Hunkering Down by Leslie Haynsworth
"All you really know,” Rosie says, “is what you know.”
Her arms swing wide as she walks; her hair shines so bright. Sometimes I hate her so much the only way I can stand to be in the same room with her is to imagine how she would feel if she got hit by a bus and was left with a big dent in the side of her head, or if she got startled while putting her mascara on one day and accidentally poked one of her eyes out. I’ve thought up so many horrible things that could happen to Rosie that sometimes I’m surprised, when I see her, to see that she’s still intact. And sometimes I even kind of feel sorry for her, that she’s the object of so much ill will, even if the ill will does come from someone like me.
“Oh, Rosie, that’s self-evident,” Seth says. “Of course you know what you know.”
“Uh huh.” Rosie nods. “But think about it: since you only know what you know, the thing you can’t really know is what you don’t know. So how do you ever know if you know enough to know what you need to know? You see what I mean?”
This is pretentious existential look-at-me-I’m-in-grad-school pomposity disguised as off-the-cuff banter, which only makes it more pretentious. It gets on my nerves.
But all the same, I have to admit that I sort of agree with her on this one, about how you’re never going to know all there is to know, and how what I know is all I have to go on. And here’s one new thing I know: last Thursday, after ultimate Frisbee, Rosie had a bad experience. It was with Professor LaFye. Or Bob, as he’s told us to call him. So this is another thing I now know: that’s what being Rosie can get you. Shiny hair, red-gold in the yellow autumn light, long legs taking big strides that make your arms swing wide, soft pouty lips and jutting cheekbones—what it all adds up to, if you don’t watch out, is not always as great as someone like me might be inclined to imagine.
“The thing is,” Rosie says, “that, see, Sartre says …”
“Oh, shut up, Rosie,” Seth says. “Just shut up already, please, and let’s go get a beer.” He grabs her by the arm, arresting it mid-swing.
But Rosie shakes her head and shakes him off. “I can’t,” she says. “I have 27 midterms to grade by 10:00 tomorrow. Come on, Anna, let’s get home.”
It is taken for granted by all that I am not going to go get a beer with Seth. Having beers with boys after class is not what I do. Also, although no one would ever say it, we all know Seth doesn’t really want to have a beer with me. Also, it’s possible that after Thursday Rosie is a little bit nervous about walking home alone.
Rosie and I are roommates by accident, the accident being that she is friends with Colleen, who’s friends with Elizabeth, who’s friends with me. When Colleen and Elizabeth found the big old redbrick house on Porter St. for rent for only $1400 a month, they decided it was too perfect to pass up and that they’d each ask a friend to go in on it with them. Colleen asked Rosie. Elizabeth asked me. Elizabeth told me later that if she’d been thinking straight, she’d have told Colleen she could ask any of her friends but Rosie. Then, after we’d been in the house a couple of months, she said Rosie wasn’t as bad as she thought, said didn’t I kind of like Rosie more than I’d expected to? I said, sure, I guess. It was sort of true. I had learned to like her in some ways. She was better at doing her share of the dishes than Elizabeth was, and she spent more time alone in her room than I would have expected. But in all the ways that I still didn’t like her, the depth of my dislike was just the same as always.
Rosie and I peel away from Seth and cut through the humanities faculty parking lot to Miller Avenue. From here the walk home takes about 10 minutes. We’ve been taking that walk together, Rosie and me, twice a week now all semester. We’re both in Professor Zylenska’s 20th Century British Novel class, which doesn’t let out until 5:15. Back in August we walked home in broad warm daylight. But now the air is sharp with cold, thick with twilight.
“Are you really going to grade 27 midterms tonight?” I ask.
“Lord, no.” Rosie laughs. “Can you imagine? But you have to exaggerate things with Seth, or he won’t see reason.”
Rosie is from North Carolina, and in the near-darkness her soft accent wraps itself around me in a way that should make me like her more than I do. I am from Georgia; she and I are the only Southerners in our year in our graduate program at our vast Midwestern university, and in a few weeks when it starts snowing and I am reminded more forcefully than usual that this is not a place I know or feel with any kind of certainty that I understand, I’ll cling to the sound of her voice as the sound of what I do know, the cadence of where I’m from. Even last year when I barely knew her, when she was just the stuck-up, pretty girl in my American Romanticism class, I loved Rosie’s voice, always wished she’d talk more than she did.
