Marcia Aldrich

Consent: I Remember

I remember the spring of my freshman year at Wells College, while living in Main, I had set up my little Sears electric typewriter that my father had bought me as a going away to college present on the desk wedged into an alcove under a suite of windows. There I would sit pounding away for hours, the pigeons coming and going on the slate roof outside the window. I wish I could say the machine purred, but it did not. When I turned it on, the vibrations shook the desk and all the girls on my hall could hear my loud typing as if they were living next door to an airport where planes idled for hours. I didn’t know what I was writing just that the words were spilling from me so quickly I could barely catch them. I must have seemed crazy enough with fumes rising from my typewriter that my friends suggested I do something with all this writing—take a creative writing course, they said, Professor K is amazing.  That’s why I attended the event that spring, to see this Professor K for myself before signing up for his creative writing class in the fall. 

I remember the first time I laid eyes on Professor K. The room was the same room he later held his film classes in, a large room, not as big as an auditorium but large enough to hold the audience for events like guest speakers. A platform was elevated in the front with a black board spreading across the wall behind where a screen unfolded for showing movies. We students were assembled waiting, all the seats filled, when he flew in through the front doors wearing an olive snow parka, with snow caught on the fake fur of the hood and a bright neon orange interior.  It was a heavy-duty winter coat popular at the time especially in upper New York state where the snow sometimes fell in May. He wore work boots, the kind that have to be laced up and had thick soles that looked as if they’d kill anything they landed on, stained dark blue jeans and a heavy black turtleneck that had seen better days. He stomped up to the platform and stood in front of the podium –his movements were rough, determined, energetic. The meeting’s purpose was for faculty to introduce their courses for the next year before the enrollment period began. I don’t remember what he said. I only remember remembering him. The force of him. His hair was unruly, flying up from his face as if electrified. He spoke through a clenched jaw, spitting out the words. He was brief, to the point, I won’t say he was angry, but he spoke with such force I could imagine that someone might think he harbored anger and it seeped out all the time. Perhaps he did. I don’t know how to account for the crisp cutting way he spoke, pressing meaning into a very few words, compelling our attention through that energy force field. He didn’t strike me as a man who liked wasting time, who took things easily. He was impatient, revved up, ready to go. I didn’t imagine he suffered fools or impediments or dithered making decisions. He never took his coat off signaling he wasn’t staying long. And he didn’t. When he was done speaking, he headed back out the door with a whoosh of air and was gone. Back out into the snow. I remember thinking everything he touched must melt.

I remember the next time I laid eyes on Professor K was the following fall on the first day of the creative writing course he had introduced the spring before.  Most of my professors so far were either too nice or too old. I think I intimidated them more than they intimidated me.  With great trepidation, I took my friends’ advice and signed up for the creative writing course he taught, the only such course offered at Wells. To be honest I don’t remember thinking this man will change my life when I first saw him. He struck me as a force of nature, someone I had never encountered. I sat up in my chair in his presence and felt awake. But I didn’t fall into romantic fantasies about him. Not at all. 

I remember the writing class was held in the reading room in the Student Union. It was odd to find such a civilized room in the Student Union that housed the pool and basketball court. The furniture was ornately upholstered in beautifully rich brocades, chairs and couches angled around tables laden with large gold lamps. I remember the color was robin’s egg blue. Drapes in matching heavy materials hung on the windows and the walls were covered with built in bookshelves filled with fancy looking hardbacks. From the main campus and the town of Aurora we walked up a hill to reach the Union. At the top, Lake Cayuga spread before us. There were only five of us signed up for the course. Upon arrival we picked out what would be our seats for the semester. I took an arm chair across from the couch picked first by two of the girls. When Professor K came in last he took the only remaining seat, a matching arm chair to mine and to my right. I could barely breathe.

