An Uncommon Education (31 page)

She dropped her head immediately, my shot hitting its mark.

I needed to move in the silence, and did, to the other side of the room, pretending to busy myself there.

“Who told you?” she said, turning a book in her hands. It was one of mine, though she wasn’t reading it; she was only focused on turning it carefully, smoothing its cover. “Did Phyllis tell you?” She looked up at me. I should have guessed she’d be bold, once the secrecy had been broken. She was too forthright to bury a raised hand.

I shook my head. I found, in my own hands, a book as well. I must have unconsciously mimicked her, wanting to be on her side even as I upset her more and more. I held it still, resisting the urge to turn it over, look down at it and smooth its cover.

“Today, in class”—I saw a flash of panic in her eyes—“you repeated her. Word for word.” She frowned in doubt. “I just guessed,” I lied.

“You just guessed?” she asked. Maybe she spoke to attack, but we both knew it didn’t matter if it was a guess or not, that I wasn’t accusing her, that I was just worried about whatever it was she had meant to keep hidden, that I knew what it was for someone to want desperately to hide something, that I just knew.

“I’m sorry,” I said, frozen, afraid to move. I needed to make the moment hers, though I’d invaded her privacy so deeply I wasn’t sure if she’d take it.

She laughed. It wasn’t particularly convincing, but it wasn’t false, either. “You know how Phyllis is,” she said, grinning at me just barely.

I did know how Phyllis was. How she made every desire and dislike known, how unwilling she was to have anyone else’s interests at heart. Suddenly, I was angry. “I do know how she is, Jun. Couldn’t you have made a better choice, first time around?”

Her face darkened, closed. “How do you know it’s my first time around?” she asked, her voice curt.

“Well, here, at least. Right?”

“So you’ve been keeping track of my conquests? This from the girl who hasn’t had a date in two years, then goes and shags someone in a back room when she’s drunk?”

“I wasn’t drunk.”

“Great. Even better. What gives you the right to say anything?” she persisted.

My stomach clenched. “I have as much right as anyone else. And I shouldn’t have let all that happen. It was a mistake,” I managed. But my insistence felt false. Had it been a mistake? Hadn’t it been just as intentional as anything Jun might have done with Phyllis?

She threw the book down on the floor. There was nothing else there. “And I’m not supposed to make mistakes,” she muttered. “Brilliant. That’s just bloody fucking brilliant.”

“I don’t really care who you sleep with, Jun,” I started in, not sure where I was going, “but what’s the point of keeping it all a big secret?” She wouldn’t nod or shake her head. I lowered my voice. “It didn’t matter, did it?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking for her affirmation, uneasy as I was. I suddenly understood Amy more profoundly than I had in the two years I’d lived with her. Of course it had mattered. I didn’t know why, but looking at Jun’s face, knowing how she hadn’t wanted even me to know, I knew that it had mattered so much she could no longer contain it. I felt myself begin to cry out, but instead I started to laugh.

I laughed and laughed; Jun kept looking at me, so worried, so pissed, and I only laughed harder. “Bloody fucking brilliant?” I repeated. “Did you really just say bloody fucking brilliant?” And then she started to laugh, too, the way she had when I’d run into her staring out into the dark the year before. I came over to her when we were done, asking for forgiveness by sitting down beside her.

Jun nodded. She had softened. “You’re right,” she said. “I was wrong to let things happen with Phyllis. I guess I’m just tired of it all. This fucking campus is so fucking tightly wound, no one makes a step without everyone else knowing, and I’m just sick of people I don’t even know coming up to me and asking me my business. It’s just not right.”

I nodded, then spoke while my nerves were still chasing me, though as gently as I could. “You probably could find a real girlfriend here, Jun. Someone who would be good for you.” And then, just before I lost heart, “I’m sure you’re not the only lesbian in Japan.”

Her reaction was automatic. She didn’t even look at me. She just stood up and walked away. I stayed where I was, wondering if she was done with me or readying us both for something more.

“My life is supposed to go a certain way,” she said finally, her expression almost pitying. “This isn’t the place where I get to define myself.” Her face hardened. “Wellesley is just a stopping point. It’s just one in a long line of decisions that were made for me before I was born. I’m not sure how to make you understand.” She grabbed her arms behind her back, like a reverse defense. “Maybe you can understand this.

