A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  The room was silent. “Come on, sisters,” she snapped. “What’s the point of reading Dworkin if you can’t apply her analysis to real-world events?”

  Zoe reached around the women between them and handed Alison a tiny square of paper. “For me?” Alison mouthed. Zoe nodded impatiently. Alison unfolded it and saw a caricature of Mariandaughter with her eyebrows knitted and smoke billowing from her ears. Below the sketch Zoe had scribbled, “She’s cute when she’s mad.”

  “Even cuter when she’s deconstructing,” Alison wrote back. Zoe grinned.

  “This is good for black people,” a skinny, boyish girl said. “A black woman being crowned as a beauty queen challenges the racist traditional standards of beauty.”

  “I disagree,” another girl said. “The Miss America contest itself reinforces standards of beauty that are life threatening to women of all races, no matter who wins it. Karen Carpenter just died from anorexia, remember?”

  The only black girl in the class, sporting a huge Afro, gold hoop earrings, and a mud cloth tunic, raised the index finger of her right hand as if she were at an auction, bidding bored.

  “Nia.” Mariandaughter’s face assumed the obsequious gaze she reserved for Nia and Carmen, the only two nonwhite students in the class.

  “Vanessa Williams is a Tom,” Nia said. “You think she’d even be in the running if she didn’t have Caucasian features and conk her hair and kiss white ass?”

  “Excellent point,” Mariandaughter said adoringly.

  Nia ignored her. “This didn’t happen because the Jim-Crow-Miss-America committee was out to change racist beauty standards. It happened because rewarding a house nigger co-opts the liberation movement and keeps the white power structure in place.”

  Alison had never seen her classmates in such a state of rapt attention. Nia ran with it. “That’s the reason Reagan just got himself a black astronaut. Same reason they gave Alice Walker the Pulitzer for The Color Purple. To set good Negroes against bad Negroes and black women against black men.”

  The room went silent. Mariandaughter looked stricken, standing in front of the posters of Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Zora Neale Hurston, Grace Paley, and Alice Walker she’d tacked to the wall. “You can see how many valid womanist perspectives there are on this issue,” she managed. “Which is why, to promote the diversity of our discourse, I’ve designed a special collaborative project in line with the ‘feminist transformations’ theme of our class.”

  Mariandaughter handed a stack of mimeographed sheets to the student next to her, who took one and passed the stack on. “We’re going to break up into six groups of four. For the midterm final, each group will create a representation of your collective analysis of the crowning of the first black Miss America.”

  The students counted off. Alison could hardly believe her good fortune: she and Zoe were both “threes.” The two of them moved their chairs together. They were joined by their teammates, Chelsea and Renate.

  “We have to do this by November?” Renate complained.

  “So much for a mellow senior year,” Chelsea shook her head. Her Mohawk, dyed purple and gelled to resemble a rooster’s comb, didn’t budge.

  “Don’t freak, you guys,” Zoe said. “If we get together once or twice a week, we’ll get it done.”

  “Wimmin,” Renate corrected her.

  Zoe winked at Alison. Alison rolled her eyes, imitating a normal person making a friend.

  “Can everyone meet on Saturday afternoons?” Alison asked.

  A few days later the four of them settled into a booth in the Student Union, Chelsea and Renate on one side, Zoe and Alison on the other.

  Zoe exuded a subtle, spicy scent that made Alison dizzy. She unstuck her thighs from the sticky Naugahyde seat and put a few more inches between herself and Zoe.

  “Ideas?” Zoe asked.

  “We could do a diorama of the Miss America Pageant, with the contestants made out of sausages and the judges made to look like pigs,” Renate suggested.

  How original, Alison thought sarcastically. She’d seen that scenario on TV years before, when feminists had stormed the pageant wearing dresses made of sliced lunch meats.

  “I’m pretty sure I saw something like that somewhere.” Chelsea lit a Gauloise and twisted her head, exhaling a thick plume of blue smoke. “Maybe we could do something far out with embroidery or quilting or something. Make fun of the traditional female homemaker thing.”

  “Uh-huh,” Zoe said. She nudged Alison with her elbow. “You’re quiet over there.”

