Elliot told us the story after dinner, once the plates had been stacked in the sink and left to marinate in thin films of water and grease, the last bottle of twelve dollar white we’d brought emptied into our glasses and nudged into our hands. We were back on the deck overlooking the lake, fireflies punctuating the blackness, white periods to finish invisible sentences.
“The last time I went sailing, I let a man drown,” he said, before raising his glass to his chapped lips and taking a long sip. He peeked at us from beneath the rim of his glass, his deep-set eyes searching for a reaction.
Mark and I looked at each other across the table, unsure what to say. Up to this point in the evening the garrulous chair of my new department and his quieter, adjunct wife had guided us through two hours of polite chatter. Susan had asked how we were liking the Myerson house, and Elliot had begun inducting me, a mere one-year Visiting Assistant Professor, into the high drama and farce that constituted decades-long departmental feuds. With this opening sally into the personal, Susan excused herself and slipped inside. Her husband seemed not to notice.
“I was ten, and it was August. It was one of those days when the summer seems endless, blue skies and sun, but if you close your eyes and wait, you can feel it—just that hint of a chill blowing in, the wind a little too strong when it comes. But it was a perfect sailing day, and so my friend Ted’s dad took us out on the lake. He had a small boat, bigger than a Sunfish but just barely, two sails, no cabin. Kind of boat that you can get some speed going, but you better have wind or you’re out of luck—no motor, obviously. So anyway, we went out, and the wind came up out of nowhere, just a freak storm, one minute it was clear and then suddenly dark clouds, rain, serious chop, everything. Ted and I were supposed to be manning the sails, but we didn’t know what to do, and we held the sheets too tight, and the boat suddenly went up on its side and then we were all swept out.” He paused and took another sip of wine. In the candlelight his grey hair looked brighter, brassy.
“But surely his dad was a swimmer,” Mark said, when Elliot showed no signs of resuming the story. “A good sailor like that, he had to be.”
Elliot let out a rumbling, performative sigh. “So he thought, but when you’ve got a storm like that—well, he would have been better off thinking he couldn’t swim.”
“Why’s that?” Mark asked, game as always to play the engaged audience, to carry the burden of polite social interaction for the both of us.
“Because he would have worn a life vest.” Elliot bowed his head solemnly.
I mimicked Elliot’s gesture, an incantatory motion to mark the end of the tale, and I hoped Mark would do the same. He didn’t.
“But why do you think you let him drown?” Mark asked.
I widened my eyes across the table at Mark, but he was watching Elliot, who was now looking out toward the lake.
“Ted was washed away from the boat, so he was bobbing in the waves, held up by his life vest. Ted’s dad was close to the boat, probably an arm’s length away, but for some reason he couldn’t reach it—the current was too strong, I guess. I managed to hold onto the boat with both hands, just like his dad had told us to do before he took us out.”
Elliot paused again, and I knew where this was going.
“If I had let go with one hand, he could’ve grabbed on. But I just kept holding that boat like I was told, and slowly he disappeared beneath the surface, until it was just me and the boat, and Ted bobbing a few waves away, not knowing yet that his dad had sunk into the sea.”
Mark and I sat in silence as Elliot looked out. I wondered if he noticed the fireflies, and if so, what sentences they finished for him.
“That’s terrible,” Mark said after a few moments, “but I don’t think you let him drown. You were a kid—you were doing what you’d been told to do.”
Elliot looked at Mark, the brightness turned up on his pale eyes, his voice low and fast now. “I didn’t intend to kill him, of course, but what did I do, if not let him drown? My inaction, my failure to do anything, led directly to his drowning.”
“But to say you let him drown suggests that you had any control over the situation, and I’m not sure you did,” Mark said. “Let’s say you had let go with one hand to grab him, alright, well there’s no guarantee that you could have reached him. Or maybe you could have, but then no guarantee you could have held on—his weight might have pulled you both out, and then you both could have drowned.” Mark’s crisp litigator voice came into focus the more he spoke, his legal training prevailing over his wine-drenched, Saturday-night mind.
“Sure, sure, all hypotheticals,” Elliot said eagerly, leaning toward Mark and away from me, “but what’s not a hypothetical is what I didn’t do. Inaction—is it just as morally fraught as action, just as compromised? Or is there a difference between actively causing harm and passively allowing it?”
