Me and the Dean

I wasn’t even all that old or bad yet. It was just a fortunate miscalculation where I ended up. I was just starting to think that, maybe, somehow, I was not one of the blessed ones. I was not quite sleeping under bridges, but in parking lots, yes, and I washed my hands and my hair in puddles of rain and melted snow. I learned a new appreciation for potholes I still hold onto to this day and finally became as dirty as the world around me. My loneliness didn’t hit me for years. No, it didn’t hit me until, standing over a rotted pumpkin squashed in the city street one day, I could only find one thing to say: I journeyed from the center of the world to find my story, and it still managed to get away from me.

I have never lost sight of that place. The hills will always be mine to go back to, but they never listened. The land is only willing to give so much, and they never heard me crying out from behind my hands. I did not passively accept the erosion of my rural identity, but once I got a taste, it was very hard for me to stop. I had to pretend to be looking at trees and tiny streams for the first time or I’m not sure I could have looked at anything at all.

Starting out fresh, I went to school in a city full of other young girls. I showed up with nothing to say for myself, and they put me in a room at the end of the hall. It was the first year of my civilized life, and the saddest, because I learned how far I had to climb to be anywhere at all—me and every other American who left the countryside. We were the evil ones and the hills certainly whispered and would send every spirit against us if we ever went home. We were told this by the dean. When anyone talked about him, their eyes started to water.

It was right around the time they found a new ring around Saturn, so big and with particles so far apart you’d never know if you were inside it.

We met in a chapel, me and the dean, and it was only fitting as he would later single me out in our religion class. He put hours and hours of me to shame, mostly those spent self-improving, and as I watched him walk up the white steps to the podium each day, sun streaming in through the screen-less windows, my ankles swelling in the heat, I knew he would someday turn and look at me.

One day, I wore a shiny green ribbon in my hair, and thank God for that. It was exactly fall. This I remember because the fat preacher started burning his leaves again. He raked them into a big line in front of the chapel and set them on fire. I watched the lines of fire, and the children walking home holding hands, and hoped I was walking in the right direction. The grass behind me was blue and flowered and led right up to my mother’s mountains. If I wasn’t careful, I’d fall right into them and a whole other story. It was on this day that he turned to look at me.

I could have smiled at him through a tin can and he still would have known it. The very next second, I sat in the hallway thinking so hard about how you can be on a night, but you have to be inside a year. This pulled and pulled at my hair until he walked out of his office. I didn’t see his face—I didn’t look—but raised my foot so that he could walk by. He went to the water fountain, and I raised my foot again. That’s when he said, “Your poor little foot.”

I looked up, and he asked what I was doing there.

“I have to go in there,” I answered, and pointed to the door next to the bathroom.

“You can’t go in there,” he said and went into his office again.

When I woke up from that thought, he was there with his hand across my stomach. It had all been so frantic. The noise of how or why we ended up there was far away now, and we were lost on the highway driving through miles and miles of bogs. I was a freshwater fish, and I got to wear what I wanted to wear every day, which on most days was the big blue t-shirt we found in the abandoned TV room, where there was no TV, and where he first put his head in my lap. It was deep in the winter, and I was still blissfully unaware of my importance in the world, which turned out not to be very much, but just enough to be annoying. We could always fall asleep, but I was always second to slip off.

There’s a good dirty and a bad dirty, but he was very clean and would never butter my toast. In short, I was afraid of all the information he divulged, the lessons he gave me, and of the weathervane on top of his house, always pointing east and away. It was the same year I learned about the war. I learned the word “try” and how painful it can be. We measured our weeks, numbered as they always are, by meals, and became comfortable in the haven we had created. It was okay that nobody else could give us anything we needed. We’ll never be fully separate, me and the dean, but for story’s sake, I’ll say we are.

It was doomed from the start but we began living a quiet life anyway. I took baths while he waited for me at the folding table in the next room, playing with sugar packets and his assumptions, the little wheels that carried him from day to day. I went to parties just to go home to him and talk about how bad they were. Functionalism got in the way every day. Ism. Ism. Ism. We loved these. It’s in our blueprint. Somebody just missed a stitch somewhere and it really was a couple chemicals that made us incapable of following along half convincingly. Come sit between my legs, I would say, and feeling half like his mother and half like his lover, I would scratch his head for hours. In the car at the hardware store was the first time I heard it—the first click of a hackneyed phrase—"I hate weddings, but I will love yours.” I pulled him into the passenger seat and wrapped him in my hair. The radio crackled and it smelled of rotting peaches, but we had new lightbulbs, and I was suddenly jealous of all the people he had ever told stories about.

