Your dark eyes softened, and you sat down on a desktop opposite me. “You can relax.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I just wanted to tell you how much I love your passion in class. You make it worth being a professor.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, and I couldn’t remember any words at all. Then I willed myself to be normal.

  “You’re an incredible teacher,” I said, and for some reason I looked directly into your eyes. Something beyond us both did bewitch us then, some depth of connection forged in our shared gaze. “I’ve never had a teacher as inspiring as you,” I added, but in such a dazed way that I couldn’t remember how to enunciate the words properly.

  “Do you hike?”

  “What?”

  You laughed. “I asked if you like to hike. In the wilderness?”

  Confused, I nodded.

  “I don’t know anyone here. I certainly haven’t met any colleagues I want to spend time with. Do you want to go for a hike with me—maybe Saturday?”

  You spoke so fast, I had to focus carefully to understand you. “Is that allowed?”

  You paled and bit the inside of your lower lip, your brow furrowing. “Why wouldn’t it be? We can be friends.”

  Of course we could. How strange that I even asked whether it was allowed, considering my innocence then. “I’d love to go hiking with you.”

  You looked so relieved. “Suggest a good place.”

  I was startled that you didn’t know everything. In class, you were so confident that you seemed almost arrogant; you probed with questions and then led us into more questions and probed some more. But in the golden dust-mote air of that late afternoon, in the empty classroom, you looked like an East Coast girl who was out of her element and needed a guide. I probably straightened my shoulders before I spoke. “Let’s hike to Dutton Springs.”

  I’m a true Iowa farm girl. I spent my childhood exploring the edges of the fields, digging in the grasses behind the barn, playing invented games beneath the giant maple trees rooted in front of our house. You didn’t know any of that. You just trusted me completely that Saturday we went to Dutton Springs. It equalized us. In the woods, I didn’t feel intimidated by you because you looked so uncertain.

  When I arrived at the parking area, you were already waiting. I’d learn later that you prefer to be early to everything, partly because you don’t like to miss out, and partly because you need to scope out the situation first.

  I’ll admit I was half expecting to see you dressed in all black still, maybe in some black high heels. It was surprising to see your unruly hair pulled back into a simple ponytail, and it was surprising—upsetting, but I couldn’t understand why—to see your skin. You wore a pair of khaki shorts, matched purple socks, a purple T-shirt. Your skin was pale but freckled—constellations of freckles. Instead of a professor, you looked like a little girl. I wanted to take your hand in mine and lead you down the trail.

  “Ready?” I asked, and you nodded. I could hear your footsteps behind me on the gravel walkway between the parking area and the small wooden bridge over the creek, like Eurydice following Orpheus. It was such an eerie sensation that I glanced behind me. “Doing okay?”

  “We just started!”

  I think you playfully hit my backpack then, and when I turned around to grin at you, I caught something in your gaze that I didn’t understand—and know now you didn’t either. That early, I saw love in your eyes.

  The Iowa woods are enchanting. My grandmother, a lover of nature and especially of the woods, had taught me to love the names of the oaks—bur, red, northern pin. I love their thick grooved trunks and their broad prayers of branches. I recognized lindens and hawthorn, buckeye and hickory. Near the ground, witch hazel. The path, dirt now, wove gently beneath the green, arched cathedral ceiling of those great trees, and somewhere nearby a house wren sang.

  “What do you see?” you asked.

  I wanted to be poetic. In class, you read poetry like others read aloud religious texts, and I wanted you to understand how beautiful I found those woods, how connected and grounded they made me feel.

  “Tara?”

  Why did it surprise me to hear you use my name? It was as if I thought you didn’t know it, though by this time I’d been a student in your class for over a month. In class, you called me by name in discussions. But some quality to your voice just then, some softness, some tenderness, startled me into silence. The house wren, too.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I . . . am. I was just thinking of how to explain.”

  “So?”