I stood up, gathered the remaining debris from the table, and slipped inside, drawn by long custom and vague guilt into the feminine orbit of tidying up. I followed the sound of running water to the pleasantly dilapidated kitchen, where chipped, white-painted cabinets hung crookedly on their hinges. Susan stood before the sink, her freckled arms poised above the soapy water. She was gazing out the window to the deck watching her husband, his tanned, lined face flickering in and out of sight, one moment alive with intensity, then vanishing into the night.
“Where should I put all this?” I asked, nodding toward the random assortment of knives, cloth napkins, and salt- and peppershakers that occupied my hands.
Susan’s arms jolted forward into the water and she began to scrub plates, removing the remnants of grilled salmon and green beans with shallots and lightly fluffed couscous, the kind of dinner that real grownups cooked, the kind I would never attempt despite being, at thirty-seven, incontrovertibly an adult.
“Oh, just set it all down anywhere, thanks, Hannah,” Susan said, turning to look at me. The corners of her mouth were creased with tiny lines, the record of an attempt to smile, but the smile itself was missing.
“That’s quite a story Elliot told,” I said to Susan’s shoulder, after she had returned her dishes.
In the mirror of the dark window I watched the skin around Susan’s mouth ripple. Her teeth must have been gnawing the inside of her lip.
“Yes,” she said. The silence lasted so long that I was wondering if I would be required to say something else so soon, when she continued. “He likes to tell it at dinner parties. Adds some drama.”
“Is that why you got up?” I asked. “You’ve heard it too many times?”
“Someone has to start the dishes, and it’s certainly not going to be Elliot,” Susan said.
I watched the taut ropes of her hands swirl the grease around each plate with a sponge, her movements practiced, certain. I knew I should come up with another topic now, and felt a flicker of resentment toward this hostess who couldn’t be bothered to man the conversation herself.
“Are you planning to go anywhere for fall break?” I started to ask just as Susan spoke.
“He tells it to test people,” she said, still facing the sink. “He’s interested in the story as an ethical thought experiment. Is the child who failed to act responsible for the man’s death or not? Would it make a difference if the child had done something active that led to the death? Does it matter that it’s a child? Who’s responsible? Who’s guilty?”
“What do you think?” I asked.
The last plate was aloft in Susan’s left hand, its faded blue floral edging dotted with soap. She turned to look at me and a smile split her face, a gash of white cutting across her sun-speckled cheeks. “What do I think?” she echoed. “I think, who gives a shit about the last time Elliot went sailing?”
Later in the car, when Mark was gripping the steering wheel too hard, hunched forward to watch the white center line slowly emerge from the blackness, I wondered why Susan had referred to Elliot as “the child.”
***
Elliot appeared in my office on Monday, his presence heralded by a crackle of student essays crushed under one arm, the assured tap of his scuffed loafers on the linoleum, and his recitation of the name of every colleague he passed in the hall. The sounds of a tenured professor.
“It was nice to meet your husband on Saturday,” he said, leaning in the doorway of my barren office at the end of the English department corridor. His eyes grazed the floor-to-ceiling white shelves, empty but for the handful of books I’d gotten around to unpacking and bringing in, props to flesh out a minimalist set. “We should have you over again sometime.”
“Thank you so much for having us,” I chirped. “We feel so welcomed here.”
“That’s the idea,” he said. “We want you to really feel like a part of the community.” He stepped across the threshold to read the title on my desk. “Teaching Eliot this semester?” he asked, picking up the book and fingering it.
“The nineteenth-century survey. Middlemarch is next, so I’m rereading it.”
Elliot screwed up his face, his eyes disappearing into deep, fleshy crevices. “Wasn’t your dissertation on something to do with Eliot, too? Eliot and class, Eliot and race, something like that?” he asked.
“Gender politics in nineteenth-century novels,” I said, laying out my words carefully, cards in a high stakes game. “So yeah, Eliot was in there.” I had submitted my Eliot chapter with my job application. Hadn’t he read it before he hired me?
His face relaxed into a slow, deep nod. “Right, I knew it was something like that.”
“I’m working on an article right now, actually, on abortion in nineteenth-century literature, and Rosamond is one of my cases.”
“Rosamond didn’t have an abortion,” Elliot informed me, his bushy grey eyebrows rising out of sight.
“Well, you can read the horseback ride as an intentional miscarriage,” I said gently, not wanting to correct him. I could feel the blush creep into my cheeks as I spoke and willed my face to cool. “I was thinking about it after your story on Saturday, actually—it’s sort of a similar question, of whether she did something active that caused the miscarriage, whether or not she intended to abort, and if her intentions change the ethical consequences or affect our reading.”