I remember that everything changed when I began that class. Is that too melodramatic? I don’t think so. It was the start I had been waiting for, an opening up. I had kept my writing and myself under wraps, had written compulsively but did nothing with those written words. I didn’t know what was inside me, and feared that whatever it was wasn’t ever going to get out.  Now I was showing my poems to a small group of people, and the class unleashed a torrent. I didn’t know where the stuff welling up inside me came from—it was just coming. I learned that when I wrote words, I wrote poetry. Even my lists, letters, and class papers were poetic, lists morphing into catalogue poems, letters into epistles, papers into eccentric meditations. I was primitive and effusive, taking the forms at hand and shaping rough things out of welling emotions and a feeling for sound. 

I remember the typewriter vibrated on my desk; its powerful motor electrified my dorm room. Awake at night or dreaming, I was seized by the impulse to put my hands on this wizard device, to make the unknown thing roll out of it on a page. The dark middle of the night was a rapturous time when words spat out of me, but I had to wait until morning when I was alone to singe the white sheets of paper I fed the machine. I was cracking open and coming into voice, and it was a beautiful thing, a genuinely beautiful time, even if it was short-lived, like the scent of a half-opened rose.

I remember during the day I was overcharged and overwrought. I took up crocheting, making of twine a rug that calmed me and produced a maximum receptivity to words. Sitting on my bed, using an enormous hook, I wove with my clumsy hands as if preparing them for their real work. When the wordfire struck, I threw down my needle and leapt to my desk. My rug had holes, but my poems came out whole, all in one sitting. The rug became monstrous over the weeks of my fevered episodes—ungainly, too large for the room, too full of holes and uneven to walk on. I didn’t know what to do with it. I just threw it on my bed during the day and then on the floor at night.

I remember as we read our poems, he leaned in to listen hard. His comments about my writing were laudatory which I could hardly believe since I had been trained by my parents to believe it was impossible that I possessed a smidgen of talent with words or anything else. He made me know I did not disappoint him. Heady stuff.  I remember as the first weeks passed that he was too enthusiastic, that there was a difference in the intensity of his response to my work from the other girls. I remember wondering if it was necessary to have one person who could hear my voice besides myself, and that person was Professor K.

I remember that same fall semester I was enrolled in an English class on modern novels taught by Professor B. Professor B’s intensity in the classroom grew out of an obsessive investment in a body of novels—his personal canon—concerned with the eternal battle of the sexes. Professor B was a devotee of D.H. Lawrence, author of Women in Love, and adopted a reverential tone when discussing his doctrines, a true believer in Lawrence’s views on sex and identity.  My classmates were soon able to quote by heart a passage in Women in Love in which Birkin, who is more or less Lawrence’s mouthpiece, describes his ideal relationship with a woman:

“What I want is a strange conjunction with you, he said quietly, not meeting and mingling—you are quite right—but an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings— as the stars balance each other.” 

One of the books we read that fall was George Eliot’s Adam Bede, on which I was assigned to give an oral report and lead a class discussion. Of the novels on our reading list, it was the first written and the only one by a woman.  The novel was a big one, and in preparation for the report I spent the weekend in bed reading. I had to digest the whole book and make sense of what could be said about it, write up a talk, and design questions that would provoke the class into discussion. I was so pressed for time I couldn’t afford to go to the cafeteria for meals, so my roommate brought me food from the dining room. 

I remember how in Professor B’s hands, Adam Bede was not about religion and village life, but about gender. Professor B quarreled with the subordinate roles of Arthur and Hetty. Their raw passion and transgression was the true love story. Hetty and Arthur were the unruly body, more like the ideal in Lawrence than the morally governed couple Adam and Dinah. He flipped the order of importance of the couples, raising the melodramatic story of the squire who seduces the farm maid and then abandons her above the less spectacular Adam and Dinah, who undergo an education, discovering their true life partner. 

I remember how I struggled with Professor B’s views. I was drawn to the sober couple, to Dinah. I admired her—a confident woman, steady in purpose, and concerned with the welfare of others. She didn’t play seductive games. Above all else, she was not rash or impulsive. In short, she was the kind of woman I wished myself to be. At the time I saw nothing of myself in Hetty. Dinah was closer to the ideal of what I might become. One had to choose, it seemed. Be wild and reckless like Hetty, ushering in predictable disaster. Or be sober and considerate, the woman who could be relied upon to help and do the right thing, to console. In truth I was closer to Hetty than Dinah, but did not want to see that about myself. Lying on my bed, trying to prepare, I debated the questions. My teacher and I were at odds, and I was anxious because I was not going to present a talk that embodied his views. 