  Alison flushed. “Let’s hear your idea first,” she said.

  Zoe shoved Chelsea’s ashtray aside, pulled a sketchbook out of her book bag, and flipped through the pages.

  “I say we go after the connection between slavery and the pageant.” Zoe laid the sketchbook open on the table. “We build a Miss America stage set that’s actually a slave auction block.”

  “Your sketches are amazing.” Chelsea said what Alison was thinking.

  Zoe turned to the next page. She’d drawn four figures, barefoot, wearing tattered dresses, their faces black.

  “Instead of ball gowns or bikinis, we’ll wear slave clothes and blackface. Where the emcee would stand, we’ll have a guy dressed as a slave auctioneer instead. So the four of us are standing on the riser as if we’re waiting to hear if we won Miss America, but—”

  “But we’re actually slaves, waiting to be auctioned off,” Alison interjected.

  “Exactly!” Zoe smiled at Alison.

  Renate frowned. “I’ve never built anything in my life,” she said. “I don’t know where we’d get the supplies. Or where we’d make all this stuff.”

  “I’m pretty handy with a hammer,” Alison lied.

  Zoe shot her a surprised look. “Me too,” she said. “I make all the frames for my paintings.” She turned to Renate. “I already talked to the guy who runs the woodshop. He’s totally into helping us.”

  “Zoe and I could do the construction part,” Alison said to Renate. “You and Chelsea could do the costumes and props.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Chelsea said, reaching for the ashtray, stubbing out her cigarette.

  “I guess,” Renate said, still sulking.

  “Sisterhood is powerful,” Alison said, thrusting a clenched fist over her head.

  “Right on, sistah,” Zoe raised her own fist and knocked it against Alison’s. The four of them slid out of the booth. Renate and Chelsea went off together, headed for the thrift store in town.

  “Going my way?” Zoe asked Alison.

  “Which way is that?”

  “Wherever you’re going.”

  How can this be happening, Alison asked herself. “I have a hot date with my typewriter,” she said. “I need to come up with another op-ed ASAP.”

  “You’re gonna work? In your room? On a gorgeous Saturday like this?” Zoe faced Alison, blue eyes flashing, hands on hips. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”

  “Let down my editor, you mean,” Alison stalled.

  “Your editor’s probably kicking back right now, smoking a doobie,” Zoe said. “C’mon. Hang out with me. I’ll have you home before you turn into a pumpkin.” She drew an X over her heart with two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  “That’s a whole lot of mixed fairy-tale metaphors.”

  “Just give me a half hour.” Zoe linked her arm through Alison’s, pulling her along. Alison’s knees went rubbery. This girl makes me nervous, she thought. But nervous wasn’t exactly what she felt.

  They left the building and took the paved path to Tappan Square, the park that joined Oberlin the college to Oberlin the town. The school brochure described Tappan as “the meeting place for students and townspeople;” as “Oberlin’s Times Square.” The comparison didn’t hold up for Alison, who’d spent her adolescent weekends wandering the teeming streets of the real thing. Despite or because of her mother’s ban on travel below the sanitized Upper East Side, Times Square was Alison’s favor
ite forbidden destination, a place to peer into discount camera shops and peep shows and tattoo parlors, gathering ideas for characters and stories that the boutiques of Madison Avenue and the sarcophagi of the Metropolitan Museum of Art didn’t provide.

  The warm weekend day had brought out the Obies in all their iconoclastic glory. On the tree-studded lawn, scruffy kids tossed Frisbees, munched on sprouty sandwiches, necked on wooden swings hanging from hundred-year-old elephantine elms. Above their heads, Oberlin’s famous albino squirrels chased each other frenetically, leaping from branch to branch as if suspended by wires.

  In the shadow of Memorial Arch, students and local hippies sat at card tables selling homemade duct tape wallets, hand-thrown mugs, and seashell hash pipes. Some offered petitions instead:INCREASE AID TO THE VICTIMS OF HURRICANE ALICIA!

  INVESTIGATE THE ASSASSINATION OF BENIGNO AQUINO!

  INVESTIGATE THE TIES BETWEEN OBERLIN AND DOW CHEMICAL!

