Pages for You (2 page)

It worked. The reader’s concentration wavered, and finally she looked up, one of her eyebrows raised, an ironic expression.

“Don’t like your breakfast?” she asked in a sly voice, so that the waitress could hear. Flannery didn’t want to come right out and admit it, so she shrugged again, mutely. Idiotically. “You seem,” the reader went on, reaching for another cigarette, “to like the look of my coffee, from the way you’re staring. Perhaps you should order a cup for yourself, if that’s what you want.”

That did it. Flannery flushed from the chest up, a full hot plum of humiliation. She looked away, asked for the check, paid it, and fled the Yankee Doodle. Without looking back. Without waiting for her change.

On the street again, her heart was noisy in her ears, from her fast walk and her embarrassment. Not so noisy, though, that it outbeat the internal words of her silent reply.

It wasn’t that she
wanted
the coffee, no. That wasn’t it. Rather, she wanted to
be
the coffee: she envied the dark drink its chance to taste those lips.

S
he never should have come here. She did not belong. If Flannery belonged anywhere—which her uneasy skin and awkward, long-legged gait made her doubt—it could not possibly be on these busy old university grounds, in a year that had seasons, alongside such sour-souled people. They were all planning to laugh at her, clearly, every single day, until she finally gave in and went back to the land of computers and eucalyptus, where everyone wanted you—sincerely—to have a nice day.

“Hey Flannery!” called a thin-coated ally from across the traffic-blurred street. Another westerner, whom Flannery had met on the first day. They lived on the same floor and shared a crowded bathroom. She was called Cheryl, which made Flannery uneasy, but then with a name like Flannery you could not afford to be choosy. “Are you going to that Intro to Criticism class? It starts in ten minutes.”

“Another new one? Isn’t it a bit late by now?” She already felt she’d been here half a lifetime; it had been two weeks.

“Yeah, but the professor’s just gotten back. From
Paris
. Bradley. He’s supposed to be great.”

There had been so many beginnings, it seemed—when would they end? Still:
Criticism.
It could be what she needed. A weapon. Fight them at their own game. Learn the language of prunes.

“Sure.” She fell in step with her half-friend. “Do you think I have time to grab a muffin from the dining hall on the way over?” Her stomach yawned hungrily.

Cheryl checked her watch. “If we hurry,” she said. “But didn’t I just see you walk out of the Doodle?”

“Of the what? Oh yeah, but—”

“Better watch it,” Cheryl teased. “It’s early days to be putting on the freshman fifteen, already.”

The sunny girl playfully reached out to pat Flannery’s stomach. It took all the taut self-restraint Flannery had not to slap her.

T
he first of any class seemed to be a scuffle of papers and faces, a busy fantasy of the great heft of new knowledge that might soon be gained. Flannery had already signed up for a weighty range of subjects: Intro to Art History; Intro to Revolution: France, Russia, China; Intro to World Fiction; Intro to Animal Behavior. Flannery wondered how she would find time for all these introductions.

Perhaps the blazered, grizzled figure at the sloped bottom of the high-windowed room, who leaned what seemed tipsily into the wooden podium, was indeed great. Flannery could certainly not tell from his introduction to this Introduction. He intoned a litany of words that she did not know but could identify as different weeks on the dense syllabus; he fluently pronounced European names whose printed equivalents she could just pick out on the list of required reading. After he had finished his bewildering garble on the material they might all one day be masters of, he mentioned that there were sections to sign up for—supplementary classes run by graduate students who did the grading, explained Cheryl in a cough-drop whisper, as if Flannery didn’t already know it. Sections were taught by Bob or Anne, figures who sat in the classroom’s front row, backs to the students, raising their weary graduate arms for identification. How to choose between Monday Bob or Tuesday Anne? Like so many of her decisions, Flannery made this one blindly. She chose Anne. Tuesday Anne.

“Goody, I’ll pick her, too, then,” said Cheryl, holding Flannery’s arm.

