“Can you believe we did it?”
Vanessa looked into his wide white face, his lips full and red, the dark brown roots of his hair showing through the blond. She had this profound feeling that he was not her. It felt in that moment that no one was, and also that she was not herself.
That night she saw H.R. hit Dexter McDonald, a kid from her math class who was thin as a stick of kindling but as bendable as putty, with the mike. The kid showed off his bloody wound all night. Sean nodded seriously when Dexter bent to show the blood on his forehead. Then everyone began to dance like crazy, harder than she’d seen. She watched the boys, who did not play soccer or lacrosse or rugby, finally finding a reason to throw their bodies into one another. They came at one another so hard, the club had to stop the music, warning that the second floor of the old building could collapse.
This shit was not on the radio. The radio was her father. The radio was Tatti, her classical records held tight to her chest. Then the show was over and after they’d dropped off several kids and their boards, including Dexter, who kept checking the rearview from the backseat to make sure the dried blood was still there, Jason and Vanessa went to her house and into the backyard, where they had sex again, at her urging, because she thought it would feel different this time, but it was just the same. Exactly.
Vanessa continued toward her mother’s party in Dupont Circle, past the two roaring lions and onto the Taft Bridge. She flicked her second cigarette out the window and imagined it sailing down the Potomac, like one of those kayaks roaring along the Great Falls, crashing into boulders and heading over waterfalls. A protest was always gathered on the other side of the bridge, but tonight, in the dark, she couldn’t tell which of the causes it was: gay pride or peace.
Over the bridge, down Connecticut, Kalorama on the right. Tonight would be horrid. She pictured Jason on his twin bed, listening to the Slickee Boys or White Boy and breaking the sealed plastic on some obscure music magazine to read an interview with Ian MacKaye. She imagined Jason helping his mother put the dishes in the dishwasher after dinner, Jason who threw off his shirt and ran around in mad circles with Sean as the Teen Idles played Reno. How was that the same person? She wanted everyone to be a single entity: all those nesting wooden dolls digested by the biggest one. Whole.
Vanessa circled the block, looking for parking; the Police sang, I’ll send an s.o.s. to the world. I hope that someone gets my . . . She passed the house twice, a soft light in the dining room. The Police were so overrated, she thought, watching the Christmas lights still blinking on a massive tree, then the brighter, violent light of the kitchen in the next window, her mother passing by, arms cradling a basket of vegetables. The sound of Sting’s voice seemed like a question, but not one whose answer was terribly pressing. And it was so radio-friendly. I hope that someone gets my . . . Vanessa continued to troll the block, waiting for a space to open, so she could get inside and get this night over with.
CHAPTER 5
Transfiguring
September 1979
When it came to deciding on college, Benjamin responded so clearly to his grandfather’s voice of dissent. That, and Columbia had rejected him. Because I refused to give them money, Dennis claimed when the thin envelope arrived. Universities are just the same as corporations; they run on capitalism like everything else.
Once, who Ben was had seemed so clear to him: he was running down a long green field. He’d always sought a goal, and he was a swath of blue shorts, a swish of tanned flesh against the bright green AstroTurf, a body continually moving toward it. When he’d come home after soccer practice, stinking of sweat and dirt, but pleasantly spent through, he imagined his future in sports and a life of teammates, and practices and coaches, games won, and also lost, orange cones and deflated balls, nets ripped and sewn, whistles blown, yellow cards thrown, uniforms pulled on and off and on again, girls waiting on the sidelines or high in the bleachers, everything a part of this beautiful and knowable structure that being on a team had allowed him.
