Free The Last First Day by Carrie Brown Page B

top, the weathervane’s bronze ship pointed her bow west.
    Once, years ago, Ruth had won a five-dollar bet with Peter about weathervanes: the ship faces the oncoming wind, she’d insisted. It doesn’t follow it.
    She had known this as she knew so many things: from reading. She read voraciously, novels and histories, dozens of self-help guides—though Dr. Wenning had disparaged such material—nonfiction on diverse subjects: world hunger, astrophysics, nineteenth-century European art. Over the issue of the weathervane, she had been her worst self, triumphantly pushing the open volume of the encyclopedia across the dining room table at Peter and jabbing the page with her index finger.
    She had made him get up and give her the money right then and there, even though they’d been eating dinner at the time. That had been part of her problem, she knew; she’d nevermade any money of her own in her life. Gloria Steinem had been two years ahead of Ruth at Smith. Beside someone like Gloria, Ruth felt the paucity of her experience, her meager achievement. Over the years, she’d done every sort of job imaginable at the school, answering the phones, playing the piano to accompany the choir—though inexpertly, it was true—even teaching French. But because she was Peter’s wife, and because he was the headmaster, and because that’s how things were then, it had been assumed that she would never be paid for any of it. That was how women had been treated—
wives
had been treated—in those days. Today no one would tolerate such an arrangement, she knew, and everyone was better for it.
    As she had watched Peter cross the room that night to find his jacket and his billfold, lifting the coat from the chair and patting the pockets, her absurd victory had felt pyrrhic, of course.
    I’ve got some work to do before the morning, he’d said after that, and he had taken himself off to his study upstairs.
    She’d been angry with herself, ashamed. Why had she needed to prove to Peter, of all people, that she knew which way a weathervane faced? He had never doubted her intelligence, never once been anything but grateful for her presence at his side, the way she had put her head down and worked alongside him. Yet she had cared so much about being
right
all the time, because that’s what happened when you felt that you were a powerless person, just someone’s
wife
. She’d never told Peter she’d wanted to be paid for what she’d done at the school, and in the end it wasn’t about the money, anyway. But perhapsit would have helped her feel less useless sometimes, if she’d ever had a paycheck with her name on it.
    She looked up now at the white steeple of the chapel, its confident ascent. The young women hired today to teach at the school were accomplished and ambitious, half of them with doctorates—one of them had
two
doctorates, Peter had told her—even though it was only high school. All of them were busy with their careers and often children, too. It was difficult not to feel a little silly, a little superfluous, when she compared herself with these young women.
    She thought about the amateurish paintings she’d made over the years, the failed play and the failed novel she’d written, the hours spent practicing the piano in hopes of being good enough to play professionally one day, even just with the ragtag local orchestra in Bangor. All those
years
, she thought now, when she had struggled so hard to be accomplished in this or that. She’d never had quite enough talent, in the end, or maybe it was patience. Few people did, she knew. Still, she couldn’t pretend it hadn’t hurt sometimes, knowing that.
    For a while she had wanted passionately to be a playwright. She’d written a play set in the nineteenth century about a Japanese geisha, but she couldn’t seem to drag her mind sufficiently away from
Madame Butterfly
, which she loved, to make the work original. Then she’d tried a novel about a star-crossed mixed-race