Mrs. Everything (23 page)

She’d imagined that Devon would have a history to match his piratical appearance, that he’d been born at sea, or that he’d grown up traveling with a circus. But his background could not have been more prosaic. His parents were third-generation Michiganders. His father was a dentist, and his mom worked in his office as a dental hygienist. “Well, at least your teeth make sense,” Bethie had said, after Dev had concluded his disappointing origin story with a gleaming smile. Devon had three older sisters, all of them with husbands and, presumably, excellent teeth.

“They’re housewives,” Dev told her, his voice rich with scorn. Whenever he played Pete Seeger’s song “Little Boxes,” he’d talk about his sisters, each of them in a small, square starter house that
sounded, in his descriptions, very much like the house on Alhambra Street where Bethie had grown up. One sister had married a banker, one had married a lawyer, and the third, the youngest, had married a friend of Devon’s who’d been in art school when they’d met. He’d been planning to be a potter, but Dev’s sister Melinda told him that would be no kind of life. Now he was in law school, too, and Melinda was expecting.

“Someone has to have the babies,” Bethie pointed out when Devon told the story of his poor buddy Randall the ex-potter, now lawyer-to-be. “Someone has to clean people’s teeth. Someone has to live in those houses, and do those jobs.”

“Not me,” Devon told her, kissing her lightly, once on each eyelid. “Not us.”

When she’d arrived on campus, Bethie worried that Devon wouldn’t remember her, or worse, that she wouldn’t be able to find him at all. For three weeks, she went to every party she could find with a blue band in her hair, like Alice in
Alice in Wonderland
, so that if Dev saw her, he’d remember. Boys asked her to dance, boys offered to walk her home, but Bethie didn’t want them. She wanted her Candyman, her magic man, the man who could, with a little bit of something on her tongue, take her out of her body and out of her head and let her forget every bad thing that had happened.

One night, at another church-basement concert, she ran into Harold Jefferson. “Why, hello, Harold!” she’d said. His Afro had gotten bigger since she’d last seen him, but his smile was the same.

“How’s freshman year treating you?” he’d asked. He wasn’t wearing a dashiki, but there was a peace-sign pin stuck on the front of his jacket. “Boys giving you the rush?” They’d chatted about people they knew in common back home, and which sororities Bethie was considering. At a Sunday-night hootenanny, nobody stared at them, but Bethie knew that, at certain fraternities, people would have noticed a white girl talking to a Negro boy. Just like in high school, there were Negro kids at the University of Michigan, but they were a definite minority, and except for
the places where there was overlap—the sports teams and, lately, the civil-rights groups—they kept to themselves. But Bethie was comfortable with Harold, who smelled good, the way he always did, and felt familiar, right up to the minute when Harold asked, “Who are you looking for?”

“No one,” Bethie said, feeling herself blush as she realized that she must have been looking over his shoulder while they’d talked.

“C’mon. You know what my daddy would say.” Harold pushed his chest forward, spreading his legs wide, turning into his father before her very eyes. “ ‘A closed mouth don’t get fed.’ ”

Bethie ducked her head, blushing. She didn’t want to tell Harold that she was looking for Devon. He wouldn’t approve.

“Go on, then. I’ll let you go find whoever it is you’re looking for,” he’d said. So Bethie had gone, and she’d looked and looked until finally, on the first Saturday in October, she saw Devon again, in the corner of the Sigma Mu house’s common room, watching the dancers with a bemused look on his face as he leaned, loose-limbed, against the wall. Bethie wanted to run right over to him, to open her mouth and stretch out her tongue, but she made herself hang back, watching, noticing how boys would approach Dev, in groups of two or three. There would be a brief conversation; hands would move to and from pockets. She waited until Devon was alone before approaching, feeling her heart lift as he smiled. “Hello, little Alice,” he said, opening his arms. Bethie stepped into his embrace, pressing her head against his chest, letting him hold her, smiling as she felt him ease her headband off her head and run his fingers through her hair, smiling even more widely when he tilted her chin, opened her mouth, and put one of those magical cellophane squares inside of it.