She was quieter last year, Rosie. Like she knew we all thought pretty didn’t go with smart. Or maybe like she wasn’t sure they went together herself. Out at night, in bars or at parties, it was different; she would laugh and smile and swing her hair and toss back beers; she was so bright and so strong and so sure in her knowledge of who she was: the one girl every drunken grad-student boy tried hardest to impress with his encyclopedic knowledge of Frankfurt School Marxist philosophy or his masterful post-Romanticist deconstruction of Paradise Lost, the one they would all think of first when they went home later that night and crawled in bed, drunk, alone, and disappointed. In a bar, Rosie was like the sun or a black hole; she exerted an irresistible gravitational pull, and girls like Elizabeth, pretty enough that they weren’t used to being cast so far back into the shadows, would, as the evening wore on, become sour and then anxious, and in their anxiety would, loudly but to no avail, trot out their own brilliant analyses of Freudian film theory, their own nimble neofeminist deconstructions of Wordsworth, Hemingway, and Updike.
So you can see why Rosie never talked much in class. She understood her place in the order of things, which was not to generate discourse but rather to be the muse who inspired so much discourse in others. Until spring, when she took Bob’s class. Postcolonial literature. I took it too. Bob assigned Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, said it was postcolonial because it was about being Irish under English rule. But when we were discussing it, Elizabeth suggested its status as a postcolonial text was undercut by Joyce’s own condescending attitude toward the Irish. Then Tim McCallan said Elizabeth shouldn’t say things like that about Joyce because Joyce was one of the greatest writers in the English language, and Elizabeth said she wasn’t saying Joyce wasn’t great, she was just saying he wasn’t postcolonial. They went back and forth like that for a while, and Bob, at the front of the room, was rubbing his hands together with glee, and then he finally broke in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what graduate study in literature is all about.” And he grinned at us, a really nasty, toothy grin, although that’s probably not how he meant it to come out, and said, “But since we won’t resolve this one any time soon, let’s move on now to discuss …”
And then Rosie broke in. “Wait,” she said. “I think Elizabeth’s right. So I’d like to know why we are reading Joyce in a postcolonial lit class.”
Bob stared at her. And his grin got wider. “She speaks!” he said. Then he kind of leaned in toward her. (She was, as almost always, sitting on the front row.) “If it finally prompted you to speak your mind, I’d say that’s reason enough for putting Joyce on the syllabus,” he said.
He never did really answer her question.
What happened on Thursday night, according to Rosie, was this: after ultimate Frisbee, she and Colleen went to Marty’s Bistro, where they ran into Bob, who invited them back to his place for drinks. They’d both been to his place before, Rosie especially. He’d kind of taken her under his wing after that day in the postcolonial class. He’d said that she, as a Southerner, occupying a marginalized and disempowered relationship to the dominant American culture, could understand the postcolonial subject position better than most academics could and was thus the perfect sounding board for his thoughts about his new book on postcolonial Irish fiction. He spent hours talking to her about his book, paid thoughtful attention to her opinions. And she knew, she had to have known, that it wasn’t just her brain he was attracted to. But she didn’t want to know. So she decided not to know. I think I can understand that. She took her looks for granted. What she wanted was to know she was thought of as smart.
It was the knowing/not knowing, though, that did her in. On Thursday night, when Colleen left after an hour, Bob poured her another glass of wine and then just asked her, flat out, if she wanted to stay the night. She was shocked, she said, because in all their time together, it had never come to anything like that before, and where it was suddenly coming from now, she didn’t know. You’re just so beautiful, he said. So beautiful and so bright, I just, my God, Rosie, I just can’t help it, he said. She looked down at her feet and said softly that it just seemed like it might be a bad idea. But she didn’t leave. She didn’t want to offend him. So she stayed, and they talked some more, about Joyce and then about Flannery O’Connor, and after a while, when another hour had passed, Bob seemed to take her continued presence on his couch as tacit approval for his suggestion, so the next time he brought her another glass of wine, he leaned in and kissed her. The suddenness of the kiss caught Rosie off guard, and she flinched, and in flinching, jostled his arm and spilled the wine all over the sofa. After which, seeing the whole situation from his point of view—she had stayed on after his proposition; she had just caused a big red stain on his beige linen couch—she understood that this was just what it had all now come to.
She cried the whole time she told me about it, at 1:00 on Friday morning, when she got home and found me in the kitchen, eating ice cream and reading Mrs. Dalloway. I asked her if she wanted some ice cream, and she said no, if she ate anything, she’d throw up. “He wants me to have dinner with him next weekend,” she said, and then she laughed, and it wasn’t really a good laugh. “But, look, Anna,” she said when she finally stopped laughing, “Don’t tell anyone any of it, okay? A bunch of nasty gossip is all I need right now, you know?”
