nature in so much light.

  “You should see Dartmouth,” Craig had said to him one morning as they walked down the staircase to breakfast. “Dartmouth was founded before there was even a dirt path hacked through this state.”

  Perry had heard about Dartmouth from Craig already a couple of times, and he’d already asked the obvious question, to which Craig had answered, “Because I couldn’t get into Dartmouth. It’s a real college. At Dartmouth I’d have gotten a real roommate, too.”

  “Fuck you,” Perry had said, not for the first or last time.

  “Thanks,” Craig said, “but I’m not horny right now.”

  It had never crossed Perry’s mind to go to college anywhere but here. All the smartest kids from Bad Axe had come to this university over the decades, and only three of them had gotten in this year—Perry, Nicole, and an obese girl named Maria, who played the harp and hadn’t spoken a word to anyone except the school psychologist, as far as Perry knew, since eighth grade, when her mother had committed suicide.

  His parents, both of whom had gone to a smaller university closer to Bad Axe, were nearly beside themselves with pride. His father had painted the big cement squares of their patio crimson and gold a couple days after Perry got his acceptance letter. “This is the big time,” he’d said. “You did it, kiddo.”

  It was hard for Perry to imagine an older, more formidable looking college than this—the library’s enormous pillars, the gold trim around the ceiling of Rice Auditorium, the leafy Commons with its marble benches. What could Dartmouth have that this school didn’t?

  “It’s selective,” Craig had said. “It’s private. Not a jock-ocracy,” waving his hand around at the walls of their room.

  But for Perry, this was like a dream of being in college. The heavy books with their translucently thin pages. The gregarious professors and the unsmiling ones. The fat columns of the library, and the crammed stacks of books inside it.

  The smell between those narrow walls of books was, Perry felt, the smell of rumination itself. Decades of reason and reflection. He checked out books that had nothing to do with the classes he was taking, just to be able to bring the heft and the scent of them back to the dorm with him. A Handbook of Classical Physics. A History of the Anglo-Saxons.

  “Huh?” Craig asked. “How’d you get like this, man—all romantic about it all?”

  “I don’t know, man,” Perry said, dragging out the man in imitation of that East Coast accent. “How’d you get so fucking cynical?”

  “Native intelligence. Born with it,” Craig said without missing a beat. He never missed a beat. He had a whole encyclopedia of comebacks on the tip of his tongue at all times.

  “Is it a burden,” Perry asked, “being so much better than everyone else? Or is it pleasing?”

  “I’m so used to it by now,” Craig said, “I really couldn’t say.”

  Perry sat down on his own bed and unzipped his backpack. You could have drawn a line straight down the center of the room. Every time some piece of Craig’s laundry or a magazine or a discarded protein bar wrapper inched over onto Perry’s side, he carefully pushed it back over to Craig’s side with his foot.

  “Your mom called,” Craig said. “I told her you were out trying to score some heroin, but you’d be back in an hour or so.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Here,” Craig said. “You can call her from my cell in the lounge if you want some privacy.” He tossed the phone, slightly larger than a matchbook and just as thin, to Perry. It had been a source of endless surprise to Craig Clements-Rabbitt that Perry didn’t own a cell phone and was dependent on the antique mounted to the wall of their room. Craig did not, himself, even know their phone number, and had only touched the telephone in the room to take calls for Perry.

  “Thanks,” Perry said. He took the phone, stood, and closed the door behind him.

  “Mom?”

  There was no one else in the second-floor lounge, so Perry lay back on the blue couch, careful to keep his shoes from touching the cushions.

  He and his mother talked about his classes, his grandfather, his father’s business—a lawn mower shop, the best one in town—and about the weather, which had been beautiful. The leaves in Bad Axe had changed dramatically already, she said, and were starting to fall, and she jok
ed that she supposed she was going to have to do the raking now, with Perry at college.

  “I can come home for a weekend,” he said, “if I can get a ride.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” his mother said. “We can handle the leaves. You just get good grades.”

  Perry was an only child—except that there’d been another, a sister before him, who’d died at birth, a baby his mother had never once spoken of to him. The only reason Perry knew about her was because his grandmother, when he was nine, had decided Perry needed to know.

