The Orphan Sister (13 page)

We walked in packs to the dining hall. Lily and I held hands like sisters, only it never felt the same. I ate six bowls of Cap’n Crunch for dinner one night, sitting at a table of new-team camaraderie, feeling flush with all possibilities.

Probably Lily kissed more random boys than I did. She fell in love with music history, art history, and a philosophy major who worked as an RA in our dorm and offered free, nonsexual back massages for anyone feeling really tense.

“I’m not tense anymore,” said Lily, returning late one night.

“Really?”

“Well, we didn’t sleep together, even though he wanted to. Almost. But you know what, Clem? It’s even better when you know you can actually say no, and maybe save it for later.”

I didn’t remind her that this RA’s nonsexual massages migrated—with me, with at least three other women I’d talked with. It felt like an invasion of her personal fictional narrative. If she’d been able to read me, like Odette or Olivia, she’d just know. I had to get used to telling people everything, to revealing what I wanted when I wanted to let it free. I was swimming in a sea of unknown plants and animals, dazzled and afraid I’d lift my head to the dun-colored sky.

Then I met Cameron Kite. He had white-blond hair, and grand passion for the violin, which he practiced when he wasn’t in the biology lab. Cameron was so pale he was almost transparent; his blue veins at the surface of his skin were like rivers; I wondered if I could see the white boats of the blood cells rushing toward a bruise. He sat behind me in Human Biology, and he was premed, but not because someone else wanted him to be, because he was planning to become a developmental pediatrician.

I’d seen him coming into class. He was stunning, a white-blond California boy whose walk belied an ease in his body, a
sense of self I could never achieve but witnessed with pleasure and awe.

His was one of the hands raised with astute questions in class; his voice made us all turn to him. Lily, who was taking the class, too, told me she’d seen him watching me. I was trying too hard to keep up with the lectures to pay attention. I’d vowed to myself that I’d only play—date, dance in the ’sco—the campus dance club—with its flashing lights and retro music and deep coolness that made it possible to dance like an idiot and feel like a goddess—when I had finished my work. It wasn’t easy, because homework required thinking; reading required thinking, ideas required the fourth dimension of time to become whole in my brain. Sometimes I struggled, and I didn’t want to get lost before I’d started the marathon of learning.

One day after class I said good-bye to Lily, as she headed off for Music History 100 at the conservatory, and turned to see Cameron fidgeting with something in his backpack, clearly waiting for someone to come out of class. I looked behind me at the chorus of faces, but when I looked back, he was looking at me.

“Are you going to lunch?” he asked. I was, only Cameron belonged to Harkness, a dining co-op, so he offered to bring me as a guest. It felt like another freshperson experiment in possible friendships—because somehow, though of course I’d noticed he was beautiful, I’d never imagined he’d be half of a couple with me.

“You are missing someone,” he said as we walked across campus to Harkness. “Maybe two people.”

“Not my parents,” I said, smiling, hoping I hadn’t seemed ungrateful when I asked what kind of vegetarian food they had at the vegetarian co-op. Cameron wore a T-shirt,
HARKNESS, WE
WEAR LEATHER
, and I enjoyed the irony and also wondered whether I was going to have to wash dishes; I’d read that everyone helped out at the co-op.

“Are
you
missing someone?” Unnerved that he could smell my triplets, because I knew that’s what he was reading, I almost asked, but then my cards would be splayed on the table and the game would be finished.

“Not really,” he said. “Maybe my brother.”

He knew. How did he know? Cameron was someone who paid attention. Later he told me he had synesthesia—sometimes he smelled color or saw sound. When he first waited for me, he said, my voice was the color of California, yellow-gold, and he missed home.

But right then, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to have lunch with him. He was sort of prying—asking right up front about my feelings, and my sisters, and I was in the happy cloud of forgetting.

“Why your brother?”

“He understands me.” Cameron’s voice made my bones resonate. I still wouldn’t tell him. We ate a delicious chickpea salad with feta cheese for lunch, and Cameron explained the co-op arrangement—he signed up for duties, everyone had dishwashing crew, but other jobs were assigned different points. He was a bread baker; he got up at four to start the bread. He loved the smell of yeast and heat. He served me some of his homemade bread with lunch, and I relished the wheatiness, the work to chew. I relished him, his beauty, his voice, and most of all his attention. I realized that while I’d had a thousand intense conversations since school started, they’d had such a frenzied flow about them; I had felt splashed, obscured by the movement of it all. Something about
lunch with Cameron was quiet. Something about the way he watched me when I spoke made me feel heard, in a way no one had ever warmed me with absolute attention.

