The Appetites of Girls (17 page)

In the warmth of our dorm, our jack-o’-lantern grew mold and had to be discarded after only two days. But outside the ground hardened, and patches of frost settled on the grass of the campus greens each night. I began to need my hooded parka even for the short walk to and from the library each evening. My assignments for Constitutional Law and European History had become longer and more complex, or perhaps I merely had other work I preferred to be doing. After hours on the library’s fourth floor, I would come away with pages of material for my fiction class but only unfinished notes for my essay on the Italian Renaissance.

“What topic did you choose?” Opal asked one evening. She was making final edits to her own Italian Renaissance essay at the carrel behind mine, barefooted—her pink flats tucked under her chair—and seated Indian-style in black leggings that made her perfectly skinny thighs appear even thinner.

“I haven’t decided which influences from classical antiquity to emphasize,” I told her. “I’ve gotten a bit of a late start. The next couple of nights will be long ones.”

“Would you like a second opinion? I’m happy to take a look,” Opal offered. But it irked me the way she chewed her pen cap as she read, scribbling little notes now and then in my margins as if she were my teacher.

“Never mind!” I almost snapped, almost snatching the paper back. But I refrained. And with a recommendation or two from Opal, this time I received a B.

“B is better than a Pass, I assume?” Mama asked over the phone. “So maybe next time another improvement . . .”

“Yes, maybe next time, Ma.” I had also finished another story for my writing class. I had entitled it “By the Light of Day,” I told her.

“Oh?” she said, in a way that made me think, for a moment, she
would ask to hear it. But she had only a question about my upcoming psychology test.

•   •   •

I
n December, during the week before the winter break, the fraternities and social dorms on campus threw holiday parties. The high point, I learned, was Saturday night. This was when the houses along the quads decorated their patios with evergreen boughs and yards and yards of twinkling lights. Candles were placed in windows, bands hired to play jazzy renditions of holiday music. These parties were open to everyone, and according to Francesca,
everyone
attended. She and Setsu, along with Winnie and Kay, had driven Fran’s car to Boston’s Copley Square and purchased short Calvin Klein skirts and high boots with zippers on the sides—outfits I had never worn.

But Setsu and Fran had surprised me, knowing, I supposed, the prudish-looking contents of my own closet. “An early holiday gift,” Francesca laughed, and placed a silky, pearly-gray camisole top in my hands. It was similar to tops I had seen Setsu wear, and I gasped at their unexpected generosity.

“You really didn’t have to do this—”

“Just try it on.” Setsu kissed my cheek, then gave my back a small push toward my room.

I gingerly slipped the camisole over my head and stood before the mirror of my closet door. I looked nothing like Setsu or Opal would. The top pulled a bit across my chest and did nothing to hide the fleshiness of my arms. But the color wasn’t half bad with the dark of my hair, and I happened to have a velvet skirt I sometimes wore to dinners at Aunt Nadia’s that matched it.

Opal claimed she could think of better things to do with her evening—that nothing distinguished one campus party from the next.
She was recuperating from a recent cough, her eyes slightly puffy, the skin at the corners of her mouth dry. Even her hair was messier than usual, still plaited in its nighttime braid and flattened on either side of her part. It was wrong, I knew, wanting her always to look this way. Wrong to hope Francesca and Setsu wouldn’t convince her to come along. Wishing she hadn’t, in the end, decided to fix her hair or highlight her cheekbones with pink blush, or root through her clothes until she’d found her jade wrap dress. I knew how I looked beside her.

The party Francesca and Setsu wanted to stop by first was at the Sigma Chi house; it was the one they had heard from Kay and Winnie was best. Snow was falling lightly, leaving a veil of flecks on the hair and overcoats of the arriving crowd gathered outside on the fraternity’s front patio. They were laughing, sipping punch from plastic cups, undeterred by the white flakes melting in their drinks. Two fraternity brothers in matching Sigma Chi sweatshirts stood on the patio’s low stone wall serenading all who approached with off-key versions of “Good King Wenceslas” and “Winter Wonderland.” Inside, a lanky boy with deep-set hazel eyes, whom I’d noticed on line at the Registrar during the first week of school, removed our wraps for us. I saw how his thumb brushed Opal’s arm, how he took more time with her coat and with Setsu’s than with Francesca’s or mine.

