The Virgins (16 page)

“I’m going to die a virgin,” moans Lena.

“Enough of that,” says Aviva. Sometimes it’s annoying, always having to tell Lena what she wants to hear. “You will not.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Lena has brought
Wuthering Heights
with her. It’s one of her favorites; she’s read it six times. Aviva borrowed it from her once but found Heathcliff repellent, Catherine incomprehensible. The characters gnashed their teeth, shrieked, struck their heads on hard objects until they bled. Everyone sneered and was agitated. Aviva doesn’t understand what Lena finds so compelling.

“It’s the way Heathcliff can’t think about anything but her,” says Lena. “The way he would rather be damned to hell—and they really believed in hell back then—than be separated from her.”

“I wouldn’t want him to think about me even for a minute,” says Aviva. “Him and those dogs? Please.”

They are silent for a while. Aviva is always on guard against the possibility that Lena will ask her what it’s like with Seung, how it’s different when your virginity is gone. In the butt room, for months now, she has smiled and kept quiet while the others talked about boys, sex, kisses, asses. The others think it is the smile of knowledge, the silence of wisdom, and leave her be.

Lena’s current crush is Calvin Arthur. He’s the best pianist on campus, tall, good-looking, and black, or as the kids are learning to say now, African American. She and Calvin
have gotten friendly at the music building during the long hours they both spend practicing there. They’re working on a Schubert duet they plan to perform in a school concert.

“It’s hopeless,” says Lena. “He’ll never have a white girlfriend.”

Aviva demurs. Why should that matter? But they both know it does. Most of the black kids sit at all-black tables in the dining hall, have their own dances, their own clubs, listen to different music, care about different movies. Lena says you have to look at things through their eyes. There are only a handful of black students on campus. Calvin tells Lena that she can’t imagine how different are the worlds from which they come.

“He went to a fancy private school in Delaware!” protests Aviva.

“Calvin says it doesn’t matter. If you’re black, you’re treated like ghetto, and you get to be a little ghetto.”

“He’s just trying to talk himself out of you, because he’s scared,” says Aviva. “Stay with it. Don’t give up.” She sounds idiotic to herself, dispensing romantic advice.

Lena hands her a banana. “You’re looking really scrawny,” she says.

“I’m 105 pounds, like always,” says Aviva. But she actually doesn’t know how much she weighs. She hasn’t gotten on a scale in months. She doesn’t want to see how much space she takes up.

They grow quiet, watching the water, listening to some early birds. Aviva gnaws unenthusiastically at the banana
and then puts it aside. Lena opens her novel. Aviva’s brought a novel, too, but lately she has trouble reading. She can concentrate enough to get the sense out of the books and articles she reads for school, but thinking with any clarity takes twice as much time and effort as it used to. She opens her knapsack. On the first two pages of her book she becomes be-wildered by what seems like a great deal of dull detail about train times, coats, mufflers. She starts from the beginning and tries again. Her attention slides off the page. She tries to revive it by turning to the back cover and reading what others have said about how great this novel is. It’s a slim book, and there are not that many words to a page. It’s incredible that she should have this much trouble staying interested.

“I’ll tell you what would have happened if Heathcliff had married Catherine,” Aviva says, causing Lena to look up. “He would have started beating her. You think he would have done that only to Isabella? Catherine Heathcliff, abused woman.
But, Heathcliff, we’re one, I’m you, you’re me, more than myself,
blah blah. Eventually Catherine poisons his dogs and him, too. The end.”

“God, Aviva!” cries Lena.

“Don’t listen to me, I’m just in a crappy mood,” says Aviva.

The first thing my mother does when she meets me at the train is tell me she’s made me her meatloaf. Her meatloaf is one of the few recipes she knows how to make since mostly the maid cooks—Jean. Jean still comes five days a week, even with Andy and Dan and me gone. But my mother has it in her head that her meatloaf is something I was wild about when I was a kid, that I was always asking for it. I don’t remember this, but who knows, maybe it’s true. Anyway, she makes this meatloaf for me at moments of special emotion or celebration, and spring break seems to qualify doubly this year. One, I am home (although there have been other school vacations when she seemed hardly to notice that fact), and, two, my grades have finally improved, although too late to be of use on my college applications. (The Judge wrote a six-word reply to my letter informing him that I did not get into Dartmouth and in fact hadn’t applied there. It said,
You are making a serious mistake.
I had to admire his restraint.)

