Free Three Women at the Water's Edge by Nancy Thayer

become a biology major. I was told I could get good jobs with it, jobs in labs and so on. But I can’t tell you how devastated I was at the end of my freshman year. I had gotten C’s in all my science courses, and I had slaved to get those. Oh, God, I still can scarcely bear to think of it. I felt like such a failure. That’s one of the reasons I was so glad to come to Rocheport that summer with Carol. I didn’t think I could bear to go back to Iowa, to face my father with my defeat. He had wanted me to be a physician, too, though he never pushed it. That was the worst year of my life—I think that might have been the worst thing that ever happened to me, realizing that I wasn’t going to make my childhood fantasy into a reality. I felt sort of dazed for the next few years, for the rest of my college career. I mean I made A’s in many courses, but I discounted that, it didn’t matter. I still felt like a failure. That’s partly why I went to Europe; I just couldn’t seem to get started in life. It wasn’t that I really wanted to
be a doctor
. It was more that I suddenly was faced with the fact that the rest of my life was not going to be as easy and perfect as my childhood had been.”
    Suddenly she wanted to
be
there, in her childhood, to take Hank by the hand and lead him around through her happy life in Iowa, as through some sort of far-off and fabulous land. She wanted to show him Liberty, a large and gentle village set among rolling hills, where it seemed all during her childhood that her father and mother were the king and queen, and she and her sister Daisy the princesses. It had been such a storybook town; all her days had been as easy as waking up in her pink-and-white-flowered room. The town’s population was only about 4, 500 and most of the people were farmers, or else they worked at the feed mill or sold trucks and tractors and farm equipment, or repaired trucks and tractors and farm equipment. And there were the teachers, of course, who taught in the consolidated public schools, and the keepers of the various necessary shops: the drugstore, which had a soda fountain and small coffee shop—everyone wandered in on Sunday mornings after church to get the Sunday papers and to gossip: the post office; the grocery store; the general store which sold everything from hard candy to women’s girdles; the hardware store.
    “My God,” Hank said, “it sounds like
Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood
.”
    Dale laughed. “It was,” she said. “It was.”
    She went on, she told him everything, it all flooded back through her and out toward him. Liberty was the county seat, and so the town was quite pretty, symmetrical, four blocks squared around a courtyard, with a graystone courthouse solidly standing on the north side, like a serious castle blocking the rest of the town from the worst winter winds. In the middle of the courtyard was a brass statue dedicated to the valiant dead of the two world wars; small boys climbed on the statue to sit on the cannons. And there was a small fountain, which children played in in the summer, and flower gardens, and sidewalks and a few trees—one towering evergreen which was always decorated for Christmas every December—and even a bandstand, with a striped octagonal roof and seven wide steps and railings. And the high school band gave concerts there on the Fourth of July. There were three churches: the Catholic, the Baptist, and the Methodist. Her parents had gone to the Methodist church, and for a long while Dale’s mother had been president of the ladies’ auxiliary. There was only one bar in town, in the American Legion building that stood on one corner. That was the only building in all of Liberty that Dale had never been in. Now, looking back at it as an adult, Dale could see that there was not much going on in Liberty: There was no movie theater, although there was a small library in a tiny yellow frame house, and in Dale’s teenage years they had begun to show old