Lessons in Love (11 page)

Instead of me? Um, that’s an invite that would never come. “I don’t need to wine and dine the chancellor…”

“The dean,” Chili corrects. I shoot her a look.

“To make it into college….” I take a breath. “You know what? You guys should do what you want. I can’t control you, can’t make decisions for you, so I’m just going to deal with my own life.” I turn to Chili. “Which I hope you’ll be part of.”

Chili smiles. “So you weren’t giving me the brush-off?”

“Not at all,” I say. Chili’s relief makes me happy and I’m glad that I didn’t hide in the shower stall. I raise one eyebrow to Lindsay — my look of triumph — and start to walk out when I step on the hem of the extra-large towel and it comes right off.

Lindsay acts poised, her face icy as she regards me with a look one might give a toddler with sticky hands — cute, but no thanks. “Brush offs aren’t ever cut and dry, are they?”

Chili looks at Lindsay and then at me. Lindsay puts her hands on her hips, annoyed by my damage control with Chili.

I step in, again, saying, “Really, Chil, I wouldn’t just leave you high and dry.”

“I’m sorry, Love.” Chili frowns, suggesting to me that maybe there’s more she’s sorry for than just believing LP. Then she waves at the air, trying to move us out of the awkward space and into new conversational territory. “Oh, by the way, tomorrow’s Harriet Walters’s unbirthday,” Chili says. Lindsay stands with her hand gripping her Euro toothpaste as though she wishes it contained ammunition.

“Yum, cake!” I smile. The best part of the unbirthdays is the sugar-high — we’ve only had one so far, but the rest will be scattered throughout the year. Lindsay is technically in charge, she picks the dates, but Mrs. Ray bakes the cake. Behind Lindsay’s eyes, the wheels of evil are turning. In a movie, this would be the part where sparks fly out from her pupils.

“What?” I ask her, annoyed by her presence and at myself for being flustered by her.

Lindsay remains focused, giving a shrug. “Nothing.”

Mary picks up my dropped soap and shampoo while I — completely naked — try to stop slipping on the wet floor and get my towel back where it belongs. I don’t have much public shame, in fact I start to crack up about this — it’s so me. So klutzy. And I keep laughing until Lindsay oozes by me. Probably she feels defeated.

“Oh, Love?” She gives me the one eyebrow back. “I have a message for you…”

Great, I think, now she knows my family business. “Who called?”

“No one,” she says. Then she flashes her trademark evil face — a combination toothless smile and pinched forehead. “But Charles Addison and his — ahem — friend, Miranda send their best.”

Now it’s my turn to be shocked. Naked and shocked. And definitely not laughing.

“Don’t worry,” Mary says as we lie in the dark. “Things have a way of working you, you know?”

I lie flat on my back, the window near me open for fresh air, my palms flat on the bed while my damp hair sticks to my neck. Did Lindsay make that up? She couldn’t have, right? Probably her grandparents had tea with the Macombers, Miranda’s clan, back when my relatives were being persecuted or working in factories in far away lands. What bugs me, too, is that Chili did nothing. Was she in on Lindsay’s name-dropping meanness? I shudder when I picture Chili falling into Lindsay’s seemingly sweet guise of diners, dancing, pedicures, and predatory nature. “Things have a way of working out,” I quote back to Mary. “You’re the kind of person who believes stuff like that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? That I’m, like, dumb and simple?” She laughs. She points to her desk. “Sign Harriet’s unbirthday card, by the way.”

I nod. “No. It’s just…how do they work out? When? Why? And what do I do to make it work out faster?”

“Man…you’ve got motor-brain.” She whistles a song I don’t know and then stops. “Here.” She hands me the card, which is nearly filled with messages and signatures which will no doubt brighten Harriet’s day without the pressure of turning a year older. My own real birthday is creeping up. “Sign it and come with me.”

In one second Mary’s by the side of my bed in her t-shirt and boxers, her hair freed of its usual ponytail. She bangs the window.

“What the…” I sit up, leaning back on my pillows.

Mary knees open the window further, then reaches for the side lock. It opens with a click and the next thing I know I’m with my roommate, outside on the porch, staring across the people-empty oval, the barren porches of Bishop and Deals.

“Now this is what I call chilling out.” Mary lies all the way flat on the wooden slats, her body slim as she faces the night sky.

