Free My Education by Susan Choi Page A

speculation I had blushed at the implication for myself. Now I felt the blush return—but if I’d inherited anything of looks from my mother, I’d inherited her robust brown skin, which could conceal a furnace of blushes, even from close observation. That same observer, though, might feel extreme heat, and I took a step backward before I replied:
    â€œIt’s funny to think of her that way, but I’d have to say yes. In her time.”
    â€œIn her time,” she repeated, as if she discerned extra meaning. “Speaking of time, I suppose you have papers to grade.”
    â€œOnly another thirty-nine.”
    â€œWell, I’ll let you get to it.”
    â€œAll right,” I said, very much wishing she wouldn’t. “It was nice meeting you.”
    â€œAnd you,” she agreed graciously, turning away.
    But somehow I could not be content with having regained dignity by the time of our parting, and so I blurted, to her back, “And it’s nice of you to have us to your house. It’s a beautiful house,” realizing too late that this inanity might somehow imply that her husband was also a guest. She looked back at me over her shoulder, and for the first time I saw her disarming, uneven smile, just one corner hitched up.
    â€œNow I know you’re procrastinating,” she chided, resuming her ascent of the stairs. “Back to the salt mines with you.”
    In the kitchen Laurence was still shaking with laughter over one of his papers, and Brodeur was rinsing bottles at the sink, and neither of them looked at me strangely despite how long I felt I must have been gone. The spell had broken for good in my absence, if not because of it, and they’d decided to transfer the rest of the party to the Collegetown Inn, so we could have a proper dinner, which it apparently went without saying we couldn’t obtain where we were, in that enormous and well-equipped kitchen. And so I didn’t see Martha Hallett again on that day, or for months afterward.
    Looking back I can almost imagine that all of that time, in my life as a student, I preoccupied myself with nothing else but Nicholas Brodeur and his household, but that wasn’t the case. The larger share of my time I spent successfully attending three classes, and writing three end-of-term papers I imagined would not be perused much more closely than I’d perused eighty-six papers on Chaucer. I chose courses to take in the spring, and set myself pious goals in reading unfamiliar classics and in otherwise improving myself. Over the Christmas holidays Dutra, as always equipped with the best in all things, produced from the basement a safety-orange plastic toboggan and took me for perilous drunken sled rides on the hills of the Ag School’s Exhibition Plantation, where the sugar maples marched in their ranks down the slope, and the lines for spring tapping were already strung, so that we might, at high speeds, behead ourselves if we didn’t first shatter our spines on tree trunks. Now I’d seen every season but one, and was inclined to believe, with Dutra, that our town was the earth’s distillation: no place hotter nor colder, no place more purely aflame in the autumn nor palaced with ice at New Year’s, nowhere so bathed by its waterfalls, cleaved by its gorges, sexed up in the spring by its shamelessly honey-mouthed blooms. “How can anyone
think
in the spring?” Dutra said one March day, as he swung in the hammock, which because we’d never taken it in was now frayed and gray as some scrap of net flung from the ocean. Of course what we welcomed as spring was a temperature just above freezing, and the filthy gray snow battlements turning slick on the top from the afternoon sun, and the little white snowdrops that bashfully hung down their heads, as if sorry that less demure flowers would soon hoist their skirts. Spring in that town was what most humans would have called winter, but