Pages for You (12 page)

Later, when Flannery had recovered and come back to the ground after her free flight, she wanted to return the favor. She searched, with clever fingers; and she was rewarded.
Gold.
Eureka! Flannery was as proud as any pioneering forty-niner.

Afterward Anne, as stunned as Flannery had been, panted her thanks.

“Well,” Flannery said modestly, “I had to try to do what you’d done. It felt—it felt so good.” When Anne laughed at that, Flannery said nervously, “What’s so funny?” She was too sensitive yet to take teasing about her lovemaking. “What?”

“No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking. Of what they say.” Anne smiled, then winced with apology. “You know—how imitation is the sincerest form of Flannery.”

T
here were other games Anne played with her name. “Flannery will get you nowhere” became a common currency between them: Anne said it to herself in Flannery’s presence, when she felt she wasn’t getting enough work done—when their love and lovemaking were distracting her from what she only half-jokingly called her higher purpose. On a good day, when Anne was teasable, Flannery would counter with a touch, and a correction. “Oh no. Flannery will get you
everywhere.
” On a dour day, when the job search worry made Anne’s limbs go rigid, Flannery didn’t try it.

Another time Anne called her “my
flâneur
,” affectionately, “or my
flâneuse
, I should say.”

“What’s that?”

“
Flâneur.
It’s someone who strolled up and down the boulevards of Paris watching the life of the city. Benjamin writes about them. From Baudelaire.”

“I’ve never been to Paris.”

“Really?” It was kind of Anne to act as though the fact weren’t obvious.

“
Flâneur.
I like that. It sounds a bit like ‘Flannel,’ which is what my mother used to call me when I was a kid. When she was trying to get me to go to sleep at night. She called me her little Flannel and held me close to her, pretending I was a blanket.”

But Anne never seemed to enjoy these memories. She had yet to evince any interest in Flannery’s mother whatever. Competition? Flannery sometimes wondered. Or just a pocket of indifference?

“
Flâneur.
Benjamin writes about it in
Reflections.
He’s great, you’ve got to read him. I can’t believe Bradley didn’t put him on the syllabus. I’ll lend it to you.”

“Thanks,” Flannery said without enthusiasm. The stack on her dorm room desk of Anne-required reading was growing steadily higher. It discouraged her. She sighed. “I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.”

“It’s not a race, you know,” Anne said gently.

“Oh. Isn’t it?” Flannery went back to her reading. Humming under her breath a childish song her mother used to sing to her, about the Flannel.

F
lannery, for her part, was first and most easily tempted by “Annery,” though she also tried “Flanne,” which eventually mutated, in a jealous moment, to Phil-Anderer, when she felt Anne was keeping from her the important stories about her past.

“Anne the Philanderer,” she said in a mock tolerant tone. “I know all about it already. I just wish you’d have the courage to tell me yourself.”

“As opposed to your hearing about it from everyone else?” Anne’s face was puckered up with a wry expression. No one, as far as either of them knew, had any idea about Flannery and Anne. They shared an uneasy assumption that it might be dangerous if anyone did.

“God, yes. I get so tired of people coming up to me to tell me the stories. ‘Anne and Derrida this,’ ‘Anne and Hélène Cixous that.’ Someone claimed they’d seen you arm in arm with Harold Bloom. . .”

Anne’s glance flicked out sharply, a sudden switchblade, and Flannery understood she’d taken the joke too far. Bloom was a critic Anne had only acid for, and Flannery wondered if her blind gibe had, inadvertently, landed somewhere true.

Safer, on the subject of their names, was the nice simplicity of the two’s relation: “Yours is a subset of mine,” as Flannery thought of it; and “Mine is the succinct version: your name, carefully edited,” in Anne’s formulation. It suited the two of them, they agreed, that Flannery’s was the softer and chattier, while Anne’s was blunt, direct, and had a ‘Get to the point’ sound about it. “One syllable, that’s all we’ve got time for,” said Anne briskly, clapping her hands like a schoolmistress. “Let’s go, let’s go. Move along. Saying ‘Flannery’ can take all day.”