Elliot studied at the cover of Middlemarch as I spoke, as though he could evaluate the textual evidence for my claim by examining the cover’s vaguely pastoral imagery. Then he returned the book to my desk and met my gaze. “If you want my advice,” he said, “I would focus on publishing some articles with broader appeal right now. Our department needs junior scholars who can speak to large swaths of the field, really make a name, you know. And if you can crank out some good stuff this year—” he raised his eyes suggestively, the beginnings of a smile playing around his chapped lips, “—well, who knows, there might be a tenure line opening up soon. Susan and I are rooting for you,” he said, his smile sliding all the way up his face to crinkle his eyes, and then he was gone, his loafers a quick patter down the hall.
***
The Myerson house was stuffed with the residue of other people’s success. Although the two professors had clearly attempted to contain the details of their lives within the guest room’s locked walk-in closet before departing for their yearlong sabbatical in Paris, the overflow was visible everywhere. Copies of journals with Jane Myerson’s name listed prominently in the table of contents were tucked into the living room bookcases and intermingled with the stack of takeout menus in the basket on the front hall table. A stack of half-signed copies of Walter Myerson’s latest book had been abandoned next to the leather armchair in the den, a pen buried in the cushions. Every cookbook I pulled off the shelf in the kitchen island, hoping to discover a recipe both enticing and simple enough to drag me out of my usual rotation of pasta and roasted chicken thighs, disgorged instead a letter on university letterhead, reduced to a bookmark and long forgotten. An offer of a visiting appointment at a more prominent university now marked Pan-Seared Halibut with Chopped Tomato Garnish. When looking up a Lemon Chicken recipe that had seemed almost achievable, I learned that Walter had secured an advance on his last book that dwarfed my total income for the past decade, grad student stipends, adjunct paystubs, and my hard-won VAP salary combined.
“Look at this,” I said to Mark’s t-shirt-clad back on Monday evening as he stirred the boiling spaghetti. I was flipping through an old Moosewood cookbook, skipping past many variations on roasted carrots in search of more crumbs of the Myerson’s’ academic lives.
He wiped his hands on his faded college sweatpants and turned to see what I was holding: a letter from the provost informing Jane that she had been awarded the Presidential Teaching Award, the university’s highest teaching honor.
“Good for her,” Mark said, his stubbled face open, light. He had never met Jane Myerson, and yet he could still feel mild pleasure for her success.
“If I got this award I’d frame it,” I said, “and she just used it to mark Curried Butternut Squash Soup.” I could hear my tone flattening, creeping out toward a whine.
“Maybe she really likes butternut squash soup,” Mark said, his back to me as he fished a single strand of spaghetti out of the boiling pot with a fork.
“I just feel like all this stuff doesn’t matter to her, and she gets it anyway.” I arrived at the whine, unable to retreat.
“Oh, come on,” Mark said. “You have no idea what it means to her.” I watched as he tasted the strand and gave a quick nod to the pot, as though it were his real conversation partner, and then drained it in the sink.
“Did you make the appointment?” Mark asked once we were seated at the kitchen table, plates of spaghetti before us, twist-off Malbec poured in our glasses. Two months in the house and we had not yet graduated to the dining room.
“I didn’t get a chance to call today,” I said, dousing my plate with an excessively generous quantity of Parmesan.
“I thought you didn’t teach on Mondays,” he said, sprinkling his plate with a far more reasonable amount.
“I don’t, but I was busy with other stuff.”
“Too busy to make a two-minute phone call?”
“Yeah, I was,” I said, my voice steel. I concentrated on twirling my spaghetti in midair, the strands twisting themselves into the perfect bite.
“Hannah,” he said, his voice pleading, and I looked up to meet his gaze. “We agreed to start trying this year.”
“I know.”
“Do you not want to anymore?” he asked. His words vibrated with worry, traces of fear, the edge of a threat.
“Of course, I do,” I said, my eyes on my fork, twirling another bite. “I’m just not sure the timing is right. I need to publish as much as possible.”
“You’d have at least nine months before you’d have to take any time off.”
“But I’m worried about how it would look, too—I want them to know I’m serious about all this.”
“That’s bullshit. And illegal,” Mark said.
