Among us three, we overlook the division, which is luck for me. Oomph fucks and washes. Sherry fucks. I wash.
But none of us yet is really political about it. Which makes us farther out than anybody here.
We three get together originally through the college system of pairing a “bright” roommate with a “good” one. Which gives you some idea, Oomph says, of the anti-intellectualism at the root of all college administrations.
When I overhear her say that, I am awestruck. I say, “A minute ago, I wasn’t even capable of thinking that thought myself, much less phrasing it. But the minute you said it, I was!” Which is an example of the rate of learning here.
“Soon as the pairing’s done,” Oomph answers, “we can all swap. Along the lines of sympathy the college hopes to avoid.”
So she and I let the two cocoanut cookies we’ve been paired off with go off into the sunset together—two very nice dumb Indianans, who both love school.
“You shouldn’t love school,” a girl standing near us says, “my older sister did and she got trench mouth.”
We turn, and there is Sherry, the filthiest beautiful blonde you are ever likely to see wearing Spanish suede shorts and a rubber life jacket. Or to smell. She has the single next door to us.
So in the end we get a boy we know to axe through the common wall between her room and ours—which the authorities ignore on the basis that in a year or so the dorm will be coed and physically ruined anyway. And there we are, ready to educate ourselves, which from one look around us we already know is the way it will get done.
Then Oomph, always the leader, says, “Let me tell you about myself. Now—my mother——”
Which Sherry quickly counters with, “Don’t you mean my father?”
And I say, “I’m a bastard, myself.”
And pr-ronto, we are friends, on a plane of subtlety which is given to few. Not more than maybe half the fifteen hundred of us. The rest, who are either too stoned or too square, are left for the faculty to educate. Plus a few of those stunned girls whom nobody knows why they are here, especially themselves. These days, the trend in the better universities is: You don’t only just go, you know why.
“Shee-yut, I know why I’m here,” Sherry says, “I’m in training to be real.” She likes to think her name just might be short for Scheherazade, but everyone knows her parents are top-flight account executives in a large ad agency, and the fact-fantasy borderline has been very difficult for her. She can’t even wear stuff like jeans, because one of her parents originated the word “sudsable.” And the only thing two years with a shrink did for her was to help her remember which. “Guess whom?”
None of us three is engaged in blaming our backgrounds. The last generation of backgrounds already did that. Our commune of three is aimed to balance out: Oomph’s inborn sophistication; my naïveté—which they both say comes of being brought up on the facts; and Sherry’s dirt, which is inarguable. The house rules are: Tolerance for all. And keep the beds far enough apart, to discourage dikiness.
On one thing we are all agreed. The difference between the genders is different here!
It doesn’t seem to depend only on fucking.
The switch is that everything else does! Diet, poetry, politics! Some girls won’t even fuck with a guy unless he eats the same. Fucking is charity too, just as much as giving your blood to an Ozark child or your kidney to your brother. Fucking is religion—you can slide like a glass bead down the life-force, arms locked with anybody from Fillmore East. That’s a rock theater; I haven’t been yet. Even before you do anything, you know all this. Fucking is music too, and ballet and art—it’s what you want to make it. But most of all—you can fuck the world.
“The only trouble,” Oomph says wearily at the end of one of these night watches, “the word’s wearing out; they’re gonna have to find a new word for it.” And Sherry, who’s writing a paper on Wittgenstein, says, “Tish, tish, then it’ll be a new thing.”
“Oh girls, everything’s all pouring out for me at once,” I say into the dark across the beds. Mine is in that beautiful axed-out opening. Axes in the home! “Education is like something I already knew!”
Except for the classes of course, which can be very interesting if you feel you have to be like that. It’s the extracurric which worries us, because it’s the part will turn out to be serious.
