by Linda Keir
“They’re weird about having you at the cabin because of the boy-girl thing,” Ian used to say when we were first together.
Never mind half the kids here seem to have a place on the same lake, and Ian’s house is ground zero for all get-togethers, coed and otherwise.
“They’re super traditional when it comes to our relationship,” Ian says now.
We both know it’s code for You’re Jewish.
We both know they’re worried that he’ll marry me, one of Glenlake’s glorious tokens of diversity. Good thing he didn’t fall for Crystal Thomas, who is (gasp) African American. I mean, how bad would it look at the country club that I’m not technically eligible to join, due to my dark curls, discernible curves, telltale nose, and otherwise obvious non-Episcopalian heritage? When his parents mention the place, which they somehow always manage to do (“Oh, this pasta salad is just like the one the club added to their menu”), I want to make the entirely bourgeois statement that my dad could buy the place outright.
But I don’t.
Instead, I smile, nod with feigned interest, use my forks correctly, and act altogether like I went to cotillion in Beverly Hills. Never mind that I hadn’t even heard of cotillion until I reached the Midwest.
“How are the college applications going?” Mr. Copeland asked.
“Well, thank you,” I said.
“I assume you’re applying to schools in California?” Mrs. Copeland asked a little too hopefully.
“A few,” I said.
“Great,” the Copelands said in unison.
“But I’m looking all over.”
“Have you settled on a number-one choice?” Mr. Copeland asked.
“I’m waiting until I see where I get in.”
“Smart,” both of them said, again in unison.
“I’m hoping she gets into Smith,” Ian proclaimed.
“Right down the street from Amherst,” Biz said and took a dainty bite of salad that somehow required an inordinate amount of chewing. “Wouldn’t that be nice.”
“Can’t wait until you’re wearing purple and white, son,” Mr. Copeland said, patting Ian on the back.
“I’m sure Andi will have lots of schools to choose from,” Mrs. Copeland said.
Monday, September 30, 1996
We had a sub in poetry class today. Dallas was sick or had a meeting or was in the middle of a poem he had to finish.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed. I worked super hard on the nature poem and was looking forward to his reaction.
Georgina seemed even more bummed than I was. She has a full-on crush on him. She says she doesn’t, but she talks about him all the time. She claims it’s because we’re both in the same class and he’s such a demanding teacher. Maybe so, but she’s usually saying something about the “cute for an older guy” plaid shirt he’s wearing, wondering if there’s a Mrs. Dallas Walker, declaring him “probably hot” as a teenager, or mentioning that she saw him driving a cool old car.
I didn’t dare tell her that I had a ride in said car, or that he was wearing the plaid shirt in question on the nature walk we took together. I definitely didn’t mention to Georgina that his hands had been on my shoulders. When the sub, Mrs. Cates, asked me how I’d gotten my inspiration for the “delightfully evocative ‘Eating Acorns,’” I said, “A walk around Lake Loomis,” and left it at that.
Tuesday, October 8, 1996
The great thing about Ian and me is that we never annoy each other.
Almost never, anyway.
Except for tonight.
For one thing, he kept smacking his gum while we were working on essay prompts for our college applications. For another, he kept trying to kiss me and/or feel me up whenever he thought no one in the study lounge was looking.
He can be really handsy sometimes.
I might not have minded the groping, but his constant need for my input on practically every sentence he wrote was making me nuts. I totally get that I’m “the writer” of the two of us, but we were only doing rough drafts we’ll be developing tomorrow in college prep class and rewriting a million more times before they’re ready to send off.
Either way, I really couldn’t get traction on the prompt I was working on:
Write a haiku, limerick, or short poem that best represents you.
Ian and Andi
Together forever more
But not right now, ’kay?
Thursday, October 10, 1996
“The applications committee must be hard up for cheap laughs,” Dallas said, looking over the essay prompt. “I mean a college-admission limerick, for god’s sake? How might that go?
“There once was a boy named Dallas / Who wanted to live in a palace. / He went to college, / Seeking money and knowledge, / But learned mostly what to do with his phallus.”
“Ha,” I said, willing my cheeks not to turn crimson.
“I’m glad you’re amused.” Dallas put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
Even a month ago, there was no way I’d have considered answering a college prompt in verse, much less tried to come up with a limerick on the spot.
“There once was a girl from Glenlake Academy . . .”
The words weren’t even out of my mouth before I was trying to figure out what, if anything, actually rhymed with academy. Agony? Strategy? Vanity? Extended family?
“She wanted to go to college so madly.”
I had no idea where I was going, but committed anyway.
“That she asked for some tips / From a teacher so hip / And he taught her to rhyme dirty, but badly.”
“Ha, indeed.” Dallas smiled and shook his head. “But as said hip teacher, I feel obliged to advise you that submitting a limerick is a risky gambit. The better it is, the more people on the admissions board it’s likely to offend.”
“What about haiku?” I asked.
“Haiku is for Japanese seventeenth-century masters and twentieth century poseurs.”