One afternoon, when Flannery was trying to wrap her arms all around Anne as she lay curled up fetally on the bed (she was curious to see whether they could reach), Flannery said,

“See? This is how it is. I can contain you here, all of you, right in my arms. The same way my name contains yours. See?”

Anne pulled away. “Contain me? Is that what you want to do?”

Flannery heard the warning, but decided not to let that stop her. “Yes,” she said. “My Anne here, where I can always have her.”

Anne looked at her then through the eyes of a faint acquaintance. Not unfriendly; just distant, considering. “You know, babe.” Her voice had an older woman’s weary advice in it. “You’re so hungry. You want so much.”

“Well.” Flannery shrugged. “So what? I’ll never get it.”

“You might. If you stop asking.”

“I’ll never stop asking.”

“I know.” Anne touched her cheek. “It’s one of the things that makes you strangely lovable.”

D
ecember only got darker and sicker, as huddled students with colds staggered around dreading finals and final papers. The library was fluorescently filled with busy notebooks and runny noses. First friendships got consolidated in the crisis mentality of the coming end: end of first semester, end of this grand beginning to Education. Flannery shared term-paper worries with Susan Kim at the bookstore/café; ate Cap’n Crunch with Cheryl one morning, lingering until the dining-hall staff glared at their delinquency. She even went to the ice cream joint with Nick one night. Normally Nick was much too cool for ice cream, but under this intense pressure personalities cracked and people allowed themselves to regress. Over two huge berry and candy bar-scattered scoops Nick said the same thing to Flannery that others had recently said: I hardly see you around anymore. Where have you been hiding? And: You look good—different, somehow. Have you changed your hair? Nick, who had the most immediate reason to have paid attention, seemed to understand that the change was not simply seasonal, that there might be a person behind Flannery’s new shape and movement. He had run into the two together once, at the all-night grocery. He was a good guy, though, Nick. What he suspected, he didn’t say.

“Take care of yourself, Jansen,” he concluded as he scraped rubbery almond pellets from the base of the Styrofoam dish. “Don’t burn the candle at both ends. They say it diminishes performance.” She eyed him, licking fruits of the forest from a plastic spoon, wondering if he meant the innuendo. He probably did. “Thanks for the tip,” she answered, allowing herself an uncharacteristic private query: would this boy, too, have left her lukewarm?

There was, inevitably, a crushing stress that drew closer, the inexorable iceberg, along with the beckoning Christmas break and its promise of freedom. By Christmas Day, Flannery told herself repeatedly, by the time you’re eighteen (her birthday crowded around the twenty-fifth), this will all be over. You will have finished your first, shattering semester at college.

She felt the stress. Of course she did. But she was protected from it, too. Wrapped in the arms of her girlfriend—
hers—
Flannery was fundamentally untouchable, even by exams and papers and the grueling needlepoint of footnotes. Whatever letters might collect on her transcript from this first series of professorial assessments, she was not going to panic.

After all, such grades were nothing—invisible ink—next to the permanent imprint she’d wear on her skin from this passion. What marks could matter more than this love’s tattoo?

A
s for the two of them, they had early-winter pleasures to enjoy. Late dawns and early dusks, the sweet taste of smoky kisses when the air outside is iced and salty; the joke of the fifteen-minute striptease, when coats and scarves and sweaters and long johns all have to be shed in a warm floor-bound bundle before flesh can finally meet flesh. Close embraces on late streets, in a lamplight two female figures (one older, one younger) had to hope would not expose them to unfriendly attentions. Day or night walks through ice-prettified wonderlands, against the ever-present kitsch of carols. Falalalalaing to each other, slyly, in the tinsel-glittered rooms of restaurants or in the naked seclusion of Anne’s off-campus apartment, at a safe distance from university eyes.