Mrs. O. is always telling us what extracurric meant in her day: college-sponsored socials and dances which nowadays don’t exist here, maybe in the funny papers in the Middle West. She comes from there, and has one of those hard, ovarian voices you can’t get away from, that seems to have no connection with the face. Hers is narrow Irish Angel. “Convent-bred and country-club cured,” Oomph says. “Draws men to bed or to church, often simultaneously.”
Sherry says the voice is the kind says to a man, “Many are fucked. Who chooses?” even when it’s asking for a cup of tea; Sherry kind of envies that.
I wonder if underneath it all Mrs. O. isn’t a starchy shit, maybe even strict as a wife.
“Oh no,” Oomph says. “Poor Mother, she’s easy enough in the general business of life. Meal anytime. Date anywhere. But she can’t help the dust is gathering on her life style.”
Sherry says softly, “Your mother would like us to forgive her for her hostility to us.”
Oomph says, “Sister, your training is paying off.”
This is all because Mrs. O. has developed a habit of dropping in on us, to loll on our floor in her Hencoop 1950 tweed skirt and sweater, drink our wine, and say things like, “My God, we freshmen still had to have a smoking room. To smoke in.” It bugs her we don’t smoke. Not the cancer stuff.
“You discover all our differences with such zest, Mother,” Oomph says gloomily—she hates being approved of, in any way.
And ten minutes later, there is Mrs. O. reading out a headline from the college newspaper, Omphalos. “My God, isn’t that wonderful, you kids don’t realize your own emancipation. Why look, right here after the weekly calendar, it says ‘Motherfuckers, unite!’”
We three groan, which may seem impolite of Sherry and me. We are bored with language by now; it’s such crap. We’re not verbalizing; we’re happening. But we are making a communal effort to understand Mrs. O.—which Oomph says is a gratuitous act. And Sherry says goes for her father, too. “I’ll never convince him he’s not important enough for me to understand.”
I am thinking of home. “Oh—I wish they all were,” I say. But we all know my hang-up.
I have to put all this down in some detail because of the orgy, which I would never have understood otherwise. And because I’ve been instructed a term paper must be in sequence, even if it is about yourself.
Sherry’s father dropped in once, but it wasn’t a success; he discovered our drop-in, the boy who lives in the dorm basement, in the furnace room right under us. “Why is he here?”
Sherry is sitting lotus-legged on the far side of the floor—stinking from three days in a pup tent on Montauk with a friend; “Healthy!” she said when she came back, but though it’s well into December by now, she hasn’t changed those shorts yet.
She looks up and says, “Howdy, Pap, and what is the Tarot telling us for today!” She takes a mean pleasure, she says, in talking how her father thinks we do—oh, the mean pleasures we take! Because she says he runs right back to the agency files and looks up all her references; he even uses them. In his work.
“I find that sad,” I say to Oomph later. “Because her references aren’t her. And he’ll never know that.” Oomph says, “Will she?”
Anyway, at the time he says, “I asked you, what is that boy doing in the basement. He’s got a regular setup there—is it sandbags?”
“No,” she says, “it’s cracked wheat. Wholesale, from East Tenth Street, that way he avoids the middleman. We chip in for the skimmed milk.”
“He goes to classes for us too,” says Oomph. “He’s getting our education.”
“And sleeping
with you?” says her father to Sherry.
What a phrase for it, Oomph says later—it certainly tells all!
Sherry looks him in the eye, she can’t wait to. “Not particularly.” But what really breaks him, she finds later, is when he writes the administration about the drop-in and gets a stiff note advising him to stuff it; they’re having a hard enough time pretending not to know.
After he goes, Sherry takes a shower in celebration, she’s really been saving up her dirt for him, and we are relaxing over a little hard study for a change when Cutchy, the drop-in—James Boyd McCutcheon the third or the fourth, he likes to pretend he’s too stoned to recall—woozes up the stairs with his hair in an Afro haystack—you could rent it out to people for romance, Oomph told him once—and says, “What was his bag?”
