Mrs. Everything (19 page)

“Is this a friend of yours?” Bethie asked Harold, who nodded.

“This is Devon Brady. Devon, Bethie Kaufman, a friend from back home.”

“Alice,” said Devon, with a grin that was almost a smirk. “I’ve named her Alice.”

“I already have a name,” Bethie said. Part of her was
indignant, and part of her recognized her indignation as a pose, like she was playing the part of the good girl, pretending to be Alice, before Alice slipped down the rabbit hole. Except Alice had taken her tumble unwillingly. Bethie, on the other hand, was excited to go. She wanted to be different, now that she was almost a college girl. She wanted to see what the world looked like upside-down.

“So have another.” Dev’s expression was paternal. Bethie didn’t want that. She didn’t want him feeling fatherly; she wanted him feeling desire. “Names are important. We ought to be able to choose our own. Once we’ve decided who we are.” Bethie watched, feeling almost hypnotized, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a spotless white envelope, folded in half. With great ceremony, he unfolded it and shook something out into his hand. Bethie saw what looked like a square of pale-brown cellophane, a quarter of the size of a normal stamp.

“Dev.” Harold’s voice held a note of warning. Ignoring him, Dev leaned in close, with the cellophane square pinched between his fingers. He had a woodsy scent, unfamiliar but pleasant, a little like a cookout in the forest, with undertones of fire and moss.

“Our friend Harold here is a P.K. Know what that is? A preacher’s kid.” Bethie nodded. At rehearsals, back at Bellwood High, Harold would do imitations of his father, Reverend Luther. “In or out?” Harold would holler, pretending to be his father, yelling at the kids. “Am I paying to air condition the whole doggone street?” Harold would demand, with his shoulders back and his chest out, assuming what Bethie imagined was the reverend’s posture. “You shut that door before I slap you into next week, have you looking both ways for Sunday.”

“As such,” Devon continued, “Harold is naturally more cautious about certain mind-expanding substances.”

“They use wine in church, right?” Bethie felt like she was being hypnotized. At her side, Harold made a disgusted noise.

“Holy Communion.” Dev reached one finger toward her face. Bethie thought that maybe he was going to tap the end of her nose, like she was a little kid, but instead he touched his finger to
her lips.

“Open up,” the pirate said. “I’m going to show you all the wonders of the world.”

I shouldn’t do this
, Bethie thought. But that was the voice of her mother, the voice of Vice Principal Douglass, the voice of scared little-girl conformity. Bethie might have to be young and female, but she didn’t have to be scared, and she didn’t have to conform. She could be like her sister, on her way to some exotic destination. This small brown square could be her ticket.

Bethie opened her mouth. “Bless you, my child,” Dev said, and laid the square of whatever-it-was on her tongue. “Hold it there. Let it dissolve.” He smiled, before reaching out with his long-fingered hands, cupping her head in a gesture that felt almost like a blessing. “Welcome to Wonderland,” he said.

Bethie let Dev lead her to the plaid couch pockmarked with cigarette burns that had been shoved against the wall. On one side of the couch was a boy and a girl, their pale arms and legs entwined. On her other side was a curly-haired, golden-skinned boy who lay on the couch, looking like a prince who had fallen in battle, with his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. Bethie sat between them and held the square on her tongue, listening to a song about purple people eaters. The smoke got thicker, and the music got faster, and the dancing became more urgent to the Beach Boys, the Chiffons, Lesley Gore and Brenda Lee. Bethie watched male hands cup and caress the curves of female bottoms, female hands gripping men’s waists and shoulders. In the dim light, through the haze of smoke, all of the girls were beautiful, all of the boys were handsome, and Bethie felt her skin dissolving, her body floating away, somewhere up near the ceiling, a high perch from which she could look down at herself and the party. She peered through the smoke, looking for Harold, but couldn’t see him. At one point, the sleeping prince shook himself awake and stumbled off, and one of the dancers flung herself down in the space the boy had left empty. The girl had a wild, loose tangle
of light-brown hair and pale white skin that glistened with sweat. She was barefoot, not thin, her hips wide above fleshy thighs, but she hadn’t seemed to be worried about her problem areas, as she spun in ecstatic circles, arms spread wide. Bethie had watched her in admiration, wondering how it felt to take up room like that, to force other people out of your way, to claim so much space for your own. Bethie’s father was dead, her mother’s life was small and predictable, her sister was moving on, heading toward a world Bethie couldn’t inhabit, and sometimes—a lot of the time—it felt like her skin no longer fit her, and her body was only a collection of flaws to be fixed or at least disguised, an endless source of despair. But now, it was as if her spirit was rising, leaving her body, and her pain, and her silly party dress behind. She felt like she was pure joy, excitement and anticipation and desire. She wanted to move on, too. She wanted to be born again, in this new place. She wanted to dance.

