The Appetites of Girls (42 page)

“No! That’s not it at all!” I’d said. But she seemed not to hear.

•   •   •

M
ama stood, her hand clamped to the edge of the living room piano as she watched me gather my bags near our apartment’s entry. In an hour, my train would depart from Penn Station and whisk me away, more than two hundred miles south to the campus on the hill overlooking the Potomac River. This would be the first time Mama would let me cross the threshold of our front door without embracing me, without pressing her mouth to my brow. But I would not crack. I would keep my shoulders even, my chin steady. Even when Poppy did not lift his eyes to mine, only fumbled to pat my hand with his. Even then.

“You should pray you never have a daughter who treats
you
this way!” Mama called after the door had shuddered closed behind me. But then she could not see how my eyes burned, how my limbs shook like leaves in wind.

In photos, Georgetown’s campus looked something like Brown’s, with its neat quadrangles, its majestic trees. But the simpler features of Brown’s buildings made them seem knowable even from a distance; while Georgetown’s Romanesque and Gothic structures, with their arches and towers, formed hidden corners and shadowy curves, resembling, more
than anything, illustrations from the fairy-tale book Sarah, Valerie, and I had pored over together as girls, drawn to the mysteries that the vine-draped turrets, thick woods, and garden mazes surely promised. And had I found Brown’s layout this elusive when I first arrived? I took several incorrect turns before locating the Office of Student Affairs and then the most direct path to Thirty-ninth Street, where, with the help of the university, I had found an apartment just blocks from campus, which I would be renting along with another woman from my program. Angela McDermott had called me once over the summer. Two weeks later she sent a note on monogrammed, sherbet-orange stationery.
Can’t wait to meet!!
she’d written. She had included a snapshot of herself standing on a wide, pebbled beach, her straight yellow hair blowing off her shoulders in wisps, a pair of black sunglasses crowning her head. Some distance behind her, a retriever dug in the sand, and a small group—her family, I gathered—sat on beach towels that matched the one Angela had wrapped around her waist like a sarong.

Angela, or Angie, as she insisted I call her, was even prettier in person, delicately featured and tanned. She embraced me as soon as she breezed into the apartment, smelling faintly of chrysanthemums, like those planted among the shrubbery of the homes along the block. We would be sharing the second floor of a two-story wood-shingled house with teal shutters. The owners of the home, Mr. and Mrs. Philips, occupied the first floor but only during certain seasons, spending the remainder of the year in California with their grown children.

Angela’s mother and father had come along to help her get settled. From the McDermotts’ efficiency, their perfect coordination, it was obvious this was, for them, a familiar routine. Around Angela’s half of our large shared bedroom, in her closet, and on the bookshelves of the adjacent sitting room, they effortlessly found places for Angie’s shoeboxes and cardigan sweaters, shampoo bottles, for her poster of Degas’ ballerinas, her silver clock radio, her collection of photos in paisley fabric frames. In
the narrow cupboards of our modest kitchen, they stacked her cans of sugar-free lemonade, her unsalted pretzels.

After a lengthy exchange of endearments, an elaborate series of farewell kisses, Angie watched her parents disappear down the steps of our front porch, across the square patch of trimmed lawn, to their red Volvo parked down the street. Then she returned to the bedroom and plopped onto her white eyelet coverlet, propping her slender bare feet on the foot of her bed. “So, we’re
here
. I can’t believe it’s already September, can you? I was
this
close”—she made a pinching motion with her thumb and forefinger—“to forgetting the whole thing and moving to Illinois to be close to my boyfriend.” She rolled onto her side, then reached for an oval-framed picture that she had set on her small lamp table. It was of a young man with strawberry hair and full shoulders, in a racing scull, oars in hand. She brought her fingertip to her lips then touched it to the photo. “Evan’s at University of Chicago Law School,” she said. “We met four years ago on vacation with our church youth group. But my parents talked me out of it:
You have too much talent to miss this! And if Evan’s the right one, he won’t be going anywhere until you finish
.” She pronounced this in a falsetto then laughed, closing her eyes with a small shake of her head as if to say, “You know how parents are.”