  You were always impatient. “So . . . I don’t have words eloquent enough.”

  “What is this tree?”

  “Hickory.”

  “And this?”

  I named them all for you, and the names of the trees and the plants became a litany of words that became a poem, until I ended with deer heart and you knelt to examine the dark-green, heart-shaped leaves.

  “Maybe Iowa is more beautiful than I thought.”

  I didn’t know, then, that you’d loathed Iowa for days after the sidewalk-chalk incident, that you’d driven miles in the countryside and observed cynically that each small town’s most prominent landmark was its cemetery. I didn’t know Iowa had begun to seem like a narrow cage to you. I simply thought you were a woman who’d spent her whole life in the rush and energy of a big city and that you were finally gaining appreciation for the rural state I loved. Weeks later, I would take you driving at sunset so we could watch the enormous red-orange sun sink slowly behind the horizon. I would take you walking in the early morning through the prairie grass along the Upper Green River. You said you fell in love with Iowa as you fell in love with me, but maybe we were always the same thing. I grew from this soil, after all.

  That day, we walked much of the trail in silence. I found this strangely unsettling since you never allowed silence to descend in our classroom. You constantly kept the energy moving; you shifted from discussion to activity to interactive lecture; you kept us continually engaged. But out in the woods that day, I learned that you were more than merely the high-energy English professor.

  I realized I didn’t know you at all, and I didn’t know where to begin, and I didn’t know why you’d asked me to hike with you. I couldn’t possibly interest someone as brilliant and literary as you. Or so I told myself.

  We hiked in silence most of the way to the waterfall, and when we reached that impressive place—the gracefully narrow falls descending white from a high limestone cliff, cascading over the rocks to a green pool—you clutched my arm and gasped.

  How odd that I didn’t wonder about my reaction to your touch. I remember exactly the way my skin heated, the way my stomach clenched with excited anticipation. I recognized my response, I think, but I slid that disturbing reaction into a corner of myself. You were just my professor, I told myself, so the power dynamic was different than it would have been with other women friends. That’s why I was confused.

  “It’s gorgeous!” you shouted in delight, and I forgot my confusing response to your touch anyway. Your face glowed with rapture and with the effort of the hike, and you spread your arms to embrace the waterfall and the pool. Several black curls had escaped from your ponytail, and your turquoise backpack was askew. I loved you. Purely. I think I even knew it.

  “Isn’t it? This is my favorite place in this area,” I shouted back. We had to shout, the crash of the water was so deafening.

  “Mine, too. Thank you, Tara.” And then you turned to me and threw your arms around me and hugged me deeply, your hug soft and maternal—though my own mother is so angular I don’t know why I called your hug maternal—but it was also . . . confusing. I pulled away, embarrassed. My friends and I didn’t hug each other that tightly or for that long.

  “I’ll spread out the picnic I brought,” I shouted awkwardly and moved toward the table some Boy Scout troop had built by the falls. I couldn’t look at you. For several minutes, I busied myself spreading out the cheese and crackers, fruit and nuts, the thermos of iced tea.

  When I looked up to tell you the picnic was ready, I couldn’t find you. Your turquoise backpack rested against an oak tree, but you were nowhere to be seen.

  I panicked. Later, I’d tell you about the freshman student who had died after he fell climbing the rocks here—just three years ago. The kid had been in my class and had been an experienced rock climber. Not like you, New York girl. And yet you managed to shimmy down those slippery limestone rocks to the pool below. That’s where I saw you, standing naked on the edge of the pool, poised to dive.

  “Don’t dive!” I shouted down to you.

  You looked up at me and smirked, shaking your head. “Live a little!” And you leaped into the air and cut into the green water so smoothly you barely made a splash.

  I was so certain I’d have to report the death of one of Grace College’s professors, or at least the paralysis of one, that I started to cry. When you resurfaced, grinning, I didn’t feel relieved—just angry at you. I stalked away from the cliff’s edge and sat down hard at the picnic table, my arms crossed.

