The Appetites of Girls (26 page)

But I liked the way Marla talked to me, wanting to know about my suitemates, my decision to major in art history, the way she looked up from her plate as I answered, as if she wanted to be careful to catch my words. After we had sat for some time, she offered seconds, even thirds of pork tenderloin and rice pilaf. But Daniel, I noticed, turned these down, to my surprise, eating with none of the abandon of the men at Paradise Jungle. He refused the Bordeaux his father served the rest of us. “Daniel’s in training for cross country,” Marla said as explanation for his restraint. “He’s very dedicated. Did he tell you he was the captain of his high school varsity team?”

“My mother likes to brag about me.” A deep crease formed in Daniel’s left cheek as he smiled.

After my second day in the house, Marla began to drop hints to Daniel. “Dan, why don’t you take Opal for a drive around town today?” Or, “Honey, show Opal the stream out back. I’m sure she’d love to see it.”

I denied the small pull of disappointment in my chest as I watched him push his tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses closer to his face and frown as if his head were too full of other thoughts to find room for her suggestions. At night, from my bedroom, I could hear soft strains of music as Daniel thrummed the strings of a guitar. While his brothers sped off in their shared convertible Saab, he played songs by Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor and Crosby, Stills and Nash, now and then quietly humming snatches of the melodies. Once, waking from sleep to use the bathroom, I glimpsed him through the door, which he had left slightly ajar, seated on his braided rug, under the soft light of a single lamp, his head bent toward the guitar still cradled in his arms. The following evening, rather than playing music, hair falling in a dark fan of curls across his brow, he pored over the pages of a thick hardcover book resting on his knees and nodded to himself as if in agreement with the material in
his lap, oblivious to my presence. He seemed different, more likable than most boys. Still, I was not interested. Unlike Setsu and Ruth, I would be in charge of my own life.

It seemed to me that friends washed in and out of one’s life like pebbles tumbling in the surf. You were tossed together for a while and then circumstances swept you apart. This was what my suitemates and I had promised to avoid. But to succeed was another matter, wasn’t it? So I was relieved Fran and Ruth and Setsu had wanted the same living arrangement for our junior year, in the dorm near Hope Street we’d had the year before. They had always assumed we would stay together, they said. Hadn’t I? Didn’t I wish it, too? “Yes, of course!” I told them. I could not say that perhaps I had even wished it more, that I had worried
they
might have a change of heart. Still, I sensed they were different from me, a part of something I was not. It seemed easy for them to join in what was popular or communal on campus. Last April, waving their Brown banners during a Spring Weekend concert on the Green—some band in black army boots and slashed camouflage shirts—they had tried to get me to dance with them. “Isn’t this fun?” I had not told them how I could not take my mind off the stale smell of the crowd, how the pounding of the amplified music made my ears throb. I pretended to enjoy myself as much as they did at Acoustic Night, at the few campus parties I attended.

•   •   •

A
lways, growing up, in every school I had been the “interesting new girl,” never sticking around long enough to fit in. College would be different though, I’d thought—all of us brand-new from the beginning, all of us staying four years in the same place. It was the
wanting
to be part of things that mattered, I was learning. An ease, a readiness to join what others did, breezily, cheerfully. This was how you were enfolded into the
social swirl, into happiness. I understood these things, still there must have been something I was not doing. I had heard references to multiple phone calls between my suitemates over the summer, though I’d spoken to each of them only once. And when Fran and Setsu had spent the weekend at Fran’s house the winter before, their assumption that I would not wish to go along had been obvious.

So I joined Fran and Ruth (and Setsu when she was not with James) for regular meals at the Ratty. I did not admit that the heavy smell that wafted over the steps leading to the dining hall still nauseated me. Or that I had never grown accustomed to the din of voices and clanking silverware inside, the mess of crowded tables, the oiliness of the food.
Cattle heading to the trough!
I would think as we stood on line with our scuffed trays on which we balanced scratched plates and glasses.

