Women in Deep Time Read Free Page A

think back to what I might have felt, if I were your age again, in your position. I might be mad, too. Roald hasn’t had time to feel different yet; he’s too young. I just came up here to tell you; I know that what I did was right, not for us, not for them”—she indicated the broad world beyond the walls of the house—“but right for you. It will work out. It really will.” she put her hands on Letitia’s shoulders. “They aren’t having an easy time either. You know that.” she stopped for a moment, then from behind her back revealed a book with a soft brown cover. “I brought this to show you again. You remember Great-Grandma? Her grandmother came all the way from Ireland, along with her grandpa.” Jane gave her the album. Reluctantly, Letitia opened it up. There were real photographs inside, on paper, ancient black and white and faded color. Her great-grandmother did not much resemble Grandmother, who had been big-boned, heavy-set. Great-grandmother looked as if she had been skinny all her life. “You keep this,” Jane said. “Think about it for a while.”
    The morning came with planned rain. Letitia took the half-empty metro to school, looking at the terraced and gardened and occasionally neglected landscape of the extended suburbs through raindrop-smeared glass. She came onto the school grounds and went to one of the older buildings in the school, where there was a little-used old-fashioned lavatory. This sometimes served as her sanctuary. She stood in a white stall and breathed deeply for a few minutes, then went to a sink and washed her hands as if conducting some ritual. Slowly, reluctantly, she looked at herself in the cracked mirror. A janitorial worker went about its duties, leaving behind the fresh, steamy smell of cleanfixtures.
    The early part of the day was a numb time. Letitia began to fear her own distance from feeling, from the people around her. She might at any minute step into the old lavatory and simply fade from the present, find herself sixty years back…
    And what would she really think of that?
    In her third period class she received a note requesting that she appear in Rutger’s counseling office as soon as was convenient. That was shorthand for immediately; she gathered up her mods and caught Reena’s unreadable glance as she walked past.
    Rutger was a handsome man of forty-three (the years were registered on his desk life clock, an affectation of some of the older PPCs) with a broad smile and a garish taste in clothes. He was head of the counseling department and generally well-liked in the school. He shook her hand as she entered the counseling office and offered her a chair. “Now. You wanted to talk to me?”
    “I guess,” Letitia said.
    “Problems?” His voice was a pleasant baritone; he was probably a fairly good singer. That had been a popular trait in the early days of PPCs.
    “The ACs say it’s my attitude.”
    “And what about it?”
    “I…am ugly. I am the ugliest girl…the only girl in this school who is ugly.”
    Rutger nodded. “I don’t think you’re ugly, but which is worse, being unique or being ugly?” Letitia lifted the corner of one lip in snide acknowledgment of the funny.
    “Everybody’s unique now,” she said.
    “That’s what we teach. Do you believe it?”
    “No,” she said. “Everybody’s the same. I’m…” She shook ner head. She resented Rutger prying up the pavement over her emotions. “I’m TB. I wouldn’t mind being a PPC, but I’m not.”
    “I think it’s a minor problem,” Rutger said quickly. He hadn’t even sat down; obviously he was not going to give her much time.
    “It doesn’t feel minor,” she said, anger poking through the cracks he had made.
    “Oh, no. Being young often means that minor problems feel major. You feel envy and don’t like yourself, at least not the way you look. Well, looks can be helped by diet, or at the very least by time. If I’m any judge, you’ll look fine when you’re