  How young and capricious I must have seemed to you. You couldn’t have seen me stalk away, but when you climbed back up to the top of the cliff half an hour later, dripping, grinning, shouting, “Invigorating!” you could see from my body language that I was furious.

  “Don’t approve of skinny-dipping?”

  “I don’t approve of people who try to break their necks.”

  “But I didn’t, did I?”

  “Still.”

  “Ah, come on. They’d find another professor. People with PhDs are desperate to find college jobs.” You plopped down across from me at the picnic table and grabbed an apple slice. “Mmm. I’m starving.”

  And that was it. You have a gift for shifting tense situations into humorous ones. In minutes, we were laughing, chattering about all kinds of subjects, behaving like great friends—which we were fast becoming. That’s what is so dizzying about you, that you can make these wild decisions one moment that throw me, and then the next moment be so utterly normal and comfortable that I can only forgive you and love you more fiercely. Except now. If you’ve left, Eliza—really left—I don’t think I can forgive you . . .

  The truth is I’ve never understood you, and I’ve always understood you completely.

  On the hike back to the cars, I tried to talk about the Modernist poets we were studying in class, bringing up ee cummings somehow—probably the line about the spirits of the trees—and you laughed out loud.

  “Relax, Tara. How about pretending I’m not your professor?”

  “But . . . you are.”

  It was true, and suddenly the space between us seemed to expand. You walked faster and said little on the way back to the cars.

  It was only later that night, when I lay in my dorm-room bed alone, that I thought again about you standing naked in the sunshine on the edge of that green pond. The image flashed like a camera’s in my mind: the soft curves of your hips, your muscular, tanned arms, the light-brown weight of your breasts. I saw the image and then felt ashamed to have remembered it. I willed myself to think of other things; I told myself it was inappropriate—and wrong—to think of a professor that way.

  Then I realized with a jolt that the most wrong part was that you were a woman. I wasn’t closed-minded, but I was certain I was no lesbian. I had a boyfriend, after all.

  I decided it was a sign that you and I should only be teacher and student, and nothing else. When you left a message on my phone the following weekend, I deleted it and didn’t respond. I made plans with Jacob, instead.

  Oh, Eliza.

  What am I doing? What am I doing, staying up all night writing what is becoming a novella-length letter to you when you will never read it, when you are who knows where?

  All morning, I’ve toggled between this Word document and my email. Refresh, refresh, refresh. Junk emails advertising sales at Target and Lands’ End, a mass email from my aunt about her family’s holiday plans, an invitation from a high school friend to meet up for drinks when I’m at my parents’. I delete each one. Be Eliza, I will the screen and then push the refresh button. Nothing.

  I hate that I burn to talk to you. I hate that I need you this much.

  I’m trying to pretend that I need to write all this down to help myself understand all that’s happened—not just with us but to me. I used to be so normal. I used to be a regular Iowan girl, a good student, bound for a college education and some good, solid job in the publishing or social media world. I used to assume Jacob and I would marry a year or two after college, that I’d wear a white dress and my sister would be my maid of honor, and then Jacob and I would go live somewhere and I’d have two little children and live on some sunlit, treelined street.

  You never really wanted that.

  Damn it, it’s like you’re here even though you’re not. Your voice haunts me. Now I know you so well, I know exactly what you’d say, or maybe it’s just because I heard you say it so many times. You were fascinated by my good Midwestern girl American dream, my American assumptions. Not a dream, really, but a Plan: college education, then job, then marriage, then kids. I’d never questioned it before.

  Well, why not? you’d ask, pausing on some moonlit walk we were taking across the darkened campus. Why didn’t you question it?

  Because no one around me did.

  But American literature does.

  Want to read more of The Beginning of Us?

  Visit www.riptidepublishing.com/titles/the-beginning-of-us.

 

 

  Lauren Gallagher, What This Woman Wants

 

 

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