Читать книгу Pages For Her - Sylvia Brownrigg - Страница 32

Human history could not be written with some different lexicon. You could not search and replace one name for another, once powerful words had been coined. That currency lasted. The verb that described one person’s online interest in another person, whether motivated by nostalgia or fascination, lust or regret, sounded like the sound produced by Flannery’s own toddler. Google. To search on the Internet for information about a person, thing, or place. I google, you google, they google.

Flannery googled.

What had Anne Arden been up to?

Flannery did not use to google. She had, at least, taken a substantial break from it. This was before Willa was in preschool, during the moms’ group era. In early motherhood each phase seems of epoch-defining length: before they hold their head up, when you can still go out to restaurants because they are angelic and sleep all the time; when they start crawling, and you are imprisoned in your home trying desperately to ‘proof’ the place, as if your child were a criminal or a rodent, requiring lines of defense; and after they start walking and getting into real trouble, a good time to join the moms’ group so you have other people who understand the true proportions of these problems, which to the rest of the world seem trivial. Flannery could not understand how any parent had time to watch television, have a coherent thought, or go online. There were simply no available hours in her day. If ever there were, Flannery used them to talk to actual living people – her friends, her mother, Charles.

Now, though, that Willa was at the Blueberry Preschool (that had been Willa at week seven, according to the fruit growth chart), Flannery began to resume relations with her computer. She browsed material she could put together for a part-time job application. And she got back to googling.

Anne had won a teaching prize at Emory. There was a citation on the department website, and trampling through the online jungle further, Flannery came upon a picture of her, small and smiling, with the university’s dean. A modest, self-contained expression that compressed a little her musical, lovely mouth. The familiar high-edged cheekbones and Celtic elegance, even in miniature.

Going further back, Anne’s book, The Awakening of Influence, had been extensively reviewed when it was published in the mid-1990s. ‘Brilliant.’ ‘Challenging, thought-provoking, and meticulously argued.’ ‘Not only paradigm-shifting but perspective-altering; a crucial step forward in our understanding of modern American literature.’ ‘To call Professor Arden’s profound book a landmark in feminist scholarship is to risk limiting its audience, or overlooking the true achievement of her generous work, which is to expand our humanist understanding of American letters.’

Flannery felt a flush of pride. Her Anne! Though, of course, Anne had not been ‘hers’ in fifteen years or so, if she had ever been ‘hers’ at all. (They had laughed about Flannery containing Anne, but it was a spelling joke – it only worked on the page.) You did not own people. Marriage was one thing, and might not yet have escaped its association with leashes or shackles, but love was not possession. People were not each other’s property. That included children and their parents.

Nonetheless: her Anne! Had shifted paradigms, altered perspectives, expanded humanist understanding. Flannery was not surprised.

Then, deflatingly, a blog post. Flannery might have missed this item, and wished she had. But on looking up at the clock in her improvised office (a narrow room upstairs, formerly used for storage), Flannery calculated that she had ten more minutes before she had to leave to pick up Willa; just enough time to find it. Blogs and posts and tweets, people’s endless chatter-blurts about their meals, dogs, travels, interested her not at all. But googling was, as its name also suggested, not entirely unlike ogling; you looked, and then you could not look away. Some purple-haired graduate student in New York wrote an irreverent foodie blog she called Finger Lickin’ Good.

Went to dinner at the elegant Bleecker Street apartment of the Kate Hepburn/Spencer Tracy couple of academia, Anne Arden and Jasper Elliott. Or are they more Ullmann/Bergman? Taylor/Burton? No, I think I was right the first time. Arden, star author of The Awakening of Influence, is a beauty on the order of Hepburn, while Elliott, a whiz in French history, if not broken-nosed and pugnacious like Tracy, certainly adores Arden the way Spencer did Kate. The intellectual sparks flew between the pair even as they served an outstanding meal of lemon sole and dauphinoise potatoes, to a group that included—

That was enough. Flannery shut the laptop swiftly, before she could read the list of luminaries.

Jasper Elliott, again. Flannery had first met him in New Mexico – an ignominious occasion for Flannery, when Jasper got Anne back. He and Anne had been together for years by now. The golden couple.

The blog put an end to Flannery’s googling, at least on that subject. She kept future searches to facts she had forgotten (who starred in that cruise ship movie? What was the name of that Carson McCullers novel?), safety research on plastics or supermarket products, and reviews of schools to which she and Charles might, one liberating day, send Willa.