It was decided as we drove in wide circles around campus. We would no longer live off the few secret pleasures we were allowed. Happiness on credit had run out. We started talking about what it felt like to wear blue jeans, and to answer the telephone. I forgot about school. He held my hand, covered in burns and the time our fingers had spent apart. The dragons, he said, would no longer go to sleep with us in our bed, and that is why we must always love America. They have stepped too many times on our toes, and it is time to look straight ahead again. We were always a "we."

Sitting in the car, on the edge of the quarry, he said, “We’ve flatlined. We can do whatever we want now.”

My coat over my ears and his hands up my sleeves, he showed no patience, and I leaned towards the window as he continued to talk at me.

“The moon,” he said, “is little more than a crying woman. Crocodile tears. She has no shame, the sun will swallow her someday, but I’ll tell you what, we won’t be around to see it. We’ll be in a city where the lights are bright, and the smoke is thick, and you can’t see the sky. I never want to see the sky again.”

The black sand, the purple water, my mother by the trailers. I wore it all on my face because somebody had to. Me in a skirt and him in his disgust at my existence. An odd little component to this melting pot I was. I didn’t want to understand. I didn’t want to learn anymore. I couldn’t fit any more culture inside my mouth and, when I sneezed at the dinner table, it all fell out.

I felt dirty waiting for the bus. As we got on, I whimpered, a wrinkle sitting on my forehead. We watched two little blond haired boys fight. We had to pretend we hadn’t been looking when their father turned to know who had seen the shame of his family, but all the same we wished they were our children and that we could afford a townhouse and to send them to the schools and the camps and that we might sleep next to each other and by a window that others looked up at. The bus drove off; they decided the snow was light enough yet. We would start over elsewhere. I didn’t know the word messiah or why everyone talked of it, but as we pulled away from the station, he handed me an elastic for my hair, and I thought: this must be messiah.

It snowed for weeks and weeks. We accidentally moved to a mountainside town where every other house was caving in, and the other half were being “worked on.” We pulled the ivy off our small one every few months and called it a day. I learned that Jesus saves and that old men are very funny. This I realized climbing the high peak, him following and holding my bags. It snowed and snowed as we walked up the mountain, following a little stream that melted a path through the snow. The woods changed every few hundred feet and we trudged on while the light sometimes found us, and sometimes didn’t. The snow muffled all the sounds of the trees and the woods and of the thoughts I might have had. Our ears were stuffed, and our legs were tired; I couldn’t feel my tongue because I kept eating the snow. He had icicles coming off his beard.

When we got to the top, we stood on the edge and stared out into the pure white. We thought maybe we’d see our tiny town or our big red barn, perhaps even the next state over, but no, we only saw blank space. We had found a hole in the world and hoped that it would always be there for when we really needed it. The snow on the pine branches made thousands of tiny white crucifixes all around us and we said damn it, God is everywhere, and got back on the trail.

I said, thinking of all the small crevices in the world, “We are two out of many now.”

“Too out of money now, you mean.”

I couldn’t stop laughing.

It was winter for years and years. We learned to live off the little the land would give us and eventually caught on that it was never going to stop snowing. We drove a truck up and down the mountain when we could, picking up missionaries and philanthropists who were walking up the side of the road trying to get to our town. “This town is asleep,” we warned, “you must be quiet,” and we drew our fingers slowly across our throats. They all had the same story and got off at the bus station at the base of the mountain; no one had told them our town was nearly at the top. People are so poor here and backwards, they said, talking always about the seven years of winter and how it had never stopped snowing. Yes, we know. I got very good at rolling my eyes. They lay in their beds thinking about us, thinking about helping us, but we never thought of them. When they got to the top, we never saw any of them again. We used to say that some of the people who were too old and tired to make it down the mountain to town for food must have eaten them. As we told these stories, the revelry that slipped into our voices scared us half to hell.