“Which is why I’ve been working on this,” I said. I handed him a poem I’d finally started during my study session in the library with Ian and then reworked with the college counselor.
“Where are you applying, anyway?” he asked, scanning the poem.
“My reach schools are Stanford, Columbia, and Brown.”
“But of course.”
“I’m also applying to NYU, Berkeley, Northwestern, Bowdoin . . .”
“And, let me guess, Tufts, as a backup?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of University of Iowa—for the writers’ program.”
“I’d save that one for grad school,” he said. “That is, if you think you’ll grow in that little hothouse of overfertilized verse and prose.”
“Isn’t that a little harsh?” I asked.
“I like the first line of your poem,” he said, changing the subject. “Who is this prompt for, anyway?”
“Smith.”
“Great school for writers.”
“So you approve?”
“Sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily have pegged you as a Smithie, though.”
“Ian’s going to Amherst if he gets in,” I said, his name both escaping my lips and somehow sticking slightly to my tongue. “So we were thinking—”
“We were thinking?” Dallas asked. “Or he was thinking?”
I couldn’t answer that question, so I didn’t.
“Promise me you won’t automatically buy into what they tell you, especially about how you have to take the overpriced, overrated, bullshit Ivy trip,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Not unless it’s where you really want to go.”
I was thrown off but also oddly relieved. Since arriving at Glenlake, I’ve felt nothing but pressure about where I’ll get into college. I wasn’t entirely surprised, though. After all, hadn’t Dallas arrived at the school accompanied by the legend that he’d given average grades to the supposedly best and brightest? “So you�
�re telling me not to do what everyone else tells me to do but what you think I should do?”
“You’d be way better off,” he said with a grin. “Speaking of which, this poem you’ve given me definitely represents what you can do.”
“But . . . ?”
“It doesn’t represent you.”
I exhaled with frustration. “So it’s back to the drawing board?”
“Hardly,” he said, and began to recite a poem from memory: “Eating Acorns.”
My poem.
What is a nut but a seed
A germ of a thing that will grow?
An idea of an oak in a smooth brown hull
A vessel for its journey into the dirt
What is a girl but a seedling
Stretching toward the sky?
Seeking air, seeking sun, seeking water
Alone yet part of the forest
Seed, taproot, shoot, seedling
My teeth break the skin
The acorn’s meat
Is strange and sweet
“That,” he said. “That’s you.”
Saturday, October 12, 1996
Tonight is my fourth and final Fall Fling. Georgina thinks I need to wear the bright-pink linen dress I wore to the first dance freshman year and then request that the DJ play “Love Shack” by the B-52s, the first song Ian and I ever danced to. Sylvie, being Georgina’s ultimate hanger-on and yes-woman, of course agrees. (If I thought we’d see less of Sylvie after she got placed in a different house than us, I was wrong.) I was planning to wear the silver metallic Calvin Klein dress I bought while I was home. I kind of feel like people expect me to bring the “girl from California” style, especially to events like this, but we still have the Winter Formal coming up. To be honest, that’s probably a more suitable occasion to bust out something slinky and backless. Besides, I’ll match better with Ian, who will be wearing the charcoal suit and white shirt he always wears. Not that I’m complaining. He looks cute and preppy in it—just like he does in everything. I swear, he could make leather pants look like they came from Brooks Brothers.
No matter what, I’m looking forward to slow-dancing with Ian, who (despite how antiquated and Midwestern it still sounds) definitely picked up a move or two at cotillion.
Sunday, October 13, 1996
Top Ten Reasons Why It Was the Worst. Night. Ever.
1. Ian got caught up prepartying with the guys on his floor and told me he’d meet me at the dance.
2. They all showed up together half an hour late, calling each other “broham.”
3. He gave me a contraband Jell-O shot from his jacket pocket “as an early anniversary gift.”
4. It tasted like orange cough syrup.
5. I looked and felt like a ninth grader in the dress, which was a little too middle school and a lot too neon.
6. Ian didn’t even remember that I’d worn it before, anyway.
7. He was in the bathroom when the DJ played “Love Shack.”
8. While we were slow-dancing to “Nothing Compares 2U,” Patrick Morris decided it would be hilarious and unquestionably super mature to give Ian a wedgie.
9. Dallas was one of the faculty chaperones.
10. When he wasn’t looking bored or bemused by Ian and the idiots known as his “Cue Sports Society,” he was totally flirting it up in the corner with Miranda Darrow, the headmaster’s big-haired, bigger-boobed trophy wife.
Somehow, watching Dallas flirt with Mrs. Darrow bothered me more than almost anything else.
Monday, October 14, 1996
To add insult to injury, Daaa-lisss (as Georgina drawls, like she’s ever spent more than a weekend anywhere in Texas) was our faculty dinner table host tonight. I might have been pleased that he chose to sit at one of the long “community” tables in the seniors’ section of the dining hall if she hadn’t spent the whole meal preening, flirting, and trying to get his attention.
“Daaa-lisss”—hair flip—“please pass the butter . . .”