The other news my mother offers is that Andy is home “for a little while.” Her eyes flicker anxiously into mine, a signal to ask no more.

My mother’s meatloaf tastes perfectly good. I don’t mind eating it. As usual, she serves it with roasted potatoes and a big bowl of applesauce. My father isn’t joining us for dinner; he has some sort of meeting with a local muckety-muck. He’s thinking of running for the state legislature.

“He just can’t stand to see the corruption and incompetence anymore,” says my mother. She runs her finger under her pearl choker.

“I’m sure he’ll get everything cleaned up lickety-split,” says Andy. His long legs are sprawled under the table. He’s practically lying down in his chair. He’s eleven years older than I am. Dan, who’s between us, is twenty-four and lives out in Columbus, Ohio.

“Absolutely,” says my mother, missing, or deciding to ignore, Andy’s irony. “When your father puts his mind to a thing . . .”

Andy tosses back his chair so fast it goes skittering into the corner. I watch it spin perilously close to the curio cabinet with our parents’ wedding crystal: the clock, salt and pepper shakers, ashtrays, bears and giraffes and elephants. Andy makes a lot of noise going upstairs. His plate is full. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s always been Andy: my much older brother, handsome, competent, happy, full of minor devilry and good nature.

“What’s the matter with him?” I ask.

“I don’t think he slept well last night. It’s amazing how cranky that can make a person.”

For dessert my mother offers large scoops of ice cream slathered in Hershey’s sauce, a childhood specialty that I am, in fact, often nostalgic for. Afterward I knock on Andy’s door.

He’s lying in bed, listening to something on one of those new Walkmans. He sits up and pulls off the headphones.

“Sorry, bud,” he said. “I just can’t stand listening to all that shit about Dad anymore.”

I can’t believe it. Andy was always the good son, despite the low-key mischief he used to get into. He took the summer jobs the Judge wanted him to take. He went to Dartmouth the way he was supposed to. He and the Judge used to stay up talking politics late into the night. The Judge adores Katy, the woman Andy married.

“What are you doing home? What’s going on with Katy?”

He crosses his legs primly. “Marriage is a for-shit idea. Katy’s been porking some other guy.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

This is beyond imagining. Andy still has that lock of dark hair falling over his forehead, the one that made all the girls in his year fawn on him and vote him Most Wanted in the school yearbook. Even a younger brother can see that he’s a damn good-looking son of a bitch, and the way his face has thinned out, gained a couple of lines around the mouth, only enhances his appearance. He’s twenty-nine and athletic and funny and from everything I’ve been able
to see, he’s a good dad. What could Katy be thinking? Can my brother be right about her?

“I’ve thought about killing the guy,” Andy says.

His face frightens me. “You’re not serious, are you?”

Andy sits up straighter. When this was his room, there was a rough wool blanket on the bed. My mother’s replaced it with a quilt made up of triangles with pink roses. “For a while I thought I was. Now I’m not so sure. I know how I’d work it, though. I had it all planned out. I was going to take Katy for a ride, tell her we were going out for dinner, and instead stop at Prickhead’s house. Have her ring the doorbell. Tell her to get back in the damn car. Then, when Prickhead comes out, run my Ford Torino right onto his front walk and mow him down. Let Katy feel the crunch of his bones under the wheels.”

He speaks with so much relish that I can’t even look at him. I just keep my mouth shut and hope he’s not crazy enough to think this would be a good idea.

“Don’t listen to a fucking thing Dad says,” he finally tells me. “Don’t major in what he tells you to major in, don’t marry the girl he wants you to marry, don’t take whatever job he thinks you should take.”

“I’m already pretty well down that route.”

