Miriam plunged her bare hands into the soapy water. “I used to do the dishes with my mother. Dad lets them go till we run out.”
“Your mother was my first friend, when I moved here.”
“I miss her so much,” said Miriam.
Dorothy was tempted to reach out and embrace the girl, but held back, always mindful of the necessary boundary between herself and students. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
They worked side by side in easy silence. When the dishes were almost done, Dorothy forced herself to speak. “You must be careful, with Todd.”
“We were just kissing.”
“It’s easy for things to get out of hand.”
“It’s no big deal, really. Are you going to tell my father?”
“No, I just want you to stop and think.”
“I tried to talk to her about the boy,” Dorothy said that evening, brushing her hair. “Keep an eye on her when you’re on campus. I don’t trust him.”
“Too pretty for her own good. Just like her mother, when she was seventeen,” said Grayson from the bed. He’d grown up with Garnet. Though it was foolish, Dorothy felt something like jealousy.
She crawled into bed beside him and reached for the Meeting’s handbook, Faith and Practice. Tonight’s passage spoke to her concern about Miriam, and the climate of casual physical affection between the students. The culture was so intemperate, lascivious.
“Listen to this. Maybe you could use this book in your class. It talks about sex in such a simple, good way.”
Grayson taught Quakerism every fall, required of all new students. The course was really about his philosophy of life—how to mow a field, sand a board, how to find the Divine through work. He’d wanted to change the course this year, call it Activism. Dorothy persuaded him not to do that. But she had been encouraging him to include something about what the public schools euphemistically called Health. “The students look up to you,” she’d said. “They might listen.”
Now she read aloud. “Love is a relationship between people. The sexual encounter can be love and consecrate or it can be lust and desecrate.”
“We don’t use books in my class,” he said.
She turned out the light; they did not reach out for each other, even in the dark. It was lonely in the bed without the weight of his arm across her. Sometimes they fell asleep on their separate sides of the bed and over the course of the night rolled close, warm animals seeking familiar comfort. But she knew even before closing her eyes that would not happen tonight.
The next morning Dorothy lay in bed, puzzling over the fragments of a dream. There had been a door in the bedroom opening to a secret room in the house. Lutes and viola da gamba hung from low rafters. A half-finished harpsichord stood in the corner. Maybe it was Grayson’s dream slipping into her sleep, the way she sometimes found a stray wood chip from his hair on her pillow. He’d never made a harpsichord, never had the time. Perhaps he could, if he quit the school, took the job with the activists. If he were happier, would it set things right between them?
Later that day while taking a prospective student and his family on tour, she saw Grayson and his Quakerism class on the lawn in front of White Hall. He’d spread out an array of forked branches: peach, apple, pear. Students wandered across the grass like sleep walkers, branches held in stiff, outstretched arms.
“What are they doing?” asked the boy’s mother.
Dorothy hesitated. This was the sort of thing people from outside misunderstood.
“Dowsing for water.”
“What?” said the father.
“It’s an old practice. If someone has the gift, the branch dips when you pass over underground veins of water. Watch, he’s letting a student try with him.”
It was Miriam. Today her leotard was peacock blue, but at least a vest covered her bosom. Grayson extended the branch; she grasped one fork, he the other. Holding hands, yoked together by the branch, they crossed the lawn. The stick writhed down.
“Cool,” said the visiting boy. His father looked at his watch.
“This way,” Dorothy said. “We’ll visit biology now.” The family wouldn’t complete the application. Faith and mystery, and Grayson, were the heart of the school but their combination made it vulnerable, too. She should have known better than to linger here.
It was almost dinner time when she started home, taking the long way, around the pond and through the orchard. Last year students had sneaked in the night before the spring dance and ripped down blossoming branches. They smuggled the limbs back to decorate the cafeteria, transforming the ugly room into an enchanted forest. She’d overlooked the mischief since the trees were doomed anyway.
She heard waltz music from the workshop. Grayson must be finishing the dulcimer. She would ask him to dance, push herself across the gap between them; make peace. Dorothy opened the door.
Grayson pressed Miriam against the workbench, kissing her.
Adrenaline propelled Dorothy across the room. She pushed them apart; picked up the dulcimer and slammed it down.
Her husband groaned as the dulcimer cracked and splintered. She tossed the ruined instrument on the floor.
“Come with me,” she ordered Miriam. The girl cowered behind him.
“Dorothy,” said Grayson. “It’s me at fault here.”
“I know that. Come.”
Dorothy had never intentionally destroyed anything before—except at the demolition derby at the county fair, soon after she’d married. Grayson bought her ticket; dared her. She’d swung the sledge hammer, smashing the car’s windshield. Wrecking the car, such meaningless destruction, had been disgraceful but exhilarating. Grayson cheered from the sidelines.
At day’s end, Dorothy liked to step into their quiet house but tonight, the tidy kitchen felt hollow and cold.
Miriam fidgeted with the cluster of wooden animals on the kitchen table.
“Leave those alone,” Dorothy told her. The black walnut lion and the curly maple lamb had been Grayson’s gift to her the first Christmas they were married. “Our peaceable kingdom,” he had said. Every Christmas since he’d added to the couple’s perennial centerpiece, carving animals from scraps of wood; this year’s addition had been a basswood elephant.
“He was only going to show me how to dance. Are you going to tell my father?”
Dorothy imagined the smirks, the gossip in Meeting. Another humiliation, like she’d endured with the music teacher. Worse: this would be a scandal the school could ill afford.
“No, I’m not telling your father.”
“Thank you,” said Miriam.
Dorothy felt ashamed. Don’t thank me, she should say. Don’t listen to me. Don’t lie.
“I’ll walk you back to dorm.”
After leaving the girl, Dorothy went to her office and sat at her desk, trying to collect her thoughts; trying, as Friends said, to reach clarity. But nothing was clear. The pain was worse now than when she’d discovered them—the way a burn hurts more after the initial shock. She locked herself in the faculty bathroom, turned the tap on full blast, and wept. Afterward, in the glare of the bare bulb over the sink, she stared at the mirror. How had she failed to notice that she’d grown old? She’d never tempt anyone again. Grayson and the school were all she had, all she’d have.
On her way home,