Each morning before we left for classes, Francesca would check the second page of the
Brown Daily Herald
and report to us the school’s menu for the day: “‘Ham and Macaroni Casserole, Franks and Beans, Potato-Zucchini Hash.’ Another gourmet dinner tonight, ladies!” But as much as they mocked the cafeteria’s offerings, Francesca and Ruth seemed to polish them off without complaint, Francesca often returning for second helpings—“Amazing what we can adjust to when we’re starved, right?” she would snort. And when Ruth abstained from large portions it was only because she had finished off two chocolate doughnuts or carrot muffins from one of the snack bars before we came and had more wrapped in a paper towel back at the suite. Was she hoping to fool us or herself that these would be saved for some other day?

“Aren’t you hungry, Opal?” she and Fran would ask as I poked at my food.

“I had a late lunch,” I would say, not wanting to admit I could swallow only small servings of what they gobbled down. So I would think of other things to talk of. Like pocketing shiny stones, I would collect amusing anecdotes throughout the day to share with Fran and Ruth later: I had caught Cleo Parker last night locked out of her room, in poodle
pajamas and matching powder-puff slippers, of all things! (Her roommate, Noelle, had tied a ribbon around the doorknob, and we all knew what that meant.) And in Ethics class I had accidentally referred to Professor Reinhart as “sir.”

“You didn’t, Opal!”

“If you saw her, you’d understand! She has hair cropped like an army sergeant’s. I think she might even shave her upper lip!”

As we laughed over my stories or theirs, I would forget any sense of separateness. For that time, I was as much a part of the hum of the room as the girls from the social dorms at the table beside ours, discussing their plans for the weekend as they ate bowls of cold cereal and disemboweled bagels, the innards balled up in napkins. Or the European transfer students and their boyfriends on the other side of us with their matching loose hair and clingy dark shirts and scarves, telling jokes in French and Portuguese.

To belong, though, to really belong, always meant to talk of men. The way the girls from the social dorms watched
every
fraternity brother who passed as if they would bait them just by looking. The way Setsu gushed every time she mentioned James. Even Fran and Ruth bounced out stories of one boy after another—Kevin Starr, who Fran said kissed with the finesse of a bowling ball slamming pins. Malcolm Kingson from Ruth’s political science seminar, who had a reputation as nothing more than a charmer—but was it true? Then sometimes they seemed to be waiting for something from me. “You could have
anyone
you want,” Ruth had said to me once, intending it as a compliment.

•   •   •

A
party in our suite had been Fran’s idea. Or Fran’s and Ruth’s together. Fran wanted wine, and beer from bottles, not the gutter runoff they served from kegs at most parties, she said. Ruth was considering inviting Malcolm Kingson. And Setsu thought if James came he
would invite some of his grad school friends—a more interesting crowd than most, according to her. I had not shared my suitemates’ enthusiasm when the plan had first been made, disliking the idea of a swarm of guests I hardly knew stuffing themselves into our private space. But as we’d pushed our furniture to the edges of the common room, looped streamers from our ceiling, and set votives along the windowsills, singing with the U2 album sounding at top volume from Fran’s CD player—“With or Without You” and “Red Hill Mining Town” and “In God’s Country,” until Kimberly from the adjoining suite pounded on the wall, making us curl over with laughter—I thought perhaps,
perhaps
I could enjoy myself, too.

Fran mixed fuzzy navels as we waited for our guests to arrive. When we’d lived in Mexico, they had been Mother’s favorite. They were sweeter than I remembered and cool along my throat. Somehow I finished a second, started a third.

“Are you going to wear your red cocktail dress?” Setsu and Ruth had wanted to know.

“It’s a little much for a dorm party, isn’t it?” I thought I had protested. But with the fuzzy navels—had I finished a third?—and the music and the excitement of my suitemates, the fragments of our conversation would not stay threaded together in my mind.

