How I got from Woonsocket High to College Hill is a short story. I worked like the devil is how I did it. I studied until bedtime and set the alarm for four a.m. and got up and studied again. Every once in a while the gatekeepers at Brown would admit a Rhode Island native for good measure, and one year in the early aughts, that native was me. Mom and Dad shelled out for a party at Amvets, and all of Woonsocket came. Brown hadn’t taken a single kid from Woonsocket since Frannie Archambeault in 1994. A great party except for when Ma raised a shaky glass to Mémé, and Dad had to shoo her into the powder room, both of them drunk on muscatel. Of course, come September, I was glad to be gone.
They didn’t know what to make of me at Brown. Ma had taken me shopping for clothes but our approximation of what a Brown student would wear turned out to be pretty badly off the mark. I showed up with half a dozen cardigans from Apex, but they didn’t suit my low-class haircut nor cover my jaw-dropping chest, which was, to be honest, an attribute my family discussed openly, because it presented many problems, some of them just logistical, like how to get a seat belt over it or how to buy a jacket for it, and some problems historical, because my Mémé had exactly the same legendary bust size, and consensus was that it had ruined her life. I had worked so hard to be a good girl. In high school, I’d worn the Woonsocket version of a burka—shapeless tunics over cotton leggings, everything a couple sizes too big. It was within me, always in my mind, that I should work extra hard against whatever it was Mémé recognized in me.
Professor K—— was my freshman advisor. Dad and Ma were happy about Professor K—— because he was a famous architectural scholar (they read this on the website), and ever since I was a kid I’d said I wanted to be an architect. In photographs, he looked like a cross between Albert Camus and a Dukes of Hazzard–era Tom Wopat. He was forty-two at the time I came under his influence, walking straight up to his desk with my hand out, like Dad had instructed me, my notebook pressed against my chest. I might as well have said, Here I am, the dope you have been waiting for, an absolute fool. His smile, after a pause, was warm and youthful. He was a very warm man when you first met him, and naturally, he had a brilliant mind. He had written a seminal text on Walter Gropius; I’d read it closely, at age sixteen, and upon hearing this he signed me up for his popular lecture course, The Autobiographical House.
He was Viennese. When he first referred to himself with the term, I didn’t know what it meant. I thought maybe it meant he was from Venice, but he sounded like a German. Why not just call yourself an Austrian? But this was the first of many such moments at Brown. Words in English that were not in my vocabulary. Everyday allusions more difficult to parse than anything out of The Wasteland. Every time I pretended to understand was a minor betrayal of myself, and all the people of Woonsocket, but it never once occurred to me to ask anyone to clarify. Looking back now, there was a lot of buried anger, layer under layer, but I did not feel any anger at all until I left school and moved to the Armory. And then I felt a lot, quite a lot.
Anyone but me would have seen it coming. Any girl who’d read the right Thomas Hardy novels or attended private school or owned a passport would have read the signs. Not me. Once, he even grabbed my wrist as I tried to leave Sayles Hall after The Autobiographical House, whispering, “Stay.” Another time, during one of our meetings, he’d langorously opened a coffee-table book of Franz von Bayros’s erotic paintings and asked me what I thought of them. (“Technically proficient.”) Yet I persisted in seeing ours as a collegial relationship. I struggled quite a bit, however, once he finally got me down on the floor. There was strenuous physical resistance and clear use of triggering words. So it was a violent coupling—the only pause originating in his awestruck expression upon penetration—and after that, well, I never struggled again. We had both experienced revelations: his, that I was a virgin, and mine, that my personal sovereignty was completely irrelevant. The situation dragged on, and on, and on—three years—a month off here and there, one semester of liberation (Austrian sabbatical), all of it a marathon of denial. As a junior, I suffered through one excruciating semester as his TA in Vienna: City of Dreams, during which I developed a case of eczema so profound that I felt I was cursed. Who’d cursed me—his wife? God? I never had any sexual pleasure. He was always rough and loveless. I told no one, and did not pursue other boys. Back in Woonsocket for holidays, I took my place around that noisy table, drawing a blank when anyone asked how school was going.
“She’s too modest,” Ma said, dragging on her cigarette. “So smart they made her an assistant to the teacher.”
Faces flipped toward me like dominoes: eyes, nostrils, mouth—five holes.
I tipped back my glass of muscatel.
“Jake, Jake,” my aunt said to my cousin, waving, “tell the story of how you got arrested at Brown.”
“Not arrested—”
“He was on a job,” my aunt said. “A couple weeks ago. A raccoon or something got into a crawl space so they called us. Some chick called the campus police and said an unidentified white male was trying to dig his way into the building. Unidentified white male!”
“That’s me,” said Jake. “Unidentified.”
“Fucking eggheads.”