As a result, she had to be very careful to act “normal.” Actually she had made love with a boy once, but she was hardly as experienced with men as she had led Linda to suspect. The single attempt had been an experiment — and a failure. Ruth was homosexual and that was all there was to it.
Afterward, as she thought it all over, the most amazing thing about it all was that Ruth was so well adjusted to what she was. On the surface it seemed as though she had much more against her than Linda did, but Ruth kept up-to-date in her schoolwork, led an active life and made friends easily. She didn’t drink, didn’t get depressed and was generally happy and at ease.
Linda, the “normal” one, was a wreck. It didn’t make much sense, she thought. And at the same time it occurred to her that there might still be a chance for her to make the best of it. Maybe, if she tried, she could make an adjustment the way Ruth had.
It seemed impossible. There were only six weeks left in the school year, hardly time enough to get caught up. She was almost certain to flunk out at the end of the term.
But she could make a try. She could start going to classes, stop going to bed with men. Passing courses and staying out of parked cars seemed equally impossible on the surface, but she knew that it was the only chance she had for a liveable life.
Chapter Ten
She was walking along the path from the Science Building to the Union, thinking how beautiful spring weather could be when the sun was out and the trees were green and the grass was green too and the sky was blue with white puffy clouds blowing around in it, when Jim Patterson took hold of her arm. She stopped suddenly and one of the books almost slipped out from under her arm but she caught hold of it.
“Hi,” he said. He flashed her a smile.
She smiled back.
“Busy, Linda?”
She nodded.
“Got time to go for a walk?”
At least, she thought, he was decent enough to call it a walk instead of calling a spade a spade and a piece a piece.
“No,” she said. “I’m pretty busy, Jim.”
“How about later tonight?”
“I’m afraid not.”
His smile faded. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you.”
“Jim—”
He turned and looked at her.
“Jim, I’ve reformed,” she said, making it sound light. “I’ve turned over a new leaf, sort of. No more... walks. I’m too busy trying to stay afloat in my courses.”
The smile returned to his face. It was a warm smile and she knew that he meant it when he said: “I’m glad to hear that, Linda. Good luck — I hope you make it.”
He turned and walked off. She watched him go for a second or two, remembering the first time with him on his blanket on the golf course, remembering the other times since then that the two of them had been together. Then she started off toward the Union once more for dinner.
You’re doing fine, she told herself as she hurried through a fairly tasteless dinner. God alone knows if you stand a chance of making it, but you’re putting up a good fight. You’re doing your best, for whatever it’s worth.
And she was doing her best; that was the funny part of it. Ever since she and Ruth had made love in their mutual drunken stupor she had thrown herself into the scholarship game with the same zeal she had previously devoted to learning the finer points of the fine art of bedmanship.
Since that night she not cut a class or failed to complete an assignment. It was embarrassing, going to a class where the professor didn’t even recall her name, but she forced herself to adjust to the routine. She went to every class and after the day’s classes were over she hit the books with a vengeance. She had to do more than keep up with the new material — she also had to work her way through all the stuff that she had missed so far in the course of the year. The first semester’s courses were a lost cause, already failed, but she felt that she still had some semblance of a chance with the courses for the second semester.
But it was such a slim chance. She had to work every afternoon and evening until well after midnight, and all of Saturday and Sunday were also devoted to the arduous process of catching up.
Strangely enough, studying was turning out to be fun in its own weird way. For one thing, she didn’t have to go the route alone. Ruth was always around — she was gunning for a straight-A average and putting in plenty of time at her books. With the two of them in the room, both studying to beat the band, it wasn’t quite so lonesome a task as it might well have been otherwise.
More important, studying was beginning to provide the same sort of escape that drink and sex had given her before. When she buried herself in a book she could forget Don, forget the way she had acted and reacted, forget everything but the material she was trying to commit to memory. And in one respect it was a good deal better than drink or sex as an escape. She didn’t feel guilty after spending an evening with a book, the way she had when her evening’s companion had been a bottle or a boy.
After three weeks of studying like that she was fairly certain that she would be able to pass her exams if there were six weeks remaining in the term instead of three. As it stood it was a toss-up. But she had a chance, slim though it might be, and she wasn’t ready to give up.
It was hard to get back into the rhythm of studying, especially in that she had never learned the rhythm properly to begin with. She did everything as systematically as she possibly could, inventing little helps for herself, making list after list and schedule after schedule, working her way down each list and sticking to each schedule as well as she could without killing herself.
Every morning the alarm rang at a quarter after seven; every morning she was out of bed the minute it rang. She would wash and brush her teeth and dress as if she were on her way to a fire. Then she would be off to the caf for a fast breakfast and two or three cups of coffee to get her mind in working shape.
When she had an hour or more between classes she spent it at the library. She managed to be doing something academic almost every minute of the day, and once she started one particular assignment she didn’t stop until she had finished it. This was tough when the assignment in question was too far over her head, but after the first week and a half she was generally able to understand what was happening in each of her classes and to get by.
As she finished the second cup of after-dinner coffee she thought about that meeting with Jim Patterson on the way to the caf. It hadn’t been the first time somebody had asked her, politely or more directly, to spread her legs and oblige him. But she had stuck to her guns so far and the propositions were steadily fewer and farther between. While she would probably never completely live down the reputation she had built up with such zest, at least not while she remained at Clifton, it wasn’t as much of a handicap as she had thought it was. She would make it — if she kept working hard enough.
After dinner, after the tray was on the conveyor belt and the food being attacked by the various enzymes that attacked food, she headed back to her room. There was plenty of work on the agenda for that night — a book to be read, a paper to be written, a Spanish quiz to be prepared for. She climbed the stairs and hurried to her room, anxious to get going, anxious to bury herself in her work and get as much done as possible.
Ruth was there, seated at her desk with a book open before her.
“There was a letter for you,” she said. “In your intramural mailbox. I picked it up for you.”