With much gratitude to Bone for fine beta, and to Carol S. for thoughtful queries, gentle nudges, and many wonderful conversations.
The Outside Member
Kat Allison
At first you think you must have gotten the address wrong. The house is a substantial one, a big stucco Georgian on a good-sized lot, in a prosperous neighborhood. You look up and down the street—big houses, half-timber or clapboard or brick, with huge old oaks in the yards and mini-vans in the driveways. Many of them are decorated for Christmas, with tasteful white mini-lights; no floodlit plastic reindeer or prefab creche scenes in this neighborhood.
Nothing here seems at all like graduate student housing. But then, as you cross-check the address on the invitation, you recall that Dan told you once his wife Becky has some high-octane job in finance, performing legerdemain with investments.
Humming a line or two of "God bless the child that's got his own," you park and lock up and crunch through the snow to the front door. Luminaria are glowing beside the path, and there's a small fire burning steadily in a firepit, off to the side of the porch, untended. But before you have a chance to wonder about it, the door starts to swing open, and in that instant you drop yourself into role, check your face, your clothes, your voice, your demeanor, so that by the time the door's all the way open to you—revealing a middle-aged woman in a red velveteen pantsuit—you're ready for your close-up.
"How do you do?" you say, and watch the accent register.
You're a total stranger to her, of course, but it's a party, a time for welcoming strangers at the door, and in one quick sweeping glance she tallies you up and reaches the right sum. "You must be one of Dan's friends from the university," she says. "Come right on in." And you step into the vestibule, surrender your coat, and prepare to set sail into the heat and crowd and chatter, trying to remember why in the hell it was you decided to come here in the first place.
The invitation had been sent to your apartment via the postal service, not to your office through campus mail, so you were late finding it; you seldom check your mailbox since so little of interest ever appears there. The square envelope had held a stiff sheet of heavy dark paper swirled with tiny gold threads and gloriously embellished with script and curlicues. "He defended! He's a Ph.D.!" And then in smaller script, "Come party with Doctor Dan." An address, a date, a time. You had looked at it for quite a while, noting the mechanical perfection of the calligraphy. In other times it would have all been done by hand, and might have been almost as perfect, but it would have taken many hours. This was no doubt done by computer, and printed off at Kinko's in minutes. A sprinkling of gold metallic stars had been loose in the envelope as well—this must be a new thing, you think—and had fallen glittering out onto the tabletop when you opened it. You gathered them up, every one, and then stood for quite a while holding them in your hand, not sure what to do with them but reluctant to just throw them out.
Gold stars are everywhere in the house, hanging on the tree and from the chandeliers and stair railings. You're not sure if they're meant as ironic meta-comment, or simply a seasonal decoration. Whatever the purpose, they glow richly in the yellow light.
The company is a mix of Dan's family and Becky's professional colleagues, interspersed with an assortment of graduate students—Dan's former coevals, now left behind to straggle toward the finish line he's crossed. They're the only ones who know you, and they seem to seek you out, greet you warmly—"Hey, Adam! Good to see you, how's it going over there in linguistics? I heard the dean was talking about folding you guys in with Cultural Studies, what's up with that?" There was a time they would have called you "Professor Pierson," but now the only ones who do that are the older generation, the parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles. You can see it at times in their eyes, amusement at the incongruity between the stuffy honorific and your youth and insignificance, but they use it nonetheless, politely.
The students are not exactly impolite, but they stalk you with clear intent, with the avidity of hunters. Invitations are extended, subtle or blunt—"I could e-mail you a draft of my proposal, if you'd be willing to take a look at it." Clearly word's gotten around from Dan that you're a good one to have on a committee.
You manage to sidestep, murmur, dissemble, avoid any commitments or direct answers. What they don't know is that you're leaving town as soon as you finish your last class on Thursday, and you're not coming back. It means they'll have no one to teach Syntax and Semantics to the undergrads next semester, which is unfortunate, but they can likely get Blocher out of retirement to handle it, this once. You have the letter already written—family emergency, father critically ill in Cardiff—and neatly folded into an envelope, which you will deposit in the department chair's mailbox in the morning.
You hadn't really planned to stay here more than a few years in any event. That was part of why you put Adam together the way you did, so you could slip into places just like this, backwaters where you could lie low, watching the students swim through your life and away again. Salmon, in their hundreds, in their generations, leaping the ladders, hurling themselves upwards to spawn and die, while you sit nice and dry at the water's edge, watching them go.
