Page 39 - WTP VOl. X #4

of a pair of ski gloves. Mom was an avid skier and fac- ulty adviser to the Spring Hill ski club. “She dragged me to the slopes to get to know me,” Dad said, “not long after I joined the faculty.”
But he was too clumsy in her presence, his feeble snowplow no match for the tight parallel arcs she could carve so effortlessly right down the fall line of the most difficult slopes at Ski Shenandoah or Liber- ty Mountain. Still, he came to know the value of good equipment, from snug boots to warm gloves—like the gloves that sat in the box on the end table just inside the door to Dean Hardwick’s office. The card- board box, hand-lettered LOST ’N’ FOUND in magic marker by Auntie Flavia, was filled with mittens, scarves, knit caps, sweater vests, and other items of clothing left in winter classrooms by students too eager to get out the door. He’d noticed the ski gloves in question when he descended into the bowels of Hawthorne Hall to change an incomplete grade for one of his fall-quarter students during his first term at Spring Hill—easily a two-hundred-dollar pair of ski gloves. Men’s gloves, at a girls’ school, no less.
(He referred to the students as girls, although Mom insisted that he call them young women.) No doubt the property of a visiting boyfriend.
The secretary from whom he’d sought the change-of- grade form at the time— Miss Flavia Finyucane, according to the nameplate on her desk—was out of the office, and so he’d picked up the ski gloves and studied them carefully, playfully trying them on. But they swallowed his small hands—those large, black, fleece-lined, leather ski gloves, with reinforced leath- er strips across the palms to buffer the pole straps. With double stitching on the thick thumbs and fingers, and extra-long jersey cuffs extending well
up the wrists to protect from snow during wipeouts (which, in his case, despite Mom’s tutoring, had come all too often). And a small ring with a snap at the heel of each hand, for attaching the gloves to a belt loop
of your ski jacket, so you wouldn’t lose them when you retreated to the lodge for a beer or a breather. And attached to the small ring on the left-hand glove in that cardboard box was a silver bar of the sort you might find jangling from a charm bracelet, bearing the initials MSG.
He’d tried to think, way back then, of students with those initials—Michelle Gonder, Mary Gross, Miranda Grothouse (debutantes, all)—but couldn’t muster their middle names, which he never recorded in his grade book anyway, although they routinely ap- peared on the Registrar’s lists. Then he remembered they were a guy’s gloves. Then the secretary walked
in. She’d been “down the hall,” meaning to the ladies’ room. He could recall their conversation clearly:
“How may I help you, Mr. Franklin?” (Dad said she was always cheerful.)
“Monosodium glutamate,” he muttered, dropping the gloves back into the box.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Did you know that the vast majority of vegetarian- prepared foods contain a dangerous nerve toxin ingredient called monosodium glutamate? MSG for short. Angela told me. She’s a vegetarian.”
Miss Flavia Finyucane, an elderly single woman, was a chain-smoker, who—when the nation and campus eventually went smokeless—would be forced to puff away outside, taking a detour whenever she went down the hall. “She reeked,” Dad said.
I remember that odor, too, the stench of a foreign brand I would encounter in Europe on my first trip abroad—as if the tobacco had been soaked in prune juice.
“Would that be Angela from the English Department?” “It would.”
“She doesn’t waste any time, does she?”
“I guess not.”
“You’re new here, aren’t you, Mr. Franklin? I remem- ber when you interviewed.”
“I remember you, too.” (How could he forget those stinky cigarettes?)
He remembered as well—as I do now—her short
(continued on next page)
32