A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY

  Title Page

  Dedication

  part one

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  part two

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  part three

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Acknowledgments

  about the author

  reading group guide

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY

  meredith maran

  My Lie

  50 Ways to Support Lesbian & Gay Equality

  Dirty

  Enough About You

  Class Dismissed

  Ben & Jerry’s Double-Dip (with Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield)

  Notes from an Incomplete Revolution

  What It’s Like to Live Now

  Chamisa Road (with Paul Steiner)

  For Dan

  And for Axel:

  May this story be outdated by the time you fall in love

  part one

  1.

  oberlin college

  September 1983

  Alison stood in the doorway of Room 113, peering into the classroom through the window in the door, eyeing her new professor, who was exactly as Alison had imagined she would be.

  Square, stocky body. Doc Marten boots with replacement lavender laces. Purple oberlin WOMEN TAKE BACK THE NIGHT T-shirt. Wide leather belt cinched mid-torso. Overloaded metal key ring clipped to terrible jeans. Why do lesbians have so many keys, Alison wondered, not for the first time.

  And the hair. Oh, the hair. The “wimmin-loving wimmin” of Oberlin wore their Bobby Kennedy haircuts as if their heads were tourism billboards for Lesbian Nation—just in case their T-shirt slogans, ill-fitting jeans, and janitorial key chains didn’t make their shared, superior sexual orientation clear.

  Two weeks into her senior year, Alison had decided that her Deconstructing the Postmodernists class was a little too deconstructing for her. Hoping to pick up a few writing tips at least, she’d put in for a transfer to Professor Pierce’s women’s studies seminar, Feminist Transformations: Retelling of Myth and Metaphor.

  Hand on door handle, Alison hesitated. Her least favorite moment of every class was this one, subjecting herself to a new set of classmates and, worse yet, to her own foolish hope that she’d make a friend out of them. She reminded herself that she’d quit the last class; she could always quit this one. Escape plan in place, she pulled the door open and stepped inside.

  Twenty-five heads swiveled in Alison’s direction. Twenty-five sets of eyes looked her up and down.

  “Who’s the Barbie doll?” one combat-booted girl whispered loudly to another, scowling at Alison’s bra-bound breasts in her slogan-free T-shirt, her narrow waist and long legs making the most of her knife-creased khakis, and, the greatest travesty of all, her long, wavy auburn hair.

  Alison was used to it, the envy and the scorn. She’d been a pretty child. But when she turned fourteen her body bloomed into beauty. Her breasts swelled, her hips flared, her olive skin shone. Suddenly every boy wanted her, or wanted something from her. Girls loathed her from a distance, which was as close as Alison wanted them to be.

  She’d come to Oberlin hoping for a miracle. The school was known for its emphasis on “human potential,” and she needed help fulfilling hers. Her goal was to graduate Oberlin a different person, not the difficult girl her mother had always said she was. Not the lonely girl she’d been since her father died in a pileup on the Long Island Expressway when she was nine. Alison prided herself on setting challenging goals and meeting them. But this was her last year at Oberlin, and it wasn’t looking good.

  “Professor Pierce?” Alison offered up the canary copy of her transfer form. The professor squinted at it and then at Alison. “Are you the one who wrote the article in the paper?”

  Here we go, Alison thought. “That’s me.” Her first published essay, “Only Your Body Can Make Up Your Mind: An Open Letter to Oberlin’s Lesbians-for-a-Day,” had just appeared in that week’s Oberlin Review.

  The piece was Alison’s critique of what she called “Obie’s Quixotic, Quickie Queens of Queer”: the girls who could be seen making out with their boyfriends in the Student Union one day and declaring themselves lesbians at gay rights rallies the next, never to be seen again without their entourage of “sisters” and their DYKE POWER buttons and regulation haircuts.

  “Sexuality is personal, not political,” she wrote. “It’s not a social construct. It’s not a club you can decide to join. Even if your boyfriend leaves the seat up or talks about himself too much, even if you like your female friends more than you like him, you can’t just decide to be gay.”

  Oberlin was a circus of costumed cliques. None rankled Alison the way the fake lesbians did. Not the punks with their black lipstick and safety-pinned ears. Not the Jews Against Zionism, who embarrassed her and drove her Jewishness even deeper undercover than it was. Not the dashiki-draped black nationalists or the serape-swaddled La Razistas. Not the buttoned-down, bespectacled nerds, or the conservatory prodigies strapped into their guitars, or the WASPy trust fund kids who shuffled around campus barefoot in thrift-store clothes, pretending not to have the money they’d always had and would always have.

  Alison had a nose for rich kids pretending to be poor, and she had a nose for coddled straight girls pretending to be tough dykes. She could smell it on them: the adoration of their parents, who’d poured self-esteem into their daughters like gardeners watering potted violets lined up on a sunny sill.

  The Queens of Queer wore buttons that said “One nuclear family can ruin your whole life.” Alison’s life had been ruined by not having one. She would have killed for parents like theirs, who paid their daughters’ tuition, sent them homemade brownies, and leapt out of their Volvos on Parents’ Weekend, bent double with eagerness to get their hands on their ungrateful girls.