Damn MacLeod for messing with your gig, hauling you back into the drink with all the others. You sip your beer, cursing him, knowing that it's not his doing at all, not really. For all your gift of planning, you've never been any good at sticking with your own plans. But you damn him anyway, for stirring in you once again that urge for the rushing water, that odd vague craving that seems to wrap itself into the word belong. You don't belong anywhere, you've told yourself that more times than there are years in your life. But you've never been any good at listening to yourself either. You've a transatlantic plane ticket back in your apartment, and it's not to Cardiff.
"Adam! Hey, glad you could make it." It's Dan, grinning, shouldering his way through the crowd. "Saw you come in, but then I kept getting sidetracked. What a mob scene, huh?" He's clearly in his element, beaming around at the chattering laughing horde. "You got something to drink, right?"
You raise your bottle to him. "First things first."
"Great, great." Dan's an energetic, purposeful young man, whose irreverent humor and hardnosed pragmatism both fit uneasily in academia. He's not at all a typical scholar; much more like the entrepreneur his family meant him to be, and you've gathered from things he's said that his decision to fling himself into classical studies in his 30s struck them as lunacy.
"Your parents must be glad to see this day come at last."
"No shit." He grins. "Man, I thought they were going to take out a full-page ad. Hey, c'mon, I'd like you to meet them."
That's one you'd just as soon take a pass on, but Dan has a grip on your elbow and is steering you through the crowd, to a stout couple encased in formal dress.
"Mom, Dad. I want you to meet Adam Pierson."
"Pleasure," says the man, gripping your hand painfully hard. He peers at you in the dim light. "You one of Dan's classmates?"
"No, Dad," and you can tell Dan is flustered by trying to mesh his various worlds. "Professor Pierson. He was on my committee."
"Mph." He's giving you a hard look. "You're in the classics department then?"
"No, I'm in linguistics, actually," and you make a placatory turning-aside-wrath gesture.
"He was my outside member. You have to have someone from outside the department on your committee, and I was—" Dan becomes more formal for a moment, and you can tell he wants to give you this, the gift of honor before his parents— "I was very fortunate that he agreed to be on mine."
"Well. You must be the only prof here tonight." He leans forward, speaks in a low confidential tone. "Hope I'm not speaking out of turn when I say most of those guys—and women too, I guess I should say—they didn't seem all that interested in helping him through all this."
"It's a competitive arena," you tell him. "Not all that different from the business world, actually. Swim with the sharks, and all that."
"And I don't have anything against that, not at all. But—" He points a finger in your face. "Then in that case let's cut all the crap about the life of the mind and the, the—what did that guy say?" He turns to his wife. "The ennobling spirit of the humanities? Whatever it was. Bunch of crap." He shrugs heavy shoulders, takes another swallow of his drink. "It's dog eat dog. Same as anywhere else. Right?"
You can tell Dan's embarrassed, so you put a little extra warmth into your voice. "Absolutely right. I've found human nature to be remarkably consistent in that respect."
Dan's father is giving you a patronizing smile, one calibrated to your apparent youth, apparent naivete, apparent lack of life experience, and Dan jumps in. "Professor Pierson saved my butt in the defense, I can tell you that. Smacked Hummel around pretty good."
His mother, looking slightly confused but earnest, tell you, "We're very grateful for everything you've done for him."
"It was my pleasure," you say, and it was indeed a pleasure to whipsaw that arrogant prick Hummel, to bloody him in front of his colleagues and his student, using nothing more than your words. Academics are no nicer than any other people, and the university is as viciously competitive as any other arena of human endeavor, but academic thugs as a rule prefer bullying over a fairly-matched fight. Hummel had gone down with only a feeble flailing, fear in his eyes at the end. The memory makes you smile, and Dan's parents smile back at you pleasantly.
There's a sudden blinding flash of light—Becky, taking a snapshot of your small grouping—and then it all dissolves, as their attention, and Dan's, is claimed by an elderly aunt, and you detach yourself smoothly, snag another beer, and, temporarily adrift, wander over to admire the Christmas tree. There's a small litter of needles on the gold fabric swathed around its base. A corpse, this tree, dead for weeks now, decked out for its final trip to the pyre. Or, rather, to the municipal compost shredder.
As you stand there, one of Dan's kids comes up to you, points at a lumpy gaudily-painted papier-mache star. "That's my ornament," he says, struggling a bit with the n's and m's.