“My personal life is not the most important thing about me. I think you know what I mean. There’s something about what’s been going on with your mother, I don’t know, it just looks to me like you’re on hold, too.” She grabbed a tennis ball off the floor in front of her and threw it above her, catching it as it fell. She threw it again. I caught it, keeping it out of play, working my thumb over its coarse, frayed surface.

“Maybe,” I finally conceded.

She nodded, sitting down on my bed and folding her hands in her lap. “To be my father’s daughter in Japan, the one he has acknowledged as his successor, it’s like having something separate from me but inseparable. Something that grows every time someone new is born to the family, and their place in it sets, so that if my link of the chain were broken, miles of things around it would break, too. Not just my family, though that would be the worst of it, but all the people around the idea of my family, the people who take pride in Satoru Oko and his strong family and the potential his good children hold for the future of the company. And, by extension, for the country itself.”

She stopped, collecting her thoughts. She stood up and started to pace. “It’s a small country, Naomi, not like the U.S. Our shared histories define us. We depend on each other. And power is one of our drugs, particularly if it’s the proud kind.” The room darkened, the afternoon was old. “Do you know how many people know I’m here?” she asked. “Do you know how many people probably even know what dorm I’m in, that I’m rooming with a nice Jewish girl from Massachusetts, that I’m majoring in economics, what my ranking is on the tennis team?” She was hardly able to make the items on her list sound like questions, her tone rote, her face almost immobile.

“Well, you are first,” I said. “It wouldn’t be that hard to find that out.”

She grinned widely, as though together we had made a joke. “I’ll miss you, Naomi,” she said, startling me. And then I thought of where we’d both be in a few short years, and I suddenly missed her, too, even though she was still standing there.

Over my desk in our room I had pasted an image of Orpheus and Eurydice from the d’Aulaires book my father had given me years ago, the one I’d kept over my desk at home after my father had tried to paste Mnemosyne together and I’d thrown her away. I thought it was a concession to my father to give at least one of the Greek myths a place of honor, but I also never got tired of looking at Orpheus: his instrument over his shoulder, his wife following him out of the underworld in her bare feet. She looked so real, with her thicket of black, curling hair under that veil and her careful steps. In my mind, it had always been clear that the image was of the moment before he looked back. I still sometimes dreamt of Teddy and me like that, me trying as hard as I could not to look back, hoping he’d drift my way if I only presented my best self. But, truth be told, I never understood how anyone could not look back, just to check. Who can believe that those who won’t show their faces will return when we want them?

I
t was never quite as easy between Jun and me again, though, oddly, I think our friendship had deepened. I thought more seriously about learning from her studiousness and refocusing my energies on schoolwork, but I felt oddly distanced from the drive that had so easily propelled me before. I’d only show up to listen to the lectures, then let the work slip from my fingers as I walked out the classroom door, like letting jewels fall anywhere once unclasped and at home. Maybe that’s why the letter from the dean didn’t surprise me when it came.

When I opened it I thought I’d immediately be reading something from the dean, but the first page was handwritten by one Grayson Alexander, an alumna writing to me about her med school experience at Johns Hopkins and as a doctor, urging me to keep my grades up so that I might be able to secure some of the “indelible friendships” (medical school) and “incredible, life-altering experiences” (South African clinics; Harvard residency) she had had as a result of (not directly linked but liberally implied) her foundational training at Wellesley. Even compared with her peers, her accomplishments were outstanding. I could almost hear the voices of the committee that had selected and described her:
innovative
,
compassionate
,
creative
.

“Huh,” Jun said noncommittally, looking over my shoulder. “I could see you doing something like that.”