Of course, his parents had hoped he’d go to Berkeley or Stanford or Santa Barbara—somewhere closer to home. They hiked together as a family; they tasted wine; he made them whole, too.

Cameron had been a boy who loved books, who surfed and played violin with equal ease, who had grudgingly been popular, who had known all along he was unusual. His older brother was autistic and lived in a group home; Cam showed me photographs stuck with Fun-Tak above his bed: his tall, easy-limbed brother, also sunshine-headed, open-faced. Cameron told me they’d had a private language of gestures that still made them both laugh like mad. Reed could talk, read, work, but he hadn’t been able to attend regular school, and he couldn’t bear loud noises or the smell of broccoli. There wasn’t anything simple about him, Cameron said; he was more sensitive, and more hurt by the world.

And I told Cameron, the first person at Oberlin, that I was a triplet, and he didn’t ask to see photos of my sisters, he just said, “I knew there was something extraordinary about you,” and kissed me for the first time, on the cheek, slightly too close to my mouth, so my lips burned with wishing.

The motto at Oberlin is Learning and Labor, and although it has been years since students put in hours in a cornfield, it was still a place where we learned to learn—and working at the dining co-op
(it was much cheaper than the dining hall; we pooled our money and relative skills, which sometimes led to a tragedy of the commons brought on by undercooked beans), menu planning for 120, running dishes through the giant Hobart dishwashing machine, I learned a little bit more about labor than I’d known before. I learned education was a tool to avoid some of it. I learned that I wanted to be good at things—at art history, at writing essays about division of household labor—not because I wanted to be better than the other students doing the same, but because I wanted to be a better person myself.

I loved listening; I loved the idea of music, I loved to hear Cameron play, and to watch him, too, his square fingers and wide palms attending to his violin in a way that made me jealous and aroused at the same time. I wished I’d started something young and fallen into it, like learning to swim as a Pollywog at the Y and later becoming an Olympian.

Cam had come to Oberlin because he knew he needed distance to see more clearly. His parents were accomplished and energetic and always watching him. His father, still working full-time as a space engineer, also wanted Cam to join in his projects—learning to cook Szechuan, playing the piano, building tree forts, buying an orange orchard. Cameron told me they never yelled at Reed, and that was a gift. Cameron was more ordinary, at least in terms of what they needed to provide him, but when he took violin, so did his mother. They weren’t hoverers, he explained, they were joiners. They’d practiced something called Floortime with Reed and focused on circles of joining in, circles of communication.
Sometimes, though it wasn’t their intention, Cam said he felt dizzied. He didn’t blame; he loved his parents and his brother—he just needed space.

Cameron and I studied together, but I couldn’t concentrate because I swore he smelled like oranges. He was quiet in class, and so intense when we met in the library, I thought he’d never be interested in me; he was too interested in drinking in the whole world of school. We swam together at the pool, and the first time he kissed me for real, on the mouth, we’d paused in the hot, chloriney, blue light to chat while clinging to the wall. I asked him what he thought of current genetic research, whether the genome project would be the panacea we hoped it would be.

“Do you really want to be a doctor, Clem?” he asked, adjusting his swim cap, which was black Lycra. His eyes were a fierce blue, his eyebrows so light they were almost invisible.

“No,” I said. “I have no idea what I want to do.”

Cameron grinned at me, and I thought he was going to push off the wall, the way he sucked in a lungful of breath, but instead, he kissed me.

At Oberlin, dating was either sleeping together and acting casual as you strode across campus, maybe even looking at other students with the sort of possibility that belied a lack of seriousness, or it was like a trial marriage. I spent my nights in Cameron’s room because my roommate, Lily, couldn’t sleep unless the room was very, very quiet, and she swore Cameron snored, though I
never noticed, and I was the one pressed up against him in the narrow, extralong twin bed. We ate our meals together, studied together, bought books together, slept breathing the same air, sharing oxygen, almost like sharing a body.

