Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates

living authors.” And he laughed with an embarrassment that seemed to be feigned. “Of course you are still alive, Mrs. Everett. I would like to show you my library and get your opinion, and I would hope that, if I'm not being too aggressive, I might have you autograph your books.”
    I could see that they had forgotten about me, so I got to my feet. This brought Dean Nash's eyes reluctantly around to me. “I'm ready to begin the examination now,” I said. It didn't come out with any sound of authority or confidence, but Nada smiled to show me I had done right. Dean Nash rose from the edge of the desk, all six feet three inches of him, lean and knobbly wristed and handsome in a caricatured Englishy way. He drew in his breath slowly and thoughtfully, like an athlete, making an interesting facial expression—pursing his lips and pulling them down, as if to make room for the air to soar up into his nostrils. He contemplated me as if he did not quite remember who I was.
    I took the examination in a classroom in the Humanities Building. Dean Nash and Nada took me over, herding me delicately before them. I heard Nada's vivacious, betraying laughter behind me as Dean Nash pointed out something droll or quaint or joked about me. Who knows what he was doing? Oh, that bastard, that lecherous son-of-a-bitch! My heart pounded with hatred and a strange, wistful admiration for him, and I wondered how I could ever be equal to those two demanding people, giant and giantess, who were striding so healthily behind me. If I failed the exam I would lose them forever.
    “Farrel will glance in every now and then,” the good dean told me as I settled shakily into a desk.
    Farrel was an instructor who wore a suit like the dean's, though smaller. His face was younger and less handsome, and Nada did not bother to glance at him. I don't think she really “saw” short men. Nada had taken off her lovely white gloves, and on one finger her diamond ring glittered enough to break my heart and on another finger an emerald glittered in such a way that stretched every bone in my body to the breaking point. At such moments of panic and disbelief I stared at her and wondered if she was my mother, if
she
was my mother, and how had it come to pass? How was it possible she made me undergo such torture and had nothing to offer me as consolation but the glitter of Father's jewels?
    Farrel shook some papers out of a soiled manila envelope, quite a few papers, and began slapping things down on my desk. My pen and pencil rattled on the shallow groove in the desk, or perhaps my trembling fingers made them rattle. While Farrel talked into my face I tried to hear what they were saying by the door. Something about lunch? Lunch together? What?
    “It is ten o'clock now, Mr. Everett,” Farrel said, checking a big watch on his wrist. “You will begin the first section now, and you will have it finished at eleven. I'll be right down the hall in the lounge, and I'll look in at you occasionally. Are you ready?”
    I looked around and they were gone. An empty doorway, and outside an ordinary empty hall, the barest glimpse of the corner of a bulletin board at the left—and nothing else.
    “I'm ready,” I said in a croaking voice.
    With a professional flourish, like a magician performing a trick, he turned the papers over. My eyes leaped to the heading, but for a few seconds my sight was blotched, I couldn't see.
    “Please read the instructions before you begin,” Farrel said. He walked backward to the door, his hands in his tweedy pockets. It was clear that he thought little of me.
    And now I could make out the first question: “The word closest in meaning to
syzygy
is …”
    Off and on, as I sweated my way through the exam, I glanced out the window in the hopes of seeing that white-and-caramel coat waiting for me bravely in the snow. But I saw only the figures of a few boys walking fast across the campus. It was the midterm break now, January 20, and they had a