She huddled deeper into her chair and tried to smile at me, but her eyes couldn’t do it. Her hair was a mess, wild red clumps of it all matted together, and on the arm of her white cotton sweater was a wine stain that would never come out. Looking at her, I remembered a girl I knew in college who got raped and then gained a hundred pounds, and it occurred to me that Rosie might now end up even bigger than I am. I could share my stretchiest clothes with her, and everyone else would see us as just alike: two fat smart Southern girls sharing a house.
But then Rosie went to bed, and in the morning, she was herself again, walking her swingy walk, smiling and laughing and talking a lot in class. It was Bob who gave that to her, that ability to talk in class. She decided to believe him when he said what he was attracted to was her mind. And so she found her voice. Maybe to her things like Thursday night are just the price she has to pay to keep it.
“Anna,” she says, into the almost-darkness of our walk home, “You know how in Mrs. Dalloway Woolf makes even the smallest details of everyday life seem so beautiful and important?”
“Uh huh,” I say. It’s what I admire most about Virginia Woolf, the way she makes the ordinary so transcendent, imbues it with meaning that most of us would never have noticed without her. It gives me hope. I like to imagine that if Woolf had known me, she could have made me seem beautiful too.
“Well,” Rosie says, “I just wonder if …” Then she stops. Stops talking, stops walking. And drops, hard and fast, to the ground. She folds herself up tight, hunkering into the ground, face tucked into her knees, red hair falling forward into the dirt at the sidewalk’s edge. She’s crying. But crying so silently all I can hear is the faint creaking sound her leather boots make as she rocks back and forth.
And it’s strange: all those times I thought about how I could like Rosie if only something happened to bring her down to size, and here she is on the ground, and I still hate her. I hate her for being so stupid, when she should have seen that she was beautiful enough, strong enough always to demand just what she wanted from any man. If she’s been brought to this, what hope is there for the rest of us?
But I squat down next to her all the same, take her hand in mine, sweep most of her hair out of the dirt. And we sit here together, two smart Southern girls hunkering down into the hard Midwestern ground.
Her arms swing wide as she walks; her hair shines so bright. Sometimes I hate her so much the only way I can stand to be in the same room with her is to imagine how she would feel if she got hit by a bus and was left with a big dent in the side of her head, or if she got startled while putting her mascara on one day and accidentally poked one of her eyes out. I’ve thought up so many horrible things that could happen to Rosie that sometimes I’m surprised, when I see her, to see that she’s still intact. And sometimes I even kind of feel sorry for her, that she’s the object of so much ill will, even if the ill will does come from someone like me.
“Oh, Rosie, that’s self-evident,” Seth says. “Of course you know what you know.”
“Uh huh.” Rosie nods. “But think about it: since you only know what you know, the thing you can’t really know is what you don’t know. So how do you ever know if you know enough to know what you need to know? You see what I mean?”
This is pretentious existential look-at-me-I’m-in-grad-school pomposity disguised as off-the-cuff banter, which only makes it more pretentious. It gets on my nerves.
But all the same, I have to admit that I sort of agree with her on this one, about how you’re never going to know all there is to know, and how what I know is all I have to go on. And here’s one new thing I know: last Thursday, after ultimate Frisbee, Rosie had a bad experience. It was with Professor LaFye. Or Bob, as he’s told us to call him. So this is another thing I now know: that’s what being Rosie can get you. Shiny hair, red-gold in the yellow autumn light, long legs taking big strides that make your arms swing wide, soft pouty lips and jutting cheekbones—what it all adds up to, if you don’t watch out, is not always as great as someone like me might be inclined to imagine.
“The thing is,” Rosie says, “that, see, Sartre says …”
“Oh, shut up, Rosie,” Seth says. “Just shut up already, please, and let’s go get a beer.” He grabs her by the arm, arresting it mid-swing.
But Rosie shakes her head and shakes him off. “I can’t,” she says. “I have 27 midterms to grade by 10:00 tomorrow. Come on, Anna, let’s get home.”
It is taken for granted by all that I am not going to go get a beer with Seth. Having beers with boys after class is not what I do. Also, although no one would ever say it, we all know Seth doesn’t really want to have a beer with me. Also, it’s possible that after Thursday Rosie is a little bit nervous about walking home alone.
