Too Much Happiness

Don’t make me sick. That’s all dead and gone. It doesn’t matter to me and Ernest. We’re together now. We’re in love now.”
    In love. With Ernie. Ernest. Now.
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Sorry I yelled at you. Did I yell? I’m sorry. You’re our friend and you brought me my things and I appreciate it. You’re Ernest’s cousin and you’re our family.”
    She slipped behind me and her fingers darted into my armpits and she began to tickle me, at first lazily and then furiously, saying, “Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
    I tried to get free, but I couldn’t. I went into spasms of suffering laughter and wriggled and cried out and begged her to stop. Which she did, when she had me quite helpless, and both of us were out of breath.
    “You’re the ticklishest person I ever met.”
    I had to wait a long time for the bus, stamping my feet on the pavement. When I got to the college I had missed my second as well as my first class, and I was late for my work in the cafeteria. I changed into my green cotton uniform in the broom closet and pushed my mop of black hair (the worst hair in the world for showing up in food, as the manager had warned me) under a cotton snood.
    I was supposed to get the sandwiches and salads out on the shelves before the doors opened for lunch, but now I had to do it with an impatient lineup watching me, and that made me feel clumsy. I was so much more noticeable now than when I pushed the cart among the tables to collect the dirty dishes. People were concentrating then on their food and conversation. Now they were just looking at me.
    I thought of what Beverly and Kay had said about spoiling my chances, marking myself off in the wrong way. It seemed now it could be right.
    After I finished cleaning up the cafeteria tables, I changed back into my ordinary clothes and went to the college library to work on my essay. It was my afternoon free of classes.
    An underground tunnel led from the Arts Building to the library, and around the entrance to this tunnel were posted advertisements for movies and restaurants and used bicycles and typewriters, as well as notices for plays and concerts. The Music Department announced that a free recital of songs composed to fit the poems of English Country Poets would be presented on a date that had now passed. I had seen this notice before, and did not have to look at it to be reminded of the names Herrick, Housman, Tennyson. And a few steps into the tunnel the lines began to assault me.
    On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble
    I would never think of those lines again without feeling the prickles of the upholstery on my bare haunches. The sticky prickly shame. A far greater shame it seemed now, than at the time. He had done something to me, after all.
    From far, from eve and morning
    And yon twelve-winded sky
,
    The stuff of life to knit me
    Blew hither-here am I
.
    No.
    What are those blue remembered hills
,
    What spires, what farms are those?
    No, never.
    White in the moon the long road lies
    That leads me from my love
.
    No. No. No.
    I would always be reminded of what I had agreed to do. Not been forced, not ordered, not even persuaded. Agreed to do.
    Nina would know. She had been too preoccupied with Ernie to say anything that morning, but there would come a time when she would laugh about it. Not cruelly, but just the way she laughed at so many things. And she might even tease me about it. Her teasing would have in it something like her tickling, something insistent, obscene.
    Nina and Ernie. In my life from now on.
    The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books-even those who were hung-over, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending-should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
.
    I was writing a good essay. I would probably get an A. I would go on writing essays and getting A’s because that was what I could do. The people who awarded scholarships, who built universities and libraries, would continue to dribble out money so that I could do it.
    But that was not what mattered. That was not going to keep you from damage.
    Nina did not stay with