“Do you wish you were here with Carlton?” I ask. “It’s mighty romantic….and now he’s only a dorm a way…”

“Ugh,” Mary says. “I guess part of me does…but part of me — I mean, space is good. You have a long-distance thing going on — definitely appreciate that while you have it. It seems like the best of both worlds.”

“How so?” Sitting here on campus as a boarder makes Charlie seem even further away. Without those summer freedoms of time and hopping in my car to visit him or hanging out all day at the docks, there’s a gap where I should feel his hand on mine.

“You get to live your life, do your work, practice, whatever…and then see your person on the weekends. You know you have someone but you aren’t dealing with the hassle of constant contact.”

I don’t want to pressure her with questions about the state of her relationship with Carlton. They’re a campus institution, practically, so to think that she might not be all happy in the coupling is surprising. Rather than demand to know what she means, I follow suit, lying back on the porch.

My shoulderblades adjust to the dips in the old planks and I settle in as though we’re at the beach, or somewhere without homework and mean girls and stress. “Hey — stars!”

“You catch on fast, Bukowski.”

I laugh, just a small laugh, the kind when you recognize something in yourself.

“What?” Mary asks.

“Nothing…Only — you’re maybe the second person to call me by my last name. Ever.”

“Who’s the first?” Mary asks.

Above us the stars blink and fade, ones seeming bright and then suddenly leaving. “No one,” I say. “Just someone I met.”

We lie there until we don’t know what time it is, until the sky’s shifted and the air is still unthinkably hot, and then — without saying we’re ready to go back in, because we’re not — we climb through the window and head for bed.

The bell rings at three-fifteen on Friday and I can officially do the countdown to being kissed. Four hours. Four hours plus or minus, depending on traffic and that gap I’ve been lugging around with me will be filled by Charlie’s presence. I’ve managed to put aside bad feelings and worries from the Lindsay incident — so she met him, so she met Miranda, so…so what. Kind of.

And I’ve managed to do a rough draft of my short story. Title:
What Wasn’t There.
Of course, this was at the sacrifice of all other homework, so I’m giving myself a few blissful hours with my boyfriend before I trek back to the reality that is my work. Not to mention the skulking pressure of the college process.

On Fridays, the day students linger and boarders either rush for sports games or hang out outside. Recently, the temperature’s been creeping up again, though, so the student center is the place to be with its cold drinks and colder air. The old dorms (Fruckner, Bishop, Deals) are woefully antiquated with their lack of a/c. If you’re lucky, you get a fan. Or — if you’re really lucky — you get a balcony like me and Mary, even if it’s technically off-limits.

I wait for my dad to wave me into his office so I can say hello before the weekend starts. He slams the phone down, takes a breath, and tries to look calm.

“What was that?” I ask him.

“Frustrating,” Dad says, describing the emotion but not the reason for the phone call.

We’re separated by his giant desk. On the top of it are folders and memos, papers to sign, the handbook, and a stack of messages on pink slips of paper. I touch them with my finger. “Lots of phone calls, huh?”

“Tons.” He looks wiped out, his forehead sweaty and wrinkled, his shoulders downturned.

“You’re always so pumped up at this time of year, Dad.”

“Well, it’s not normally ninety-plus degrees this time of year.” He stands up, comes around the desk and hugs me. It’s the first hug we’ve had since he dropped me off at the dorms. First, I thought it was because he was busy, but now I think it’s because we’re both trying to make it work. If he treats me like his daughter the day student, it will only add to my dislike of the dorms, or serve as a reminder of what I don’t have. And I if I make him my dad instead of my headmaster, it’s like I never left home. And part of me wants him to miss me, to know that he can’t have it both ways.

“So what’s wrong with hot weather?” I ask. Then I think back to my restless night, kicking the duvet off, my t-shirt slicked to my stomach.

“What’s wrong is — the overpriviledged…” Dad stops himself, remembering we’re in his office, not at our house. “Many of the parents feel their children are uncomfortable — god forbid — and are insisting on the installation of air-conditioning.”

“Couldn’t you put a window unit in each room?” I suggest, thinking it sounds so good — Charlie and I could sit there, in the cold air, doing…doing whatever we can do with the door open at least five inches and with three feet on the floor at all times as per parietal rules.

“It’s nice of you to suggest, Love, but the cost of hundreds of those units wouldn’t make sense — plus, until we upgrade the oldest dorms, the electricity supply can’t take the mass.”