Bethie went home with him that night. In his bedroom, when he began to undress her she helped him, without hesitation, unhooking her bra, slithering out of her girdle, lifting her arms over her head so he could pull off her dress. The walls and the ceiling hadn’t started their magical pulsing, but she felt the
sensation she remembered, like she’d left her body and was floating far above, watching as Devon laid her on the bed, moving her limbs and her head to suit himself. For a long time, he just touched her with his fingertips, stroking from the tops of her breasts down to the swell of her hips, moving his fingers slowly toward the center of her body, until he’d eased her legs apart and was touching the slick seam at her center. Bethie sighed, spreading her legs, lifting her hips, murmuring, “More.” She was done being a good girl, done being anyone or anything at all. She was just feeling, nameless, skinless sensation, watching the action from somewhere up near the ceiling as Devon kissed her neck and her shoulders and fondled her breasts, clasping and suckling and even slapping them gently. His beard tickled and scratched her skin as he moved his face against her, licking here, kissing there, nipping at her breasts with those strong, white teeth. She watched as Devon shed his own clothes, observing his skin, smooth and olive, the triangular patch of dark hair on his chest and another between his legs. His penis was long and slender, matching the rest of him, and Bethie didn’t resist when he instructed her to touch it. “Here,” he said, and took her hand. “Like this.” She wrapped her hand around him, pumping gently, hearing his breath catch. After a few minutes, he pushed her hand away and again worked his fingers between her legs, pushing one, then two fingers inside of her. Bethie sighed and wriggled, murmuring her pleasure.

“You’re a virgin, little girl?” he asked. She wondered if it was something he’d touched with his fingers or something he’d seen on her face that gave it away.

“Yes,” said Bethie, “but I don’t want to be anymore.” She felt his hands on her legs, spreading them wide, his mouth on hers, his penis nuzzling against her, and Bethie shut her eyes and prayed that the drugs would never wear off, that Devon would want to keep her around, that she would rise up from his bed transformed, with all of the old pain and sorrow behind her. She did things she thought he’d like, tossing her head, moaning in
appreciation, chanting, “So good, so good, so good” in time to his thrusts. She wanted to give her body, the most secret parts of herself, to this man, instead of having them grabbed and groped and taken. The next morning Bethie woke up in his bed, with Devon smiling at her and starting to touch her again. When they finally got hungry enough to leave the bed, Bethie abandoned her crumpled party clothes on the floor and didn’t bother with her curlers. She borrowed Devon’s toothbrush and one of his denim work shirts, found a pair of bell-bottom corduroys at a thrift shop on College Avenue, and began her college life, reborn.

Since that first October, she was Dev’s girl. She joined MUSKET and had appeared in the chorus of
Medea
, and had played Tuptim in
The King and I
, and understudied Alexandra Del Lago in
Sweet Bird of Youth
. She attended enough lectures and turned in enough of her work to maintain a C average. She saw her sister once or twice a week, for pizza dates at Pia’s, where Jo worked, or for lunch at the Union, and on Sunday nights they’d make a phone call home together, usually from Jo’s friend Shelley’s rooms, because Shelley had her own phone and would discreetly leave when they were talking. The rest of the time, Jo was busy with her demonstrations, and with Shelley. Bethie had her suspicions about that relationship, but she never asked, and Jo left her alone about Devon, after one unpleasant conversation where she tried to tell Bethie that her boyfriend had a little bit of a reputation, to which Bethie had scornfully replied, “Oh, and who doesn’t?”

There was a not-insignificant amount of overlap between Devon’s customers, Jo’s fellow activists, and the theater people Bethie fell in with, a crowd of vivid, chatty, bright, amusingly neurotic young women (and a few young men who Bethie suspected were homosexual) who talked endlessly about themselves and who were unafraid to dress how they pleased, to take up space. Because Bethie was Dev’s girl, she was treated with admiration and respect, and received all the advice she could wish for about what clothes to wear and where to buy them and how to do her hair. By Thanksgiving, Bethie had swapped her kilts and
cardigans for bell-bottom jeans and loose cotton caftans with billowing sleeves, and long skirts with colorful embroidery. She put away her rattail comb, her hot rollers, her curling iron, and her economy-sized can of Elnett, grew her hair past her shoulders, and let it hang, wavy and unstyled, the way Devon liked it. It was funny, she thought. He complained about his sisters and their small, conformist lives; he made fun of their little houses and their safe suburbs, but he liked it when she looked like all the other girls in their crowd, and he liked having dinner on the table at seven o’clock. Bethie didn’t mind. She was happy to dress for him and cook for him. She learned to fry burgers on his stove, how to make pasta the way he liked it, al dente, so that the noodles still had a little starchy stiffness when you bit them. She would wash their clothes at the Laundromat, and iron Dev’s shirts on the kitchen table. In return, Devon kept her safe. He slept curled around her at night, the big spoon to her little spoon, and during the daytime, he gave her what she needed, pills when she had to stay awake and study, pills when she wanted slow, lapping waves of euphoria, pills to go up, pills to come down, and acid to take her out of her skin and out of the world entirely.

