She’d hated high school, thought college would be different. Believe it or not, she imagined a community of scholars who would stimulate each other intellectually. The faculty would be no more than facilitators, wise mentors; in her imagination, mostly male—see absent father, above. Of course the mostly male part turned out be true. She was actually surprised that college had grades. She lived in her own world, she sees now. By her third semester she had one foot out the door. She saw the desirability of studying a broad range of subjects, but thought the distribution requirements were insultingly rigid. (Insulting, because it assumed students would seek to evade becoming “well-rounded” if not hemmed in by rules.) At the same time she wasn’t blind to the fact that many of her fellow students were neither self-motivated nor intellectually stimulating nor discernibly interested in learning anything. In other words, college really wasn’t much different from high school.
She thought, well fuck this rodeo. (Man, she must have been insufferable. No wonder she didn’t have any friends.) For her third semester she ignored her adviser’s suggestion about getting certain requirements out of the way and just took what she wanted: Woolf and Auden, Beginning Arabic, Principles of Limnology, The French Revolution, Astronomy. It was a heavy load, but she already suspected she was going to save her mother and herself a ton of money by not continuing, and she didn’t have any friends, nor at that time wanted any (you know—you can’t fire me, I quit), and she liked the idea of going out in a blaze, or at least a wan glow, of scholarly lucubration. (Using words nobody else knows: see having no friends, above.)
So she was exhausted a lot of the time, but really kind of having fun, haunting the libraries and hauling around piles of books and being the butt of jokes and ignoring people. The limnology class was drier than she’d expected (cheap irony!) but it overlapped with marshland ecology, which she’d always been interested in because the plot of land she’d grown up on was next door to a swampy little delta. Woolf and Auden was a blast, not least because the professor, a small hirsute male chordate d’un certain age, was so egotistical he might have been clinically insane, which condition she found so absurd she grew fond of him, in a semi-horrified way. He, in his turn, took a shine to her because she was just the sort of woman he liked: interested in a subject he knew ten times as well, and half his diminutive size. Arabic was a lot of work, but she loved learning how to read that gorgeous script and try to make those amazing sounds with her throat, and as for the French Revolution, a blood-soaked object lesson about societal collapse appealed to her sense of alienation.
And astronomy? Well . . . That one’s a tad embarrassing. One of her adolescent fantasy father-lover figures was Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth-century astronomer who built an observatory on an island a brief pirate’s sail south of Hamlet’s castle and compiled the most accurate star catalog to date. Why Brahe? Suffice it to say that he was Danish and tyrannical and forever out of reach, just like her dad.
She has an uneasy feeling she may have done something cringeworthy at an early astronomy lecture, something to get the professor’s attention and simultaneously maybe take him down a peg. (Shower me with approval, aren’t I the smart daughter, and by the way, fuck you.) Whatever it was, she remembers she felt embarrassed, and reined herself in after that. Then a few weeks later there was a post-lecture exchange on god knows what when she practically made a pass at him. (Bathe me in lust, aren’t I the sexy daughter, and by the way, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?) For the rest of the semester, she forbade herself further antics.
But she had to admit she was attracted to him. And it didn’t have to be for solely unhealthy reasons, right? Because, yes, he was older and accomplished, but really the person he most reminded her of was her younger brother. He displayed an oblivious absorption in his subject that called to mind six-year-old Quinnie regaling her with the nutritional preferences of dinosaur species she’d never heard of. She remembered an early lecture when he was explaining emission spectra, and he’d brought in a step stool and colored Ping-Pong balls, and he stood on various steps and stepped down one or two or three levels and tossed away different colored balls to represent the emission of photons of different wavelengths when electrons jumped from higher to lower states. The whole idea was so corny, and made downright comical by the fact that he couldn’t seem to keep himself from demonstrating every possible energy shift, long after the point had been made. He was exhausting the permutations because, for the zillionth time, they were fascinating him.
He was a beanpole, almost a marsh-wiggle. She thought when she first talked to him he must be 6’2”, then found out later he was 6’4”, only he slumped. He had narrow shoulders and large hands, a beaky nose with a fluorescent gleam along the flat bridge, gray eyes and sandy hair in an awful cut, and the kind of pale pink skin that turns papery in middle age. When she spoke to him the second time (what was it about? she seems to remember Saturn) her main impression was one of helpless honesty. He was simply too obtuse socially to be anything but straightforward. (Maybe another relevant thing to know about her dad is that he is a sociopath and an adept reader of character and consequently an extremely good liar.)
So there you have it: a man with the rough physical outline of a father to replace the one who charmed and abandoned her, but temperamentally like the younger
