Tam Lin

  Nobody had so much as mentioned it, though carved pumpkins had appeared in some of

  the lounges. Her habit had been to go trick or treating with Danny Chin, who had finally written her a postcard informing her that his Christmas vacation began on December 20th.

  Janet thought she would see what Nick and her roommates had in mind.

  Nick, asked after class, said, "Lock my door and cower under the bed." Janet poked him and he kissed her and that was the end of the discussion. They went off to Eliot and settled at their corner table with Molly and Robin and Peg. Janet had made sure to get a seat facing the windows. It was a cloudy day. The gray lake was dotted with mats of yellow leaves. Every little bare maple along the stream had a circle of red leaves on the ground beneath it, as if it had gotten undressed and left its clothes on the floor."What is anybody doing about Hallowe'en?" said Janet generally.

  Robin said, "Lock my door and cower—"

  "Under the bed," said Molly, not patiently. "You can't get under your bed, you dodo, it's packed full of boxes."

  "Lots of room under mine," said Nick with his mouth full.

  "I thought we could have a party," said Janet to Molly. "Hot cider. Cookies. Pumpkin bread."

  "Invite Nora," said Peg. "She's working too hard."

  "And Sharon," said Janet. "Maybe she could bring Kevin."

  Peg shook her head. "Kevin's family lives in the city; he's going home." Nobody asked the obvious question; Peg smiled at them and added, "They don't get along with Sharon."

  "There's a fine recipe for disaster," said Nick. Janet wondered if she should be glad or sorry that his family was in England.

  "You know who else we should ask," said Molly. "Those two kids in the triple at the end of the hall—the ones Nora calls the foolish children. Their freaked-out roommate's moved across the hall with Odile and her cronies, and I think they feel kind of lost and abandoned. That was their whole social group, along with Barbara and Jen from Third."

  "What are their names?" said Janet. "They never come to floor meetings."

  "Neither do you," said Molly.

  Peg said, "Rebecca and Susan."

  "Could you ask them, then?" said Janet.

  "Sure," said Peg. "What time?"

  "Afternoon or evening?" said Janet, mostly to Nick.

  "We should make sure it's okay with Tina," said Molly.

  "True," said Janet guiltily.

  The conversation turned to other matters: the obligatory appearance of Schiller at Homecoming, which none of them had witnessed, Homecoming at Blackstock being a thing that "nobody went to," which, as Molly remarked, meant that there were a great many nobodies at Blackstock. They then considered a rumor, proffered by Peg and heatedly denied by Nick and Robin, that Professor Medeous was getting married; and concocted theories of how the Food Service got its broccoli to behave as it did.

  When Molly ran off to her biology lab session and Robin went away to wrestle with Aristophanes and Peg departed to commune with Homer, Janet and Nick held hands under the table and talked about The Duchess of Malfi. Janet was indignant about it—by Aristotle's standards, which she had first encountered in high school and read again in Professor Soukup's class, it was not a tragedy of any good sort.

  Professor Evans had told the class to beware of Aristotle because they weren't ready for him yet, and referred darkly to "students who have had their minds permanently injured by too early an exposure to thought." Janet had scrupulously kept Aristotle out of her paper on The Duchess of Malfi, but Evans had evidently discerned some injury in her mind just the same, and scribbled scathing comments all over the margins. The fact that he had then given her a B + had not soothed her in the slightest.

  Nick, who had gotten an A and the single remark, "I will suffer a great deal from someone who presents me with original and rational ideas—but tame your semicolons,"

  was, Janet thought, much too full of himself. She had presented the play as a failed tragedy; Nick thought it was a black comedy, and kept reciting speeches he thought were funny. He held that the only rebuttal would be the recitation of the same passages in such a way that they were not funny, which was perfectly impossible, especially for somebody who had never been trained for the theater and whose main dramatic accomplishment as a child had been the lugubrious recitation of "The Raven" to the accompaniment of her sister on the bongos. Janet explained this to Nick, and had to be content with the minor triumph of making him laugh too much to continue the discussion.