But last winter that image had begun to collapse. The resulting transfiguration was due largely to Sigmund. Ben thought of his grandfather on the white living-room couch rubbing his hands together, readying to speak: Without conflict, true true conflict, there is no movement forward, he’d begin. And the protests, the real protests, started with the workers! Any protest against the Vietnam War, any picket line, we can’t really understand it without going back to the Bolsheviks; we really can’t. Everything comes from before. We were really under the spell of that revolution—I was only a boy, but it was this amazing thing. The workers revolted! It was unheard of. And I could say, because this is my point of view, that everything from there is in decline. And people here started to believe it could happen as well. Of course capitalism is a very powerful thing, he’d say, and to prove his point he’d go get a box of cereal from the kitchen. Holding the box up high and shaking it, he’d rail about how that box was intended to make boys like Benjamin think merely to eat that cereal would transform them into strong athletes. Which Ben had of course believed it would.
That winter Ben began to listen, and in so doing his sense of sight seemed also to heighten, and he saw himself transformed. Now before stepping into the shower after practice, that image he once held so close—of winning—dissipated. What replaced this idea of running down a field was one of him alone at a desk piled high with books and papers. Benjamin was bent over his own work, but from where he looked in, he could never get close enough to see what was printed on those pages that held him there until long after dark. Was it a timeline, an equation, a symbol, a fairy tale? The image had such clarity, and at the same time, it was blank.
It was this voice and not the voice of his coach yelling at him, Pass now! and not the voice of his teammates screaming, Here! Over here! as they got closer to the goal, but Sigmund’s voice Ben heard when he decided on Brandeis. And he heard his grandfather’s voice when he turned around in the tiny dorm room that looked out over a stone-rimmed pond, to hug his father and gently tell his weeping mother, good-bye.
Unfortunately for Benjamin, his grandfather’s perorations came too late. Because by the time he arrived at Brandeis University he’d missed everything. It was September 1979, and he’d missed History, those years of resistance and protest, which was the very reason he was here, and not at some Southern school with its emphasis on sport. What was he made of before? Snakes and snails and puppy-dog tails . . . that’s what Grandma Tatti had always told him. Vanessa was sugar and spice; what a load of crap. Vanessa was filled with a lot of bullshit—no beer, no steak, no weed. She was empty! And anyway, since when did opting out mean anything?
Because he had left home, nerves exposed, and he was ready to opt in. He wanted in on all of it. But where the hell was everything? Where were the burning bras and draft cards? Where were the heirs to the Ten Most Wanted on the FBI list, who all had gone to Brandeis? Who would be the successors to Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman? The first few days of school had revealed that the heirs to activism were a bunch of pre-law and pre-med students from New Jersey; it was good riddance to everything those sixties radicals had stood for. The only organizing Ben could find was a freshman orientation in the student center called Fun Fair!, no joke, and here Ben was partnered with several horsey, dark-curly-haired girls from New Jersey—he would soon learn this was the Brandeis type—and a dorm “meet and greet” where he and his dormmates were asked to reveal their best scar stories. Benji had bent his head and parted his hair to show the lightning scar, evidence of a fall off the bench freshman year that nearly cracked open his skull. (Yes, it’s true, the ever-so-coordinated Benji fell off the bench . . .)
Arnie Lefkowitz’s scar story was his nose job. Arnie Lefkowitz. How the two of them had ended up as roommates was beyond Benjamin, who had written his interests fairly earnestly on the form—playing soccer and ice hockey, watching baseball and basketball, sometimes football. The only thing he and Arnie had in common was that neithe
r smoked. Arnie had a large, doughy body with disproportionately small feet and was from New Jersey. Ben was the only person in his dorm not from New Jersey. So far he had only met two people on campus who were not from New Jersey: Rajani Guptas, from India, and the delectable Rayna Zahavi, from Tel Aviv. And though this was not in any way a problem, Ben assured everyone, Arnie was gay.
Arnie and his identical twin brother, Michael, also gay, with or without self-knowledge, Ben was not sure, adored tap dancing and show tunes, as well as their twin jobs at the campus bookstore. Hi, Arnie, hi, Michael, the girls all sang when they went in for their Snickers bars and Yoplaits before lunch. But were they taunting them, or flirting? Both boys always giggled.
Not three days of school had passed when Ben walked in on Arnie blasting the sound track from Follies and tapping to “Who’s That Woman?” Ben had opened the door to Arnie screaming, his hands moving in large circles, his little feet tapping away: Lord, Lord, Lord, that woman is . . . Me! Me! Me! he sang breathlessly.