Cam had told me his roommate was a slob—mostly the roommate was absent when we were there, and I didn’t see all that much evidence; some laundry left lonely in the corner, unemptied trash. But Cam said he’d borrowed Cam’s jeans—without asking—and returned them with a heap of stains: mustard, grass, paint, maybe blood. He’d bumped into Cameron’s violin and popped a string. The bridge was more important to Cameron than his own body; it made me wonder that an object could be so close to self, but I sympathized. “He should just not touch your stuff,” I said, thinking it might not be that easy in a small room.

The mutual dislike had started young; the roommate—Eli—had brought a woman back to the room on their very first night at school, and Cameron had come home to find her lying on his bed. It was prudish, Cam knew, he said, but he’d put masking tape across the floor: your side, mine. So then when I met Eli for the first time, I didn’t recognize him—the shadow across the room at night was a real person, and not so greedy for space and attention as I’d imagined.

Still, when we were in bed, sleeping together for the second time, someone came in the room, someone coughed and interrupted a particularly intimate session of licking, someone said, “Excuse me, but do you expect to be here all night?” as though we’d thought this out—which of course I had. I did.

Once, while Cameron was in the bathroom, I’d moved Eli’s books and notes from the floor—just shy of the tape border—and
put them on his desk. I didn’t want to trip. And I felt a little guilty; we dominated the room, and he didn’t seem
that bad
.

When Cam came back, he looked at the desk, then at me. “Why’d you do that? He’s a slob—and you’re not his mother.”

“Jeez. I didn’t want to trip.”

“Oh, well, that’s fair,” he said, eyeing the neat pile I’d made. Then he tucked his leg behind mine—tripping me, folding me like a bedsheet, disarming and charming me, and laid me on the bed.

With the exception of Eli, Cameron looked and took in people before he judged them. He opened before discarding—willing to believe in possibilities whereas my East Coast sensibility taught me to assume limits and frauds. Cam assumed friendship and the magic of anyone’s particular senses.

“He sounds like a French horn,” he said of Professor Steinberg, who taught human biology. We were eating real fall apples we’d bought at a farm stand, riding our bikes out into the expanse of corn and soy fields, away from Oberlin, away from everyone but the two of us.

“And your roommate, Lily, is a Meyer lemon—more sweet and watery than bitter tang.” The sky was more open here than Princeton, a wide palm of possible blues.

We tossed our apple cores and filled our backpacks with the rest of the apples. I felt fat and happy as a pony. I felt full of the greens and tangs of outside.

Cameron’s luminosity came from where he grew up, his parents, his brother’s special sensitivities, but most of all it came from his own inner light, an elegant synaptic originality. Some people, those who held sarcasm on the surface like a thicker skin, made
him politely temperamental. Maybe that was the issue with Eli—Eli’s sharpness, his harder humors. I was lucky to meet Cam when I was flush with learning to crack open ideas for the various nut meats of discussion. I’d turned off just enough Princeton to believe.

It didn’t hurt that Cam was stunning and played the violin as though each note were sexual devotion. He took longer steps than the rest of the group of us parading from place to place—Cameron strode headlong into whatever came next.

He was a virgin until we met. In all my fantasies about finding a mate, I never imagined a virgin. He was vaguely embarrassed by his body the first time we slept together, watching himself and watching my face as if there were clues to successful lovemaking that could only be revealed by eyebrows, elbows, and of course the angle of his penis. We took our time. We did it repeatedly, our first night, we loved each other’s body in a way they hadn’t been loved since we were infants, and even then, it was caretaking, not the kind of honor we bestowed upon each other.

The sex made me wonder why I had been so thrilled about sex with Drew. This new invention was long and slow; we spent hours in the morning exploring each other’s body as if they were new countries. After that first night, Eli spent most of his nights at a girlfriend’s off-campus house. Cameron and I consumed each other like chocolate. It wasn’t just that we loved each other’s body and mind; we loved what we’d discovered, as if no one else had lived in the land of new love. I missed my classes and barely passed
the Ethical Biology elective for which I’d waited in line over three hours to register. His skin tasted of oranges. His mouth felt like bee’s wings against the smooth contours of my back.