  As they browsed the bizarre bazaar, Zoe’s arm crooked through Alison’s, Zoe’s body close to hers, Alison grew more and more nervous. She used the excuse of signing a petition—“Increase scholarships for minority students!”—to extricate herself. When she straightened up, Zoe took her arm again.

  Alison made a show of checking her new transparent Swatch. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Rapunzel’s about to turn into a pumpkin.”

  Zoe caught Alison’s gaze in hers. That funny, rubbery feeling radiated upward from Alison’s knees.

  “Right,” Zoe said. “Well. Good luck with the writing.” She jammed her hands into her harem pants pockets and sauntered over to the next table.

  Alison stepped around the knots of people having fun, wondering why she was depriving herself of a sunny afternoon with Zoe, disappointed that Zoe hadn’t offered to walk her home.

  3.

  oberlin college

  October 1983

  Alison stood outside the Oberlin woodshop, inhaling the loamy scent of fresh sawdust, remembering.

  Her dad had been an ad exec by vocation, a wood-carver by avocation—an unusual hobby, to say the least, among Upper East Side Jewish men. Alison’s grandfather had taught his son to carve, and her dad had taken great pleasure in teaching the craft to her.

  On Saturday mornings, while her mother slept late, her dad would cover their kitchen table with the past week’s issues of the Times. Then he’d open his father’s buttery leather satchel and arrange the wood-handled tools on the table like a surgeon preparing his instrument tray. When Alison begged to carve a piece of her own, he told her she was too young to handle the gouges and carving knives. “When you’re ten,” he promised. By her tenth birthday, he was dead.

  Her dad began each sculpture by turning the raw chunk of wood in his big, hairy hands. Then he’d hand it to Alison and ask her the same question: “What does it want to be?”

  She learned to match her answer to the shape of the wood. If it was rounded, she’d suggest a face or a globe. If it was squarish, she’d ask him to make her a magic treasure chest, a wagon, or a book. If it was oblong, she’d ask for a dragon or a bird. As her dad began to carve and the pile of brown, red, or blond shavings grew, Alison would throw out guesses. “It’s a dragon!” “Is it me?”

  In every room she’d slept in after her father died, she’d made a shrine of his carvings. The shrine lived in her dorm room now, on the bookshelf above her desk: a rough-hewn oak squirrel clutching an acorn, a mahogany mama bear holding her baby, and a book carved from redwood, with “Stories Yet to Be by Alison Rose” whittled into the whorled grain.

  Alison took a breath, let it go, and pulled open the shop’s metal door. Zoe was perched on a tall metal stool at a workbench. “Hey, Al!” she called. “Come meet Tom.”

  A man in plastic goggles and denim overalls was guiding a plank through the table saw in the middle of the room. As Alison and Zoe approached, he flicked off the saw and pushed his goggles up onto his forehead, staring at Alison. She stared back. He looked like the Marlboro Man minus the chaps and cigarette.

  “Tom, this is Alison.” Pointedly, Zoe cleared her throat, “As you seem to have noticed.”

  Tom broke their gaze, pulled his goggles down, flipped the switch, and went back to work. “You’re staring,” Zoe whispered into Alison’s ear. She laughed. “I don’t blame you. He’s a hunk.”

  She led Alison to the tool bench, where she laid out two boards and handed Alison a hammer and a box of nails.

  “I’m putting you in charge of the supports.” Zoe showed Alison the pencil marks she’d made on the boards, indicating where each nail should go.

  “Yes, boss.”

  Zoe looked contrite. “Am I being too bossy?”

  “You?” Alison said sarcastically.

  Zoe winked and walked away. Alison started nailing the first set of two-by-fours together. The nails slid easily through the soft fir, and it was nice having Zoe’s marks to follow. She glanced over at Zoe—and smashed the hammer down on her thumb.

  “Ow!” she yelped. Zoe rushed over, took Alison’s hand in hers, and examined her thumb.

  “Poor baby. You’re going to lose that fingernail.” Zoe took the hammer out of Alison’s other hand. “Good thing you have that writing thing to fall back on,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ve got a future in carpentry.”

