Free Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) by Rosie Schaap Page A

woods
?”
    â€œCommuning with nature. Or something. I’ll let her know you called.”
    My mother knew, even as I wished to deny it, that the woods were not where I belonged. It’s true; I am a city person. And while North Bennington could hardly qualify as an urban environment, it offered at least some of the amenities of civilized life; namely, it had a bar.
    But the thing about small towns is,
they are small
. People will know all your shit, and you will know theirs, and you, and they, will have to accept that. Commercially, this tiny pocket of northern North Americana had little to say for itself. It had a post office, a general store, a pizzeria, a fancy restaurant where your mom and dad might take you to dinner during parents’ weekend or a friend might get a job bussing tables, a gas-station-slash-cigarette-and-beer-convenience store with launderette attached, a bank—and the bar. And there’s no way that each and every day you spend in a small town, and pass your time and live your life in these few venues, you’re not going to run into someone you know and who knows you. Unless you are an absolute shut-in—like Constance Blackwood in Jackson’s great novel
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
—you cannot hide from your fellow townsfolk.
    Certainly, as I sat on the front porch of my little first-floor apartment on the village’s Main Street, I relished having a convenient vantage point from which to monitor the comings and goings at various hours of those whom I knew to live in North B, as most of us called it, and those whom I knew did not. I passed many temperate evenings on that shabby porch, playing Scrabble or cards with friends, maybe sharing a bottle of cheap wine or a six-pack of beer and a bag of chips, and many mornings with coffee and cigarettes and a crossword puzzle before going to class. From there I could observe an off-campus version of the well-known Walk of Shame on campus, where one might witness over weekend brunch the traffic patterns across the main lawn, and if you knew who lived where, as most of us did, well, you could arrive at all sorts of conclusions. Small, isolated places breed this kind of thinking.
    It didn’t take much doing to understand why Jackson had allegorized her little community in the most sinister way imaginable, but to a big-city girl like myself, North Bennington was also something new and nearly heavenly: all scuffed picket fences and hilly streets and beat-up clapboard-clad or brick houses that listed to one side or the other, lilac trees that burst into perfumed life every muddy spring, twisty creeks and canals that sang and sputtered. In autumn, Vermont may just be the most magnificent place on earth: its frantic display of so much red and orange and gold, its trees that bleed and flame with the splendor of incipient fatality. But otherwise, there’s little grandeur to speak of in North Bennington, dotted as it is with rusty rotting mills and expired factories, sliced by railroad tracks upon which no trains have rolled since God remembers when. North B isn’t stately like neighboring Old Bennington, with its neoclassical mansions and phallic-triumphalist obelisk commemorating the Battle of Bennington (which actually took place a town west, in Hoosick, New York), its whitewashed, austere Congregational church and its picturesque graveyard in which generations of students have paid their drunken midnight respects at the grave of Robert Frost. North B is also too settled to be called bucolic. Still, it’s charming in its own modest way; it is humble, it is ordinary, a small town populated by families and working people, a handful of college professors, and the few students, like myself, lucky enough to get permission to live off campus. I moved to North B as fast as I could, first into the only college-owned off-campus house—a gray Victorian cube capped by a cupola, just beyond the railroad tracks—and