The Monsters of Templeton (7 page)

And then the little girl said in a surprisingly deep and throaty voice, "Holy crap. Scared the pants off me. Well, come on in, and make yourself at home." The professor grinned at her, tickled.

It was only when I approached and saw the girl's quick and mischievous eyes, and the way she held herself, that I knew that she was far older than I had at first imagined. "This is Professor Serget, and I'm Clarissa Evans," she said. "We were talking about George Sand. A minor writer, in my opinion, but we're reading Indiana this semester. Yet again," and she twinkled at the professor, who gave a little chortle. Then Clarissa smiled kindly at me and said, "And you're a freshman. Come sit next to me and I'll let you crib my notes."

Instead, though, I sat opposite her and scowled. "Willie Upton," I said as coldly as I could manage. "I'm sure I can hold my own."

She nodded and her face lit up. "Aha," she crowed as the door opened and other students began to trickle in, "spunk! Now that's what I like to see," and she winked at me.

Clarissa's ideas were excellent but her French reprehensible, and even the professor couldn't help but swallow a grin when she opened her mouth and in her incongruous voice started attacking something new. When I walked home from the class that day, she walked beside me. We must have looked ridiculous, I with my lanky height and tiny little Clarissa, like an egret striding alongside a chain-smoking parakeet.

From then on, and even though she was a junior, we did everything together. I took higher-level classes with Clarissa, ate meals at the dining hall with her and her friends, all quick-witted types. I even moved into her suite when one of her dorm mates was kicked out for selling pot. Clarissa amazed me: she could do endless keg stands and quote Nietzsche; she could hike for eight hours without complaint and give a better manicure than a beautician; she left red lipstick rings around her cigarettes, and scattered the stubs behind her like flower petals. She walked away from nastiness, from gossip, but loved her friends so much she mimicked them endlessly, and you always felt pleased she was making fun of you. She had the worst taste in jokes, was the most puntastic person I'd ever met, had the unique talent to always make me laugh and wince simultaneously; when she at last snagged a guy she liked, Sully Bird, she grinned at me, saying one Bird in the hand, and left me to supply the rest. As the coxswain for the men's crew team she made herself heard up and down the river, shouting at her boys, "Come on, you bitches, pull," and, because she was Clarissa, they pulled. They would win for her at Little Threes; they'd place second that year at the Head of the Charles.

The day I was going back to Templeton for Thanksgiving, I went by Clarissa's room with my knapsack, ready to leave. I saw her on her bed, reading. Her room was a sty, and there was no evidence of packing. "Clarissa," I said, "when're you taking off?"

She didn't take her eyes off the page. "I'm not," she said. "I'm staying here."

"You can't stay here for Thanksgiving," I said. "That's ridiculous."

"Sure I can," she said. "I like the international foods potluck. Who knew you could have poppadom and lingonberries all at the same time. Delectable."

"Good God, girl," I said. "That's it. You're coming back to Templeton with me."

It took great force, but in the end, she came. As we drove, I could tell that Clarissa was startled at the traces of poverty and decay in upstate New York, the dying barns like whale ribs sticking out of the frosty ground, the trailers hugging the highway, the ghost towns of battered Victorian houses. I could see she had begun to question her choice of coming to Templeton, picturing cat-piss-soaked couches, probably, and shivering all night from a damp draft from the window. If there was one thing that irritated me about Clarissa, it was her skewed concept of money, that she would spend a hundred dollars on highlights for her hair and only eat Belgian chocolate. And so I encouraged her dismay, telling her that my cousin BillyBob (who didn't exist) would want to take us out on his snowmobile; explaining that we called my grandmother (who also didn't exist) Genesee Ginny because she cracked open her first can of beer at nine in the morning and kept up the pace all day, to not worry if she found her passed out somewhere on the floor, just to roll her over so that she's on her side in case she vomits. All of upstate New York was dying, I told Clarissa. I told her what my friends and I called towns up there: Syracuse was Sorry-excuse. Rochester was Rot-and-fester. Albany was All-banal. Oneonta was Oh-I-don't-wanna.