"Really?"
"Yeah, my guys live in there. And then, see, they can go on this—" And he moves one finger along the path of an electrical cord away from his star and around the front of the tree, and as his fingertip travels he makes a strange shrill buzzing noise with his lips.
"Is that warp drive?"
You shouldn't have asked; he gives you the look kids reserve for idiot adults who try to be chummy. "Nooo." He draws out the syllable in a growl of exasperation, and gives you an irritated scowl. Another decade or two, and he'll be almost as good at that as MacLeod.
But unlike Mac, he lets your slip pass instantly, forgotten, and he resumes the journey where it left off, humming, making little "pzKOW" noises every times he passes a lightbulb, until he reaches another papier-mache ornament, very like his own. "That's Devon's city, where his guys live," he tells you. "We were going to have a war, but then mom said we couldn't."
"That's a thought," you say. "Christmas being a time of peace and all that."
"So instead we race each other around on the highways." He's peering up toward the glittering upper layers of the tree, out of his reach. "If I could just get on a chair, I could get up to the other cities, and maybe we could have a war with them. But mom won't let me have a chair either." His outrage, his disgust, are vast and unassuagable. He craves mayhem, enacts it in imagination upon even the glowing benevolent bosom of the Christmas tree. It's elemental, you think, as deeply encoded in the DNA as bilateral symmetry and the urge to speech. Remarkably consistent, indeed
Suddenly the dog is there, shoving a wet nose into the boy's neck, and he's shrieking and giggling, swatting at the dog, and then they're both racing off, caroming off the grownups, and you know that you are instantly forgotten.
Children perpetually interest you, in part perhaps because you don't remember your own childhood; in part, perhaps, because they seem to live their lives without subtext, each moment experienced wholly and purely for just what it is, and forgotten as soon as it's past.
That, at least, is your version, and you continue to hold to it, even though a number of children have given you to know it's a self-willed delusion. Maybe it's just that that's how you'd like to live, and it comforts you to believe that mortals at least achieve it, if only for a brief time.
You've finished your drink and are starting to contemplate a quick exit, when Becky calls out above the din, "OK! Showtime, everybody! We want you all to get a chance to see what it's been like, life with a grad student, so those of you who've never been through it know why this is such a happy occasion for us all." You look over at Dan, who seems a little embarrassed, grinning but pink in the face. Or perhaps that's just the heat.
A screen had been set up on the far side of the room, while you weren't looking Suddenly the lights are turned off, and you're just part of a crowd in the dark.
"See, being a graduate student means reassessing the importance of life's little events, like, say, the birth of one's first child—" A slide flashes on the screen, a picture of a noticeably younger Dan and Becky, her sweaty and exhausted on a bed, he grinning, clutching between them a red-faced infant. "—to which Dan was late because of his Pan-Hellenism seminar." Her voice is mocking but affectionate, and the crowd chuckles.
"...or family vacations..." Another slide, with Dan in swim trunks on a beach, holding a toddler on each knee. The larger one is wearing ridiculously tiny pink plastic sunglasses jammed on his face; the smaller one is wearing green sunglasses that are grotesquely oversized and about to fall off his nose. Both are grinning crazily up at their father.
"...during which Dan read Herodotus." The beach, again. Dan is almost entirely buried in sand, the children are gleefully dumping another bucketful on his chest, while he holds Herodoti Historiae at arm's length, studying it with a ponderous scowl on his face.
The slides go on, and the voice, but you're not listening, just taking in the images, one after another: a picnic, with a stack of papers in amongst the chips and beer cans. The entire family, grandparents and Dan and Becky and two toddlers, decked out in Fourth of July flag-striped garb and heading off to the neighborhood parade, Dan with a backpack slung over his shoulder. A Christmas past, with Dan beaming down at his gift of a brand-new laptop, and the new puppy roistering in shredded wrapping paper, the puppy who's now the outsized hound working the crowd for treats. Parties, birthdays, Thanksgivings, years clicking past in flashes of light. In each photo, the children get larger and larger, while the adults get older; not obviously, perhaps not to any eyes but your own.
And finally, Dan, in front of this house, formally dressed, with a gaudy necktie you recognize as the one he wore to his defense. Becky must have snapped the photo, because she's not in the picture, just Dan and the children, who are standing in the doorway waving frantically at him, bundled up against the November chill, and they are the size of the children across the room from you. The projector shuts off, the lights come up; it is the present moment.