“Hey, little sister,” the dancing girl said. Bethie turned to answer her and felt her mouth fall open. The walls were expanding and contracting, but gently, like lungs, breathing in time to the music, which pulsed through the room like a wave.

“The walls,” Bethie tried to say. She lifted her arms, intending to point, but her limbs felt like they’d turned into some kind of very soft, heavy metal. She could imagine them bending and drooping, like petals full of rain. “The walls are breathing.”

“Cool,” said the other girl, not unkindly. She reached behind the couch and, like a magician pulling a rabbit from an empty top hat, produced a blanket, the kind of knitted afghan that Bethie’s
bubbe
had once made. Gently, the girl spread it over Bethie’s curled-up legs.

“You’re tripping. Just stay calm,” said the girl. “Enjoy the ride.”

In the months that followed, Bethie would learn that Devon’s woodsy smell came from the patchouli incense that he burned in his bedroom, and that Harold’s style of shirt was called a dashiki, and that the cellophane-looking square that Dev laid on
her tongue was blotter acid, high-quality stuff that Devon, who once upon a time had studied chemistry, made in the U of M’s own labs. She would learn the lyrics to all of Bob Dylan’s songs, and “Like a Rolling Stone” would become her friends’ anthem when she arrived on campus nine months later. She would learn, too, that it was fortunate that no guy tried to touch her as she lay sprawled on the couch, watching the walls billow and retreat. Other nights, she wouldn’t be as lucky. But that night, Bethie stared at a poster of the beach that was thumbtacked to the wall, imagining that she could taste colors: the sharp acidity of yellow, the soothing cool of blue. The green was tangy and astringent, like an unripe banana, and the yellow was a rich ribbon of butterscotch. She tried to explain it to Harold when he appeared beside her on the couch. Harold listened, then repeated what the dancing girl had said: “You’re tripping.” Harold looked considerably less amused than the girl had been. “Let’s get you home.”

Tripping
, Bethie thought. She had never been on trips, except in the summertime, to a cabin on the shores of Lake Erie, when her father had been alive. She remembered sunshine in her hair as a canoe went gliding through the water; the feeling of piercing a worm’s body with a fishhook, how it would squirm and then be still. “Was it weird to be a preacher’s kid?” It was hard to get the words out correctly. Her tongue felt as heavy and droopy as her arms had.

“It was different,” Harold said. “People look at you differently. They hold you to a higher standard, I’d say. Oh, and there’s no getting out of church. Ever.” He had his arm around her waist. Leaning against him felt like leaning against a very warm wall.

“You’re strong,” Bethie told him. Before Harold could respond to that, she asked, “What’s it like, knowing your Messiah’s shown up already?”

“What’s that, now?”

“Jesus,” Bethie explained. “Like, your Messiah’s already come,
and now you’re waiting for him to come back, right? Is that weird? Does it feel like there was a great movie and you missed it?”

“Ah, not exactly,” Harold said.

Bethie said, “See, if you’re Jewish, you wait. Because the Messiah hasn’t come yet. Could be anyone.” She made a show of looking around at the kids walking around campus. “Could be . . .” She paused, then pointed at the least-likely person she saw, a shrimpy pale-faced red-haired boy with a sunken chest and a rabbitty overbite. “Him!”

Harold chuckled.

“Could be me!” Bethie said. She stopped in front of a wooden bench, climbed on top, and said, “I could be the Messiah!” A few kids clapped, a few more stared.

“Come on,” Harold said, and put his hands on her waist, lifting her down the way he had in the show. “Keep moving.”

The night air was cool, and it felt good against her flushed cheeks. Bethie wanted to ask him about being a Negro, if he felt different all the time, or if it was more like being Jewish, where you could go for long stretches mostly fitting in, feeling the same as everyone else, until something—a store clerk wishing you “Merry Christmas,” or a casual exclamation of “Jesus Christ,” or someone saying, “I jewed him down” when he’d gotten a good price on a used car—would remind you that you were different. She wanted to ask if he was the kind of Christian who thought that Jews were all going to hell, or if he believed in hell, or God at all, but before she could decide how to ask it, Harold had walked her through the door of Stockwell Hall, up the stairs, down the corridor, past a half-dozen open dorm-room doors from which a half-dozen different kinds of music could be heard, and into Jo’s cell-like chamber. Bethie lay back on Jo’s bed, feeling Harold fumble with the straps of her shoes. He spread a blanket over her and turned off the light, and Bethie shut her eyes, thinking that there was more to the world than she’d ever imagined. She pictured the dancing girl, arms spread wide, hair flaring out as she spun and spun, at ease with her own size, her own power,
forcing people to make room for her, and how she still felt like she’d somehow left her body, like she was pure feeling now.
I want to be brave like that
, thought Bethie, as sleep washed over her and carried her away.