“Well, good. Because he doesn’t know a fucking thing.” I notice Andy hasn’t taken his shoes off. He’s scuffing at the quilt with one dirty toe. He’s going to tear the quilt. I feel bad about this, for my mother’s sake, but not bad enough to say anything.

“So I’m not going back,” he tells me. “Katy wants her new life, Katy gets her new life. She always was focused on her own big self.”

“What do you mean, not going back? What about Gil?” Gil is Andy’s three-year-old. I’ve only seen him three or four times. Andy and Katy live in northern Maine, where Katy’s from. Much as he was in favor of Katy, my father always has some excuse not to travel up there. Once they had the baby I think he knew he couldn’t just walk in and act like the boss of the place; Andy and Katy had a new authority.

Andy finally takes off the damn shoe and tosses it on the floor. Then the other one—thud. “I hate being apart from Gil,” he says quietly. “And abandoning a kid is about the worst thing a person can do. But I can’t explain it; I just can’t go back and hang around the edges of that dopey little town, where everybody knows what’s happened, that I’m the big cuckold. I can’t just tie the whole rest of my life to that nothing place, and her, and her parents, when she’s the one that did wrong.” He rubs his eyes, hard, the way I used to see him do when he was up late studying for an important exam. His grades were never that terrific. The Judge got him into Dartmouth through some sort of hanky-panky, I’m sure of it. Dan was always the one who stood out at school.

“Do you mean you’re, like, never going to see him or Katy again?”

“Maybe. Maybe I’ll go to Texas, or Kuwait. When did you become such a force for the moral good?”

“I just think it would be hard for, you know, Gil.”

Andy leaps up and starts pawing through the shirts he’s hung up in the closet, like he’s thinking of packing up and taking off again. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

There’s a soft tapping at the door, which I left slightly open when I came in. I can see my mother standing behind it.

“Are you comfy in here, Andy?” she asks. “Do you need a fresh washcloth?”

Andy stops rattling the shirt hangers. “I’m fine, Mom. Thanks a lot. I have everything I need.”

She steps inside the door. “I got you a few more washcloths,” she says. She’s holding a stack of six or so from the odds-and-ends closet: lavender, sea-foam green, tan, white, all the superseded shades of her bathroom color schemes. She’s clearly a little drunk already. She holds the stack out with two hands.

“Thanks, Mom. Sorry about the mess in here. I’ll clean it up tomorrow.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Jean will take care of it. She takes care of everything. I wonder what time your father will be home?”

“Don’t wait up for him, Mom,” I say. “You know he can be really late.”

“Yes, that’s true,” she agrees.

Later that night I hear her fall. I’m asleep on top of the covers with a Nietzsche handout lying on my chest. My eyes open in the dark. Andy is fast asleep. I’ve always been able to hear that—people sleeping. When I was a kid I could
tell you if my mother was way under or just fitfully dozing. Her fall makes a truly heavy sound, the sound of something drained of all buoyancy. I can tell she’s in her bedroom, at least, not on the stairs. I keep listening. It takes a while, but eventually I hear feet again, her groping around the furnishings in her room. My father’s absence fills the house, except for that one heavy space my mother is taking up. I won’t go to see if she needs help; it would only give her one more shame to have to misremember, to hide.

Seung has bought a ring for Aviva, a thin gold band with three tiny, diamond-shaped rubies in a row. She needs to have something on her finger when they check in at the beach house. It will be good too for when they go out in the little town. Aviva looks at it uneasily. A ring like this costs something. She wants to know where he got it.

“That’s my little secret.”

“Did you sell drugs for it?”

“It looked just like you. I knew it was the one for you.”

“I don’t want to take it if that’s how you got it.”

“I didn’t say that’s how I got it.”

He lifts her hand and slides the ring onto her finger. It is like the moment in the wedding in front of the rabbi or the priest. As soon as it comes to rest she feels she has made Seung some sort of promise. She spreads her fingers to look. The ring makes her small, thin hand look womanly, dressed. It’s a beautiful ring.