We talked about her younger brother, Allen—“Brilliant! An even better student than I”—the boarding school she had attended, her summer job at a girls’ day camp, her friends from home. “Sorry! I’ve been blathering on and on.” She blinked at me, smiling, waiting. So I offered small tidbits: Brown—where I’d met Fran and Setsu and Opal, my professors there, New York City, of which technically, I explained, Riverdale was a part. But other things went unmentioned. I could think of nothing that wouldn’t widen the chasm separating Angie’s life from mine.

“I think we have a lot in common.” Angie said my description of Fran reminded her of her friend Libby at Williams, and she’d always adored New York, though she’d only been a handful of times. She gave my elbow
a gentle squeeze before changing into tennis sneakers and cotton shorts, which just covered the perfect grapefruit roundness of her buttocks, and heading for the door.

So I nodded my agreement, though I imagined Angie would have offered this extension of friendship to anyone.

After she’d gone, I studied her belongings: a small glass canister of beach glass on her desk, another of smooth, oval white stones, an amber, cube-shaped bottle of perfume with a gold ball of a top. Beside these,
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
. “My favorite short story writer”—she had smoothed her hand across the cover of the book when, earlier in the afternoon, I had commented on it. “Do you know ‘The Ice Palace’?” I had frowned at the book as if trying to recall the piece, though I was certain I had not read it, only the Fitzgerald novels assigned in high school.

At the center of her desk lay the salmon-pink telephone Angie and I had agreed she would bring from home for us to share. As I unpacked the last of my items, I was sure I caught, with each creak or rustle, the beginning of a ring: Mama calling with a storm of accusations. But my ears were playing tricks. No call came, and I spent the remainder of the afternoon arranging and rearranging my things in a vain attempt to make my half of the room as orderly and inviting as Angie’s.

•   •   •

M
y first Monday at Georgetown, I climbed a wide, spiraling staircase, with a wrought-iron balustrade, to the third floor of a small-windowed building, which, for the life of me, seemed to have no etching or plaque identifying it. I slipped into a front-row desk of an empty classroom, white and clean, unadorned save for a bronze crucifix on one wall, and arranged before me my notebook, pens, my newly purchased copy of
David
Copperfield
, and my syllabus for Victorian Novels, only to be informed by a teaching assistant that a mathematics class would be assembling in the room shortly. And though Professor Brennan had agreed to
meet with me weekly so that I could pursue my writing in addition to my literature courses, it took me some time to track him down, his office having been temporarily relocated due to construction. In my scramble to find the places I was meant to be, I began to wonder if I was the only one having difficulty. No one else seemed distracted by the crosses or the occasional Jesuit brothers in their black shirts and Roman collars.

Angie’s parents called her at seven-thirty on the nose every evening. “Hello, sweetheart. How’s the future Edith Wharton?” Mrs. McDermott would ask if I was the one to answer. Sometimes it was Katherine Mansfield or Dorothy Parker. The same joke every time, and I could hear from Angie’s response, when I passed the phone, that the joke was repeated for her. But I didn’t mind, liking to be included and the way Mrs. McDermott always sounded so cheerful, and liking the background home noises—a television on some sports channel, the soft spray sound of what I imagined was Angie’s mother cleaning her kitchen counters or dining table.

During this time, Mama made no attempt to fix all that was wrong between us. Three weeks passed with no contact, an occurrence that had once seemed as impossible to me as the ceasing of sunrise and set. Not that I was waiting. No. Just . . . just that I noticed. That was all. But then the letters began to trickle in: courteous notes, each no more than a handful of sentences. Far from the gushing declarations of affection Mama had sent me at college, these were simply terse updates:
Valerie ran into her old piano
teacher, Manny Onassis
.
Poppy’s arthritic knee flared up—doctor’s appointment tomorrow
. She signed them simply,
Mama
. No
Love and kisses
. No
Shower of hugs
. Missives no warmer than those she might exchange with a business associate of Poppy’s or some newly made acquaintance. How transparent her plan was! Injure me deeply enough, she thought, and I would cave, come rushing home admitting foolish misjudgment and that I should have listened.