  Nick had an afternoon class, and Janet walked him to it and then wandered aimlessly back across the campus. The grass was still green, but that would not last much longer.

  Now that most of the leaves were gone, the shapes of the buildings were clearer. Chester Hall really did sneer at you. It was the same red brick with limestone windowsills and limestone toothing stones that comprised Masters and the old Chemistry Hall, not to mention Ericson. But while Masters seemed to peer anxiously out from behind its four white pillars, Chester looked at you with its twelve-paned windows in their lancet arches as if you were a blot on the earth. Janet chose to pass it on its chapel side, and proceeded absently over the brick crazy quilt of the Music and Drama Center's plaza, and so to Ericson.

  There were no classes tomorrow, and none Saturday. When Evans's class met again Tuesday morning, it would be to discuss Paradise Lost. There was reading to be done for Monday, too, but Janet pulled the red Dover edition of the poem off her shelf and lay down on her bed with it.

  She rapidly made the discovery that Milton's notion of an English sentence was as erratic as those held by the authors of her most obtuse anthropology texts.

  The infernal Serpent, he it was whose guile,

  Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived

  The mother of mankind, what time his pride

  Had cast him out of Heaven, with all his host

  Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring

  To set himself in glory above his peers,

  He trusted to have equalled the Most High,

  If he opposed, and, with ambitious aim

  Against the throne and monarchy of God,

  Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,

  With vain attempt.

  Structure a sentence in an English paper like that and they'd write three times as much taking it apart for you. Or this, for pity's sake:

  All is not lost—the unconquerable will,

  And study of revenge, immortal hate,

  And courage never to submit or yield:

  And what is else not to be overcome.

  You couldn't parse that; it would fall apart in your hands. And yet he could get away with it. He had you cheering him on, whereas the anthropologists imbued you with fury and a desire to stone them to death with copies of The Harbrace College Handbook and The Elements of Style.

  She was far past the lines assigned for Tuesday when Molly and Tina came back. Tina had immediately acquiesced to the party, and they were deep in plans.

  "Do you think Rob Benfield would like to come?" Janet said. "Nobody ever sees him except Nick."

  "Thomas says he hangs around with the Classics professors mostly," said Tina. "He had to stay on for a fifth year to finish his major, so most of his friends have graduated."

  "Poor creature," said Janet, and added his name to the list. "We can tell Nora to ask her boyfriend. I want to get a look at him."

  "You'd think we would have," said Molly. "She's got a single."

  "Well, he might have one, too, and you know she knows we're dying to see what he's like. The people on his floor are probably less nosy."

  "They couldn't possibly be more nosy," said Tina, much more grumpily than she usually said anything. "Every time I run into Odile in the bathroom she asks me personal questions about Thomas. In that fake French accent."

  "What makes you think it's fake?" said Molly.

  "Her sister hasn't got one," said Janet, thoughtfully. She had last seen Odile's sister draped over Robin, a
nd never had discovered the extent of their acquaintance.

  Thomas arriving just then, they asked him to the party, and he said gravely that he would be delighted to spend so terrible a night in such splendid company. Janet had fully expected him to say he was going to cower under his bed, having formed the theory that the boys were planning to attend some private party where they could behave disgustingly without incurring the censure of their girlfriends.

  Nick and Robin's arrival was presaged by their singing an Elizabethan round in the staircase. Janet went out into the hall to hear them better. The husky tenor and the clear one twined around one another like the roses they sang of. "'The roses die, the grass doth fade, and thou dost walk an ice-pure maid.'" They became entangled suddenly, and broke up in laughter. Robin began again alone. "'Roses, their sharp spines being gone, not royal in their smells alone . . .'"

  "Not that one!" said Nick, quite close; they must be on the third-floor landing.

  "This, then," said Robin, in the light voice that meant he was in a mood. "'She that could think and ne'er disclose her mind; Sees suiters following, and not look behind; She was a white—'"

  "Fuck you too, Armin," said Nick, not amiably.

  "Whenever you like," said Robin in the most careless voice he owned. "But it won't help you a jot."

