A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [38]
Immediately the sweat began to dry on her skin. She sat in her jeans and her bra on a rock, mildly tickled by the thought of herself half naked in the woods, slightly disconcerted by a narrow roll of fat hovering above the waistband of her jeans. She would have to increase her sit-ups from fifty to a hundred a day. She had a horror of Jim calling to arrange a rendezvous and Agnes finding herself overweight. If a woman had a man every day in her bed, Agnes wondered, was she then able to stop worrying about an extra pound or two?
Tonight, someone would ask Agnes why she had never married, why she hadn’t wanted children. Someone would assume, but not say, that she was a lesbian. It was bound to cross the mind. Never married. No observable boyfriend. Field hockey coach. Agnes had been asked these questions before, had even been the recipient of passes from other women (one on the Nova Scotia trip). The questions, which Agnes used to try to dodge or dismiss, had lately begun to annoy her for their repeated assumptions. Agnes did not hunger for a child. Sometimes she wondered if this wasn’t a failure of her imagination. She could no more picture herself with a child than she could with a horse.
A slight breeze rose and passed across her skin and cotton bra. She put a hand to her chest and was reminded of how smooth and taut her skin was there, of how long it had been since it had been touched. More than a year. How many years, Agnes wondered, before her skin was no longer smooth but crepey in the cleavage, as she had noted on underdressed older women? It would be all lost then, this skin, this loveliness, a dismal thought that gave rise to another one. Did a woman who had been fully loved mind the loss of her youth less than a woman who had not?
They’d all been together in Jim’s class their senior year. Harrison and Nora and Rob and Jerry and Bill and Stephen. Not Bridget, who was a year behind them, the only junior in their circle of friends. Contemporary American literature was a class with a waiting list, and those who got in considered themselves privileged. They sat on sofas in Bloomfield Lounge, discussing Bellow and Kerouac and Ginsberg. Stephen, who seldom did the reading, had a gift for arguing a point. Nora, a true scholar, wrote papers she was sometimes asked to read aloud to the group. Agnes remembered Harrison as the thoughtful one; ideas and deft debate were Stephen’s forte. Rob kept up a barely audible running commentary on the commentary, amusing anyone lucky enough to sit next to him, sometimes even Mr. Mitchell. Jerry, Agnes remembered, was always well prepared and brusque, occasionally resorting to ad hominem attacks when all else failed; yet just when you thought he’d gone too far, he would graciously concede the point and ask the one brilliant question that none of them had quite been able to formulate. And Mr. Mitchell (not yet Jim) would attempt to answer it, gently moving the conversation toward a kind of conclusion, allowing them their intellectual theatrics. Beneath the posturing, real learning was going on. It was only later, when Agnes herself became a teacher, that she understood the quiet skill of his methods.
It was November of their senior year, November 13 to be precise, a date Agnes had observed every year since as a kind of private anniversary. She’d walked into Mr. Mitchell’s office after school to argue a grade on a paper. She had not, during her years at Kidd, made a habit of harassing teachers (as some of the students had), and so she had thought herself perfectly justified in her assault. She went in ready for a battle and did not allow Mr. Mitchell a word until she was done. By the end, she was sputtering, red and blotchy in the face. Jim, sitting across an oak desk while she stood and delivered, pushed his chair back and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Miss O’Connor,” he said, everyone “Miss” or “Mr.” then, “that was the most cogent argument I’ve ever heard in