Flannery held her breath. Intro to Criticism. Here we go.
‘Goody
,’ she practiced quietly, in the privacy of her own thoughts,
is not something that we, as college students, any longer say. It makes you sound like a fifth-grader.

Maybe she could get the hang of living here, after all. Would the crafting of such retorts be covered in this basic introductory course?

D
ays she staggered; but nights she swam free, through the cool waters of her imagination. Her body was relieved in the dark of its shy apologies, and her young hands wandered over her own flesh, as if for the first time. She allowed herself whatever late hours she needed for this discovery, even if it made her sleepy for the next day’s Revolution, relying on Coke to power her through the forced labor of note-taking.

How could Flannery be so old and still not know herself? For this seventeen-year-old did feel old. Those private years of intense adolescent reading and music-fueled writing in her journal had made her sure she was full of maturity—of a certain unusual, and in its way impressive, emotional self-assurance. She had an alert awareness of what people were like. She’d talked two of her high-school friends through the loss of their virginity, even as she’d held on easily to her own.

Flannery’s assurance did not reach to her sexual self. She and her body were only now beginning to speak to each other. Where had she been, she sometimes wondered, when all the other six-and eight-year-olds were busy playing nurse and doctor, undergoing examinations in the shaded end of the garden? Why hadn’t her mother ever discovered her and some little friend fondling each other in the closet, so she could spend the right number of years afterward ashamed and still curious? Everyone had these stories, it seemed. The rude older boy who stuck his hand in your jeans. The beer-enhanced groping in junior high that might mean “third base.” She’d even have settled, for God’s sake, for the solitary horseback ride through the dusty canyon one afternoon, when the animal’s seductive rhythms brought on a hot-faced excitement.

Nothing. None of it. Flannery had been kissed and embraced, she’d been dated and danced with, as any pretty teen might be. There had been park fumbles and party fondles, the unexpected encounter with slobber, and within that encounter a thin, faint hint of excitement. But she’d certainly never known
orgasm.
She had to read about it first, typically, and had then, curious girl, set out to look for it.

At college, thousands of miles from home and the familiar, under safe cover of darkness, she finally found it. Over and over. Oh! So
that’s
what they meant. Once Flannery found it, she couldn’t stop wanting that pleasure, enjoying the sound of her own short breaths in the quiet night air. More. Over. Again. She had to make up for lost years.

Yet, even as she grew ever more learned in this new field of knowledge, she knew that something was missing. She needed someone else—a face, a figure—to take with her into the fantasy.

W
hy was Cheryl always around? Why could Flannery not shake her for the shy Puerto Rican girl on the floor below, who spoke with the low lilt of a poet; or even for bleached, surferish Nick with an earring, whose laughter she often seemed to sit next to while eating, though they’d yet to trade anything besides names and home states and complaints about the mold-ridden dorm rooms?

“Hi, Cheryl.” Flannery was too tired to fight it this morning. She’d had a long night: she’d gone to a late screening of a crime caper that starred a feisty black-haired actress—whose leather-clad antics had kept Flannery up, after, back alone in her room. Her stiff fingers plucked now at the cranberries embedded in the top of a sugar-crusted muffin. She needed their vitamin C.

“What are you doing here?” Cheryl stood over her at the table. “Aren’t you coming?”

“To what?” Sometimes college seemed merely an endless exhausting string of appointments. She needed a nap already, and it was not yet ten o’clock.

“
Section
.” Cheryl pulled Flannery’s sweater. The girl couldn’t stop touching her. It was beginning to get out of hand. “For
Criticism.
Remember?”

“Oh God. Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.” Flannery swallowed a few more chunks of cranberry muffin, took a gulp of weak coffee, and cleared her dishes. “Thanks. I’d completely forgotten.”

