Who Do You Love (18 page)

“It's important that people really commit to this. If the sisters don't take it seriously, the potentials won't take it seriously, and we won't get the best girls.”

“The best girls,” Andy repeated. He'd known that was a mistake even before Rachel raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth, then shut it, turning calmly toward the makeup mirror at her desk.

“How is wanting the best girls for our sorority any different than a track team having cuts?”

“But what does the best mean?” He had wondered, ever since she'd rushed the year before, how his funny, merry Rachel who could make a joke about everything could take all of this, all the rules and guidelines, so seriously. Not to mention how thin she'd gotten, and how he never saw her anymore without a full face of makeup. He could picture the evening yawning ahead of him, all those long, empty hours to fill, Rachel off at the rush party downstairs while he stayed hidden in the bedroom like some kind of male Anne Frank. Guys weren't invited tonight, not until Saturday's formal. He saw himself trying to get some homework done in this frilly, scented girl-den, trying to make a meal of the yogurts and SlimFast shakes that were all Rachel ever kept in her fridge. (“What would happen if you put a beer and a burger in there?” he'd asked her once and she'd said, completely deadpan, “They'd take me out back and shoot me.”)

But now her feathers were ruffled. “We do charity work,” she'd said, spacing her words out, speaking each one distinctly. “We volunteer. We tutor. While you're off running laps . . .” She paused and made her index and second finger take a little jog around the edge of her desk, “we're trying to improve the community. We want girls who are committed to what being a Gamma means, to what it stands for.”

As far as Andy could tell, being a Gamma stood for being one of the pretty, popular girls at Beaumont, a girl more
interested
in having the right clothes and dating the right guy than she was in tutoring inner-city kids or raising money for the battered women's shelter, but he knew better than to say so. It wasn't an officially Jewish sorority, but plenty of its members were Jewish, and almost all of them were white.

Once, he'd asked why the sororities were so segregated, and Rachel had acted like he'd accused her of something awful. “The black girls have their own sororities,” she'd said. “They don't even want to join, but if they did, of course we'd treat them the same as anyone else.” Andy had nodded, but he'd wondered. A few times he'd started asking Rachel whether she'd told people that he had a black father, and every time he'd stopped himself.
Of course she did
, he'd think. It doesn't matter to her. Still, he thought about it, when he walked through Beaumont by himself and felt strangers looking at him; when he saw, or imagined that he saw, the security guards watching him with special interest when he went into the coffee shop or the convenience store at the center of town; when the guys who joined Rachel and her friends in the dining hall always wanted to talk about rap music, assuming he'd bought every CD and knew every song; when in fact, in his experience, it was the nerdy Jewish guys who could quote every N.W.A. lyric perfectly.

Maybe his race didn't matter to Rachel, like she'd told him every time the topic came up, but he was sure there were girls in the sorority to whom it mattered a great deal. Even if Rachel had never lied about it, she could have used a little strategic silence here and there, let people think that Andy was Hispanic or Israeli or Greek. She'd told her parents, and they'd been nothing but polite and nice to him when he'd been visiting during Parents' Weekend last spring, but he wondered about them, too, and whether they wouldn't be happy if Rachel ditched him in favor of one of those Dr. Dre–quoting Jewish guys.

Even if he'd never asked her specifically about race, he had asked lots of questions about the girls she hung around with at Beaumont. They all dressed the same way, the same brands of jeans and shirts and shoes. “It's like they got a memo,” he'd once said to Rachel. He'd meant it as a joke, but then Rachel explained that a version of such a memo actually existed.

“It's just suggestions, really,” she'd said, looking embarrassed, which meant she at least knew how ridiculous it was, and Andy didn't want to fight, but he wondered sometimes about whether he could actually have a future with a woman who handed other girls instructions about Girbaud versus Guess jeans, and how many buttons' worth of cleavage they could show.

“You look nice,” he told her as she sat in front of her light-up makeup mirror and assaulted her eyebrows with her tweezers. The year before, she'd cut her hair in that face-framing, short-in-front, long-in-back style that the
Friends
actress had somehow convinced every woman in America to get, but now it was long and curly again, the way it had been when they met in Atlanta, the way he liked it best. She pulled on a short white skirt, a blue silk blouse, a scarf at her throat in the sorority colors, and a pair of beigey high heels that matched the color of her skin and made her legs look impossibly long.

