Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Vanessa hated to be the kind of girl who was not game. Bee might have been the leader in the sex department, but it was Vanessa making out with one of the locals under the boardwalk at Heather’s beach house, Vanessa sneaking vodka and running naked into the sea, Vanessa out getting the dime bags in Dupont Circle while Bee and Heather and Jessica waited, looking at Rolling Stone and Seventeen in Common Ground.

  I protest myself, she thought now, turning to Peter. “It’s been a while.” She took a sip. “Drinking can be seen as a way for the government to keep you down, you know. I realize this is a stretch, but it’s what some people do believe, and it’s not totally off.”

  Peter nodded solemnly. “That’s so true.” He looked at his cup of beer. “It really is.”

  Benji smiled at Vanessa, who was slowly turning back into the girl he knew, and he was relieved to hear Janis Joplin come on the stereo with a scream. That’s when the smell of sandalwood and that Herbal Essence—the yummy-smelling shampoo that smelled of wildflowers and the woods, in the green bottle on the edge of Rachel’s shower—overwhelmed him.

  “So, no dinner invitation tonight?” Rachel said, coming up from behind them.

  “You,” he said, turning, both accusingly and with adoration.

  “You must be Vanessa. The famous Vanessa! I’ve heard so much about you.” Rachel held out her hand.

  “Famous? I doubt it.” Vanessa shook Rachel’s hand and moved her head ever so slightly to the music. Janis was good, Vanessa thought, bringing the beer to her lips. She wasn’t flower power at all, but soulful and bluesy and jagged and raw, and Vanessa wondered why she had always dismissed her and what it must have been like to see her perform live. Famous! She had to laugh at Rachel’s comment because she knew Ben had rarely considered her. He was older; the only place he looked was ahead. Then she thought, Ben’s girlfriend is fat! Vanessa was trying not to add up the calories she herself was consuming—each beer was about 240—and instead tried to concentrate on feeling once again sprung loose, the way she’d felt with Bee and Heather and Jessica, drinking at the bonfires at the country club, then running like hell through the bushes and out into the street when the cops came.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you too,” Vanessa said. Rachel seemed incredibly comfortable with herself, Vanessa thought now, looking at her fresh, clean face, her many silver pendants, strung on different lengths of brown and black leather, slung along the cotton of her tie-dyed shirt.

  Before Benji said anything, Schaeffer gave Rachel a big, sloppy hug. “Where ya been, baby? Need a little instant Zen?”

  “Sure do.” She opened a suede bag that crossed her chest diagonally, bisecting her enormous breasts. She took out a plastic Snoopy wallet.

  “No way!” Schaeffer pushed the wallet away. “I got this round, been handing these out all day.” He laughed. “In honor of the protest.” He slipped a blotter stamped with Pink Panthers—about a third were left on the sheet—from a delicate wax-paper sleeve, like one you would use to collect postage stamps.

  “So where have you been?” Benji hadn’t yet begun to feel the drug’s effects, and he wanted to stop Rachel so he could actually talk to her in real time. Instead he watched her place the tab on her tongue.

  “Dada dadumm,” she sang, her neck bobbing.

  Vanessa stared at her. She imagined the girls Ben brought home those afternoons. Most of them had been coltlike, thin and incredibly lean and long-limbed, utterly enviable. Some were athletes, mostly runners and field-hockey players, though there were more than a few cheerleaders, and she vaguely remembered a tall volleyball player named Michelle, and an arty girl who wore a sweatshirt painted with a huge A for “anarchy.”

  “Crazy day,” Rachel said, tilting her head back. “Lots of studying for soc, and I ran into Cambridge to meet up with a friend from high school. Anyway, how did it go today?”

  “Really well,” Benji said slowly, dumbfounded. “We could have used the support. But clearly you had a friend to see. From high school. I mean, we didn’t need it—it went amazingly well—I just mean, like, I could have used it.”

  “It was fucking awesome!” Peter poured Rachel a beer from the keg. “Totally radical.” He started to laugh.

  “You sure you don’t want a little bit of my pink sunshine?” Schaeffer asked Vanessa, twisting his neck so he was looking up at her from below.

  “Who talks like that?” Vanessa asked.

  “I do, I guess,” Schaeffer said.