“Sorry,” Ben had said, quickly closing the door. He put his back against the door and breathed deeply.
After a brief moment, the music was turned off and Arnie cracked open the door, a towel slung over his thick neck. “It’s okay, Ben. Sondheim just gets me carried away, you know?”
“Not really.” Ben looked down and could see Arnie was wearing leg warmers.
“Come on, Ben! Sondheim!”
Ben found it impossible not to like him.
What else? The usual sign-ups for classes and clubs, the purchasing of outrageously expensive textbooks, and the barbecues and keg parties—slim pickings compared to the wild stories of drinking and debauchery and serious sportsmanship that Nick at Notre Dame would tell—that signaled an East Coast liberal arts education had officially begun.
Ben had already screwed an Israeli and gotten drunk at several “illegal” ZBT frat parties when it happened: finally, a sign. A ripple of dissent, a window onto the past. In response to the announcement that the university intended to serve pork and shellfish in the non-kosher dining areas, a protest had risen up, and proud signs were posted all over dorms and dining halls: BLTs coming to you soon! It was scandalous—serving pork at an institution founded in Jewish law? The uproar was tremendous, and protests were spearheaded outside all the dining halls, including Sherman, the cafeteria on the south rim of the Massell Quad and directly across from Ben’s dorm.
Students stomped around the rim of Yakus Pond with handmade posters: First it’s shrimp, next the camps! And Pork is dirty and Kosher food is clean food! The kosher and many non-kosher diners were livid, as were members of the larger Jewish community, who came in from Boston to give speeches on the singular importance of maintaining Brandeis’s history. Quotas were mentioned several times, as were the hypothetical desires of the righteous Justice Louis Brandeis. Even Albert Einstein’s opinion was considered on the What would Al say? placards, which was how Ben learned that originally the school was to be named for Einstein, but they’d fought over issues of fund-raising and spending.
Those who supported the university, in favor of pork and shellfish, were also represented, and these few protesters who were protesting the protest carried their own signs and banners: Diversity is the spice of life and Internationalize our eating!
Ben had to pass the dissenters at breakfast, and while he usually ate lunch up the hill in the student center near his classes, he passed them each evening at dinner as well, including an olive-skinned, black-haired, short, big-breasted, and as revealed when she held up her sign—Get your rules out of our kitchens!—very hirsute Rachel Feinglass. Yet despite her hairy armpits—the hairiest he had seen on any woman, or perhaps any person—he found himself brushing by her on his way to meet his new friends in Sherman.
“Come stand with me,” she said when his arm touched hers.
“Me?”
“What’s your name?” Her teeth were incredibly white against her tanned face.
“Ben.”
“Benji,” she said. “Sweet. I’m Rachel. Want to hold the sign?”
He shrugged and looked around at the scrappy group of protesters. It had been four days and the intensity had obviously waned. Just this morning it was reported in the Brandeis Justice that talks had resumed, and soon a verdict would be handed down.
“Sure,” he said. “But can I just say? What’s the big deal?”
“Benji.” Rachel put her hot palm on his cold shoulder. “It’s not about the pork and shellfish, you know that, right?”
“I know. But it kind of is about that, you know?” The sign seemed to wilt in his hands, and realizing this, he hoisted the wooden splint upright with both hands. “I mean, that’s the issue at hand.”
“Uh-uh.” Rachel shook her head. “This is about choice. This is about making our own decisions, about being free. This is about truth, about what this university is supposed to stand for. This is a participatory democracy. I’m a vegetarian, what do I care if I can get a club sandwich here? But soon they’ll be telling us we can’t get birth control on campus.”
Just Rachel’s mention of those two words, birth control, uttered from the same mouth that housed those two straight rows of blinding white teeth, sent a shot of electricity straight down to Ben’s crotch. He felt a line starting from his throat and bisecting him straight through.