And the present moment, you think, is only the pause between one slide and the next. Someday, years from now, the snapshots taken tonight will be flashed on a screen or a monitor, somewhere—likely not in this house, or in this city—and they'll try to come up with the name of that skinny guy in the fair-isle sweater, the one who was on dad's committee, way back when he was in graduate school. The outside member. It's an unsettling thought—some part of you will always be in this living room, holding a beer and grinning, with a dog looking hopefully up at you. Even after everyone in this room is dead, as long as these photographs last, you'll still be standing here, a part of this company of ghosts-in-the-making, never really able to disappear.
Sometimes you think photography is the most ambiguous gift of this age of mixed blessings.
With the end of the slide show, the party shifts, groupings reconfigure, and you think it might be a good time to slip away. You finish your beer, take a quick look around for your host—but he must be off somewhere, in the kitchen perhaps. You make a foray to the bedroom, retrieving your jacket from the great heap on the bed, sending a few nylon parkas slithering to the floor. And with a few quick nods, waves, smiles, you slither through the sweaty crowd, and out the door, shutting it firmly behind you.
Blessed blessed cold, after the stifling heat of the house; the blessedness of fresh air and space. You stand for a moment just breathing it in, feeling as if steam must be rising off you, and looking up at the night sky. It seems blessedly silent, too, for a moment, after the din of the crowd, but then you hear voices nearby. There's a group of people at the firepit, which is blazing higher than when you'd arrived, and the flickering light illuminates them, giving them craggy prehistoric faces and gleaming eyes.
The sight of a group standing around a fire, at solstice, and singing—that hits deeper, harder, than you'd expected. Though nostalgia is a self-indulgence you keep thinking you've left behind, you could almost let yourself wax nostalgic, looking at it, if you could mute the soundtrack. But what you hear is some uncertain baritone rumbling, overwhelmed by several tipsy sopranos lurching shrilly into the descant chorus of "Angels We Have Heard on High"
And Dan is out there too; seeing you, he separates himself from the group and walks over, stumbling on the frozen ground.
"Hey." He's grinning, tipsy and joyful, grabbing your shoulder. "C'mon over, we need someone to give us a little bulwark against all those damn sopranos."
You should go, you know you should; stay here any longer and you'll be getting yourself into a mood. But Dan's pulling you over toward the group, and it's too easy to just go along, for a moment. And it's been far too long since you've stood in front of an open fire, on a cold night
The final "Glooooria" has wavered to a close, and you're greeted with enthusiasm by the entire group, and especially by one woman—Nancy, is that her name?—short, with spiky black hair and a great deal of make-up. "Adam!" she crows, taking your arm from Dan. "Now we're getting somewhere." She used to sit in on your seminar, you remember, though she wasn't registered.
She hauls you over by the fire, and the others make a space for you. "'Cause—you're English, right?" Nancy is leaning against you, looking up with what's clearly meant to be a saucy grin. Sauced is what she is, and you smile back, giving her a careful little pat on the shoulder. "You can help, you gotta know this song ... see, there's this song I wanted to sing, but I couldn't—I just couldn't remember all the words, but I know that you'll—cause it's English, and you're English, so—"
Abruptly she pivots, using you for balance, and addresses the others. "OK! You guys, you gotta sing along, 'cause it's like, it's like the Twelve Days of Christmas, except different, and the words—it's complicated, so I couldn't remember them all—"
"That'd be the eggnog," someone says from across the fire.
"Noooo." She's trying to be hurt, and laughing at the same time. "No, it's cause it's—complicated. And it's really really old. The song." She leans back on you. "But Adam'll know it, cause he knows everything." Another flirtatious grin, her head tipping back dizzily, and then she suddenly launches into song, and you're surprised by what a good voice she has. And then surprised by the song.
"I'll give you one-oh,
Green grow the rushes, oh."
An old song indeed. You listen as she makes her way, leading the group, through the first few verses, working up through the count—two, two, the lily-white boys clothed all in green-oh; three, the rivals; four for the Gospel makers; five for the symbols at the door—each time counting back down all the steps to the beginning, and then with the next verse surging one number higher, only to dance back down to one, and then beginning yet again. On "six" she needs your prompting, that it's six for the six proud walkers, and then again at eight (April rainers). While the rest of group sings their way from that back down to one, she leans back against you and says breathily, "Adam, what does all that mean? It's, like, symbolic, right? Pagan, or something?"
