Riverside Drive. Laura Wormer Van
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was helpless against the charms of her granddaughter. For the next fourteen months Amanda could be seen daily riding across the expanse of Fowles Farm, scarves trailing in the wind behind her. It had not been Nana’s intention to put Amanda’s fantasy world on four legs, but the girl was growing so quickly, so alarmingly, that even Nana had to admit that adulthood and labors of the heart would be arriving soon enough.
However, every afternoon at four, Monday through Friday, poor old Mr. Hammer would arrive, shouldering the burden of trying to teach Amanda mathematics. Amanda was cheerful, amiable, and even stopped touching Mr. Hammer’s ears when he asked her to (“They are ever so remarkably red,” Amanda would say), but she seemed to go into some kind of autistic trance when his lesson began. She watched as hard as she could but heard nothing. It was a language that her brain did not understand.
“Amanda,” Mr. Hammer would say, marking a big red X by every question on the test sheet, “you have outdone yourself. Now, not only can you not do algebra, but you appear to have lost the ability to add.”
Amanda would slide down in her chair and examine her hair at close range. “Nana will be most grievously vexed,” she would sigh.
Poor Nana was also suffering grievous vexation over the bodily changes that had descended on her granddaughter. The slight girl who had arrived was blossoming in ways that Fowles women did not. “You must do something,” Nana would direct the seamstress, “about that—about her—” The movement of her hand would indicate that the seamstress was to do something about concealing Amanda’s ever expanding chest.
Amanda, Nana noted, was the only one oblivious to her new body. The gardener had taken to trailing around after her; the groom smiled in a most inappropriate way when he insisted on giving Amanda a leg up on her horse; even Randolph, the butler—who was at least as old as Nana—could be seen gazing elsewhere than at the gravy he was supposed to be serving.
If Amanda gained any permanent knowledge from her “stabilization” at Fowles Farm, it was Nana’s opinion of the saving graces and potential downfalls of her heritage. Amanda loved Fowles Farm because, Nana said, her Fowles blood responded to it. Amanda’s thinness, her five-eight height, her light brown hair (and its straightness), her nose, her straight white teeth, her strong jaw line and her long arms and legs were all Fowles. As for the shape of her eyes, their strange shade of hazel, those long lashes, that mouth, and the “overendowment” (referring to her chest), they all—sigh—clearly came from the Millers (said with the same emphasis as murderers).
Mr. Hammer pounded enough mathematics into Amanda’s head—right up to the door of the examination room in Baltimore—for her to score a 560 on the SAT. As for the English part, if the examiners had taken her essay on “What George Orwell Would Think of the Design of This Test” into consideration, surely Amanda would have scored higher than her 800.
Amanda went to Amherst on the strength of her desire to attend school with Emily Dickinson’s ghost. She enjoyed school very much and felt at home around the English department. She also made great friends with the curator of the Dickinson house. As for her contemporaries, everyone liked her—and some even admired her—but always from a distance. She was, in their words, “just sooo weird.”
In her senior year Nana died. It became campus news that Amanda had inherited some four million dollars. And it was right around then that Christopher Gain appeared on her doorstep—literally. She was dressed in billowing white, just departing from her cottage to visit the curator. Christopher was dressed like Zorro. He bowed, deeply, his hat in hand, swept his cape to the side and offered her his hand. The girls roared from the windows above, but after Amanda smiled pleasantly at them, she turned to Christopher and took his hand.
Christopher had graduated some years before from Dartmouth. Since that time he had been hanging out at Amherst, discussing his future as a brilliant writer with various gorgeous coeds. He himself had gorgeous blond looks, tremendous charm and appeal, and a three-hundred-year-old pedigree.
Amanda found Christopher slightly magical. Sitting on the grass outside Emily’s house, in the dark of the night, he cited poem after poem that the great lady had written. While Amanda noticed that he kept bending the emphasis to imply that Emily had been writing to some lover hiding beneath her bed, rather than to her universal lover in the heavens above, she enjoyed the performance immensely. And then, offering his hand to her again, he had led her behind some trees. He spread his cloak, gently helped her down, and then gracefully, gently, laid himself down on top of her.
Amanda marveled aloud at the way Christopher touched her. What he was doing, what it felt like—what she did not know it felt like. But it felt wonderful, she said, over and over. Amanda said a lot of things. In fact, she rendered a verbal narrative description of everything Christopher was doing to her—as he did it to her—as if it would help her to remember it all.
Amanda had never been touched that way before. Amanda had never been so much as kissed on the mouth before. Amanda was introduced to earthly delights beyond her comprehension. It wasn’t like Mr. Hammer’s mathematics—but it was very much like reading, she thought. It was taking her somewhere quite far away, somewhere quite different from the places she had been—inside of her? outside of her? where?—and she had the feeling that, yes, like reading, she would not fully understand it until she reached the end of what Christopher had to share with her.
They married three weeks after her graduation and moved to Florence. For two years Amanda and Christopher read and played and talked and dressed and drifted and reveled in Italy. They also spent hours making love.
At night, Christopher would go off alone to the cafés to think about his novel. Amanda preferred to stay home, reading and writing, playing records on the stereo, and acting out plays that had no beginnings and no endings….
Amanda’s first brush with reality struck when Christopher said he couldn’t have sex with her because he had herpes. Had what? Christopher took her to the doctor with him, where it was carefully explained to her that she was lucky not to have caught it. But what was it? How did one catch such a dreadful thing? Did it have something to do with the water here?
The doctor explained.
Christopher said it happened one night, late, when he was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing. It would never happen again. And soon he would be well, he was sure, and then— “oh, darling, do you know what I’m going to do to you?”
On Christopher’s inspiration, the couple moved to New York City in 1978, renting an apartment on 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison avenues. Two weeks after they arrived, Amanda came home from registration at Columbia University to find a young man named Marco wandering around in her kitchen with a towel around his waist.
It took almost six months for it to penetrate, but Reality Part II visited Amanda. Christopher, by his own admission, was bisexual. For Amanda, this information did seem like Mr. Hammer’s mathematics. Not until Christopher persistently pounded it into her head was she able to glean what it was he was talking about. (“But I don’t understand, how can this be?” “It just is, Amanda.” “Is what?” “Like it is between you and me.” “But he’s not like me—how could it be like us?”)
Amanda took her furrowed brow to Columbia to concentrate on an MFA in their creative writing program. It didn’t work. With each passing day she and Christopher were splitting apart. Their sex life broke down completely and Amanda, for the first time in her life, felt terribly lonely. She stopped writing, she could scarcely read, she could not act out plays of any kind. After a while, not even the huge mirror of the wardrobe could evoke a line from her. Her costumes hung in the closets; her attire died into jeans, the denim growing looser, her blouses growing baggier. She dropped out of graduate school.
In 1979, Tinker and Reuben surprised the Gainses by arriving in New York to see them. (It was the first time they had actually made it.) The Millers were frightened by the change in their daughter. They were also stunned by Christopher, who, last time they had seen him, had not being sailing in and out of the house in silk pajamas. And there was something else—something Tinker had to talk about in private with Amanda.
Tinker