“He’s probably a pledge. He won’t officially be a brother until next year,” explained Francesca. As roommates, we had attended a few parties in our dorm—a Halloween costume party on the floor above ours, a sixties party for which Setsu had made us tie-dyed shirts, a few impromptu all-female gatherings in Kay and Winnie’s room over berry wine coolers and fat-free popcorn. But Fran had been to several more fraternity parties than the rest of us. “Let’s go to the back room. That’s where all the food and drinks will be.”

The back room was dimly lit. A Christmas tree adorned with plaid ribbons and silver tinsel stood in the corner. At the center of the drafty room’s wooden floor danced tight circles of girls in their low-backed holiday dresses, flimsier than my top despite the cold. Some were girls I
recognized but had seen before only in school sweatshirts and jeans, their hair bound up in ponytails rather than curled and falling past their shoulders. Near them danced couples with foreheads touching, legs rubbing. Among them, though I would not have known her at first, transformed, shimmering in gold sequins, Nora, our head counselor, clasped her hands behind the neck of someone tall, his head bowed toward hers. We followed Francesca through the milling guests and past beer kegs to a table laid with cheese cubes and pretzel sticks and star-shaped cookies. She filled a plate for us to share then moved to the far end of the table, where we could choose from every kind of alcohol: a display of bottles like those at the weddings and birthdays, the bar and bat mitzvahs, where my cousins and I had sneaked half-glasses of Manischewitz or splashed rum into our Coca-Colas. But never so much that our parents would notice. I knew the things Mama said of the Wolmans’ daughters, who shamed themselves and their family. She had forbidden me to attend high school bashes even though my friends were permitted: “I wasn’t born yesterday, Ruth. I
know
what goes on at those parties. Someday you’ll thank me for wanting you to be better!” But now Francesca, chuckling, handed me a glass of red punch before crossing the floor to greet her friend Jackie—“Remember, Ruth! Vodka and fruit juice—it slides down like candy!”

Nibbling the star cookies sprinkled with green sugar, Opal, Setsu, and I watched the dancers from the edge of the dance floor. After several songs, the music softened and slowed. The crowd thinned, leaving only couples, who pressed closer, their fingers intertwined. Setsu was swaying to the rhythm of “What a Wonderful World,” humming lightly under her breath with Louis Armstrong’s raspy voice. From the way she arched her back, one hip jutting out, I could tell she was hoping someone would invite her to dance as well.

The boy who had taken our coats when we first arrived reappeared and now stood near the doorway. He was taller, his shoulders squarer than I had at first noticed. Despite the semidarkness, I could follow the path of his eyes over the heads of the dancers, around the room. When
he noticed the three of us, he smiled, but I knew for whom it was intended. And then, to my surprise, just behind him—though I’d never dreamed he’d be caught dead at this kind of thing—I spotted Gavin Rutledge, a sophomore from my Psychology 10 class. He leaned against the wall, the heel of one foot, in its hiking boot, kicking aimlessly against the other, one hand tucked in the back pocket of his jeans, the other swirling and swirling a drink, as if he were too bored even to swallow it.

Earlier that week, I had learned that for Psychology 20 the following semester Gavin would be my assigned lab partner, as Georgie Farnsworth would be transferring to another section due to a scheduling conflict. But I had noticed Gavin long before because he had sat alone at the back of the auditorium, slouching slightly in his chair, a checked scarf wound around his neck despite the warmth of the room. He had a thin face, thin nose, fidgeting legs, and a hairline that was beginning to recede ever so slightly at his temples. He wore silver wire-rimmed glasses, which he tapped occasionally with his forefinger. “A few rungs short of drop-dead handsome!” my sisters and I once would have said. In no way did he resemble the boys on campus I knew my classmates murmured about. There was nothing chiseled about his face like the pledge with the hazel eyes or like Matty Cronin, whom, I knew, Francesca, earlier in the fall, had followed around for weeks. But he stretched his arms so decisively across the empty seatbacks on either side of him and squinted with such intensity throughout Professor Wren’s lecture that I could not help turning to stare.