I played my trump card. “Elliot told me there’s a tenure-track job opening up next year, and they want me for it,” I said.
“Really?” Mark asked.
“He came by my office today, and that’s what he said.” The vagueness of Elliot’s phrasing, the translucence of his non-promise, crystallized into certainty as I articulated it to Mark. “He said there would be a permanent job next year and he’s pushing for me. So I think once I have the job, that’s the time to start trying. Besides, do we really want to bring a baby into someone else’s home? Shouldn’t the baby’s first home be ours, too?”
Mark’s face relaxed into a broad smile, the light bulbs in his cheeks emitting a warm glow. “Absolutely,” he said.
***
The semester slid along, with lecture notes written and seminars conducted and student questions answered and essay comments provided about argument and structure and grammatical maladroitness. Afternoons were for teaching and meetings, but mornings were my own. I spent hours ensconced in the company of Rosamond and Helene and Anna and others, hours with the women whose half-told stories of averted reproduction were, I was convinced, the subconscious keys to their novels, the explosive kernels concealed within works that otherwise appeared to forward patriarchal narratives of paternal legacy and control. I was not a critic but an archeologist, unearthing the narratives hidden between the words on the page, rediscovering these women whom readers so often dismissed or reviled. In my readings, their choices were not ethical abdications but reclamations of agency, assertions of a secret authorial power that was creative, not procreative. Morning by morning, my article came together. I did not make my IUD removal appointment.
Elliot ducked in to say hello every week or so, his overripe bulk bouncing in his loafers. He filled my little office with grand plans about possible future collaborations and promises of more dinner party invitations that Susan would follow up on, he assured me, effortlessly delegating to his absent wife. Occasionally he asked about my work, whether I was cranking out general interest articles like he had suggested, and I demurred—no need to tell him that I had ignored his advice. Once my article was accepted and I was hired as a full-time faculty member, it wouldn’t matter that he had advised me against writing it.
I saw Susan almost every day—she had taken to haunting my morning office hours. She taught the eight-a.m. section of the freshman writing class, the one that tenured faculty declined to teach, and by the time she finished at 9:15 my office was still the only one occupied. My door was perpetually open in what I hoped was a symbol of my personal openness but what was really just a silent assertion that I was still here. Susan would stand in the doorway, never crossing the threshold, her flowing skirts juxtaposed elegantly with fitted blazers, and she’d ask me about my article. The first few times I babbled on about whatever new passage I had unearthed that day, what new peephole I was peering through into the subversive sexual politics of a classic novel, but as the weeks passed I retreated to the safety of vague politeness. “Oh, it’s coming along, just some revising to do,” I’d say with a painted-on smile.
Why was Susan so interested in hearing about my work? She, to whom tendrils of failure clung, whose resignation at being towed along in the wake of her husband’s success was written into every shallow line around her mouth? Could she still be trying to breach the academic fortress, looking for new ideas to enliven her research, to restart her aborted career? I began to recoil from her presence, propping my door less and less open until by December I left it closed. When no dinner party invitation materialized, I was relieved.
***
I finished my article the afternoon of the department holiday party, my fingers buzzing as I typed the final lines of my conclusion, the frisson of my last sentence sending jolts of electricity up my arms. It was done, and it meant something. I had connected my nineteenth-century anti-heroines to women’s unheard and unuttered stories throughout history. I had made a political claim for the importance of uncovering these narratives, for listening to women, for not letting their words be ignored or silenced or stolen by the men around them, the men who mattered.
I was still high on my draft when Mark and I arrived at Elliot and Susan’s for the party. It had been a mild December, and so there was no snow yet, just naked trees standing guard along the roiling lake. The uniform grey skies flattened the landscape, giving the sense that the house and deck were teetering on the edge of a too-shallow stage. Mark reached for my hand as I rang the bell and I smiled at him, for once letting my face relax to match his perpetual openness. Susan opened the door in a dark green dress, and ushered us into the living room, where far less well-dressed colleagues and their spouses mingled, muting the room’s bright blue couch and colorful paintings with their beiges and greys.
“I’ll get us drinks,” Mark said, and he disappeared into the kitchen, abandoning me with my arm raised to where his shoulder had been. I put my arm down and looked around the room, smiling vaguely at no one. I had planned to enter the party buoyed by my newfound confidence, awash with tales of my article that was sure to find a home in a big-name journal, but the knots of tweed jackets and grey sweaters had tightened. I hovered on the outskirts of Elliot’s circle, waiting for him to pull me inside, but he was mid-story and absorbed.