Rosie and I are roommates by accident, the accident being that she is friends with Colleen, who’s friends with Elizabeth, who’s friends with me. When Colleen and Elizabeth found the big old redbrick house on Porter St. for rent for only $1400 a month, they decided it was too perfect to pass up and that they’d each ask a friend to go in on it with them. Colleen asked Rosie. Elizabeth asked me. Elizabeth told me later that if she’d been thinking straight, she’d have told Colleen she could ask any of her friends but Rosie. Then, after we’d been in the house a couple of months, she said Rosie wasn’t as bad as she thought, said didn’t I kind of like Rosie more than I’d expected to? I said, sure, I guess. It was sort of true. I had learned to like her in some ways. She was better at doing her share of the dishes than Elizabeth was, and she spent more time alone in her room than I would have expected. But in all the ways that I still didn’t like her, the depth of my dislike was just the same as always.
Rosie and I peel away from Seth and cut through the humanities faculty parking lot to Miller Avenue. From here the walk home takes about 10 minutes. We’ve been taking that walk together, Rosie and me, twice a week now all semester. We’re both in Professor Zylenska’s 20th Century British Novel class, which doesn’t let out until 5:15. Back in August we walked home in broad warm daylight. But now the air is sharp with cold, thick with twilight.
“Are you really going to grade 27 midterms tonight?” I ask.
“Lord, no.” Rosie laughs. “Can you imagine? But you have to exaggerate things with Seth, or he won’t see reason.”
Rosie is from North Carolina, and in the near-darkness her soft accent wraps itself around me in a way that should make me like her more than I do. I am from Georgia; she and I are the only Southerners in our year in our graduate program at our vast Midwestern university, and in a few weeks when it starts snowing and I am reminded more forcefully than usual that this is not a place I know or feel with any kind of certainty that I understand, I’ll cling to the sound of her voice as the sound of what I do know, the cadence of where I’m from. Even last year when I barely knew her, when she was just the stuck-up, pretty girl in my American Romanticism class, I loved Rosie’s voice, always wished she’d talk more than she did.
She was quieter last year, Rosie. Like she knew we all thought pretty didn’t go with smart. Or maybe like she wasn’t sure they went together herself. Out at night, in bars or at parties, it was different; she would laugh and smile and swing her hair and toss back beers; she was so bright and so strong and so sure in her knowledge of who she was: the one girl every drunken grad-student boy tried hardest to impress with his encyclopedic knowledge of Frankfurt School Marxist philosophy or his masterful post-Romanticist deconstruction of Paradise Lost, the one they would all think of first when they went home later that night and crawled in bed, drunk, alone, and disappointed. In a bar, Rosie was like the sun or a black hole; she exerted an irresistible gravitational pull, and girls like Elizabeth, pretty enough that they weren’t used to being cast so far back into the shadows, would, as the evening wore on, become sour and then anxious, and in their anxiety would, loudly but to no avail, trot out their own brilliant analyses of Freudian film theory, their own nimble neofeminist deconstructions of Wordsworth, Hemingway, and Updike.
So you can see why Rosie never talked much in class. She understood her place in the order of things, which was not to generate discourse but rather to be the muse who inspired so much discourse in others. Until spring, when she took Bob’s class. Postcolonial literature. I took it too. Bob assigned Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, said it was postcolonial because it was about being Irish under English rule. But when we were discussing it, Elizabeth suggested its status as a postcolonial text was undercut by Joyce’s own condescending attitude toward the Irish. Then Tim McCallan said Elizabeth shouldn’t say things like that about Joyce because Joyce was one of the greatest writers in the English language, and Elizabeth said she wasn’t saying Joyce wasn’t great, she was just saying he wasn’t postcolonial. They went back and forth like that for a while, and Bob, at the front of the room, was rubbing his hands together with glee, and then he finally broke in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what graduate study in literature is all about.” And he grinned at us, a really nasty, toothy grin, although that’s probably not how he meant it to come out, and said, “But since we won’t resolve this one any time soon, let’s move on now to discuss …”
And then Rosie broke in. “Wait,” she said. “I think Elizabeth’s right. So I’d like to know why we are reading Joyce in a postcolonial lit class.”
Bob stared at her. And his grin got wider. “She speaks!” he said. Then he kind of leaned in toward her. (She was, as almost always, sitting on the front row.) “If it finally prompted you to speak your mind, I’d say that’s reason enough for putting Joyce on the syllabus,” he said.
He never did really answer her question.
