The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (3 page)

The two other boys stood in the kitchen doorway on the opposite side of the room, watching with their mouths open. Helene got up and ran to see if she could help, and before long, as Charlie was being slid into the fat back of the ambulance, Helene had her hand on Sophie Ashby, who, with her broom-handle arms and blow-dried hair, looked to Anders more like a scarecrow than ever. After the ambulance had pulled away and the truck idling had disappeared, along with the party’s hosts, some grabbed their coats as if to leave and then milled around the foyer, suddenly uncomfortable with abandoning a house that had just been plunged into distress before their very eyes. A team of helpers had started cleaning up, making quick trips to the kitchen garbage with fists of soiled napkins and plastic cups bloodied with wine, and soon the foyer guests joined them, their own fur coats open and purses hanging off them as they cleaned and cleaned the room, until finally someone opened the stereo cabinet and politely killed the music.

To hear her
tell it, and she often did, it was a miracle that Anders and Helene had ever met in college, much less fallen in love, because, as a scholarship kid besieged with scholarship duties—dish scraping and book filing and towel folding—Anders spent every moment he wasn’t wearing an apron sequestered in a bubble of academic determination. Though he liked the halo of hard work her story put over him—especially later, when they would be, say, sitting with people around a wicker table at a beach home on the Cape and he could feel the others pause to consider, for the briefest moment, how much of any of this they had honestly earned—it wasn’t completely true. Not that Helene had invented it. The facts, in her abridged version, were right. It was just that a few important details had been omitted, details he’d never discussed with Helene but that, like all unspoken things, contained the real truth—namely, that he wasn’t actually a scholarship kid, at least not in the way she’d implied, and also that he’d known who she was from the moment he’d arrived on campus.

He first saw her perched on a high stool and wearing a name tag that was filled from edge to edge with bright block letters. As the Info Girl, her primary job was to greet visitors, most of whom had just made the unpleasant trek up to coastal Maine in the off-season, and hand them brochures with glossy collages of lobster boats and seminar rooms and the quad at the height of autumn. She smiled at just about every single person on campus, including an endless stream of lonely men—fellow students, yes, but also kitchen staff, grounds crew, assistant coaches of most major sports—who hung around the info desk with a regularity even Anders noticed, trying, it seemed, to exhaust her unusually deep wells of patience. She was polite to them and she was beautiful, elevated on her stool in the middle of the middle of campus, all of which meant Anders, who had found himself staring at her in the mayhem of registration and had told his roommate that she was “sirenic,” went well out of his way to avoid her.

He had chosen Bowdoin, a speck of a college on the scribble of the Maine coast, because they had given him full work-study regardless of the fact that his father, a judge in Fayetteville, North Carolina, could have bought his way onto the trustees’ table during the school’s annual lobster bake. Instead, Anders had saved for even his bus ticket and had shown up on campus that first August astounded by the tall evergreens and the ancient chapel and the peninsulas that ran for miles into the Atlantic on nothing but pine needles.

They’d placed him on a floor of hockey players, guys from Nashua, New Hampshire, and Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and Digby, Nova Scotia; guys like his roommate, who kept a tin of dip in the pocket of his shirt and whose accent was thick as a fish-stick commercial and who worked summers tarring cracks on the state highways—guys who generally seemed more in need of aid than a southern kid who’d slept on sheets that’d been ironed by a domestic employee. But he’d submitted his financial aid as an independent, no mention of parents, and his name miraculously had been on the list at the work-study meeting, so he was able to pass, on the dish line or the grounds crew, as another kid working his way through school.

Because the truth was, he did need the money. His father, Judge Portis Hill, was a stern man who, after his first two sons had so disappointed him by becoming physicians, would tolerate only one kind of life for his youngest, what he referred to as “a calling to the law,” which was a fancy way of saying a life exactly like his. By the time he was thirteen, Anders was so tired of hearing about the importance of American jurisprudence that he intentionally flunked the entrance exams of every major prep school in the South—one of them so spectacularly that the headmaster had called Judge Hill with concerns that his boy was retarded.