Her kiss was brisk, almost impersonal. “See you at midnight,” she said, and then, in a swirl of hair spray and perfume, she was gone.

Andy sneaked into the bathroom, marveling at the array of stuff, enough scrubs and lotions and masks to stock a drugstore. He spent a long time in the shower, enjoying the water
pressure
—the showers at Oregon usually felt more like a trickle. He used exfoliating cream for his legs and deep conditioner for his hair, and considered a leave-in olive oil treatment before deciding that it might be missed. Back in his jeans and sweatshirt, he slipped down the back staircase, which Rachel told him had once been for servants to use, and roamed around the campus, buying a few slices of pizza for dinner, then sitting on one of the benches to eat them and watch the people go by. Ten black girls in blue suits and black shoes, all in a line, were balancing potted plants on their gloved hands as they marched by him. They were followed by half a dozen guys, each pledge carrying his own books and a second backpack, no doubt laden with a senior brother's texts. Andy decided, again, that fraternities and sororities were the stupidest thing in the world.

Finally it was midnight. Andy lay in bed while Rachel paced around the room, shoes off, hair loose, telling him the story about some potential getting drunk and puking in the ladies' room—“She told us she was on antibiotics, which, I'm sorry, but shouldn't she have remembered that before she, like, drank three glasses of punch?”—and how she'd heard that some other sorority was ripping off the theme for their formal, which was One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “They're doing Midnight at the Oasis, which is basically the same thing. And I heard they rented an elephant,” she fretted.

“That's—”
Awful,
he'd been going to say, but Rachel jumped in with “I know! God, I could kill myself for not thinking of it!”

“Maybe you could just get a fat person.”

Rachel paused, halfway through unhooking her bra. “Huh?” Even though she'd gotten thinner, her breasts, in profile, were round and heavy as some kind of fruit. Melons were the cliché, of course, but hers reminded him of peaches, from the tawny pink-gold color of her skin to the sweetness when he kissed
her.

“A fat person,” he said, mostly kidding. “You know, so a fat person could come to your parties.”

He could see her making up her mind, deciding whether to be amused or combative. “We have fat people,” she finally said.

“Who?”

“Missy Sanders.”

“Missy Sanders isn't fat,” he said, hoping they were talking about the same person, a bosomy, rosy-cheeked blond whose thick legs were more muscle than flab and who was an all-conference field hockey player.

“She isn't thin,” said Rachel.

“And isn't her father a senator?” Andy asked.

Rachel slipped on her pajama top, a stretchy cotton button-down imprinted with red hearts. Freshman year, she'd bought out Victoria's Secret, and had worn some kind of weird new outfit every time he visited, lacy bras and panties, sheer, short nightgowns, garments made with hooks and wires to pull her waist in and push her breasts up. Finally he'd told her that his favorite outfit was a plain white tank top and pajama bottoms loose enough that he could slip his hands inside of them.

Rachel made a face as she pulled on her bottoms. “State representative,” she said.

“So if her dad was a senator, could she be actually fat?”

Rachel shook her head. “Nope. If her dad was president, maybe. And that would only be if she had a gorgeous face and a four-point-oh, and her mom was a legacy.” She crossed the room, went to her closet, slipped her gown out of the plastic and held it up against her, frowning at her reflection in the full-length mirror. The dress was turquoise and strapless, with gold embroidery. “Are you getting ‘Princess Jasmine,' or just ‘slutty'?” she asked.

Andy didn't answer; wouldn't answer, wouldn't pretend that this was an actual problem. Rachel frowned, and then her face brightened. “Oh, and look! Look what I found for you!” She rehung the dress and stretched to reach the top shelf of the closet, letting Andy enjoy the view of her rear in the snug pajama pants. Then she handed him a little round beanie with a tassel on top. “Um, yeah,” he said, getting out of bed and setting it back on her desk. “No.”

She pouted in a way he normally found adorable. “It's a fez,” she said. “It's authentic.”

“Not wearing it.”

“But . . .”