 I remember how on Monday afternoon I arrived for class early and took a seat near the middle of the long seminar table, facing the door, through which I could see Professor K’s office on the opposite side of the hallway. My report and questions were typed up, and I placed them in front of me, next to my copy of Adam Bede, which I had heavily annotated, marking passages I could discuss and use as evidence. I was full of trepidation about my report and anxious about the responses from Professor B  and the students. In a few minutes Professor B arrived and took his seat at the head of the table while we waited for the classmates to wander in.

I remember they didn’t wander in—or half of them didn’t. We sat and waited, Professor B visibly agitated by the empty seats around the table ten minutes after the designated start time. Before this class, there had been no absences. Deciding that no one else was going to appear, he asked if the girls present had read the novel. No one had finished it. They had read the first half at best. I didn’t care that half of the class was absent and the other half unprepared. I still wanted to give my talk. I did not want to go through another week of anxiety, plowing deeper into Adam Bede. But Professor B did not ask what I wanted. He did not consult my wishes or even look at me. He cancelled the class, said I’d give my presentation next week, and was gone from the room. I pushed back my chair, clasped Adam Bede  to my chest, and stalked out the door into the hallway, angry that I had been such a fool, devoting myself to this book that no one cared about, angry that my fellow students had let me down, angry that my professor saw nothing of what I suffered and was outraged only on his own behalf. Sitting at his desk, Professor K had overheard enough to understand the gist of my disappointment. When I emerged from the classroom, he saw my face, flushed with anger and frustration.

 I remember that from his desk he said, “Come here,” as I pushed down the hallway.

I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross the hall and  enter his office. I sensed he was going to ask something of me. Again he urged, “Come here,” pointing to the chair near him. The sun shone through the window behind him, poured down upon him at his desk. How could I refuse his command? I couldn’t, and I turned, entered his office, and took a seat. 

I remember the portrait of his wife, a photograph in black and white that he had taken himself, hung high on the wall next to the big window, which looked out on a ravine, and through which the sun bathed the room in light gold. The portrait was like a movie still, glossy and intense, his wife young and beautiful. He said, “Give me your hand, “ and I obeyed his command. I gave him my hand, his impulse so strong. It seemed as if I had no choice—choices were not mine to make. And yet I could have held my hand, pulling it close to me.

I remember his hand was hot, and the blood beat in it. He made a bridge of it and grasped mine, making a knot of our two hands. He squeezed and it hurt and I felt he would not let go. Out of nowhere, as if the room had floated away from the world, he was squeezing my hand and looking into my eyes and making me meet his gaze—no, not out of nowhere, but out of something he had been feeling, intense in his reactions, eager about my poems, something more than the poems alone could excite. Come here , his eyes said. The sun came down on the wood of his desk, warming the planks of the floor and the arms of the chair where I sat.

I remember that out of nowhere, surprisingly, came my consent. I was ready to look into his eyes, to do what he asked. No, not out of nowhere. It had started years earlier, this readiness, this turn, on a wheel that rolled back through the choices I had made, one after another, and carried me forward to his office and made me take the hand he offered.

She is watching, I thought,  his beautiful wife high on the wall is looking down and watching. We are not alone.

Across the hall in Professor B’s class, we had been asking whether an equilibrium could hold between separate persons, or did one person always abandon herself, or himself, to the other. Can a great difference between a man and a woman, in what they give to each other, be sustained? I did not carry these questions across the hall to Professor K’s office and answer them. I just extended my hand. His clasp of my hand was much stronger than mine of his.

I remember asking whether it would have been better not to stop, to keep walking down the hall, down the spiral staircase, out the front door, to stand for a moment and smell the autumn air. Not to give him what he asked for, not to let him squeeze so hard that I could barely breathe. I did not answer the question. I stopped at his Come here.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her chapbook EDGE was published by New Michigan Press. Studio of the Voice was published by Wandering Aengus Press. Her website: marciaaldrich.com. Her essays have been included in The Best American Essays.