“You’re so fucking right!” He stood up straight and leaned the sign against his shoulder. He put his free hand in his pocket.
“You have to make your own revolution,” she said. “We can sit here and just beat off, or we can do something!” Rachel looked over at the ten people on her side of the debate. “Every view must be questioned. And for every view there is an equal and opposing position.”
Ben had heard this before, minus the beating-off part, but did girls really do that? Could they? He imagined what that might look like. Anyway, he shook the titillating image away; it all sounded new to him. It felt specific to them. This girl is phenomenal, Ben thought, though from this moment on, he would be Benji. And right then, as if to tether him to his own past that lacked any sort of political mobilization whatsoever, he envisioned Nikol Stathakis in her blue-and-yellow cheerleading uniform, her tanned legs and arms emerging from the polyester at her center. Nikol had been one of the few girls he’d balled in high school for more than a couple of weeks. Probably he thought of her now because of the dark skin. Or maybe because Nikol set Rachel, this voluptuous fount of radical thought, in relief. Opposite, but not necessarily equal, he thought, remembering the first time he and Nikol had sex in his bed when his parents were away, and though they’d had the whole evening, he had been quick, then they’d just lain there, not a thing to say to each other. He remembered the song on the radio: Thinking of you’s working up my appetite, looking forward to a little afternoon delight . . . More due to his discomfort than his desire, though her body had truly been astounding, Ben had kissed her neck and rolled on top of her, entering her again. Nikol was rumored to have a porno video in her school locker and Playgirl pages torn from the magazine and pinned up over her bed. Once, after a country-club bonfire several blocks from the Goldstein house, they’d walked to his house and, though his whole family was home asleep, snuck into the basement—a cold room that smelled of his father’s sweaty balls, with chalky walls that left markings on whatever body part had the displeasure of making accidental contact with them—and done it in an old sleeping bag he’d found rolled up behind the couch.
Unlike Nikol, Rachel Feinglass was incredibly short, a little bit stout, and had ideas; she had what he had come to college—to this college, the same college that was about to take away his right to choose what he ate—to find.
“There’s a party in Rosenthal tonight.” Benji pointed to the dorm of suites where Peter Cox and Roland Berger, juniors from his American Protest! class lived. “Want to come with? Around nine?”
Rachel reached for her sign. “Go eat.” She pushed him toward the cafeteria doors. “I’ll
meet you right here.” She kicked the ground. “At nine thirty.”
Benji nodded. He looked up to see the pond, reflecting the tree branches in the still, clear water. The sun was setting and he could see his dorm darkening across the quad. He wondered if Rachel would be coming home with him tonight and if his roommate would be there—though whom was he kidding? Arnie never spent the night out.
Benji’s back was to the hill, flanked by the practically brand-new library, and the social studies center. All of Brandeis had seemed modern, not like Columbia, where the buildings were held up by columns as old as the D.C. memorials.
When Dennis had been dragged to look at the school, he’d said to Ben, “Where’s the fucking ivy?” But Ben had liked the new feel of it, the way it seemed as if nothing too important had happened here yet.
Up from the library and along the curved hill was the student center, where kids played Hacky Sack and Frisbee on the lawn, right in front of the glass window of the radio station, then up the steps to Rabb and Olin-Sang, where American Protest!, a popular yearlong survey course, and his World History class, ironically only one semester long, were held. Beyond all that was Waltham with its old redbrick watch factory, where women died from the effects of licking radium-filled paintbrushes to sharp points in order to brush teensy numerals onto watch faces. The beaten town did not seem terribly welcoming to the college or its students. The most birth defects per capita in the United States, the students all said. Boston’s smelly armpit, they called it. Beyond the town, along the Pike, just ten miles, was Boston and Cambridge. But Benji had yet to leave campus.
He smiled at Rachel. “Sounds good!” he said. “I’ll meet you here. X marks the spot.” He jumped in place and then planted his feet firmly on the ground and handed Rachel back her sign. Rachel Feinglass’s sign.
I fucking love college, thought Benji.
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