  Janet melted back along the corridor, unwilling to be caught eavesdropping, and was able to meet them at the door to the room. Nick gave her a fierce hug, as if he had not seen her for months. Over his shoulder, she saw Robin close his eyes, not in disdain or impatience or even common politeness, but simply as if he were tired to death. She and Nick preceded him into the room, and she tried to give Molly an eloquent look.

  Molly raised both eyebrows—any such attempt at signaling made her impatient—but when she saw Robin behind them she sprang up, scattering lists, and held out her hands to him, quite against her habit. Robin smiled at her.

  "You did it, didn't you?" she said. "We didn't hear you."

  "You weren't meant to," said Robin, dropping her hands.

  "Have you been playing the bagpipes again?" demanded Christina.

  "Midterms," said Robin.

  "Oh," said Tina.

  Friday morning, Tina and Molly dragged Janet away from Paradise Lost, despite her assurances that it was a fantasy novel and she needed to finish it so Molly could read it and they could perfectly well buy refreshments without her. They took their bicycles, because they could fit more in the baskets than they could carry, walking; and they sailed down Main Street in a welter of brown leaves. The storefronts bristled with black cats and pumpkins and witches' hats.

  "Should this be a costume party?" asked Tina as they parked the bicycles in front of the grocery store.

  "Costumes optional, I think," said Molly. "It's short notice, and everybody's been studying for midterms."

  "I didn't have any," said Janet. "All my teachers seem happy to rely on a final exam."

  "Yeah, but you have to write a paper a week for Evans," said Tina. "I'd rather take a midterm."

  "That's why I'm in English and you're in Biology."

  "While I," said Molly, flinging a bag of candy pumpkins into their cart, "am neither fish, flesh, nor fowl."

  "I think Nick feels like that," said Janet.

  "Why should he?" retorted Tina. Janet deduced that Nick was getting on Thomas's nerves. "English, Classics, what's the difference? It's all just grammar and literature."

  "It's a very different atmosphere," said Molly, piling molasses, cinnamon, and ginger into the cart. "Those Classics people are creepy; I think Nick should stick to English."

  "Thomas isn't creepy!" cried Tina.

  "No, and he's only been a Classics major for a year, too. Poli Sci, Chemistry, Art History, Astronomy. I didn't know they let you change your mind that often."

  Tina chuckled. "There isn't much they can do about your mind, is there?" she said,

  thereby revealing, Janet thought, an interesting idea of the purposes and effects of education. "It depends on your advisor and the department heads how often you can change your major."

  "And who," said Janet, a little hollowly, "is Thomas's advisor?"

  "Melinda Wolfe," said Tina. She looked thoughtful for a moment, performed a double take and gazed at Molly wide-eyed. " Robin is a Classics major," she said.

  "He is not creepy," said Molly patiently, "but he is extremely strange. The same may be said for Rob and Jack. And all the other Classics majors they hang around with are creepy. Anne Beauvais always smiles at me as if she were going to eat me for supper."

  Janet knew what Tina meant by creepy. She meant that the people in question were creeps—that they did not conform to whatever arbitrary standards their particular peer groups had decided on, and possibly but not necessarily failed to conform to more general societal standards, like washing and making sure their shirts were buttoned straight and not bringing up awkward subjects in conversation.

  She thought she knew what Molly meant, too; but what Molly meant had more to do with Anne Beauvais hanging on Robin like a creeping vine, or Odile standing in the doorway of that stifling, shadowy room, smiling and patient and uncomprehending. And yet Tina and Molly were perfectly amiable together. It was a wonder anybody ever talked to anybody else.

  They spent Friday writing invitations and dropping them outside people's doors, and Saturday peacefully baking. Janet called her mother three times to get recipes she did not have in her head after all. Nick made them stop and come with him to eat lunch, conveying Robin and Thomas's regrets—they were engaged, with their fellow students of Aristophanes, in a detailed postmortem on the midterm examination in that class, which everybody had flunked.

  "I thought Peg said Robin already took Aristophanes," said Janet.

  "Oh, he did," said Nick, "from Ferris. But the play they read in the original in that class was The Frogs. They're doing the Thesmophoriazusae this time, so he took it again."