  Their families’ love had made those girls so safe in the world, so certain that they could have anything they wanted, whenever they wanted it, that they could scorn the thing Alison wanted most, the dream that sustained her after her dad died: kids of her own, a family of her own.

  As a teenager she hired herself out as a babysitter. She had a passion and an aptitude for the job. Unlike her mother, unlike other kids her age, unlike Alison herself, the children she took care of liked her just the way she was. She craved their innocent adoration the way a sunflower twists toward sun.

  “I don’t agree with what you wrote,” Professor Pierce said. “But I admire the guts it took to write it.”

  “Thanks.” Alison pulled herself up to her full five feet ten inches, which put her a head above her professor.

  “Sit anywhere. Oh, and call me Mariandaughter. ‘Professor’ just reinforces the male hierarchical power imbalance. And Pierce is my father’s name.”

  Alison looked around the room. The chairs were arranged in a nonhierarchical circle. Twenty-five sets of feet were planted on the floor. Alison took a seat near
the window and crossed her legs.

  “Did everyone make it to The Big Chill?” Mariandaughter asked.

  All the students nodded, except Alison.

  “Good. Let’s discuss the patriarchal subtext of the film.”

  Hands waved. “Zoe,” Mariandaughter said. Alison followed her gaze to a girl with the lean physique of a handsome boy, the sculpted cheekbones and sultry lips of an old-time movie star. Her face was striking; her haircut was short but stylish, streaked with gold and platinum and white. Her outfit was a complicated, clashing collage of colors and textures—orange and lime green, polka dots and stripes, crumpled linen and corduroy and velour.

  Alison attempted to sort this Zoe person into one of her tidy boxes. Zoe wouldn’t go. She was too chic to be a lesbian, too animated to be a punk, too flamboyant to be a nerd. Who was she?

  “The screenplay was a collaboration between a man and a woman. But it’s obvious the film was directed by a man,” Zoe said. Her voice was hoarse and lilting, tinged with a faint accent Alison didn’t recognize. Her fingers, blunt and splattered with several colors of paint, drew pictures in the air as she spoke.

  “Kasdan let the women decide whether Meg gets pregnant by artificial insemination or by having sex with Sarah’s husband,” Zoe continued. “But that was just a feminist façade slapped onto a sexist film. The men were the ones with the real power in the group.”

  Mariandaughter nodded approvingly. Several women signaled their agreement by snapping their fingers in the air.

  “Excellent analysis, Zoe.” Mariandaughter addressed the class: “This is why I don’t hold to arbitrary grade distinctions. If I did, we wouldn’t have a bright freshwoman like Zoe in a senior seminar.”

  Again, fingers snapped.

  “Senior ovular, you mean,” Zoe said, deadpan.

  Alison stared at Zoe, measuring the distance between them. How could anyone be so self-assured, so firmly grounded where she was? Zoe caught her looking and smiled, as if she caught people staring at her all the time. Alison flushed and looked away.

  “I’ve never considered the etymology of the word seminar,” Mariandaughter said, frowning. “Thank you, Zoe. I won’t use it again.”

  Alison recalled a joke she’d overheard one guy telling another in the Student Union: “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? One. And it’s not funny.”

  “Any thoughts on how we can apply Dworkin’s gender analysis to the film?” As the conversation continued, Mariandaughter passed out mimeographed copies of their homework assignment. Alison glanced at hers. It was an open-book quiz about the course text, Pornography—Men Possessing Women, by Andrea Dworkin, an author Alison had never read. She reminded herself that she’d joined this class to be exposed to books and writers she might not otherwise discover. She’d pick up a copy of Pornography at the school bookstore.

  After the bell rang, Zoe intercepted Alison in the hall. “I read your article in the Review,” she said. “You’ve got balls to put yourself out there like that.” Zoe smiled. “Ovaries, I mean. Seriously, you’re an amazing writer.”

  Was she being sarcastic? It didn’t feel like it. “Thanks,” Alison said. “That was my first published piece.”

  “You’re kidding!” Zoe said. “Well, write on, sister. You’ve definitely got some skills.”

  As their classmates filed by them, the girl who’d called Alison a Barbie doll shot a hostile look in their direction. Zoe glared back.

  “I’ve been kind of worried about the reaction I’ll get,” Alison admitted.

  “I hear you. I’m a painter, and I freak every time someone even threatens to give me an opinion of my work.” Zoe glanced at her watch. Alison was startled to see it was the same one she’d admired at the school bookstore, a clear plastic Swatch that revealed its inner workings as it ticked.

  “Gotta run.” Zoe gave Alison’s shoulder a light squeeze. “Don’t let the turkeys get you down,” she said. She sauntered off down the hall. Alison stood there, watching her disappear.

  Sitting at a table in the back of the Oberlin cafeteria, sipping milky lukewarm coffee from a chipped white mug, Alison sighed and went back to pretending to write about the Dworkin book she’d been pretending to read.

