An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [66]
"Yes," she said. There was a strong, wet sibilance to the word, which made me suspect that she had a tongue ring, in addition to her many other piercings. She would have been in high demand as a model for Face and Metal, assuming there was such a magazine.
"Why?"
"We're reading My Ántonia," the Chairman Mao kook said. My face must have looked as baffled as I, its owner, felt, because she clarified: "That's a book. By Willa Cather."
"I know that," I said. My Ántonia was another book my mother had made me read, and I remembered it well: the sweeping Nebraska prairie, the waist-high snow, the transplanted Scandinavians and Slavs and their work ethic, the strong women in calico always drinking strong coffee. And then there was Ántonia herself, who, as I remembered, was plucky, among her other notable qualities. "But why did she call Willa Cather" ― and here I summoned all my courage and finally got it out ― "a cunt?"
The Chairman Mao kook didn't flinch when I said the word. "Professor Ardor thinks all writers are cunts."
I turned to the Richard Nixon kook to get his take on the matter, but he wasn't paying any attention to us at all. His eyes were fixed on Lees Ardor; he had this aroused, glazed look on his face and kept smoothing and stroking his tie, and you didn't have to be an English major or a reader to know what that symbolized.
Meanwhile there was a discussion going on in front of us. One of the normal, scantily clad college girls had said about My Ántonia, "I liked it."
"What do you mean by like?" Lees Ardor asked, in the same tone she'd used when she asked me what she was supposed to profess. There followed a long debate about what it meant to like something. I didn't pay much attention to this at all, not so much because I didn't understand the discussion, but because it flew so far below the radar of my interest. Finally they exhausted that topic, I mean really exhausted the hell out of it: even the air in the classroom seemed weary.
"I'm sorry about your mother," one of the other normal, scantily clad girls said.
"What is she talking about?" I asked the Chairman Mao kook.
"Professor Ardor's mother died," she whispered back. "She canceled classes last week so that she could go to the funeral. It was in Nebraska." She paused again, fingered her nose ring like a thoughtful bull, and then added, "That's also where My Ántonia is set, by the way."
"I knew that, too," I said. "I've read the book, you know."
"Her mother died of cancer," she said. "The really bad kind."
I could hear something shift in the Chairman Mao kook's voice, could hear the boredom and knowingness seep out and the empathy flow in. I could see the change in her female classmates, too. They sat up in their chairs and leaned toward their teacher, and you could almost feel them waver in their dislike for Lees Ardor. The men did not care ― they were slumped down in their chairs, as usual, their baseball caps pulled down over their faces in an attempt to either hide or call further attention to their apathy ― but the women in the class cared about Lees Ardor: her mother had died, after all, and they had just read My Ántonia, and no doubt they were thinking what I was thinking. No doubt they had visions of Lees Ardor's melancholy return to the great sweeping North American prairie. On the prairie, the students probably imagined, there were self-strong women in calico showing off their self-strength during Lees Ardor's mother's funeral and drinking strong coffee afterward. And then there was Lees Ardor's mother herself, who (so we imagined, speaking for the female members of the class, whom I considered myself one of at that moment) was as strong and as stoic as any woman in Nebraska ― strong when her husband had died ten years earlier of a heart attack and she'd had to sell their farm, strong during the six months she was dying of leukemia.