They ambled over to a remote classroom across some foreign lawn. Flannery had to follow Cheryl’s lead there. She ought to be grateful to her annoying hallmate, really, for her organization, and to prove that she was, Flannery allowed Cheryl to flutter on chirpily about a date she’d had the night before with a cute Iowan named Doug.

Tuesday Anne. Right. And here it was, Tuesday.
If this is Tuesday, it must be Anne
, Flannery thought, entertaining herself sleepily with bad jokes of this kind.

D
oug was still in the air between them as the two women found the classroom, but for Flannery their entrance was accompanied by a loud internal sound effect.

Fuck.

She had to be Anne, of course: Anne had to be
her.
Smaller in the large beige classroom, but just as vivid, as mouth-perfect; just as burn-bright. Sitting at the head of a broad seminar table looking through a folder of papers, handing a sheaf to a student on her right to pass around, giving Flannery a moment to look at her.

She had the same serenely clear skin, the same slick red-dark hair, straight to her chin. And she wore the same outfit. Black leather jacket, in a cut trim and feminine rather than motorcycle-like, silver-zippered in a few strategic places; close-fitting blue jeans, studiously faded; pointed, pretty, argumentative boots. Not high-heeled or spiky, and not black either—a deep animal brown—but certainly the kind that were made for walking. They brought a Nancy Sinatra shiver to Flannery’s hunched shoulders.

She stopped in the doorway, before she’d been seen. “I can’t . . . I forgot . . .” she stuttered to Cheryl.

“What? Come on. This is the right room. I recognize the lady.”

That’s no lady,
Flannery wanted to say, but she kept quiet as Cheryl dragged her over to a corner chair. At least the closer seats were filled, so they could sit farther away, near the window. If worse came to worst, Flannery could always jump out of it. The act might have a certain poetry. Might reveal, all too late, her sensitivity to Criticism.

It had to happen. Once seated, Flannery tried to busy herself with her educational equipment, but all she really needed was a notebook and a pen. She placed these in front of her. Someone handed her another printed sheet of paper, which listed due dates for papers, Anne’s office hours, the exam schedule. It had to happen. There was nowhere else to turn. Flannery finally looked up.

And there she was, her tormentor, watching Flannery cannily with her glorious green eyes.

“A
ll right, kids,” the instructor began, getting the irony in at the very beginning. “Welcome to the wide world of criticism. There are a lot of you, which is delightful, but it means extra work for me. Your job is to be able to distinguish, by the end of the semester, Derrida from de Man, Henry Louis Gates from Harold Bloom; mine is to be able to distinguish one of you from another. Sadly, that means roll call. Pretend you’re in the army. Amy Adamson? David Bernstein? . . .” And on she went, stopping after each name for a moment with each face, to lock it in her memory.

Inevitably she reached “Flannery Jansen,” a name that caused her to look around the room with a disbelieving half-smile. Flannery had no choice but to raise her pen in reluctant self-identification.

“You’re
Flannery
?” she repeated, bringing the rose of embarrassment once more to Flannery’s pale face. “Well, that gives you a kind of head start, doesn’t it, in the literature department?”

She carried on, mercifully, so that Flannery could keep her head down and devote the rest of the hour to not listening to anything else the woman had to say. The instructor went over the material of the first week’s lecture, adorning and explaining and encouraging questions. In spite of Flannery’s stubborn ears she couldn’t help noticing that the words were uttered with an easy wit and grace. She also couldn’t help noticing—it was her fingers that noticed it—a taunting intimacy between their two names. Without thinking about it, while not listening, Flannery decorated the instructor’s name on the printout with some extra letters, so that
ANNE
became
FL-ANNE-RY
. Having seen with horror what she’d done, she then had to scribble over the entire name, rather violently. Finally,
ANNE ARDEN
was wiped out altogether, lost to a block of blue ink.

Class was ending. Thank God. People were standing. The ordeal was almost over. Flannery leaned over to Cheryl.

“I’m going to have to switch into a different section.”

“You are? Why?”