What happened on Thursday night, according to Rosie, was this: after ultimate Frisbee, she and Colleen went to Marty’s Bistro, where they ran into Bob, who invited them back to his place for drinks. They’d both been to his place before, Rosie especially. He’d kind of taken her under his wing after that day in the postcolonial class. He’d said that she, as a Southerner, occupying a marginalized and disempowered relationship to the dominant American culture, could understand the postcolonial subject position better than most academics could and was thus the perfect sounding board for his thoughts about his new book on postcolonial Irish fiction. He spent hours talking to her about his book, paid thoughtful attention to her opinions. And she knew, she had to have known, that it wasn’t just her brain he was attracted to. But she didn’t want to know. So she decided not to know. I think I can understand that. She took her looks for granted. What she wanted was to know she was thought of as smart.
It was the knowing/not knowing, though, that did her in. On Thursday night, when Colleen left after an hour, Bob poured her another glass of wine and then just asked her, flat out, if she wanted to stay the night. She was shocked, she said, because in all their time together, it had never come to anything like that before, and where it was suddenly coming from now, she didn’t know. You’re just so beautiful, he said. So beautiful and so bright, I just, my God, Rosie, I just can’t help it, he said. She looked down at her feet and said softly that it just seemed like it might be a bad idea. But she didn’t leave. She didn’t want to offend him. So she stayed, and they talked some more, about Joyce and then about Flannery O’Connor, and after a while, when another hour had passed, Bob seemed to take her continued presence on his couch as tacit approval for his suggestion, so the next time he brought her another glass of wine, he leaned in and kissed her. The suddenness of the kiss caught Rosie off guard, and she flinched, and in flinching, jostled his arm and spilled the wine all over the sofa. After which, seeing the whole situation from his point of view—she had stayed on after his proposition; she had just caused a big red stain on his beige linen couch—she understood that this was just what it had all now come to.
She cried the whole time she told me about it, at 1:00 on Friday morning, when she got home and found me in the kitchen, eating ice cream and reading Mrs. Dalloway. I asked her if she wanted some ice cream, and she said no, if she ate anything, she’d throw up. “He wants me to have dinner with him next weekend,” she said, and then she laughed, and it wasn’t really a good laugh. “But, look, Anna,” she said when she finally stopped laughing, “Don’t tell anyone any of it, okay? A bunch of nasty gossip is all I need right now, you know?”
She huddled deeper into her chair and tried to smile at me, but her eyes couldn’t do it. Her hair was a mess, wild red clumps of it all matted together, and on the arm of her white cotton sweater was a wine stain that would never come out. Looking at her, I remembered a girl I knew in college who got raped and then gained a hundred pounds, and it occurred to me that Rosie might now end up even bigger than I am. I could share my stretchiest clothes with her, and everyone else would see us as just alike: two fat smart Southern girls sharing a house.
But then Rosie went to bed, and in the morning, she was herself again, walking her swingy walk, smiling and laughing and talking a lot in class. It was Bob who gave that to her, that ability to talk in class. She decided to believe him when he said what he was attracted to was her mind. And so she found her voice. Maybe to her things like Thursday night are just the price she has to pay to keep it.
“Anna,” she says, into the almost-darkness of our walk home, “You know how in Mrs. Dalloway Woolf makes even the smallest details of everyday life seem so beautiful and important?”
“Uh huh,” I say. It’s what I admire most about Virginia Woolf, the way she makes the ordinary so transcendent, imbues it with meaning that most of us would never have noticed without her. It gives me hope. I like to imagine that if Woolf had known me, she could have made me seem beautiful too.
“Well,” Rosie says, “I just wonder if …” Then she stops. Stops talking, stops walking. And drops, hard and fast, to the ground. She folds herself up tight, hunkering into the ground, face tucked into her knees, red hair falling forward into the dirt at the sidewalk’s edge. She’s crying. But crying so silently all I can hear is the faint creaking sound her leather boots make as she rocks back and forth.
And it’s strange: all those times I thought about how I could like Rosie if only something happened to bring her down to size, and here she is on the ground, and I still hate her. I hate her for being so stupid, when she should have seen that she was beautiful enough, strong enough always to demand just what she wanted from any man. If she’s been brought to this, what hope is there for the rest of us?
But I squat down next to her all the same, take her hand in mine, sweep most of her hair out of the dirt. And we sit here together, two smart Southern girls hunkering down into the hard Midwestern ground.
Leslie Haynsworth is fiction editor of Yemassee. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual, The Battered Suitcase, The Common Review, Marie Claire, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Virginia and is a web editor for the University of South Carolina.