“Rach,” he said, feeling the familiar itch, like he was going to jump out of his skin if he didn't find a way to start moving. He loved her. She was sweeter than any girl he'd ever met. She made him laugh, took him out of himself, made him feel light when he could feel so weighted down sometimes, being angy about old grievances and insults, real and imagined. He'd thought about her constantly during the two years after they met again in Atlanta, when he'd get letters that told him everything about what she was doing, what she was thinking, how she was feeling. He knew his letters were less revealing—she'd always teased him about writing like he was being charged for every drop of ink—but on the phone, he'd talk about practices and track meets, which of his teammates were working hard and which were goofing off, and she would listen to him, asking questions, recalling things he'd said weeks or even months before, indulging him with a patience he'd never imagined and certainly never experienced from anyone except Mr. Sills.

He and Rachel still wrote, and they still talked, but he thought that not only had the sorority sucked up most of her time but it had encouraged her worst impulses, turned her into a girl who cared too much about manicures and formal gowns and hardly had time to listen to him or any interest in the future beyond the next rush or the next dance.

Andy shifted from foot to foot. The night was cool and crisp, the air smelled like apples and the smoke from all those fireplaces, and there was a towpath that ran in a two-mile loop around the man-made lake that some wealthy Beaumont alum had had dredged so the crew team would have a place to practice. He could run a quick lap, maybe two. Rachel was looking at him, waiting for him to finish. He forced himself to hold still, drumming his fingers on the desk, next to the stupid hat. “You wanted me to rent a tux, so I rented a tux. Which, by the way, was not cheap. I came because I wanted to see you. I know you're busy and I don't want to be in your way, but I'm not your dress-up doll.”

She stepped close to him with her hair down and her face gleaming and her breath smelling like toothpaste. In spite of himself, he felt his body react. His hands slipped around her waist, cupping her bottom, pulling her close. “There's a prize for best-dressed couple,” she whispered, rolling her hips against him, then pulling back, then coming in again until he grabbed her, holding her still. She looked up at him, her eyes big, lashes fluttering. “My sorority gets points.”

Jesus. He let his hands drop. “Okay, okay,” she said, and laughed, and nuzzled against him, grabbing his hands and putting them back on her bottom. “Not that you wouldn't have looked adorable in the fez, but I get it. You're a man, not a Ken doll. Free will. Learned about it in philosophy class.” She walked to the door, stuck her head into the hallway, then grabbed a towel and grabbed his hand and pulled him back to the bathroom. “I already took a shower,” he said.

“Cleanliness is next to godliness.” There were three stalls, all in a row, with only curtains separating them. Rachel turned on all three showers and pulled the curtains aside, and then pulled him in with her, with all that hot water drumming down. For twenty minutes, as the room filled with steam, he whispered to her, making her laugh, before she filled her palm with bath gel, then took him in her hand, sliding with delicious slowness up to the tip and back down again. “Honey,” she said, with the water washing her face clean, slicking her hair back so that he could see her face without its frame of curls. “I love you.”

The next morning, he woke up ready to go again, but Rachel was out of bed before he could reach for her, giving him the kind of kiss he imagined long-married wives gave their husbands when they left for work. Andy made the bed, did his workout, showered and changed, and got one of Rachel's friends to wave him into the dining hall, which had a vaulted ceiling, marble floors, and long, heavy wooden tables where the students ate, or didn't eat (he'd once dined with some of Rachel's sisters and had spent thirty minutes watching them shift salad around their plates).

Andy had pancakes and turkey bacon, then sneaked into the library, which was lovely, like an old mansion full of books, all carved dark wood, gleaming brass lamps, and rows and rows of carrels. Andy found himself a nook with a big chair that overlooked the quad, and did his homework: Sociology of the Family, Abnormal Psychology, and a grueling plod through twenty pages of Aristotle for his philosophy seminar. Most of his teammates were educational foundation majors—gym teachers in training, in other words. A few of the even less academically inclined studied geology, commonly known as Rocks for Jocks, where the professors would pass you as long as you didn't fall asleep and snore too disruptively in their classrooms. Andy hadn't decided yet between comp lit and political science. He liked reading about how the world worked, about why people did what they did.