Clarissa was pale and her forehead was creased by the time we rounded the lake, but when we came into Templeton, with its great old mansions and sparkling streets, with its crowds of happy tourists, she brightened. "This," she said, turning to me with wonder in her face, "is like a town in a snow globe. This is a perfect place."

"Well. It's pretty nice," I said.

"No," she said, and her voice was severe. "It's perfect."

That week, Clarissa and my mother got along swimmingly, so much so that Vi often stayed up with us late into the night over cookies and wine, and laughed and laughed, more than I'd ever heard her laugh in my life. It was a prematurely snowy Thanksgiving, and while my mother worked one night, Clarissa and I went to a candlelight festival at the Farmers' Museum, where the snowbanks were carved into cups and held flickering votives, so that the snow was lit from within by golden orbs of light. The upwafting wind smelled of woodsmoke and the fresh snow-smell and wassail cider and even the clean sweat of the Clydesdales who trotted us around from place to place in sleighs. The sounds of their harness bells mixed with the fiddlers in Sherman's Tavern, where there was a dance of sorts going on, and the laughing shrieks of the kids having a snowball fight in the darkening commons.

Clarissa stood with me on the steps of the pharmacist's, looking out at the old-fashioned village in its soft dusk. In the small, close house we had just smelled the mingled smells of a thousand herbs; feverfew and yew and bee balm and willow-bark aspirin; we palpated the phrenological head; we watched the fat black leeches crawl on the glass of their jar. Aristabulus Mudge, moonlighting from his modern pharmacy in town, watched us good-humoredly, cocking his head above his hunchback like a parrot and slipping us free lavender sachets for our sock drawers.

"Here ye are, Willie Temple," he said to me, our little ritual.

"Willie Upton," I said, pretending irritation, as usual.

"Whatever you say," he said, and gave me the same wink as always.

Walking outside, Clarissa sighed. "I really feel," she said, "like a colonial woman. Isn't that strange?"

I looked at her expensive duck boots, three-hundred-dollar jeans, and grinned.

But then I said what I had been thinking about, which was just as strange. I said that when we as a society ran out of oil, the hobbyhorse of my econ professor that fall, when all social structure broke down and we could no longer supply ourselves with goods in the way we had developed, I felt comforted that all we had to do was go to the Farmers' Museum to learn all those forgotten, essential arts. "It's a self-contained world," I said to Clarissa, so excited I couldn't see the face she was making. "There's a whole body of forgotten knowledge here. They make everything: shoes, barrels, wheels, brooms, linens. We can learn animal husbandry and herbal medicine, you name it. Like a little backup generator of culture we've got here. When all of civilization ends, we can just come to Templeton."

It was only after I delivered my little speech that I looked at Clarissa and saw the fury on her face. "Why do you always have to ruin things like that," she said, and she leapt into the snowdrift beside the porch and went wading off, the little red pompoms on her hat waggling furiously at me.

When it was time for us to head back to school, my mother took Clarissa's little face in her hands and peered down into it.

"There is a room here for you whenever you need one," she said.

"Vi," I said, horrified. "Clarissa's got her own family."

Vi didn't look at me but rather kissed Clarissa on the forehead.

And she said something so softly I could not quite hear it, that sounded like "Well, an orphan knows an orphan."

Later, in the car, as we passed into Massachusetts, I stared out at the glittering icy road. "Clarissa," I said. "Want to tell me what that all was about? What Vi said?"

And she said nothing at first, for at least fifteen miles. And then she lit a cigarette, even though it was forbidden in my car, blew the smoke out a crack in the window, and said, "She was right." Staring out her passenger window, she told me that she'd been the only child of aging professors, the child of their old age, the center of their attention. And then, when she was almost sixteen, they went on a family trip to Norway, and her father pulled the rented Volvo to the side of Goblin's Pass to get a picture. As her parents stood on the brink admiring the view, she climbed behind a tree to take a tinkle.