Each had her own anxiety to inhabit—“You’ll do fine,” they emptily reassured each other—in a place quite separate from the juicy benevolence of their mutual affection. Anne wrung her hands and devoured cartons of Marlboros at the thought of the MLA ordeal, which would unfold just after Christmas in a fraught, overcrowded Chicago hotel. Sooner than that, Flannery had to walk straight into the source of her panic, somehow to sit in the right rooms at the right times and disgorge all the knowledge she had accumulated of Art History, World Fiction, and Revolution. For Criticism she wound a long skein of argument around the skunk-haired Susan Sontag; and did not let Anne read the result. They both agreed it was better that way. “I’ll have plenty of these to look at soon enough,” Anne groused. “The efforts of all your brilliant darling peers.” “Give Susan Kim an A,” Flannery said. She was brave enough to risk such cracks by now. “Unless you think she’s cute, obviously, in which case I think you’d better fail her.”

Then the break was on them. Flannery packed for the reverse journey in the blue van with the irascible driver to the chaotic airport and from there west, to home. The dorms were a confusion of suitcases, deadline frenzy, and shouted seasonal greetings. People left before you’d said goodbye to them. Everyone was underslept. There was an escape-from-a-burning-building feel about the place, as students vibrated on their tense diets of caffeine and sugar.

Anne would not do a pre-limo dorm goodbye. She didn’t want to say goodbye at all. “It seems overdramatic,” she said emphatically. “We’ll see each other again in a few weeks. I might be a human being again by then, after MLA. That or a vegetable. One or the other.” Anne advised against their spending Flannery’s last night there together and thought she’d gotten away with a “See you in a few weeks, babe,” parting after a shared spanokopita—nourishment that followed a brief and urgent afternoon encounter.

Of course, this meant another short night for exhausted Flannery, who woke to take a dark dawn walk to Anne’s apartment. It brought on shadowed memories of her earlier pilgrimage to the train station, for Anne’s apartment was on the same route.

An ash-gray, crotchety face appeared at Anne’s door; her hair was almost colorless from lack of sleep. But those loved lips did manage a smile when she took in the sight of her up-and-ready, travel-anxious lover.

“You crazy girl,” she said affectionately, and opened her arms for an embrace.

“I didn’t have time to write you anything this time,” Flannery clarified, before stepping in to take up the invitation. “So this is a substitute for a poem.” And for the last time in that banner year, she kissed Tuesday Anne, in a long and eloquent farewell linger.

V
acation was an agony of absence.

Her mother was pleased to see her—“I’ve missed you so
much
, honey,” in a fervent hug at the airport—and Flannery suffered a mild guilty heartbreak that the feeling wasn’t mutual. There was a deep, primal comfort in being around this familiar life-giving body again, and she did love the harmless trot of her mother’s conversation; but she was no longer the essential woman in Flannery’s life. She was not the woman Flannery heard when she closed her eyes, or inhaled still in the warm wintry scents of her clothes; she was not the woman Flannery figured as the soft pillow she held close to herself at night, in an empty effort to fill the hollow of her curved, sleeping stomach.

Flannery had never considered that the word “ache” might be meant literally, when applied to the heart. “Heartache” was a fancy, surely, a gift for songwriters and a handy rhyme for “heartbreak.” They weren’t serious? But no, they were. It was something else to learn. The heart did ache, actually. She felt a dull grind of lack somewhere near her diaphragm, a pain that occupied the space of something removed. A phantom limb. A scratchy hunger. The wasting muscle fatigue of
want.

Flannery listened and talked with her mother and her friends, and their friends. She told funny stories to these older women, as if she’d just returned from a war. College! What a mad lark it was. She enjoyed these reunions; they were meaningful to her. But she remained separated from her company the whole time by the screen of their ignorance, and her knowledge. They thought—and why shouldn’t they?—that this was just Flannery they had in front of them. Same old smart and loping Flannery, sheltered and friendly, cautious and curious, maybe one day a writer. She charmed, in her modest, wise-eyed way.
It would be interesting to see
what she’d become.

It was only Flannery who knew she was already becoming it. It was she who knew that this eighteen-year-old in front of them was someone else entirely. She felt like an elaborate impostor, as if her lines had been carefully rehearsed to sound authentic—the kinds of things Flannery, the girl we used to know, might say.