Poor Duckface

Poor Duckface. Left at the church. So many allusions. Especially the "Get me to the church on time" thing.

Duck-face. Duck facing.

That’s how her mind worked. Not everybody understood it.

How do you do these things? her grad school advisor used to ask.

I don’t know. I just know. She really could identify quotes from May Sinclair and other authors without having read many of their books. Others guessed. She knew.

it was just a talent she had.

Dorrie’s paper on Babbitt, a novel no one else wanted to read, had been written and written and written and all the drafts ultimately stolen by Patty, a woman with brains who hated her. Patty mocked her constantly. She made fun of the way Dorrie talked. It took Dorrie a while to come to the point, but she had a point. She was not pointless. Yet Patty tried to make her seem pointless. Patty could talk, but Dorrie could write. Dorrie came to the point quickly in her writing. For years she thought that writers couldn’t talk, that they were all like her, people with disorganized brains, but then she met some writers and found they could talk.

Patty who could talk had brains, all right. The brains to steal Dorrie’s paper while Dorrie went to the restroom at the house where the graduate students all had desks. Dorrie came back and it was gone from her desk.

Make copies, her friend Ben advised over the phone. He was already with Doctors without Borders. The phone bills were enormous. He called her once a week because eh knew Dorrie was frail. He loved Dorrie. She was faithful to him. She went out with men, mainly to the diner or the bar her department frequented, but she didn’t have sex with them. They all coddled her. Dorrie was sweet.

Not necessarily smart, but very nice indeed, her friend Fig said.

Dorrie swatted him.

Dorrie’s advisor knew about the stolen paper when Patty handed it in. Good God, Patty, Dorrie showed me a rough draft of this. I’ve got the notes right here. Look at this?

Patty cried. I couldn’t work. I had to have a paper. She has so many ideas.

Weeping Patty called her parents and they flew in from Washington and took her to a hospital. She was having a nervous breakdown, which was unlike Dorrie’s nervous breakdowns or any other nervous breakdowns she had heard about. Patty made friends with the nurses. Apparently she lay around in bed and joked with the nurses all day. Fig went to visit Patty because he was nosy and wanted to see if she was really sick.

Not a damned thing wrong with her.

Later, when Dorrie was sick, she cried and prayed. She had not once made friends with the nurses. She was so frozen she couldn’t talk. She went into the common room and drank soda when she started to feel less frozen. But she had been in real pain. Not joke, joke, joke, like Patty.

Patty’s parents told the chair of the department, There, you see. Patty never plagiarized before. The theft of this paper was because she was in a major depression.

So Patty had a doctor’s excuse. The university had to accept her back. But they made it clear that there could be no repetition of the incident.

The professor and Dorrie didn’t know what to make of it.

I’ve never seen anything like this in thirty years of teaching. She should have been kicked out of the program. She’ll never get a recommendation from me. But I suppose her parents can buy her a Ph.D.

Isn’t her father an admiral or something?

A senator.

Dorrie’s professor thought she was very funny because she didn’t know any facts. She could write about Marlowe, she could write about the Renaissance, and she could look up everything but she didn’t care about the present.

Who’s the president? he asked one day when she tripped into class a little late.

Reagan? Dorrie said absently. Oh? Do you mean I’m a moron?

Everybody in the class was laughing.

No, it’s just a joke.

Everything was a joke. Because if it wasn’t a joke, it was just too terrifying and repellent.

But people were fond of Dorrie. She was friends with everyone in the department except Patty. And when she dropped out to marry Ben without finishing her dissertation on Sinclair Lewis, everybody was sorry.

You’ll be back, her professor said. Do you have any idea how good you are?

Dorrie somehow thought this was funny. She had never slept, could barely speak, could never get through all the reading, and had taken to reading Agatha Christie mysteries so she could get her three or four hours of sleep.

What you need...Fig used to say.

Fig was dashing, a German blonde. He looked a little like Ben. Dorrie and Fig hung around a lot. In the small town there was nothing to do but buy natural foods and sit around at coffeehouses. They did their homework together endlessly. Fig yawned. Fig had read everything at his school in Germany and didn’t have to do much work in the U.S. Why bother? Reading May Sinclair could do no one any good, he said. He would tell Dorrie everything she needed to know about May Sinclair and they could go to a concert. Laughing, Dorrie protested. But she listened and then they went out together and then she came home and had to stay up all night and read.

Maybe she should have married Fig! No, Fig had never asked her. He had thought they should sleep together because they were in grad school together.

Fig hadn’t liked Ben much. He’s too--fake.

Fake? That doesn’t sound like you, Fig.

He’s a phony. So Uriah Heepish. So much like--Patty.

Everybody likes Ben, Fig, Dorrie said wearily.

That’s the problem.

It was a problem. She did know what he meant. If you didn’t have to try at anything, if everybody said you were great, you became--false. Ben wasn’t really sincere anymore about helping the poor at his law practice. He did help them, but he didn’t care. She could see the difference. He cared about hanging out with the famous. He knew Bill Clinton, for God’s sake.

Dorrie didn’t want to know Bill Clinton. She had voted for him, but she didn’t want to know him.

Now, like poor Duckface, Dorrie was thinking about marrying Ben (again). But she didn’t really want to be Duckface. She could see herself in the church, left at the church, while Ben decided he loved Rose (he did love Rose: Dorrie knew it) and then told her he couldn’t marry her. There was a long tradition of movies about this: The Graduate, Four Weddings and a Funeral.

She would be wearing a white dress (sure) and her father would be giving her away (oh sure).

Would she get to sock Ben in the face?

Duckface, Duckface!

No, she would never come out of her room again. She would simply refuse to get married. She was in love with Ben (sort of) and would probably always love him but he had practically killed two women already. Rose was not happy. Rose was so unhappy she wanted to marry Ben off to Dorrie. What was that about? Dorrie didn’t like to think. And she couldn’t believe Ben was so crazy that he would do anything Rose said.

Dorrie would love to go to Seattle again but she thought she was banned from that city. Truly. If she showed up they would put her in mental hospital. She wouldn’t be surprised. She really wasn’t sure where to go. Her doctor and social worker thought she was best off where her family was. Why? Because in case of emergency... In case of emergency they did nothing except put her in the hospital. The only person who helped her at all was Rose, because Rose was a social worker type and because she couldn’t believe Ben hadn’t given her a settlement. The alimony was for three years and then Dorrie was supposed to have a job. Of course Dorrie had fallen in the world...

She called Fig. She knew she shouldn’t but she did. He lived in Colorado and taught literature. He had a wife, no kids. Nobody of their generation had had kids. That’s how it seemed somehow.

She listened to his voice on the answering machine. He read a poem. He changed it often. She liked calling just to hear the poem. Sometimes she left a message.

It’s me. Dorrie from grad school. Just called to say hi.

Once he had called her. Fig had called Ben’s number. He was still the same Fig. It had seemed miraculous that he had changed so little.

And that was enough. She didn’t tell him she had fallen in the world. She didn’t leave Rose’s number. What good would that do?

I am definitely not a duckface. Duckface? Desperate.