  Since he’d been a toddler, Perry’d had an imaginary sister whose name was Mary.

  He was getting too old for imaginary playmates, his grandmother told him one day, and God knows what it must be doing to his parents, listening to him in his room, talking for hours to that imaginary girl. Unlike the other adults in Perry’s life, Grandma Edwards pulled no punches just because he was a child. She was the one who’d told him that his grandfather had been an alcoholic, and that his Uncle Benny took after him, a slobbering drunk, and that’s why he was never invited for Christmas dinner. She was the one who would, eventually, tell him that she herself was dying of bladder cancer, not “recuperating” in the hospital, as his parents had said.

  So Grandma Edwards took him to the grave—a flat, shining stone engraved with “Baby Girl Edwards,” and a date that meant nothing to Perry—and that very day, his imaginary friend Mary had vanished, as if the imaginary could die as easily as the actual. Perry almost never thought about her again, except on the rare occasion that her translucently pale skin would come back to him, and the way her soft, cool, imaginary hand had felt on his, guiding it across a piece of paper, teaching him how to draw a dinosaur.

  And the scent of her hair—that red tangle of curls—like warm earth.

  “I love you, Mom,” Perry said before hanging up.

  “I love you, Perry,” his mother said.

  “Tell Dad I love him.”

  “He loves you, too.”

  A few more good-byes, back and forth, and Perry snapped Craig’s snazzy cell phone shut, rose from the couch, and headed back. A few students passed him on the way—strangers, but strangers he recognized now from the hallways, from the cafeteria. One guy, with wire-frame glasses, Perry recognized from a class, although he couldn’t remember which one. They nodded seriously, politely, to each other.

  The stairwell was empty when he got there. He could hear his own steps ringing around him, and as he climbed to the fourth floor, he suddenly was struck with a terrible grieflike longing for his mother, home alone in their two-bedroom bungalow. What would she do now that their phone call was over? Call her own mother? Watch television?

  And there was grief for his father, too, still at the shop. He might be trying to fix something, or sell something, or schedule some kid to work on Saturday now that Perry was gone.

  He thought about his grandfather, too, sitting on the bench in the hallway of Whitcomb Manor, already looking forward to Sunday, when Perry’s parents would pick him up to go to Dumplings.

  And then he was feeling sorry for the whole town of Bad Axe. The drugstore. The pizza place. The brick façades of the few, desperate businesses downtown. The strip malls at the edge of everything. The cemetery with its little flags and flowers stuck into the soft, green ground. The women at Fantastic Sam’s, staring out at the parking lot, waiting for someone with too much hair to come inside.

  Homesick. Now he knew what that was. And as soon as he stepped out of the stairwell, eyes fogged with emotion, Perry realized how stupid he was being, and rubbed away his ridiculous, homesick tears. Sentimental crap. The only other Eagle Scout from his troop in Bad Axe was already in the Marines, sent off to Afghanistan. That guy had something to get teary about, not Perry.

  A girl in a miniskirt rounded the corner of the hallway, laughing hysterically into her cell phone. She didn’t even glance at him. When Perry rounded the corner himself, he saw that the door to his dorm room was open, and someone was standing in it.

  And then he saw who it was.

  The bright blond ponytail. The perfect posture.

  Nicole Werner.

  She turned when Perry came up behind her, and she said, “Hi!” in that voice so bright and girlish it sounded like it was coming out of a piccolo.

  “Hi,” Perry said back, sounding like a party pooper in comparison, but who could compete with Nicole Werner when it came to congeniality? He saw Craig, still in his boxer shorts, no shirt, standing a few feet in front of her.

  “I came by to see, you know, how it’s going,” she said to Perry, but glanced back at Craig as if trying politely to include him in the conversation. “You know, see if you’d want to set up a study time . . .”

  “Oh. Yeah,” Perry said. He’d forgotten. They’d talked about this back in Bad Axe—after they’d both gotten their acceptance letters, but before she’d been awarded the Ramsey Luke. They’d said they’d keep up the ritual, the weekly study marathons. “Okay,” he said, and shrugged.

  Craig caught Perry’s eye then, and Nicole looked from Perry to him. “You’re welcome to join us,” she said to Craig.