“How is your article coming?” Susan asked, appearing at my side as I was bobbing behind Professor Neel, who kept shifting his prodigious weight from side to side.
“Oh, it’s done,” I said.
“That’s wonderful,” Susan said, a gentle smile reaching her usually inscrutable eyes, so much less transparent than her husband’s. “Do you have a title?”
“Aborted Stories: Uncovering Untold Female Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Novels,” I rattled off.
“Ah, right,” Susan said.
I glanced at her and saw a flicker of something cross her face—jealousy? regret? But then her impassive mask reappeared. “You’ll send it off soon, then?”
“Yes, I’m hoping right after the holiday.”
Professor Neel wandered off to refill his wine glass and suddenly Susan and I were in Elliot’s orbit. He was standing with his loafered feet wide, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his navy sports jacket, his cragged face bright with his usual enthusiasm. “I’ve already got a publisher lined up, so my sabbatical next year will be a perfect time to finish it. They’re really excited about it, think it could be marketed for a general audience,” he was saying to Reese Miller, a wispy septuagenarian clad fully in tweed, and his even wispier wife.
“What’s the book about?” I asked, gratified to be in the circle at last, to have escaped yet another conversation with Susan.
“Ethics of inaction,” Elliot said.
“Elliot’s been working on this for a while,” Reese intoned to me. “He’s giving a talk on a new chapter next semester. What are you calling it again?” Reese asked.
“Miscarriage of Justice,” Elliot said. “It’ll be on hidden abortion narratives in the nineteenth century—what the characters’ intentions are, whether they actively or passively terminate their pregnancies, and how we ethically judge them, focusing specifically on Rosamond from Middlemarch.”
A pit ballooned in the back of my throat, bumping my uvula, threatening to cut off air. I looked at Elliot, waiting for him to acknowledge me, to thank me for the idea, but his nose was buried in his wineglass.
“I think it’s so great that male scholars are starting to work on female narratives,” Reese’s wife said. “In my day that was considered ‘women’s work,’ not serious enough for male academics.”
“Rebecca got her PhD in English, too,” Reese informed me. “That’s how we met. But she didn’t want to keep pursuing all this tenure nonsense once our kids were born,” he said, patting his wife’s back fondly.
I nodded, the pit preventing me from speaking.
“Speaking of tenure nonsense,” Elliot said, smiling at me, “any news on your job search front? Happy to write a recommendation if you need it—tell those committees that they’d be lucky to have you.”
I swallowed, willing the pit to dissolve, just as Mark appeared with a gentle hand on my back, placing a glass in my hand.
“I wanted to talk to you about that, actually,” I said, conscious of my flushed cheeks, which must clash with my too-loud red dress that had seemed like a good idea hours earlier. “You mentioned that there’s a job opening up here? Do you know when there will be more details on that?”
“Oh, no, not this year,” Elliot said, punctuating each word with a quick jerk of his head, “there’s just no room in the budget for it, I’m afraid.”
I felt Mark’s hand close around a fistful of my dress.
“But I thought you said there was definitely a position—” I began, not looking at Mark.
Reese let out a gravelly laugh, much lower than his diminutive frame would imply. “A new tenure line? That’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
Elliot raised his grey eyebrows at me, a schoolmaster disappointed in his pupil. “I would never have said that,” he declared. “You must have misunderstood.” Elliot pivoted away from me, angling himself toward Reese and Rebecca so that Mark and I were suddenly on the outside of the circle, trying to break back in.
“Any winter break plans?” Rebecca asked Elliot and Susan, who had slipped in next to her husband. His arm was wrapped loosely around her waist.
“We’re doing Christmas here with all the kids, and then I’m meeting Thomas and some of his friends in the Caribbean for a week—he’s rented a sailboat, and the plan is to island hop,” Elliot said, to a chorus of oohs.
“Susan, you’re not going?” Rebecca asked.
Susan’s eyes found mine just outside the circle, where I was watching the conversation continue on without me, my face inscribed with shock and loss. Her mouth was a blank line, but her eyes were full of something I couldn’t quite identify—smugness? resignation? pity?
“No,” she said slowly, not taking her eyes off me, “I don’t sail. The last time I went sailing, I let a man drown.”
*****
Erica Drennan holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Columbia University. Originally from New York, she now lives in Western Massachusetts.
