“I can learn,” he says.
I climb onto the island to screw in one of the lightbulbs; it comes back to life. I look down at my students eating pizza and drinking Coke—most of them don’t drink alcohol—and wish I could stay there, stretch my body across its length while they glance nervously at each other and giggle. I open another beer and excuse myself to the bathroom where I text my boyfriend, the doctor. All of my exes have been reduced to two words, three at most, and this one, though still current, still in play, I think of as The Doctor. The famous writer is also a doctor. My sister says this doctor only wants to sleep in the famous doctor’s bed—it must be his dream—but all of the mattresses are new, as is most of the furniture, and my boyfriend prefers for me to sleep at his house. The only person who really likes it here is my mother. She comes to get away from my father. She brings her little dog and we go on exploring missions in which the dogs peer into holes and run through fields of tall grass. Once I let them swim in the pond and laughed as they struggled to keep their heads above water. Another time the little dog fell into a hole and I had to climb in to get her out.
I’m watching Bob’s Burgers, he texts back. How are things going with your students? I don’t reply. I feel my lower body, swelled with blood, and hope my period starts soon.
Once, after he came inside me, I said, “Let’s have a baby.” I can’t explain these things to myself. Do I say them because I want him to break up with me or do I say them because it’s what I truly want, deep down in some unknowable part of myself? I have never wanted a child, but perhaps this is because I’ve never been with anyone who wanted a child with me. He was kind about it. He said that we should do things in the proper order. But since my divorce, eight years ago, there is no order, proper or otherwise. I think I love someone and they love me and then something comes along and ruins it. They let me believe that I am that something.
In the dining room, I find a few of my students flipping through some old university annuals—1904, 1906—beautifully bound in soft leather. The fraternities used to publish them, their clubs interspersed with poems and drawings of farm animals, profiles of women with pinned-up hair. I got an email recently from the secretary who was looking for a particular yearbook, and then someone from the foundation contacted me about it, and then someone else. I thought it might be rare, the only copy, but I saw the secretary at brunch and she told me they wanted to destroy that year because one of the fraternities had formed a KKK club, had dressed up in white robes with cutout eyes, and the university wanted it gone.
We walk the rooms. The house really is beautiful. There are windows everywhere and a table for twelve, high ceilings, chandeliers. When I first moved in, I imagined the house full of people and laughter, just like this, footsteps going up and down the stairs, doors opening and closing. But it hasn’t been like this; it hasn’t been anything like this. I am alone, far enough from town that it’s considered the country, though it’s not that far from town and is not the country.
The boy follows me around, asks questions. He wants to know what it’s like to live here. They all want to know what it’s like.
Nights, I climb out onto the roof with its not-too-steep incline to smoke a bowl; the window opens easily—all I have to do is throw a leg out. We stand in front of this window and I open it. This is what I want to show them: here is where I sit nights. When you think of me, imagine me here. But I don’t actually sit out here very often. Only after I’ve had too much to drink, when the potential for hurting myself is greatest.
They peer into my bedroom, admire the size of my bathtub, the separate shower and all of the closet space.
The boy comes up behind me and I ask how old he is, though I know how old he is. The only correct answer is that he is old enough and I am young enough. And I’m old enough to know better but not so old to take myself seriously when I talk about the young people today with their pretentions and noise music and carefully crafted carelessness. Their highly developed sensitivities to sexism (but not so much to racism or classism because it is still the Deep South). Stop policing my body, I once overhead a female student say to a male—not mine—and I smiled at her, thinking the comment ironic.
As we stand awkwardly around my bedroom, I tell them things happen in the house that I can’t explain. There are noises. Lights come on. Garage doors open by themselves and books are moved. It’s an old house and there are rational explanations for all of these things, or at least most of them. The country is noisy as shit and nails don’t hold and wiring is faulty and I drink a lot so I can’t say whether or not I closed a door or moved a book, at least not for certain.
The women ask about an alarm system—nonexistent. I tell them that my dog would happily lick the feet of an intruder, though I don’t know if this is true, and that dozens if not hundreds of people know the gate code: the year the university began. I say this with pride: I am okay here; I’m tough. But on my worst nights, I don’t sleep. I lock my bedroom door and lie awake planning escape routes. I imagine myself climbing out of the bathroom window, shimmying and jumping my way down without a scratch. I am unbelievably limber in these imaginings and there is a part of me that wants to be tested. But the facts show that I am bad in an emergency, that I will stand in one spot and scream until rescued, which is why my father refuses to give me a gun.
And then we gather in the living room where they take turns reading their stories. I have given them guidelines: the stories must be under 750 words; they must be in first person and they must have been written this semester. They don’t follow them. As graduate students, they know they don’t have to.