These stunts, as his father called them, soon became the stuff of legend in Fayetteville, where the clerks in every store knew Anders’s full name, a development that forced Judge Hill to respond in the only way he knew how—by making more rules. If Anders was going to smile to his face and then turn around and humiliate his family by pretending to be a retard, then there would be no imperfect grades, no athletics, no movies, no dances, no long walks home, no locked bathroom doors, no unclean plates, no blue jeans or comic books or music of any kind. It was all an attempt, of course, to force Anders back to whatever prep school would still take him, but neither he nor his father would budge. If he hadn’t been mandated to sit on the stiff living-room furniture with his schoolwork in front of him every moment the old man was home, and if he hadn’t been banned from whittling rabbits, nice basswood figures he’d spent hours on in his room, he likely would have relented eventually and headed off to meet his fate at Woodberry Forest. But instead, he ran away.

He didn’t get far—his friend Spencer’s room on the other side of the state highway—but after the night he spent tossing on Spencer’s chilly floor, everything changed. Judge Hill, at his wife’s urging, decided to disengage from his youngest entirely. For Anders, there was surprisingly little difference between his father engaged and his father disengaged, except that now during meals his father would reach across him for the salt and talk right over him and leave the table cluttered with dishes for Anders to bus. But that wasn’t so bad, because Anders no longer had to do anything for school, it turned out, so long as he didn’t ask his father for so much as a pencil. So when the time finally came, he applied to college without speaking a word to his parents, writing away to schools as far north as he could find and accepting an offer from one whose name they wouldn’t know how to pronounce.

And so began the project of remaking himself. This meant working—for the college, yes, but also at a pancake house in town, where he picked up dishwashing shifts, and at an inn out in Harpswell, where he spent the weekends changing the linens and running the graveyard shift—all of which were time-consuming and menial but soon became a compulsion for him, necessary, as though the harder he worked on jobs that, as a judge’s son, he should never have had to take, the farther away all of the expectations of that life became. His days stretched for eighteen and twenty hours, during which he shoveled walkways or laid sod or sprayed scalding-hot water on dishes that were glued with syrup, and while he made enough money to eat, he had little to say to his classmates, much less to the only daughter of an orthopedic surgeon from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who was already surrounded by men.

That is, until he got back to his dorm one night and she was sitting on his sofa. She was wearing old sweatpants and a green track T-shirt that was worn down to its final gauzy threads. Her hair was loose and she was hugging her knees, which had a can of beer held between them. Normally his manners would have compelled him to introduce himself, but he had been working at the inn since Friday night and now that it was technically Sunday morning, he had the energy only to walk past her, pull off his boots, and collapse into the chair at his desk.

“Are you asleep?” she asked eventually.

He shook his head, but it wasn’t until he heard the sound of the toilet flushing that he opened his eyes.

“Are you here with Donny?”

“Um”—she glanced around as though checking to see who was listening—“it’s not official or anything.”

Anders slumped back in his chair. “He didn’t tell me.”

“I’m Helene.”

“I know.”

She smiled. “You’re reading my favorite book.” She gestured to a paperback edition of
Middlemarch
on his desk, easily the fattest book he’d been assigned.

“I didn’t actually read that.”

She drained the rest of her beer. “Where are you from?”

“Because I haven’t read
Middlemarch
?”

“Because I’m trying to be polite.”

Anders smiled. “North Carolina.”

“Long way from home. You miss it?”

“God, no,” he said. It was the first time anyone had suggested such a thing. “I hate it there.”

She blinked a few times with a warm sort of smile, as though he’d just confessed something deeply intimate. “When people say things like that they’re usually just talking about their parents.”

Anders raised his eyebrows. “You should start charging for this.”

“Funny,” she said without seeming amused. “That’s exactly what Donny said.”

“Roommates,” said Anders and they both nodded.

The door opened and Donny was standing there in a Bowdoin Hockey sweatshirt. Helene stood up. “Good night, southern boy. Dream of tobacco fields.”

“I told you,” he said after they’d shut the bedroom door. “I hate that place.”