“Daaa-lisss”—giggle—“while you’re pouring dressing, do you mind putting a little on my salad?”
“Daaa-lisss, are we going to do a unit on Pablo Neruda?”
As if all that wasn’t obvious enough, she even had the balls to ask if he had “a wife or a girlfriend or anyone you’re, you know, serious about?”
He told her he didn’t, which is a mistake with Georgina, but she was actually the least of it. Sylvie and Patrick, who apparently made out at some point during the dance (when he wasn’t giving people wedgies), were alternately ignoring each other, stealing furtive glances, and making everyone else feel uncomfortable. Despite, or because of, the palpable sexual tension, Michael and Jacob spent dinner trying to crack each other up by calling the other “gay” using increasingly obnoxious slang.
“Do you two need some alone time to work this out?” Dallas asked at the tail end of “sausage jockey,” causing Michael to blush and Jacob to spray milk out his nose.
In the awkward silence that followed, Ian tried to reestablish dinner decorum. Everything was yes sir, no sir, and please pass the potatoes, sir. Given that Dallas is faculty and we are students, I should have been proud of my boyfriend’s efforts. Not to mention his flawless table manners. I usually am.
“Dallas likes to be called Dallas,” I whispered in his ear.
“Dallas, sir,” he said the next time.
I wanted to die a little.
Especially when Dallas said, “Hanging is the word, sir; if you be ready for that, you are well cooked.”
Everyone at the table, including Ian, looked at him like he was speaking in tongues.
“Shakespeare,” I said, totally guessing but apparently getting it right.
As Dallas smiled and everyone else nodded like they’d known that, too, I counted down the minutes until I could get out of there.
The second we were excused, I mumbled something about needing to do homework I’d actually completed, then did my best to get lost in the crowd heading toward the double doors.
Dallas must have exited through the faculty doors while I was stuck in a slow-moving cluster of sophomores, because he was already in the quad, leaning against the brick pillar closest to the student entrance when I made it outside.
“Andi,” he said, my name seeming to echo despite the babble of voices surrounding us.
As I walked over, wondering why he’d waited for me, I noticed for the first time how uncomfortable he looked in the khakis, ill-fitting button-down shirt, and too-short tie he was required to wear for Sunday dinner. How un-Dallas he looked out of his usual jeans and faded chambray or plaid shirt.
“I volunteer to be a table host in the hopes of enjoying your scintillating dinner conversation,” he said, “and you barely say a word.”
“It’s just that . . .” I shrugged, unable to answer.
“What?”
The courtyard was starting to clear, but it was still an awkward place to be having this conversation. I’d bolted from the table, so Ian, Georgina, and the gang would be coming out at any moment.
I glanced over my shoulder to make sure they weren’t already in the doorway. “I was so embarrassed by the way my friends were acting.”
“They aren’t a reflection of you,” he said, tucking a stray piece of hair behind my ear.
Then he recited a verse of poetry. I like it when Dallas reads or recites—he doesn’t do that lofty “poet voice” everyone uses to make themselves sound more important. He just says the words like they matter.
“This town slumbers in its blanket / The mayor wears a mask / The police chief has plugged his ears / The breath of their wives is deep and dry / No one even murmurs in their sleep / But you and I are awake!”
“Who wrote that?” I asked.
“Me,” he said. “It’s called ‘Bloom.’”
Tuesday, October 15, 1996
Bloom as in a flower or Bloom as in my last name?
It had to be a coincidence.
Unless it’s a s
ubconscious noncoincidence.
He’s a famous poet, for fuck’s sake. Everything he does is intentional. The subconscious is his conscious.
He told me he’d volunteered to be a table host in order to enjoy my dinner conversation.
And he’d tucked my hair behind my ear.
But that could be fatherly. Or teacherly. We definitely have a teacher-student bond.
Which makes perfect sense given that I’m Andi Bloom, literary It Girl at Glenlake.
Bloom as in the poem’s title . . .
Friday, October 18, 1996
Ian keeps asking if everything’s okay.
I keep telling him I’m just stressed out with college apps, keeping up my grades, and the normal stuff.
Which is true.
I can’t tell him everything feels weirdly not okay but that I’m probably just overthinking things. Things I can’t even get myself to write.
Tonight, when he asked, I said, “I’m just having really bad cramps,” which was also true, even if they weren’t bad enough to bail on the screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which I really wanted to see (again). “I think I need to hang out in my room instead.”
“I’ll stay with you if you want,” he offered.
“Go see the movie,” I said, feeling guiltier than I already did. “It’s okay.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, watching the other kids file past and disappear into the auditorium.
“Positive,” I said.
I meant it, too, even if I’m not positive about anything else where we’re concerned.
Monday, October 21, 1996
Dallas showed up to class late, hair and eyes wilder than usual, looking like he’d been up all night. Per the syllabus, we were starting a unit on Langston Hughes.
“I sing the body electric,” he said.
Which I assumed meant we were going to discuss Walt Whitman instead?
He turned to the chalkboard and began to write.