When she emerged, they were gone. The camera was placed at the edge of the fjord. The last picture was their two faces, smiling before the crevasse, taken by her father from an arm's length.

"Mom? Dad?" Clarissa called out uncertainly, and nobody ever answered her. She began to scream, louder and louder, and the echo that returned and returned was distant and mocking.

When the rocks below were searched, nothing was found. When she went back to the house in Connecticut, nothing was missing. She had their life insurance policies, she sold the house and most of the furniture, she had plenty of money. But her parents were the only children of only children, and so she had nowhere to go on holidays, she said.

Then she turned to me as we pulled into the parking lot behind the dorms. "You fucking tell anyone, and I kill you, okay?" she said. "Dead. An extremely painful and tragic death, understand? Garroting. Possible flaying involved, if I'm pissed enough." Parked there, we watched a boy trying to stuff an enormous duffel through the door of the dorm, his breath in the cold rising like a furze around his head.

"All right," I said at last. "Why?"

"I'm nobody's pity case," she said, and gave me a little pinch on the arm. "Ever. Not even yours. Head case, maybe," she said, and smiled weakly at her joke.

Clarissa had graduated, ended up as a journalist, though her career choice at first surprised me. But there was something about her smallness, her huge personality, her bright clothing and wickedly innocent ways that led people to confide in her. She was very good at what she did. She had a fiance, Sullivan Bird, who was clever and kind and funny, and though I at first had a hard time accepting that a nonpervert would want to be with someone who looked as if she were a twelve-year-old girl, in the end, I was sold. Sully Bird was an architect, had a face soft as a koala bear's, and the first time he'd met her at a concert, he'd followed Clarissa around all night, looking dazzled, saying, "Please, just go out with me. Please," all unspoken rules about not looking utterly pathetic to an unknown love-object thrown to the wind. She laughed; she caved; and to the surprise of both of us, she found out how kind and gentle Sully was, and had been with him for five years. True, that past winter, things were rocky between them, blowing up once in a bar (the jukebox blaring "Love Me Tender," the tang of mojitos in my mouth), an argument that seemed to come from nowhere and that devolved quickly into ad hominem attacks. In between Sully's charges of "snob," "superficial," "egoist," "brute," and Clarissa's of "sap," "weakling," "intellectual pansy," "conservative," people cowered and ran for cover. All our friends dissolved away.

"I can't marry that man," wailed Clarissa in the taxi home after I had wrestled her away. "He doesn't know me." Their separation lasted a week, and then they were back together as if nothing had happened, cracking each other up with their saucy little impersonations of their friends, doing their choreographed, impromptu swing moves on the street corners. Still, maybe I imagined it, but I felt a little hesitation, a little chill there where I hadn't felt any before. I suspected sometimes that when she was gone for the weekend on "assignment," that she was visiting Templeton and my mother, staying in the room on the second floor of the 1970s wing that we called "Clarissa's Room." I never mentioned it, though. Everyone deserves a little comfort.

And then, out of nowhere, at the age of twenty-nine, my Clarissa found herself sick.

One night in late February, Clarissa and I went to a gallery opening for one of our friends from school. Heather was a sculptor, and already getting famous, though back when we first met her she was a plump poli-sci major who had dreamt all her life of running a think tank. Now she was splinter-thin on her diet of raw foods, sleek in her artfully deconstructed cotton dresses, and she made lush three-dimensional body parts from organic matter, great astounding breasts and bellies and penises crafted of leaves and seeds and braided grasses. We were barely in the door with champagne flutes in our hands when Clarissa sighed and rubbed her head. "I'm so tired, Willie," she'd said. "God, I've never been this tired in my life." I wasn't really listening: I was trying to find Heather to compliment her on her opening, and Clarissa had been whining about being tired for almost three months, which I thought was because she had been working hard on her current huge story about a crooked Berkeley cop. I took a step away from Clarissa and heard a little oof, and when I turned back, she was sitting on the granite pedestal of two billowy golden ass cheeks woven from some ripe straw. Ex(flax) was its title. Clarissa was pale and shaking her head.