“Film studies!” he said. “They watching movies, or making them?”
I felt there was no answer that wouldn’t make Lee think worse of both me and the school. I said, “The history of film,” which was both correct and incomplete. I added that until recently I’d taught film studies at UCLA, which had the desired effect—I’ve used this trick before—of getting him straight onto Bruins football. I could make noises of agreement while he monologued. We only had twenty minutes left in the drive, and the odds were low now that he’d either ask me about podcasts or mansplain Quentin Tarantino.
The school had invited me specifically to teach the film class, and I’d volunteered to double up because it would mean twice the money—but also because I’ve never known how to sit still, and if I was leaving my kids and heading to the woods for two weeks, I didn’t want to just sit around. The need to keep busy is both a symptom of high-functioning anxiety and the key to my success.
My podcast at the time was Starlet Fever, a serial history of women in film—the ways the industry chewed them up and spat them out. It was going as well as a podcast reasonably could, occasionally hitting top slots in various download metrics. There was a bit of money in it, and sometimes, thrillingly, a celebrity would mention us in an interview. My cohost, Lance, had been able to quit his landscaping gig, I’d been able to turn down the adjuncting crumbs UCLA threw my way, and we had a couple of literary agents offering representation if we wanted to cowrite a book. We were knee-deep in prep for our upcoming season, centered on Rita Hayworth, but it was research I could do from anywhere.
We followed another Blue Cab down Route 9, one with two kids in the back. Lee said, “See, there’s some of your students, I bet. None of these kids are from around here. They’re from other countries, even. This morning I drove some girls coming back from China, and they didn’t say a word. How can they do classes when they don’t speak English?”
I pretended to take a call then, before the racism turned more overt.
“Gary!” I said to the no one in my phone, and then I spaced out a series of uh-huhs and okays for ten minutes as the frozen woods blurred past. Without Lee’s distractions, though, I was unfortunately free to feel the nerves I’d been ignoring, free to feel the woods swallowing me toward Granby. Here was the little white union church I always took as the sign that I’d be there soon. Here was the turnoff to the narrower road, a turn I felt deep in my muscle memory.
As if the turn had brought it up, I remembered the too-long jean shorts and striped tank top I wore on my first drive to Granby in 1991. I remembered wondering if New Hampshire kids had accents, not understanding how few of my classmates would be from New Hampshire. I restrained myself from telling this to Lee, or saying it into my phone.
The Robesons, the family I lived with, had driven me most of the way from Indiana in one day, and the next morning we woke with just an hour to go. The backseat windows down, I sat with my face in the rushing air watching the scroll of calendar-pretty farmland and woods you couldn’t see into, just walls of green. Everything smelled like manure, which I was used to, and then, suddenly, like pine. I said, “It smells like air freshener out there!” The Robesons reacted as if I were a small child who’d said something delightful. “Like air freshener!” Severn Robeson repeated, and gleefully slapped the steering wheel.
On campus that first day, I couldn’t believe the density of woods, the way the ground was somehow the woods, too—rocks and logs and pine needles and moss. You always had to watch your feet. The only woods I’d known in Indiana stood between rows of houses or out back of gas stations—woods you could walk through to the other side. There were cigarette butts, soda cans. When I’d heard fairy tales as a child, those were the woods I pictured. But now the stories of primeval forests, lost children, hidden lairs, made sense. This was a forest.
Outside Lee’s cab: the Granby Post Office, and what used to be the video store. The Circle K was unchanged, but it was hard to get nostalgic over a gas station. Here was the campus road, and here was a wave of adrenaline. I ended my fake phone call, wishing Gary a great day.
When all the leaves fell that first November, I expected to see the houses and buildings that had been waiting, all along, through the trees. But no: Beyond these bare branches, more bare branches. Beyond them, only more.
At night, there were owls. Sometimes, if the dumpsters hadn’t been latched, black bears would take entire garbage bags, drag them across campus to open like party favors.
The car we’d been following took the fork toward the boys’ dorms, but Lee opted for the long route around Lower Campus so he could give me a tour, and all I could do now was listen politely.
He said, “Where you have me dropping you, that’s Upper Campus, above the river, the fancy new buildings. But down here, this is the old part, going back to seventeen-something.”
The 1820s, but I didn’t correct him. It was midafternoon, and a few kids trudged out of Commons and across the quad, hunched against the cold.
Lee pointed out the original classroom building, the dorms adolescent farmer boys used to freeze in, the cottages where bachelor teachers of yore passed solitary lives, Old Chapel and New Chapel (neither a real chapel anymore, both impossibly old), the headmaster’s house. He pointed out the bronze statue of Samuel Granby and said, falsely, “That’s the guy who started the school with just one classroom.”
As a student, I couldn’t pass Samuel Granby without rubbing his foot, a tradition shared by no one. I also couldn’t pass a pay phone without flipping the receiver upside down. This was incredibly witty and rebellious; you’ll have to believe me.
When Lee finally circled to the bottom of Upper Campus and stopped the car, I opened the door onto a wall of cold. I paid him and he told me to stay warm, as if that were a choice—as if it weren’t the absolute pit of winter, everything locked in ice and salt. Looking at buildings that hadn’t changed, at the thin ridge of White Mountain crest rising above the eastern tree line, it was easy to imagine the place had been cryogenically preserved.
Fran had offered me her couch, but the way she said it—“I mean, there’s the dog, and Jacob’s always at volume eleven, and Max still doesn’t sleep through the night”—made it seem more gesture than invitation. So I’d opted to stay in one of the two guest apartments, located right above the ravine in a small house that used to be the business office. There were a bedroom and bathroom on each floor, plus a downstairs kitchen to share. The whole place, I found, smelled like bleach.
I unpacked, worrying I hadn’t brought enough sweaters, and thinking, of all things, about Granby pay phones.