“I think he’s looking at you,” Setsu hissed in my ear. “You should go talk to him.” And was it my imagination, or had he lifted the cup in his hand in a greeting—not meant for Opal or for Setsu, but for me?

Setsu grabbed Opal’s arm, leaving me alone with my drink and our shared plate of half-eaten cookies. Gavin’s voice was liquid and low, the words pouring, though his lips seemed hardly to move. “So you’re going to be my lab partner in Psych next term, right?” He tilted his chin, draining the remaining contents of his glass.

“I guess.” I did not think he knew me and had never imagined he’d
given a thought to having me for a partner. I hoped he couldn’t tell how certain I was we had been paired, hoped he hadn’t caught me watching him in class. I felt for the feather-thin edge of my camisole, which seemed to cling to me now as closely as skin.

“You’ll regret it. I’m always weeks behind in the reading. You’d be far better off without me.” He let out a small laugh but without curving his mouth so that I could not tell if he was joking or sincere.

For an eternity I tried to think of something clever or interesting to say. I thought he would move on, find someone else to talk to. But he stayed, drumming his fingers against the rim of his cup, keeping the rhythm of the music. Was it possible he liked this—just standing side by side in silence? Was it possible, if I dared turn to him, I might find him gazing at me as boys so often gazed at Opal?

But when I finally looked again, he was gone. So he hadn’t been. Of course. And I had only been wishing—ridiculous things.

Through the open window, I saw that it was no longer snowing but that flakes still drifted from the tree branches. A few solitary flakes floated inside, one landing on my arm. As I turned my wrist to watch it melt, ice clinked in my punch glass. I had almost forgotten I was holding it, remembered taking no more than a taste or two. But when I looked down, I found it empty save for a few pink droplets running along the side. A radiant moon was visible through the white-dusted trees, a series of iridescent glowing rings surrounding it. As dazzling as in the TV romances my sisters and I used to sneak when Mama was out. Bright enough to make the night sky glisten with magic, and with the promise of bold, new things. But not yet for me.

•   •   •

A
fter the winter break, my first shared lab with Gavin included an experiment on obesity in mice. Would I mind conducting it while he observed? Gavin whispered so that Professor Wren could not hear. As
usual, he had neglected the previous night’s reading. Several days after completing each lab, we were required to turn in a report outlining the experiment and its results in detail. I wondered if Gavin would ask that I alone take responsibility for these as well, but instead, he offered his dorm room as a workspace. “My roommate’s never home. The place will be quiet, and there are two desks and two chairs.” He shrugged his shoulders in a way that made me feel foolish for ever hoping the things I had during our weeks away from school, for ever imagining his thoughts might match mine.

So every two weeks, I knocked on his door, my Psychology 20 text and lab notes in hand. In Psych, the course reading was straightforward, and with adequate hours of studying for the tests given periodically, I received high marks. It soon became clear that my understanding of the subject matter was greater than Gavin’s. So, often, he spent much of the time quietly watching from the chair beside mine as I, seated before his computer, perused the relevant materials, then typed out the various sections of our report. But one afternoon as I worked to phrase and rephrase a particularly lengthy report on the nervous system, I felt a whispery touch beneath my arm, along the side of my ribs, so light I thought at first I had imagined it. But then I felt it again and this time, the distinct press of fingers, sending through me an explosion of fear and heat. For some seconds I froze, my hands motionless over the keyboard, my mind spinning with fragmented thoughts. “You distract me, Ruth. Do you know that?” Gavin murmured. I nodded, though I hadn’t meant to. I was concentrating on keeping my hands from shaking, wondering if I should summon the courage for some similar declaration. But when the report was done and I stood to leave, he rose and leaned in the doorway, thumbs tucked in his woven belt, as casually as he had every time before.

That night, I lay in bed watching the yellow glow of light that shone through my window from the quad below and listened to the late-hour sounds of students returning from Funk Night at the Underground and
the pubs near campus. I recognized the voices of the European girls who shared the suite down the hall and dated only older boys, and of the field hockey girls from upstairs who’d claimed boyfriends within weeks of the start of school. And as they laughed over their shared escapades, a flutter moved through my chest with the thought that I might soon have my own taste of the things they knew.