But two could play Mama’s game. For every note she sent, I penned one equally concise, equally matter-of-fact. For emphasis, I used
Georgetown postcards, which were sold at the student bookshop. I dropped them coolly, nonchalantly in the nearest campus mailbox, striding off before the thwack of the card reaching the bottom, listening, instead, to the bold hammering of my heels along the pavement. But always, later, despite the distractions of campus life and the busyness of my course work, it came: the familiar void I knew only one way to fill. The 7-Eleven on Wisconsin Avenue was a ten-minute walk from campus. Once inside, squinting under the fluorescent tubes of light, I headed for the stack of orange baskets beside the register. Ducking through the aisles to avoid the undergrad revelers, with their cheeks red as torches, their shirts clingy and thin despite the late-night air, I loaded my basket with sour-cream chips, fruit turnovers, handfuls of peanut chews—all the things required to sate the clawing emptiness. These I toted home in a bulging bag, turning from my distorted reflection in the windows of cars parked under the street lamps along my route. I needed no reminders; I knew well how I looked—fleshy arms wrapping piggish bundles, a chubby girl with no self-control. Then in the dark of the apartment—Angie having already turned in for the night—I flopped onto the sitting room couch. There, I pulled apart every plastic wrapper, eating my way through the mound of food, my breath dying each time Angie stirred, lest she awake—she of yogurt-and-diced-fruit breakfasts, of wheat-bread sandwiches and vegetable soups—panicked she would reach for her bedside lamp and throw open the door, flooding the room with light, exposing all.

Then, in mid-October, something happened. A stroke of luck, a turn of events that would bring Mama and Poppy to their knees with repentance. I met someone. A grad student from Georgetown’s business program. For fun, he was auditing my Victorian literature course. Joshua Weiss. Even before I glimpsed his name printed across the spiral notebook that lay on his desk, I discerned something familiar in the curve of his lips, the flaring lines of his nostrils. His mouth had the fullness of my
uncle Leonid’s; his eyes, behind wire-rimmed glasses, shone the same brown-black as countless boys from my childhood Hebrew school classes. When they learned that,
here
, I had found one of my own—and not just anyone, but a man who was considerate and kind and full of humor, and a business major to top it off—God, it was almost a cliché!

I memorized all the romantic details, planning how I would recount them later to my sisters. How our first date was magical, far better even than the ones we used to imagine with Neil Keller from the top floor of our building, whom for years we’d spied on from our secret spot on the back stairs. I would tell them how I’d borrowed a tennis racket from Angie and how Joshua and I had played until sundown on one of the campus’s outdoor courts, our long shadows bobbing. How Joshua had swung his arm with mine to show me a proper forehand stroke then backhand, how he’d complimented me for picking these up naturally. How we’d almost collapsed with laughter over his imitation of the Austrian instructor who had given lessons to his brother and him until they were thirteen and fifteen. And later, how we’d walked to Lucky’s Café in town and found a private corner table upstairs beside framed drawings of horses. “We talked until a waitress began to sweep the floor and dim the lights,” I would tell them.

That night, Joshua had spoken to me of things other people hadn’t—the trip his family took to India five years before that changed him, the figures from history he most admired. And he’d had as many questions for me as he’d made revelations about himself. “You’re very easy to talk to, Ruth,” he had said, his lips moving to my cheek, full and warm, as we stood on the steps to my porch under the milky glow of the overhead lantern. Later, after we parted, I had lain awake almost until morning, listening to the sigh of the dogwood branches outside my window, the baying of some faraway hound, smiling and smiling to myself in the hush.