When she came by the next day to bring Donny his sweatshirt, she asked Anders how he was doing with a kind little grimace, as though there were some sort of ailment he were battling, an ailment that, as the semester wore on and his work piled up, seemed to grow inside of him. He had classmates and dorm mates and coworkers—indeed, he was surrounded by people all day—yet none of it felt real. Late at night he would wake up convinced he was tucked into his ironed sheets and listening to the pulse of cicada through the screens. It took a moment to recognize the hiss of the steam radiators and the stink of Donny’s practice socks drying on the irons, and to remember, in a terrible moment, that he was alone in the North. It was Helene, his roommate’s new girl, who had seen it before she even knew him and who had, when he took a detour by the info desk later that week to say hello, suggested he stop working so much, 
take a day off, 
and go skiing or something.

“I don’t ski,” he said.

“Oh, it’s not hard,” she said. “I could teach you in fifteen minutes.”

It was finals week and the campus was clearing out, and Donny, he knew, would be on a bus back to Nashua by Thursday. “How’s Friday morning?” he said.

The drive to Sunday River was about two hours on narrow country roads that wound up into the sparse interior of the state, where even the barns seemed abandoned for winter and the motto Vacationland was only a cruel reminder of the lives on the other side of Route 1. He brought along his wool hat and his copy of
Middlemarch,
which he was actually enjoying, but everything else down to the long underwear had been borrowed. He spent the morning trying to snowplow at Helene’s instructions and the afternoon trying to mask his frustration every time his skis popped off and he ended up Supermanned in the middle of Easy Street. Learning to ski, it turned out, was an activity better done in private, and it was hard to pretend that crashing was a hoot after he could no longer bend his knee. Helene of course was a beautiful skier, which he finally saw in full form as she carved off down the hill, looking for a medic who could retrieve Anders with a sled.

The knee wasn’t anything as serious as the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon might fear, but it did require that he limp to the car and put his arm around her neck while she eased him into the front seat. The real problem—the ailment that, it turned out, had actually been growing inside him during the three sleepless months he had been in the North—started with a tickle in the throat that, after he’d spent an entire day face-planting in the snow, became a violent cough that seemed to be kicking at his chest from the inside. By the time they made it back, he was burning up, and she put her hand on his forehead and his cheek and told him that she felt terrible, that the whole skiing thing was all her stupid idea, and could she at least make him a cup of tea, which she did while he curled up on her dorm-room couch. “There,” she said as he blew on the steaming mug and took a sip. “Does that feel better?” He stayed three days.

He knew all the laws regarding roommates and girls, but in his defense, he did have pneumonia and the flu at the same time, and he did stay confined to the couch, almost entirely unconscious, and when Helene did finally kiss him, it was only on the forehead during the height of a fever so he was never entirely sure if he’d dreamed it. All of which Anders would gladly relay to Donny, even though Donny had told him nothing about his pursuit of Helene, had in fact kept it all quite hidden in a way Anders found thoroughly shady. But regardless, he remained in her room instead of returning to his own, a detail that was hard to explain, as was her staying awake at night to read to him from
Middlemarch.

He woke at dawn after the third night, the sky lightening from navy to white and a blade of pink light burning the eaves across the quad. He cracked open the window, and the coastal air washed over him, a mix of salt and smoke and spruce. In a few hours she would be up to check his temperature and put a cool rag on his forehead and look at him with a squint of sympathy that was so imbued with affection it made him grin like an idiot. His fever was back up to 103. He needed more care, she told him, from a doctor, and he needed a real bed. The dorms would be closing soon and she had to get home for her own holiday in Wellesley, so it was understandable, at least rationally, that during his subsequent sleep, she called his house in Fayetteville and spoke to his father.

He would pay to hear a recording of that telephone conversation, to hear how Helene had introduced herself to his mother, how his mother had responded, how Helene had explained the predicament—that Anders was too sick to ride the bus and certainly too sick for an airplane—and, once his mother went to fetch his father, as he was certain she did, to hear what Judge Hill had said to this strange girl who had his runaway son on her sofa. In her defense, he hadn’t yet told her much of anything about his life at home, and so, as most people from functional families do, she’d made the assumption that his parents were worried about where he was.

“You did
what?
” Anders said when he woke up.

“He was very nice. As soon as he heard you were sick, he said he’d be right here.”

“Here? He’s coming
here?
”

“He said he’ll call from the airport in Portland.”

“I have to go,” said Anders, sitting up and searching around for his things.

“Just relax. He thanked me for calling. He seemed, I don’t know, relieved.”