We both guessed what the other letter in the packet said, the one that bore the college seal. “Dear Ms. Feinstein,” it began. “It has come to our attention . . .” Why is it that so many hide behind the protection of overused language to deliver bad news? Maybe it’s to deaden the blow, but the emptiness of the words makes the news seem cold, without the possibility of the warmth and messiness of personality. And, indeed, it was only my GPA, a 3.4, which was two-tenths of a point below what was expected of me, that earned me the warning, that compelled them to tell me I would not be admitted to my medical school of choice if I did not keep my grades up, that compelled them to express concern that my diminished performance reflected a lack of enthusiasm. There was help available to me if I wanted it. But we all knew—me, Jun, Dr. Grayson Alexander, Dean Silas, and the premed faculty advisor, who, together, had signed the official letter—that it wasn’t only a matter of what I wanted, what struck my fancy. It was a matter, primarily, of what I should have wanted.

“Did you ever request personal time?” Jun interrupted my thoughts. She was sorting through her mail.

“What?”

“When your mom got sick, Noms.” She was looking directly at me, now. “You didn’t request personal time then, did you?” I hadn’t. “Did you talk to your advisor?”

I didn’t answer her, just walked over to the bin to dump my junk mail. A credit card offer, probably, a few deals on spring break travel. “I don’t know why they didn’t send me the letter over the summer,” I ruminated, pretending to be more thoughtful than I felt. “I might have been able to do something before I picked out my classes.”

“Like what?” Jun asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something.” The truth was I knew I had been heading in this direction. So much of schoolwork is designed to please both the student and the teacher, a way for lovers whose shared passion is knowledge to exchange promises. But either party will grow nervous if the other is inattentive. And understanding is not enough; the understanding must be offered regularly and willingly. No lover likes to have to demand affection of his beloved. It didn’t matter what I could memorize if I wasn’t willing to perform, to demonstrate my knowledge willingly. I knew the hastily completed lab reports I’d submitted created echoing silences where a straightforward response had been expected to an equally straightforward call. What was I doing, I wondered.

“I’m not sure,” I began again. Another woman burst through the front door, ignoring us as she got her mail, making noise about it, taking the time to toss her undesirables into the bin I was standing near before heading upstairs.

“It’s not too late. You could work harder, Naomi, maybe not disappear into Shakes next semester. You only have to show up for the meetings to stay current. Lots of us bow out for a while when the work gets to be too much.”

She was right. The mailboxes stood in their glass and bronze rows, hundreds of single handles in a shining square. I fingered one, knowing I couldn’t open it.

“It’s up to you, though,” she said. “It’s your choice.”

She had gathered her own things, but stood waiting for my response. I folded the letters back into the envelope. “I’ll call the dean tomorrow,” I said, “see if she has any ideas.”

“Okay,” Jun agreed, and we made our way back to our room. As we walked, Jun began talking about something entirely unrelated, a distraction for which I remain grateful even to this day. By the time we had dropped our things and turned on the lights, I was relieved, even glad to have the opportunity to reach out to the dean, like a thief finally caught and offered fair justice.

Twenty-Three

D
ean Silas had office hours every Tuesday afternoon, so I went to her office the next day, hoping she’d be booked as I made my way there. But there was no one scheduled during the time when I arrived, and only two other students had signed up for appointments later that afternoon.

Her office was at the end of a large, carpeted hallway, one of a handful of administrative rooms on that wing of Green Hall, and it was a hushed place, hushed, I imagined, even when busy. The carpets were a rich, dark color, the walls a dull, matte white. Sketches of various Wellesley buildings sat in ebony frames on the walls.

The dean must not have been expecting any walk-ins, so we surprised each other a bit when she came out to check the list. She ushered me through the door graciously, taking a minute to study the clipboard that had been hanging outside while I took a seat. “Ms. Feinstein,” she said, offering her hand as she walked through the door, so that I had to stand again to take it, and nod my hello, tell her it was nice to meet her. The formalities made me want to leave all the more.

“I suppose you’ve come about your letter,” she said as she walked toward her desk. She registered my look of surprise with a smile, “Believe it or not, I’m aware of every letter that goes out of my office to a student.” Her smile relaxed. “Also, I’ve never met you before, and you look fit to be tied, so I assume you’re here under duress. Premed, if I remember correctly?” I nodded. “Tough road,” she said amiably, leaning back in her chair. She had a pencil or pen, something that she used to tap the desk from her relaxed position. I watched it, not responding to her observation. “How can we help you, Ms. Feinstein?” she asked when I continued to say nothing.