Page 2 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

“I suppose I can ask Dr. Pines if I can have time off from the clinical study.” She would still have to work things out with Andy. Maybe she would meet him in New Hampshire instead.

Her mother sighed. “Betsy, we’re going to have to sell the house.”

Betsy had always imagined bringing her own kids to the Vineyard. She’d planned to show it to Andy this summer. “But Mom, it’s all we have left of Daddy, of our childhoods,” she heard herself stammering. The television grew staticky, and Betsy stared at the fuzzy screen as her mother said she’d explain everything when she arrived.

When she hung up, Betsy immediately dialed her sister Aggie, in Boston, to see what she knew, but there was no answer.

Andy’s office was in the heart of the Columbia University campus on the fourth floor of the beaux arts Schermerhorn Hall, with its facade of Indiana limestone and a quote carved over the elaborate entrance: “Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee.” The inscription had intimidated Betsy when she first stepped into the building forclasses last September, but she barely noticed it anymore; hurrying through the doors now made her a bit numb to the grandeur. She’d spent most of her time in her graduate classes avoiding raising her hand—whenever she spoke up, her male classmates, who outnumbered female students five to one, found some way to belittle her arguments.

Betsy knocked on the frosted glass cutout in the pine door, ajar just enough that she could see a couple of cardboard boxes beside the professor’s office chair.

“Come in,” Andy said. His hands were folded on the metal desk, the desktop clear of the stacks of thick textbooks and medical journals she was accustomed to seeing. He didn’t rise to close the door, and he didn’t unthread his fingers and embrace her either—those fingers that had caressed her in places so private it made her blush.

“Thank you, Dr. Pines.” It was what she called him on campus, to keep their relationship a proper secret. “I have so much to tell you. My mother called and I need to go…”

His expression remained impassive—there was no wide smile, no playful eyes—and he motioned for her to sit down as he shuffled a few folders around. He was young, only thirty-two to her twenty-three, but he appeared older now, more formal. She swallowed her nerves and lowered herself onto the chair, watching as he pulled out her thesis paper; there was the neatly typed title page, the shadow of a blot of Wite-Out where she’d needed to correct the date.

“Let’s get down to it, shall we? I’m afraid your paper didn’t quite make a solid enough argument, and I had to give you a score you may be disappointed with.”

He tossed the paper on the desk, a large red F flashing in what felt like neon lights in the right-hand corner. She felt a ringing in her ears.

“I—I don’t understand,” she said, working hard to get him to look at her, really look at her, and exchange the intimacy she’d felt with him when their bodies were twisted in the sheets just last week. “An Fmeans I don’t pass. If I don’t do well in your class, I’ll have to retake it and then I won’t be able to graduate on time next year.”

He darted his eyes down to the desktop. “I’m afraid we’ll need a complete revision. Professor Warner agreed after reading it. He’ll step in as your advisor next fall.”

“You’re passing me off? Does that mean I have to retake the class?”

She’d worked hard on the premise of her thesis, “Self-Esteem: Sex Stereotyping or a Girls’ Way?,” a topic that had come up at her parents’ dinner table. Were girls taught to believe they were less than men or were they conditioned to be so? Betsy had sorted through whatever research she could find, which admittedly had been slim, but she’d pulled in Freud’s theory of fathers and daughters and a few others. To silence any critics, she approached the topic from a position of science, keeping her emotions out of her arguments entirely.

His voice was gentle, and she imagined him kissing up her neck, how they’d connected in the first place after talking about theories of attachment. “The premise was faulty. You didn’t express any unique thought, and there was just not enough evidence to support your ideas. I did warn you of this.”

“But you saw my annotations? The research on the topic isn’t robust, I agree, but it’s why I thought I could use this paper to apply for a grant. Maybe run my own case study.”

“Perhaps. If you can find something new to say. But academics don’t repeat research, they synthesize it.” Odd, because she’d talked to Andy about her thesis many times, and he’d always thought the topic unique. “Ms. Whiting, your belief outweighs fact-based science, and you’re taking leaps that cannot be supported in the field of psychology, at least not yet. Research shows that women don’t even develop a true identity until they settle on a husband.”

“You believe that?” Betsy bit at her chapped lip, pointing to her sources page. “Anyway, that’s been refuted. Very clearly in Naomi Weisstein, 1968.”

“The concept isn’t widely accepted.”

Betsy hadn’t been looking for a boyfriend. She’d been sitting in class that January, doodling, marveling at how normal everyone seemed while the loss of her father still pressed down on her heart. The professor had been late, and when he rushed into the room, he’d apologized kindly. Betsy had looked up at his tweed blazer and chiseled cheeks, the way the young man kept running a single hand through his hair when he spoke. “I’m Dr. Pines,” he’d said, smiling at her. This made Betsy sit up straighter in her seat, feeling for the long strand of wooden beads at her neck.

She sat up straight now too. Her mind left the paper and whatever Andy was droning on about. It was as though he wanted her to get so upset that she’d storm out of his office and never speak to him again.

“Your interest in counseling is a strength of yours, Ms. Whiting, but completing your degree will be a struggle if you cannot separate emotion from science.”

Betsy chewed at her fingernail, still trying to understand what her lacking paper meant for their relationship. “Why wouldn’t you have guided me to a better topic or sources?”

Andy folded his arms against his skinny chest—he was wiry, like her older sister Aggie—and he leaned back in his seat, taking a studious position that indicated he thought he was about to say something insightful. “I suppose we were busy having other conversations.”

“I would say so.” She pressed the soft of her palm against his bare wrist. “I don’t care about some stupid thesis. I just don’t want to lose you.”

“You shouldn’t be so, so… frivolous.” He met her gaze, then slipped a nervous glance toward the hallway, voices approaching from somewhere in the stairwell, snatching back his hand. Rising, he closed the door, his leather loafers screeching against the waxed floor as he returned to his desk.

“Dartmouth is a tenure-track position, Betsy, and I want to start fresh. You and I won’t work in the long term. You must know that.”

“I am not frivolous. I’m…” Happy. She had been happy with him.

The office smelled like a musty mélange of dust and yellowed paper, sharpened pencils, and typewriter ink. It made her queasy. “But I could come with you to New Hampshire. I could rewrite my thesis at the Dartmouth library.”

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