The dress was too short, it seemed to me, and everywhere too tight. “No, it looks so great on you!” they had insisted. They would wear dresses, too.

“I’m glad we decided to do this,” I thought I remembered saying to Fran as we sat on the couch with Kimberly and Christie, who’d come from next door. Others from our hall had come, too, and from upstairs. I had arranged the crackers and cheeses we’d bought earlier on our terra-cotta platter, passing it to each of the guests. But the door to our suite kept opening, more and more people squeezing in, until I couldn’t stand without pressing against the bodies of strangers. Their sour beer breath in my nose, their smoke in my eyes, someone’s fingers on my thigh, on the hem of the dress I should have known not to wear.

“I can’t move three inches!” Ruth laughed. Malcolm Kingson hadn’t come, but she was flirting with some other boy whose hands kept moving to her shoulders and down her arms.

“You should be careful,” I said, but the words did not come out clearly or loudly enough for her to hear me. She seemed to be tilting, falling as I watched her. Or was I? “I think I need to lie down for a few minutes,” I told her, though she would not hear that either.

I pushed through one group and then another. “Where are you going?” Two seniors grabbing my wrists. And then the boy who’d been with Ruth just a moment ago. How had he made it through the crowd to me? “Can I get you another drink, sweetheart?”

“No. No, nothing!”

And that was all that stayed with me of the night.

When I woke, it was not quite morning, only hints of cloud-gray light seeping through the cracks around my window shade. Something seemed to be smoldering in my head, behind my eyes, my stomach still sick from the drinks and the smoke. And from the egg and cheese sandwiches and pizzas someone had ordered at some point, congealing, I imagined, somewhere in the pit of me. But what made me sicker was the discovery of my red dress crumpled at the foot of my bed. It seemed to me it had been on when I first crawled in. Hadn’t it? Now I wasn’t sure. Was it possible I’d allowed someone in? One of the seniors or the boy who’d been talking to Ruth? No.
No
. But how was it I could not even remember? How unbelievably stupid! This had happened to several of Fran’s friends. And to Cleo and to Noelle. But it was not the kind of thing that happened to
me
.

Wrapping myself in my robe, I walked into the common room with the thought that I would begin to clean the mess. It reeked of spilled alcohol. Cheese and cracker crumbs were smeared into our carpet and littered our couch cushions. Cigarette butts floated in half-empty drink glasses. Ruth had left the door to her room ajar and was snoring, her jaw hanging open, her hair matted to the side of her face. I thought I could hear James in Setsu’s room—a sleepy male groan. Always she went to
him; this was the first time he’d stayed here. I imagined the slabs of his limbs stretched out across her dainty white sheets, across her. She seemed so helpless with him sometimes, as if he had devoured every bit of her strength. How could she
stand
it? I needed to get out suddenly. To sort my thoughts. A clearer yellow-pink light was washing through the windows now. I grabbed a sweatshirt, leggings, and sneakers and slipped out as my suitemates slept.

This was mid-September and I could feel the clean tang of the morning air as it moved down into my chest. I walked north along Hope Street and then turned east toward Blackstone Boulevard, almost empty of cars at this early hour, its manicured houses placid behind their green shade of trees. Here my thoughts no longer seemed to ricochet like so many pellets inside my head. There were only the birds and the branches above me, the whir of the occasional biker passing, and the padding of my own sneakers along Blackstone’s dirt walking path. The pounding behind my eyes had ceased, and I quickened my pace until I was running, any unpleasantness from the night before falling away like the shrinking memory of a dream.

I decided to run the next morning, too. And then the next and the next—three miles and four, then five—liking the clenched feeling in my hamstrings and calves and the way, as I ran, my mind seemed rinsed and cool as glass.

“Jesus, Opal, are you training for the Olympics? We all finished breakfast over an hour ago,” my suitemates would say.