  Alison burst into tears. Zoe’s grin disappeared.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked gently.

  “My dad—” Alison swallowed hard.

  “Your dad,” Zoe repeated, her voice low and soft.

  Alison shook her head.

  Zoe hung her hammer and Alison’s on the pegboard above the workbench. “I’m starving,” she said. “Let’s go get some dinner.” She put her hand on the small of Alison’s back and guided her toward the shop doors.

  The path through Tappan Square was bathed in golden light, sunset shadows dancing through the leafy arms of the trees. The evening air was hot and soupy. Alison’s limbs felt limp.

  “I wonder why they call it Indian summer,” Zoe mused.

  “Native American summer. Have you learned nothing from Mariandaughter?”

  “I appreciate the constructive criticism, sister.”

  “Deconstructive criticism.”

  Zoe laughed. “It gets hot in the fall where I come from,” she said. “But not as sticky as this.”

  One squirrel chased another across the asphalt in front of them, white blurs against gray. “Where’s that?” Alison asked.

  “Hilton Head, North Carolina. It’s—”

  “I know what it is,” Alison said. A resort town for really rich people, she didn’t say. Under the guise of scratching her nose, she swiped sweat off her upper lip. “One of my favorite historical fiction writers lives there.”

  “John Jakes?”

  “I can’t believe you’ve heard of him!”

  “That was the best part of growing up on the island. Lots of writers and artists and musicians. Theaters. Museums. Galleries. And gorgeous beaches.”

  “Sounds great,” Alison said, choking down envy.

  “It was. But it’s not what I want for my kids. I’m not going to raise them on an island, literally or figuratively.”

  “I grew up on an island too,” Alison said. “Literally and figuratively.”

  Zoe looked at her quizzically.

  “Manhattan,” Alison explained. “And my family was really . . . isolated.”

  “My mom always talked about moving us to Berkeley,” Zoe said. “She made it sound like the best place on earth to raise kids.”

  Two young boys on skateboards zoomed past them. Zoe picked up a bubblegum wrapper they’d dropped in their wake, balling it in her fist.

  “Are you Jewish?” Zoe asked, as if she were asking if Alison was hungry.

  “Ethnically, yes,” Alison answered. “Religiously, no.”

  “So you didn’t get bat mitzvah’ed?”

  “No Hebrew school. No Jewish holidays. None of it. My parents were both raised as re
ligious Jews, and they hated it.”

  “Too bad. I think the Jewish religion is super-cool. Except for the patriarchal stuff.”

  Spoken like a true non-Jew, Alison thought. “You don’t sound like you’re from the South,” she said.

  “I went to boarding school in New Hampshire. They scrubbed the South right off me.”

  Alison thought, She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s rich. Why would she want to be friends with me?

  “What’s going on, Alison?” Zoe asked. “Your vibe changed just now.”

  Alison didn’t answer.

  “You think I’m one of those spoiled Oberlin trust fund brats.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Well, I was spoiled. And I did inherit a bunch of money when my grandfather died. And I’ve had a hell of a time making friends here because of it.” Zoe shook her head. “Obies love to hate kids from families like mine. The rich kids come here to get away from their ‘white privilege.’” Her fingers made quote marks in the air. “And the kids who don’t come from money judge me for having some.”

  Alison was stunned. How could she and Zoe be so different and see things so much the same way?

  Zoe put her hand on Alison’s arm. “If that’s an issue for you, I really wish you’d say so now. I’d hate to get to know you, and then . . .”

  “It’s not,” Alison lied. I won’t let it be, she promised herself. Even if I’m here on a full scholarship, and even if I’m barely going to make it to graduation on what’s left of my inheritance.

  They walked past a historic marker commemorating Oberlin’s part in the Underground Railroad. One of the boulders surrounding it had been painted white with black lettering. Zoe read the message out loud: THIS ROCK IS SO BORING.

  Zoe laughed. “A little less boring now,” she said. “Don’t you love street art?”

  What’s street art, Alison wondered. “Love it,” she said.

  They walked on toward Oberlin’s tiny downtown, stepping over a granite plaque set into the ground, blanketed by a scattering of fiery fall leaves:TIME CAPSULE