But we loved the snow. I watched the women of the world sweating at jury duty while we got to live on a pie in the sky. Hollywood, we said, is that way, and pointed down the curve of the road. Limbs were lying under the median, and the chiefs were long dead. Our neighbors were witches, and they were always trying to get us to go over for dinner. If everything was backwards, then at least we knew we were headed in the right direction.

Soon after, there was the accident. There was some black ice and the truck spun off the road and down part of the mountainside. They told me that the people in town below could see his blood soaked through the snow, splattering into continents and islands, reaching all the way to Russia past the reindeer herders and out into the sea to Little Diomede where there is nobody and there is no sound and your breath freezes and falls to the ground in front of your face. So many people threw words at me it was difficult to get at who was speaking yet stop them I did and still often do. In a matter of minutes, I became the worst word in the English language: unlucky. But I could see him, the car flying down the mountain, glass on his eyelashes and a fat smile on his face. I saw him at the hospital, with blood for skin and a brain plugged into the wall, and still I thought he was more beautiful than ever, the pressure on my ears causing them to bleed and rightfully so. I brought him hyacinths and thought that if this were doomsday, at least there would be hyacinths and we would be tired enough to sleep through it.

He was a vegetable they told me, and most of his brain was gone. I see, I said, think of it as if somebody moved out of his head, and now there are just pictures on the mantle and the refrigerator and the things that were left behind because they were too big to bring along, or just too painful. It was a game, and as I splashed my face with water in our little bathroom, I thought about the waterfall and the maid of the mist, and his mother and me eating bagels, talking about him with poppy seeds in our teeth.

He came home with me, though, strangely coming out of his state and remembering what it felt like to fly into the hole in the world. When you go into the hole in the world, we learned, you never fully come out. He didn’t know what to do with words anymore, and by this I mean that words going at him and words coming out of him got stuck in a cloud that surrounded him and hung in the jelly of space. Sometimes he picked them up and put the right ones together correctly and sensically, but most times he didn’t. When I said something, I never knew what he was going to hear and could never guess. Words from hours or days ago came back to haunt me, and finally, we stopped talking in bed. I think he just fell asleep in the mountains somewhere and never woke up; it wouldn’t surprise or even sadden me, but it felt like we were living life as a second choice to something else, and that something else was probably sleep. It was too serious a thought for a winter’s day, so we bought ice cream and sat in the backyard.

I started waking up in the middle of the night. I couldn’t ever fall back asleep, so I took to hanging out the bathroom window, holding the shades back and asking over and over like it was a tick, “Don’t you like one another?” And wandering the mountain.

Right around the time I realized just how cold I was, the town started to thaw, and it stopped snowing. I ran outside in my nightgown, bare feet and a coffee pot in my hand, and stood looking towards the top of the mountain. For a moment, it was as silent as it had ever been, like in the moment right before a bomb explodes. And explode it did—the snow globe popped—and I dropped the coffee pot spilling brown into the melting snow. Time, it seemed, started to matter. I felt propaganda, I prayed that God would hide his face, wished that it were possible to grow wives in a garden, and stuffed all my pictures into our pots. He ran down the street after the car and the whole time I wished he knew that I wasn’t just trying to drive away. I was trying to kill him.

I moved back to the city, bought a pool, and opened up a business in the center of town. I chose suburban realities over myth making, and made money off it, too. I thought it didn’t matter if God was hiding his face, the glare of the foil in the windshields of all the thousands of cars surely blinded him. In the house, everything is clean, except for the wall where there are all the pencil markings, getting higher with each year that was cursively drawn in Mother writing: “Elizabeth,” “Richard,” and “Edward.”

My favorite story is still the Rock of Gibraltar, and I dry the children’s faces and behind their ears and hope that they will someday remember what it feels like to be safe. No, you do not always have to walk side by side, but there is some thread of common responsibility I lack that would have made it all possible. My favorite picture is still the one of me drinking a coke from the bright red can. My wrist is thin, and so am I. My eyes are iced with blue, and I wear his diamond on my hand. It never flowered; I drew blood from it and tossed it in the snow. After that, everything was easy.

Maryellen Groot

Maryellen Groot is a fiction writer and essayist living on the North Shore of Boston. She tells tall tales, fables, folk tales, myths, and the truth. A graduate of Bard College, her work has appeared in Vox and Racked. She shares more stories on Substack in her newsletter She-Wolf and on Instagram @maryellengroot.