Jo

E
ven at a school as big as the University of Michigan, it was statistically probable that most students’ paths would cross at least a few times before graduation. The same face would appear in lecture halls, on the Diag, at the Student Union, or in the stadium for the football games. So it was that Jo Kaufman had seen Shelley Finkelbein three times, and knew exactly who she was, before they ever spoke.

The first time was in Introduction to Philosophy, her freshman year. Jo had taken a seat in the middle of the hall, and Professor Glass had started his lecture when the door banged open and a slender, dark-haired girl with luminously pale skin and light eyes fringed with thick, dark lashes came hurrying down the aisle, leaving the fresh scent of something floral trailing in her wake. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she murmured, taking a seat, easing an expensive-looking trench coat off her shoulders and tossing it negligently on the chair beside her. Her hair was stylishly arranged, teased up high around her head, hanging long and loose in the back. Professor Glass raised his bushy eyebrows. “And you are?” he inquired. A few kids laughed.

“Shelley Finkelbein,” said Shelley. Her voice was low, but confident, and if the professor had expected her to squirm or apologize, he was disappointed. After a brief pause he launched back into his discussion of the Ancients. Shelley’s dark head bent over her notebook as she wrote. Jo made herself look away, keeping her attention on her own notes. Two days later, when the class met again, Shelley was a no-show, and when she didn’t reappear the following week, or the week after that, Jo figured she must have dropped the course.

The second time she saw Shelley, Shelley was onstage, standing atop a plywood tower, playing Juliet in a production of
Romeo and Juliet
put on by MUSKET, the campus theater troupe (MUSKET, Jo had learned, stood for “Michigan Union Shows, Ko-Eds Too,” which was what the formerly all-male theater troupe had renamed itself in 1956). Shelley was almost unrecognizable at first in a long blond wig, until Jo recalled the curve of her cheek and the contrast between her pale skin and dark brows. “Deny thy father and refuse thy name, and I’ll no longer be a Capulet,” she said, in the low, thrillingly assured voice with which she’d addressed the philosophy professor. Jo wasn’t sure if Shelley was a good actress, or if it was her own predilections that made it impossible for her to take her eyes off the other girl.

“She’s rich,” said Rachel, an SDS friend with whom Jo had gone to see the play. When Jo described Shelley’s single visit to philosophy class, Rachel nodded and said, “Sounds like Shelley. I’ve heard she’s changed majors four times.” Rachel knew more stories: how Shelley had shown up in Ann Arbor with a red Karmann Ghia, with a monogrammed gold plate by the driver’s-side door, and how she’d ruined the engine because she hadn’t known enough to change the oil. Jo, who’d grown up watching her father care for his cars, had winced, and Rachel had nodded. “I hear her folks just bought her a new one.” Jo learned that Shelley was the only female participant in Sigma Alpha Mu’s weekly poker game and that she won, more often than not, and that Shelley had dated the fraternity’s president and dumped him for the local television weatherman, a man of thirty-two.

“Is she still with him?” Jo asked, disappointed but unsurprised.

“I’ve heard things,” Rachel said, but wouldn’t say what.

The third time Jo saw Shelley Finkelbein had been in a picture on the front page of the
Michigan Daily
. “Dean of Women Confronted Over Policies,” read the typically bland headline, but there was nothing typical or bland about the photograph. The dean, with her cat’s-eye glasses and Mamie Eisenhower bangs, had been sitting behind a table, her expression grim. In front of her, arm extended, finger pointing and mouth opened, stood Shelley Finkelbein. “Miss Finkelbein, a junior, lives off-campus in a league house,” the name for non-dorm residences where women could live. “When her landlady refused to allow Miss Finkelbein’s date, a Negro, up to her room, Miss Finkelbein took her case to the dean.” The dean had told Shelley that landlords were permitted to make their own rules. Shelley had argued that they should be forced to abide by the same regulations as the dorms. Jo had read the article all the way to the end, before going back to stare at the black-and-white picture. Even with her face contorted, like she’d been photographed mid-yell, Shelley Finkelbein was lovely. Lovely and politically aware. She wouldn’t be like Lynnette, another pretty, dim, head-in-the-sand girl who didn’t care about the world around her.