“He’s my father,” Sherry says, and we all sigh, because that expresses it. It. Them. All. Lots of people look like their cars, she says, but Connecticut people look more like them than most. Her father’s is a Cadillac.
“Well, he’s hopelessly sincere,” says Cutchy, meaning insincere of course, you have to know our references. “I gather he’s made a career of it. But I hear he paints on Sundays.”
“A successful career,” Oomph says. “How do you think she pays for your milk?”
“Yahm,” Cutchy says, meaning yessum, which has a whole lot of history in it. His. “Well, he gives me the idea maybe I should be in the sack with her more for it. Sherry, want come downstairs?”
She saws her towel up and down thoughtfully; she’s a waverer. And rarely decides against.
“No you don’t,” says Oomph. “She’s just changed those shorts.”
So we’re all four drinking the grappa from the Montauk friend’s still—we’re not much on alcohol but this is nature stuff—when Mrs. O. drops in for her group therapy. She knows about Cutch, but hasn’t met him yet. Same for him.
“Meet Cutchy, Mrs. O.,” says Sherry. “He’s supposed to be from Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County, and makes like he’s a black albino, but he isn’t. He’s an albino, but a white one.”
“Meet my mother, Cutch,” says Oomph, “but watch out for her, she marries role players. Whom she then deflates.” Sherry and I know about Mr. O., a tough stockbroker who Oomph says was so deep in his role he was almost natural, and so thick-skinned he lasted eighteen months before he divorced Mrs. O., who refers to him as “still playing the love game.” With her. Of course the reason she is hard to talk to is because she is communicating all the time. And very conscious of it in other people.
She keeps following us around, because she thinks we know how. When she isn’t denying it.
“Oh you young ones, always phrasing your life before you even have it,” she says now. “Leading our lives took us time.”
It kills us she can be so perceptive and then stop. For instance she’ll say of an East Village couple, twenty-eight-year-old ex-folkies who keep a headshop-and-dress boutique Oomph took her to, “Must be hard to start life wearing granny glasses, being called your old man’s old lady, and then find yourself settling down.” But then she’ll say again, “We took our time.”
Sinister. They’re always trying to give us time like an object; Oomph says they find us terrifying because we have lost it, and have no intention of acquiring it.
“Time is property to them,” Oomph says. “Twenty years after the bomb—they’re unbelievable.”
Sherry says, “I said.”
I’m too old-fashioned on this to do more than gape. Back home the girls are still so bogged down in time in the old way I understand it; who knows, I may even be that way myself? A bomb-virgin, so to speak. Maybe virginity goes all through a person?
But right now Oomph only says, “Don’t mind my mother, Cutchy. Her intellect is her thorn.”
“Evening,” Cutchy says politely. “We are just discussing, do those liberation girls who chop off their hair for freedom really want to cut off some man’s balls? Scares me right much, down in my basement.”
Mrs. O. says for his sake she hopes they’ll stick to hair.
Sherry says, “Oh why do those chicks make such a fuss? If gender’s on the way out, don’t we all know which?”
“Mind telling?” Cutchy says, though we’ve been over all this before. He’s sore she said he was white. Which is an understandable hang-up for an albino.
It’s smug of me, but I never get tired understanding people’s hang-ups. My own most of all.
“A woman can go get herself inseminated,” Oomph is saying. “And take the future of the race with her. But you can’t put an egg basket in a man.” She still has her hair though.
I put in my two cents, which is seldom. “Navel to navel, Cutchy—there’s more behind ours.”
And I tell them what you told me, Dr. Werner.
I say, “Education is really just finding out your thoughts aren’t only yours, the faculty says.”
“Or even theirs,” Oomph says.
“How is the faculty?” Mrs. O. asks, like of an invalid.
We look to Cutchy, our representative.
He says, “Ma’am, they’re taking us through all the crimes in history, and then asking us what to do about them. Or saying, ‘Go do.’”