  Despite Mariandaughter’s apparent conviction that analyzing Dworkin was second only to godliness—goddess-liness—Alison was more engaged by a mission of her own. Fortified by Zoe’s praise, she’d parked herself in the cafeteria to monitor the student body’s reaction to her op-ed. For the past hour she’d been nervously watching the Obies pouring into the cafeteria, the girls with spiked Mohawks and smoky kohl eyes; the boys with shaved heads and graffitied Converse high-tops, some of them plucking copies of the Review off the pile on the floor, some not. Not one of them, as far as she could tell, was reading her piece.

  Alison ached, suddenly, with missing her dad. He’d loved the stories she wrote, so she wrote one for him nearly every day. As soon as he came through the door at night, one he’d ask her to read to him. “Whatever happens, Beautiful, don’t stop writing,” he always said. Later she wondered if he’d known somehow that he wouldn’t be around to give her the daily doses of encouragement she only got from him.

  When he died, Alison lost her hero, her best friend, her shelter from her mother’s storms. She lost the girl she’d been with him too. She wasn’t anyone’s smart, funny, beautiful girl anymore. The less she remembered that girl, the more she became the “difficult girl” her mother said she was. When her mother wanted to go out for Italian food, something inside Alison made her ask for Chinese. When her mother ordered Chinese, Alison wanted pizza. The fragile peace Alison’s dad had brokered between Alison and her mother died when he did.

  One day when Alison was in sixth grade, her teacher held two magnets wrong end to wrong end to demonstrate magnetic repulsion. In that moment, Alison found a name for the feeling she had when she and her mother were together. Even when her mother hugged her, Alison felt shoved away. Repulsed.

  “Why must you be such a difficult child?” her mother would ask, ice cubes clinking in the squat glass of vodka she sipped from all day every day. I wasn’t difficult with Daddy, Alison wanted to say. But her mother had a hot temper and a fast hand. Alison worried that one day she’d slap her mother back. And then what might happen?

  Was Alison difficult because her mother didn’t like her? Or did her mother dislike her because she was difficult? When her dad was alive, it didn’t matter. He’d loved Alison enough for two.

  Every night Alison prayed that her mother would wake up happy in the morning. But on the rare occasions when her mother was pleased—by a pair of shoes she’d found on sale, by a TV show that didn’t disappoint her, by an upcoming date with a man—Alison got mad at her mother for reasons she didn’t understand and mad at herself for being so difficult.

  Alison knew what she wanted only by its absence. She knew that if she stayed the way she was, she’d never have the future she wanted. Wasn’t that what college was for, to try new things? To become someone new?

  After three years at Oberlin, Alison wasn’t anyone new. She hadn’t made a single lasting friendship, let alone a best friend. One friendship after another had started promisingly, then ended for reasons Alison couldn’t understand. The clock was running out on her self-improvement project. Adulthood waited, tapping its impatient foot. Which was why she figured she might as well publish an article that could give her writing résumé a boost, even if it earned her more enemies than friends.

  Alison gave up waiting for something better to happen. She stood up, stuffed the Dworkin book into her backpack, wove her way through the labyrinth of chairs and tables, and left the cafeteria, alone.

  A few days later, Alison found a fat manila envelope from the Oberlin Review in her dorm mailbox. She dropped her backpack onto the mailroom floor and tore the envelope open. It was stuffed with letters to the editor in response to her piece.

  Skimming them, Alison counted nine protesting he
r homophobia, two defending her right to free speech despite her homophobia, and one anti-lesbian rant. At least someone read the damn thing, she thought.

  “Great response,” her editor had written on a sheet of Oberlin letterhead. “I hope you’ll write for us again.”

  Alison allowed herself a fantasy. For the rest of the school year, she’d keep writing for the Review. She’d send her best clips to a bunch of real newspapers and magazines, see if she could land an assignment or a job offer, maybe even before graduation. If Oberlin couldn’t improve her, at least it could improve her future.

  Alison’s daydream spun on. She’d bring the letters to Mariandaughter’s class and show them to Zoe. Zoe would be outraged on Alison’s behalf.

  “Whatever happens,” Zoe would say, “don’t stop writing.”

  One of Alison’s dorm-mates walked in, snapping her out of her reverie. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and pushed through the mailroom’s swinging door.

  2.

  oberlin college

  September 1983

  Mariandaughter’s students were buzzing as they filed into the classroom. “I’m canceling the quiz,” Mariandaughter announced. “We’re going to deconstruct what happened in Atlantic City over the weekend. This is big news, wimmin.”

  Snap, snap went the fingers. Alison had no idea what had happened in Atlantic City or anywhere else. She’d spent the weekend in her room pounding on her IBM Selectric as if she could beat an op-ed out of it. Three seats away, Zoe wasn’t snapping either. She had a bemused look on her face and the body language of a theatergoer waiting for the show to begin.

  “Everyone knows what I’m talking about, right?” Mariandaughter asked. Alison and a couple of other students shook their heads.

  “On Saturday, Vanessa Williams became the first black woman in herstory to be named Miss America,” Mariandaughter said. “So. Which gender does this benefit? Which class? Which race?”