Dad sighs and I see concern register all over his mouth. He goes back to his desk, click on the screen and pulls up the weather site. “They say it could break tomorrow. Or Sunday. We’ll see.”

“And if not?”

Dad shakes his head. The phone rings again and he puts his hand on it to pick it up. “If not, I’ll have to come up with something. Just hope for my sake we don’t get a real heat wave.” The phone blares again and my dad’s secretary sticks his head in and points to the phone meaning Dad has to pick up. “That — that would mean serious intervention.”

I leave my dad to fend off irate parents whose kids have been calling home and complaining about the heat and how their offspring can’t study, can’t think, can’t sleep and can’t possibly achieve all that they’re meant to without the aid of air-conditioning. Never mind that people survived centuries in these very buildings without it. As I step the stone steps two at a time and head toward Maus Hall — or as it’s known, EEK! — I realize I never told my father what I was doing this weekend. That he never mentioned his plans to me. That while we hugged, we had that true boarding school experience. He knows nothing about what I’m doing and I know little of him.

The quiet of Maus Hall is a welcome change from the Frisbee shouts outside, and the continual complaints of heat. Maus is cooler than many places, since it’s built of stone, its walls thick. I take a seat on one of the brown leather chairs, enjoying the cool of it against my bare thighs until after thirty seconds, I begin to stick to it. I check my watch. Four o’clock. Closer to Charlie every second. With the stacks of books around me and nothing but the smell of stale coffee and fresh college catalogues, I think about him. The real him — how we talk about books and joke, how good a listener he is about my family, the way he looked in his dinner jacket at the Silver and White event n the Vineyard. They called it an “event” to make it seem less-glitzy and downplay the glamour so as not to disrupt the image of the Vineyard’s kick-back style of wealth, but it’s basically a ball. I wore a borrowed white silk dress that Charlie compared to moonlight, and we danced in our bare feet, outside on a custom made floor while torches lit the night and fireflies competed for brightness. We kissed a lot then, and more, down by the dunes of Squibnocket Point. The thought of that night now gives me chills, and those delicious haunting stomach flips when you remember with your whole body, not just your mind.

Chris and Chili kept asking about what might happen with him — wink wink nudge nudge — but I’m not sure. Not sure yet. There aren’t that many things in life that can’t undo — but sex is one of them — you can’t unkiss someone. You can’t unsleep with them. And knowing my propensity for dwelling on everything over and over again, I just want to make sure — as much as doubtful Love can be — that Charlie is IT. Not kind of it.

In a cotton ensemble worthy of its own category of clothing, Mrs. Dandy-Patinko my college advisor, appears at the front of the room and waves me into her office. I peel my thighs — which have adhered to the leather chair, and follow the swish of her skirt — it’s billowy, with striped in multiple widths and colors; a Technicolor umbrella turned upside down.

“It’s SIBOF time again!” she says when I sit down. STATISTICAL INFORMATION BASED ON FACTS. The Hadley computer program that chews up all your personal facts — scores, grades, and nicks and chinks in your armor — and churns them around with the most recent admissions info from colleges in this country and abroad and — boom — presents you with percentages you may or may not want to see.

“How was your summer?” I ask, deflecting the college chat as long as I can. It’s not that I dread SIBOF anymore — it’s more that my own confusion about schools gets to me.

“Lovely,” she says. “And you? Are you any closer to coming up with your list?”

Everyone else has one. The list. Maybe it has only one school on it or maybe it’s your top twelve, but almost everyone does. “I don’t,” I say. “Have it yet, I mean.”

Mrs. Dandy-Patinko squints at me, her brown eyes resting on my hairline. “My, it’s hot…not exactly college cruising weather…”

“That’s true — it’s always fall, really autumnal in those pictures….” I point to the catalogues on her desk.

“Love…” she starts. Her nails are painted a deep brown, chipped on the thumbs. I imagine her at night, with a bottle of polish unopened as she watches some game show.

“I know, I know what you’re going to say — it’s time. And I need to come up with a list. But the thing is — I wrote the applications!” I smile at her, proud. “I did them — just like you suggested. Over the summer. Recently, in fact. And I have a range, too, just like you said. Yale and Brown and Amherst and Florida State because of their writing program although to be honest, this heat bugs me now and it’s like this all the time there…”