“We should start packing,” Devon said, and Bethie, who understood that
we
meant
her
, got out of bed and went barefoot to the closet. The plan was for them to do the first half of the drive, from Ann Arbor to Pittsburgh, on Wednesday, arriving in Rhode Island on Thursday afternoon in time for the shows.

“Can you throw some stuff in a bag for me?” asked Devon, hopping onto the floor with his usual limber grace.

“Sure,” Bethie said. She pulled on one of his T-shirts, found a duffel bag at the bottom of the closet, and had started to fill it when someone knocked on the door.

“It’s your sister!” Dev called. Bethie found her skirt, smoothed her hair, and trotted into the living room. A shopping bag stood by the door, and Jo was examining Devon’s library.

“Have you read this one?” she asked, holding up Ken Kesey’s
Sometimes a Great Notion.

“Not yet,” Bethie admitted.

“Says here it has the mythic impact of a Greek tragedy,” Jo said, reading from the copy on the back.

“I’ll bring it with me.” Bethie held out her hand, but instead of handing her the book, Jo gave her the brown paper shopping bag.

“It’s for your birthday,” she said. “Sorry it’s late.”

Bethie pulled an oversized shoebox out of the bag. “I hope you like them,” Jo continued. “Shelley helped me pick them out.” Bethie lifted the lid to reveal, tucked into a nest of crumpled white tissue, a pair of soft red leather cowboy boots, ankle-high, with pointy toes, embroidered with green vines and flowers in shades of blue and gold and purple.

“Oh, my goodness,” Bethie said. “They’re gorgeous!”

“Spanish boots of Spanish leather,” Dev said, peering over her shoulder and into the box.

Jo launched into some story about how they’d been in Chicago, because Shelley said there weren’t good shoes available in Detroit, but Bethie was barely listening. She was hearing, in her head, the song lyrics that must have inspired the purchase, whether Jo was aware of them or not.
Oh, I’m sailing away, my own true love / I’m sailing away in the morning / Is there something I can send you from across the sea / From the place that I’ll be landing
, Bethie had heard Bob Dylan singing in her head.
Take heed, take heed, of the western wind / Take heed of the stormy weather / And yes, there’s something you can send back to me / Spanish boots of Spanish leather.

“They’re beautiful,” she told her sister, feeling her throat tighten. Soon, her sister would be leaving Ann Arbor, leaving Michigan, leaving the United States. Jo would be leaving her alone. “I’ll wear them for the rest of my life.”

Her sister looked at her closely. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Bethie widened her eyes and tilted her chin, hoping she looked innocent and that she didn’t smell of pot. She was
high a lot of the time, which did not make her unusual among her group, or Jo’s, for that matter. She smoked pot most nights, and sometimes in the morning, and reserved uppers for test and paper-writing time, the downers and the acid for weekends. Mondays were miserable, but usually, just the knowledge that, in a few days, she’d be able to drift away from her skin, her body, and her memories was enough to keep her on the straight and narrow during the school week, and she was careful to be straight (or mostly straight) when she saw Jo, knowing that Jo would worry.

“You’re too thin,” said her sister. Bethie preened, even as Jo frowned. Among his treasure trove, Dev had prescription-strength diet pills. Bethie would take a few whenever she felt her clothes getting tight, or when she spotted the hint of a double chin in the mirror. The pills sent her flying. She wouldn’t even think of food for days, and she’d have so much energy that she could clean the entire apartment and still have pep to burn.

“Jo, I’m fine.” Bethie braced for a fight, but Jo wasn’t going to give her one.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “Shelley’s waiting.”