  Craig nodded, appeared to consider it, and then said, “That would be helpful. I could use the support, you know, to keep up the good study habits.”

  Nicole nodded. She’d obviously missed the false note, and the fact that Craig Clements-Rabbitt was half-naked, having been lying in bed with an iPod and Brain Freeze at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night. “Great!” she said. “So, now we just need a time and a place.” She whipped her academic planner out from under her arm in a flash, and slid out a pen conveniently tucked into her ponytail. She stuck the pen in her mouth as she scanned the pages of the planner.

  “I’m free anytime,” Craig said.

  Perry rolled his eyes.

  4

  Maybe her students thought she was deaf. They could chase her down a hallway for half a mile calling out, ��Professor? Professor?”and it did not occur to Mira to turn around.

  Professor?

  That couldn’t be her.

  But here she was, a professor at one of the largest universities in the world. They called her a cultural anthropologist, as if that were an occupation. She was an “Expert on the Treatment of Human Remains in Preliterate Civilizations”—the way her father had been an Insurance Salesman, or her mother, a Homemaker.

  She was thirty-three, the mother of two-year-old twins, the wife of a Nice Guy who happened to be content in the role of Stay-at-Home Dad. She’d gotten her Ph.D. with honors and kudos and special awards: a Fulbright to Croatia, and even the unheard-of Guggenheim for a graduate student. Her dissertation, Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins: Fear, Fantasy, and the Cults of Death, had been published by a major academic press just a few months after she’d finished it. There’d been positive reviews in the specialized journals, and even a quick notice in a newspaper or two because of popular interest in her subject.

  So, why, when they called out, “Professor!” did Mira not assume they were calling out to her? Why, day after day in that place, did she feel like such a fraud?

  Because, perhaps, she was a fraud?

  Mira Polson had ridden into her position as an assistant professor at the Honors College on the merit of that first book, and the “promise” the college saw for her future publications. That was three years ago, and now she was two years away from her tenure review, and there was no doubt—the department chair had made sure she had no doubt—that she would not receive it, and would not be kept on at the university, if she did not publish a book between now and then. And, so far, in the last three years allotted to her by the university to write and publish that book, Mira had produced nothing beyond some scrawled notes on a legal pad—notes that had become, in the year and a half since she’d scrawled them, illegible even to her.

  And if she did not get tenure, then what?

  Then she would be far worse than a fraud. She would be an unemployed expert
on an obscure subject with two toddlers and a husband to support.

  This Mira had considered as she closed the apartment door behind her and headed off to Godwin Honors Hall, trying not to listen to the twins scream after her, or to Clark’s impatient shushing on the other side of the door. It took every ounce of fortitude she had to keep walking down the hall toward the stairs.

  They had been sick in the night. No fevers, but both had barfed over the sides of their cribs around two o’clock in the morning, Andy taking his cue from Matty, as he usually did when it came to vomiting. They had apparently gorged themselves on Doritos while Mira was at a department meeting the evening before. Clark had been dead asleep when she got home, although it was only nine o’clock.

  “The twins sleep, you sleep,” their pediatrician had advised at their two-year checkup when Clark complained that the twins were still waking up once or twice in the middle of the night. Clark had been doing that anyway—sleeping when they slept—as far as Mira could tell, but after the pediatrician’s advice, Clark had made a religion of it. Sometimes he even slept while the twins were awake. Mira would come home to find him out cold on the carpet in the living room beside the playpen while the twins stood inside it, shaking the cushioned edges like bars on a prison door.

  They were healthy, active, curly-haired boys who spoke to one another in a rapid chatter that, when she was being irrational, Mira thought might be some linguistic or genetic remnant of her Eastern European forebears in their blood. When they asked for milk, it was milekele; “bye-bye” was gersko; “mama” and “papa” were meno and paschk. Sometimes Mira caught herself wishing that her grandmother was still alive to translate. Even more irrationally, she’d gone to the Llewellyn Roper Library in the summer to look up the words for milk, good-bye, mother, father, in Romanian, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and cross-referenced them to everything—Latin, French, German, and all the dialects—to find, of course, nothing that indicated that her twins were actually speaking a foreign language.