Every Day Read Online Free

stuff. You must be tired. Time to get down to brass tacks.”
    He handed out a reading list no elderly person with time on his or her hands could have tackled in five years: The Book of Job, Tristram Shandy, The Divine Comedy, Middlemarch, Ulysses, Moby Dick, War and Peace. I looked up with glazed, tired eyes that begged to be impressed.
    He was smiling at all of us, waiting for us to look up in horror. I steeled myself. No way. I’d drop the course in the afternoon. I’d laugh my way back to the dorm. As Pam had said so often, “Fuck him.” Mr. Nowhere doing his Nowhere thing in the middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts. Getting over his brilliance. Fuck him.
    He took the roll, making checks as each student responded grimly to the reality of being present. Again he looked up, victorious.
    “You’re here. Get ready. This is going to break all of your backs. But it’ll be good. You’ll all be as tired as Lisa over here.”
    “Leigh,” I corrected.
    “You should be as tired as Adelman over here. Don’t worry. She can handle it. So can you.”
    I swallowed. My last name still rang out like the shofar in this bleak wilderness of pristine WASPdom. I watched him sift through a pile of Xeroxes, decide which to hand out first, start them around, give no instructions, assume everything of us, assume I hadn’t taken offense. And, oddly enough, I hadn’t.
    •   •   •
    “It was great,” I told Pam, who seemed eager to know. “You know, the kind of class everyone who has no life should take.”
    We were in the snack bar, smoking, waiting for our group to assemble: Bill, Murph, and Todd, I could have died of boredom, were buying food. It was amazing what they could put away, not so amazing to me now that I see how much Isaac needs to sustain him for a mere morning. “Totally repulsive,” Pam had said the night before. She’d never met people who actually ate.
    “You call this a life?” she said, indicating the panorama of students in booths stuffing their faces with grease and sugar.
    “I know,” I said, my voice sliding like Pam’s. “I’d much rather be in the dorm reading Job.”
    “Look,” Pam warned, “at least he’s fun to look at. All I do in English is stare at Greenaway’s nose and try to figure out how many times it’s been broken.”
    Todd and Murph slid their burgers onto the table. “Scoot over,” Murph told me. He hip-checked me. He was tall and beefy, like most of the boys at Hastings. He made a show of wanting me, but he always had to get to bed early because of a game the next day, thank God. He was from a town outside of Hartford. Todd, from Greenwich, was in the daily habit of pressing Pam to accompany him to the woods for drugs.
    “Hopeless,” she called him.
    Our intolerance for these boys had magnified since I’d begun Fowler’s class and our discussions about him had become regular. I thought Pam might have been miffed that she didn’t have a daily crack at getting his attention.
    “Hey, nymphet, where are your wings?” Todd said to Pam between bites of burger.
    Pam sucked hard on a Parliament. She spoke before exhaling. “Come again?”
    Todd chuckled to himself, and Murph waited respectfully for the other shoe to fall. Bill, our wrestler, was unwrapping a Hostess fruit pie.
    “I thought all angels had wings.” Todd smiled, his eyes red, dopey slits
    “I can’t deal,” Pam said. She looked at her watch, which was intricate enough. “Time for my enema. Bye, fuzzy-wuzzies.”
    She got up. She waited for me to get up. I stubbed out my cigarette on the top of a Coke can.
    “This is so where I don’t want to be,” Pam said as wewalked across the golf course, knee-deep in mist, the lake, still and silver, to our right. To our left, the library lights were being shut off, window by window. Ahead, downhill, was our dorm. My sandals were wet from the grass, and I was sliding a bit as I walked.
    “Have an affair with the guy, would you?” Pam said.
    “You have an