The Wrong Kind of Woman by Sarah McCraw Crow

Author:Sarah McCraw Crow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2020-07-14T18:14:48+00:00

* * *

Outside, the afternoon had grown mild, too warm for March. The grass on the museum’s little curve of lawn was already greening up. She paused on the top step to take in the springlike day and the people below who were using the museum steps as lounge chairs, enjoying the sun and the mild weather. Halfway down, a young man sat writing in a notebook and eating potato chips from the bag. Dark hair, duffel coat, backpack; she felt a surge inside, felt herself smiling. Sam hadn’t gone to New York. She’d have someone to ride back to New Hampshire with. Maybe he could have dinner with her and Rebecca, or they could go out to Mo’s. She could ask him if he—

But it wasn’t Sam. It was just another dark-haired college student, awkward long legs thrown out in front of him. Her chest and neck prickled with heat—she’d wanted his company too much. She’d been too happy to see him.

She wondered what Oliver would think. She was only trying to help—Oliver would have done the same thing, wouldn’t he? He had done the same thing. He’d taken plenty of students out for a coffee or a beer over the years, had called her to say he and a couple others had to stay late, an emergency meeting about this student or that student. Still, her cheeks burned with the realization that she’d been thinking about a college boy.

She took two wrong turns getting back to Storrow Drive, where the Friday-afternoon traffic crept along. To her left, across the filthy but glinting Charles River, the outer buildings of Harvard asserted their quiet brick majesty: Cambridge, where she’d been a whole other person. She imagined an alternate self, still dressed in her grad-school black turtleneck, black skirt, black tights, even now striding from point to point in Cambridge, unencumbered by a failed dissertation, by pregnancy, birth, miscarriages, an unhappy untenured husband, a dead husband.

On the radio, a single muted trumpet coaxed Dionne Warwick to sing about love. “What the world needs now,” Dionne sang, her voice lifting with the melody. Oliver had made fun of Burt Bacharach; he thought Bacharach’s tunes were treacly, but Virginia loved this song.

When she’d first met Oliver—Houghton Library, they’d first encountered one another there—and they’d gone on a few dates, she’d made a list of the things that weren’t right about Oliver, to talk herself out of him.

—He didn’t like dogs. Okay, he sort of liked dogs, but he didn’t love them.

—Or cats.

—He lectured—he got going on something, started discoursing on the Wars of the Roses, the Spanish Civil War—and he couldn’t stop himself.

—He had way too many opinions about music. Like her, he was the youngest in his family, and he had three older brothers who’d taught him about early jazz and the big-band greats. Chick Webb, Stompin’ at the Savoy. Louis Prima. Benny Goodman. Ella Fitzgerald singing with Dizzy Gillsepie. She liked all that stuff too, she just didn’t want to talk about it, or listen to Oliver go on and on about it.

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