Following is the eighth chapter of Lars Gustafsson's novel The Dean, translated by Michael Meigs.
8. Message from a Trash Truck
But that’s really not the beginning. How shall I start? I have to find a beginning point. Now, when I can’t identify an ending, at least I need a beginning.
Okay, so here goes: I saw Mary Elizabeth again. She had been an undergraduate in my class the first year that I taught here. After that she had been out of the picture, perhaps in some other state or maybe in some other part of this one.
I’d had absolutely no expectation of meeting her again.
I had to brake the car and wait right next to the bus stop. A late arriving trash truck was busy gathering up its load in front of me and it didn’t seem a good idea to pull out into the next lane to try to pass it in that relentless, close packed and fast moving afternoon traffic. The old Texas tradition of the polite driver: the attitude that only employed menials are in a hurry and that a gentleman shows his good breeding by always having time to wait. A virtuous attitude that is on its way to extinction.
The truth of the matter is that the place is getting Americanized. The Dean used to say that it was all the fault of the barons of information technology.
The Dean, my former boss Professor Paul Chapman, did not care for IT barons.
Next to the bus stop across the way a woman was sitting. Or rather, a girl. She was a bit too young and a bit too well dressed to be a bag lady. The bag lady association was prompted by all the sacks and parcels she had piled around her. But her dress of bright earth-toned wool was obviously expensive, very possibly custom-made. And the cane that she had leaning next to her on the bench at the bus stop had, I think, a grip made of bone or perhaps even of ivory. What use could she have for a cane? She seemed all too young to use a cane.
It’s really remarkable how much you can manage to see from your car while you’re waiting for the traffic to move. You might even manage to think a bit. The only others you see around that bus stop are cleaning ladies, most of them the plump Mexican women who usually work in the big houses of those now well-off and pricey neighborhoods.
When I finally got a green light I drove three streets further, swung into the entrance of the municipal golf course, and drove back. She was still there, at bit to my surprise.
I braked my old Mazda pickup to a halt, rolled down the window and asked, “Can I be of some help to you?”
She looked at me with her sharp but not entirely unfriendly blue-green eyes.
In that instant I realized how horribly nearsighted I must still have been.
“Mary Elizabeth, it’s you! What are you doing here?”
She no longer had the same appearance as before. The passage of three years had done something to her. It was as if she had in some way become more lady-like. But there was more than that to it.
“I’ve moved out.”
“And where are you going now?”
“I don’t know. I was going to take the bus down into town. To leave my stuff with a girlfriend.”
“You can leave it at my place instead. That is, if you want to. . . ?”
In fact I had an appointment in the northern part of town, near Balcones, with a German woman acupuncturist. Something to do with my knee – it was tending to lock up again. It does that from time to time.
I had hesitated – the knee or Mary Elizabeth? – and decided in favor of Mary Elizabeth.
It might have started right there.
For I already knew her from earlier. From my time as a university lecturer.
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