"Hard to say," you tell her, and you can't resist adding, "I doubt anyone's around nowadays who could tell us authoritatively."
She gives a little crow of laughter, more than the feeble joke deserves, and is late jumping back in to cue the group that nine is for the nine bright shiners. She doesn't seem to mind that you're not singing, just listening, as the group, gaining confidence with each verse, tackles ten (for the Ten Commandments) and eleven (that went to heaven), and musing for a moment at just how many things humanity had managed to muddle together in this one silly Christmas song. And at twelve (for the twelve apostles), the group, singing now with great boozy brio, begins its final trip down the roster:
"—Eleven for the eleven that went to heaven,
and ten for the Ten Commandments—
Nine for the nine bright shiners,
and eight for the April rainers—
Seven for the seven stars in the sky,
and six for the six proud walkers—"
They're gaining volume, slowing and swelling as they move toward the finish, attempting a variety of atrocious English accents, snorting with laughter and yet seemingly filled with a kind of happiness that goes beyond silliness.
"Five for the symbols at your door,
and four for the Gospel makers—"
Deep breaths, a great surge of voices, all trying for different harmonies:
"Threeeee, threeeeeeee, the ri-i-i-i-vallllllls..."
—then released, to canter toward the finish:
"Two, two, the lily white boys,
clothed all in greee-een, oh —"
And finally, startlingly, in majestic unison again:
"One is one —
and all alone —
and evermore — shall be so."
Whoops of laughter, giggling, echoing through the icy night, up toward the indifferent stars. You stand, feeling cold edge down your collar and through your shoes, and after a moment you put Nancy away from you, gently, and step back. Past time to go.
They hardly notice as you turn away, chattering, delegating one of their number to go inside and bring back a bottle. But Dan sees you, follows after.
"Hey, Adam, you taking off? It's early, party's just getting good." He grabs your hand and shakes it; you're not sure if the gesture is meant as stay or goodbye.
"Gotta go, Dan." You let him hang onto your hand for a moment; your fingers have started to chill, and the warmth feels nice.
"You leaving, really?" He's crestfallen. "Hey, it's early. Don't go yet." He's looking at you with some concern, now, in the flickering firelight. "Are you having a good time? You OK?" There's kindliness in his eyes, the instinctive warmth of someone whose nature it is to gather others together, to spread the table and throw open the door. You suddenly feel ashamed of yourself. There are a number of ways in which humans are remarkably consistent, and not all of them are bloody.
"No, thanks, Dan, this was delightful, I had a wonderful time, a great pleasure, thanks so much for the invitation."
"You all right to drive? Should I get you a cab?" Protective, paternal almost, and that would be enough to make you weep if it weren't so funny.
"No, no, honestly, I'm just fine. See?" You demonstrate flawlessly touching forefinger to nose, first left hand, then right, while standing balanced on one foot. Looking utterly foolish, of course, but that's all right too, you'll never see him or any of these others again, it's all right to be a fool this once.
He accepts it with a nod, a grin. "So—let's get together again, during break. When it's not such a mob scene. I'll buy you a drink, okay?"
"Yeah, let me check my schedule, I'll give you a call," you lie. You should end it right there, but you find yourself adding, "And if that doesn't work out—have a good life, Dan. Take care."
You shouldn't have said that, he's looking oddly at you again, concerned, but before he can say anything you turn away and crunch through the snow, back to the car.
By the time you get the door unlocked and slide in behind the wheel, you're already shedding the persona, hanging it up in the closet, and your brain is settling back into its usual track, clicking along about packing and uploading files and transferring funds, storing a new datum: cold climate + short parka + vinyl car seats = poor idea. As you start up the engine, you glance over at the house, and the sight holds you for just a moment longer—the golden glow of the fire in the freezing night, the glow on the faces grouped around it, singing again, evidently, Dan among them, arms slung around his friends' shoulders. If you had a camera, this is the photo you'd take, this would be the one you'd keep. But you've never cared much for photography.
You'll write in your journal tonight, you suddenly think. You'll make some words for it all. Perhaps five hundred years from now, when Dan's great-great-grandchildren are ash, it'll be nice to have the song, at least, notated. Perhaps you'll stumble across it, going through your scribblings some winter night, and you'll build a fire, and stand in front of it, and hum to yourself. Perhaps there'll even be others there, to teach it to.
You put the car in gear and, skidding only a little on the ice, drive off into the night.