  "The what?" said Tina; the only reason Janet had not said it was that she knew Tina would.

  "It means the women going to the Thesmophoria," said Nick. He made a pause long enough to be irritating and not long enough to deserve being hit for, and added, "It's a festival sacred to Demeter and Persephone, that's all. It's a slight thing, that play, full of parodies of Euripides and a lot of low comedy to do with men disguised as women. Robin likes that kind of thing."

  "Don't you?" said Janet.

  "It's all very well in its way," said Nick, "but it gets wearing. So does Robin." He hesitated, tilted his head at Molly, and said, a little lamely, "Don't mind him."

  "I don't," said Molly. "Not in the least. That way lies madness. Good God, what is in this soup?"

  "Canned okra, I think," said Tina. "All I can say is, they had better be done with their postmortem by the time the party starts."

  "Thomas said to tell you specially that he was coming," said Nick.

  Something in the way he said it made Janet look at him. He was buttering a large baking-powder biscuit; then he spooned honey onto it; then he rushed it into his mouth before the honey could run down his wrist. Then, of course, he had his mouth full, and by the time he had swallowed, Molly was asking him which plays of Euripides were parodied in the Thesmophoriazusae, which necessitated an explanation of which of those were extant and who had done good translations of them. Tina then demanded what "extant"

  meant, and had to have the entire history of lost classical manuscripts explained to her.

  Janet considered interrupting, but what she thought of as the fatal flaw of the novel-reader prevented her. She had meant to ask Nick if he and Robin were coming to the party, since neither of them had actually expressed any intention of doing so. But the flaw of the novel-reader is to want to know what will happen if a situation is allowed to develop unmolested. So she let them talk, and ate her canned okra and tomato soup, and wondered if they should move any of the furniture in their room to make more space for the party.

  After lunc
h Nick went off to practice with his chamber group. Molly and Tina and Janet cleared off their desks and bureau tops, lugged miscellaneous cushions out of closets and suitcases, vacuumed the floor, strung up black and orange crepe paper, put a dozen orange candles in Food Service glasses borrowed for the occasion, and started a gallon of spiced cider steeping, in a pan cadged from the dormitory kitchen, over Molly's illegal hot plate.

  "Should Nora have to see that?" Janet asked her.

  "She's got one herself," said Molly. "It's only the ones without asbestos pads under them that she gets frantic about."

  "Remind me not to volunteer to be an RA," said Janet.

  "That reminds me," said Molly, "what happened with those weirdos at the other end of the hall?"

  "I think," said Janet slowly, "that Odile stopped inviting the two Nora was worried about after I threatened to tell Melinda Wolfe on them."

  "I can still smell the stuff sometimes when I come up the side stairs," said Molly, "but not as much." She was making her bed—not a thing anybody except Tina normally managed to do—and she added to the pillow she was shaking, "Would you really have told Wolfe about them?"

  "You bet," said Janet. "Better for her to deal with it than for the whole college to get wind of it. The College tries to stay out of people's private lives, but you've no idea what they're like once they're roused. They'd love an excuse to reinstitute dorm monitors and visiting hours and room searches, and those girls were going to give them one."

  "Are you sure? Sounds like a lot of trouble to me."

  "Not as much as parents screaming at them about corrupting their precious babies."

  "I guess." Molly twitched her bedspread straight and sat down on the floor. "Do parents ever scream at your father?"

  "Only when he teaches The Cenci."

  "What's that?"

  "Shelley's play about incest."

  Tina came back into the room with a bowl of apples and put it down in the middle of Janet's desk. "What are we wearing?" she said.

  "I thought I'd come as a radical college student," said Molly .

  "You need an army jacket and bigger bell-bottoms," said Tina, with complete solemnity. Janet suspected her of joking, but it was not easy to tell with Tina. Her sense of humor ran in different channels than Janet's or Molly's, and if Nora was right, Tina had been made to doubt that she had any sense of humor at all in the first weeks of their acquaintance. Tina was not, Janet would bet, accustomed to lacking confidence; it made her unpredictable.