“Well in my day, they didn’t ask,” she says brightly.
It’s warm and reflective in our room, being so near the furnace room, and I am thinking how much cozier it is to bear the intellectual burden of the world in congress, instead of like nine weeks ago when I was doing it all by myself. And have like a glass of wine while you’re doing it, meanwhile stretching your flesh in a new jumpsuit, of which when you brought it home a whole floorful of girls approved. Plus the boys who are staying overnight with them.
Turns out Sherry is having her own thoughts about the comforts here. Being clean always unsettles her. She says, uneasy, “Hang around here, and you begin to feel you could almost do without men.”
“Can it,” says Oomph. “It’s only an hour since you got back.”
And I am thinking dreamily what one bf the faculty said to me—or maybe to the air—after his political science class; talking to them privately makes you feel like a stool pigeon here, maybe they feel the same. But in the end each side keeps moving to keep the lines open.
“Doctor Werner, you know him, you know what he said to me?” I say. “He said, ‘And how are all you devils stewing in your broth?’”
And I think right away, devils or not, yes we’re like that here; any of my brethren moves an arm, I feel it in the leg. Youth is the broth! And maybe political science is my major!
Cutchy says, “Anybody hungry?”
Mrs. O. says, “Who is this man Werner?—what a nerve! With what we pay for you to go here!”
And that’s it, folks. Whatever they say unites us against them in the end, Oomph says. But I know money is the worst. Especially when you’re living on theirs. Beyond a small diamond sold, I’m not, because of a shockeroo of a scholarship, that turned up after I sent in my application essay. But I can feel it in the others, through the broth.
It’s terrible to watch your friends close in on an oldie. Who doesn’t even know. And to find you almost like it.
It starts with Oomph saying in a silvery voice, “Hungry, Cutchy? My mother’s taking us out to supper.”
And Cutchy moving in as if he’s only any undergrad after a free meal. “You mean she’s taking us all?” But like the poor hen doesn’t know what he’s got in his hand. Behind his back. Which she doesn’t.
She’s looking up at him, like the pinched expression Werner has put on her face has carried over to him. But it’s still a social gesture.
After all, they’re only hitting her for dinner, I think. On her alimony.
They’re not going to serve her up on a trencher with an apple in her mouth and the same hard, rosy china glaze I saw on a suckling once—long pig. Then why do I think of it?
Because Cutch is kind of looming over her, six-four to her five-eight. “Awfu
l nice of you, Ma’am, when in your day boss lady like you would give water boy like me the white feather.”
She snaps back, “What’ve you been reading, what’dy’a mean in my day, that was World War One!” But it’s her last snap. “You mean you’re…you’re——?”
On the run? Evading? What will she say, if she can say it? Dodger. “Watch their eyes,” Cutch is always telling us, “how they grow foxy with the law, their bones are loaded with it.” Even Sherry is intent.
He says, “Ma’am, you think we albinos naturally like basements, à la moles, or something?”
Sherry says softly, “Moles are brown.” It’s only she knows his hang-up, like we all know each other’s here. He’s not even an albino, much less a black one. It’s his put-on. He’s probably only one of those pale blond types with broad noses and frizz hair; why he’s from Princeton. And he’s not evading because he has to, at least not at the beginning; he started out here on an exchange. If he went in for credit, he’d even be near the top; he does more work than any of us. Head to toe, hair to draft card, it’s his put-on. Which is holding him up. Like a white plume. The reference, Dr. Werner, is to Cyrano.
Mrs. O. says nervous, “Oh, of course. It’s just—Oomph’s father is Navy; it’s just her background.”
Oomph says freezing, “Lean on the alimony, Mother. Not on him.”
And I’m with her. Background—how dare they mention it. Oh I’m getting politically minded all right!
Cutch says, “Ma’am—I confuse all wars.”
“Oh, so do I,” she says. Brightly. “I agree.”
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