  “Yes.” She turned her head. “I’m positive.”

  “I just took mine now,” Rachel said to her, reaching for the beer Peter offered. “We’ll be peaking at the same time, not to worry.”

  Vanessa nodded and sipped her beer.

  Schaeffer pulled off a tab. “It won’t hurt a bit! Open wide!” His face was obscenely close to hers, and her eyes crossed looking down at him.

  Benji pulled him back by the elbow. “Cut it out, Schaeffer, she doesn’t want it. She’s never tripped before.”

  At first Vanessa felt a surge of gratefulness; she was so thankful that Benji cared enough to not let her get lost in this muddle of strangers. But as quickly as it welled, her anger and embarrassment burgeoned. This was the first time he was going to stand up for her? Over a tab of acid? She was tired of being Benji’s younger sister. She remembered waking up in a kid’s car in the parking lot of the Carousel Hotel in Ocean City two summers ago. Jessica was with her in the backseat; Bee was gone, down to the beach with the guy who’d been driving, it turned out, and Heather, well, Vanessa had a hazy memory of her perched at a slot machine with a handful of nickels.

  “It’s okay. God, Benji, lighten up!” She laughed. “I’ll try it.” She intercepted the Pink Panther tab. “It’s no big deal.” Vanessa looked with meaning at her brother. But instead of opening wide for Schaeffer, she placed the tab of acid on her tongue herself.

  “Nanoo nanoo,” Schaeffer said.

  Benji shook his head at them both. “You’re in for it, little sister.” Then, so as not to freak her out, he said, “I’ll be here, okay? Just take it easy. Easy.”

  He turned from his sister to Rachel. “You didn’t come.” He could smell her shampoo, that shampoo!—it was irresistible. And she looked incredibly foxy with her tight T-shirt and that black hair cascading down her back. He had never wanted anyone else, he never would want anyone else, the way he wanted Rachel. “How could you not have supported me?”

  “Benji.” Rachel turned to face him. “I do support you. In everything. But I don’t support your cause. Two totally different things.”

  Sometimes, though, he had to admit, she got on his nerves. “I’ve gone to everything with you. Everything. Just because you were there.” Benji was starting to feel the LSD; it was not coming on in the waves of love stretching time that usually overtook him, but was approaching more in sealed boxes, love and time stuck inside them. As he looked at Rachel, he began to see her only in parts, as if she were an anatomy model, her tits and her pussy removable, her face peeled back, no longer her face.

  “I’m sorry if I disappointed you, Benji, but I told you I wasn’t going to be there.”

  Benji nodded. “Yeah. You’ve really disappointed me.” He thought of the plan for Vanessa to sleep at Rachel’s, and he no longer felt this would be possible. He wasn’t sure now if Rachel’s parts—her removable organs, that plastic heart that gave nothing, a heart he could just detach and examine, smash even—should sleep near his sister. Arnie would be out tonight anyway—the Lefkowitzes were staying together at a hotel, like a family, Arnie had said, hugging himself—so Vanessa could stay with him now. It was by far the best plan anyway. “You’ve really let me down,” he said to Rachel.

  Rachel put her hand, her warm hand that he felt for a moment, before it turned plastic, on Benji’s forearm. She leaned in. “I will make it up to you.” Her smell! That smell was what held her muscles and organs together, it was all that made her human. “You know I will.”

  “Yeah?�
��

  “Yes.”

  He crossed his arms.

  “Okay?” she asked. “Ben?”

  “Benji,” he said, nodding, still looking at the floor. He felt her whole body around him, only it was plastic. “My name is Benji.” He looked up. Her body was sharp and hard; it hurt him. “What’s your fucking problem? Can’t you even remember my name?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Parents’ Day

  Dennis and Sharon watched incredulously as their children got up to leave the table.

  “Good to see things haven’t changed,” Dennis said as Vanessa slid out of the booth at the pizza parlor after Ben. “We pay; you split. Welcome to parenthood.”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Benji said. “I feel really bad, but we have to go to this party, you know? It would be totally shit city if I didn’t show.”

  “Well, we certainly wouldn’t want that,” Dennis said.

  “What are you talking about?” Sharon said to Benjamin. “Who are you? And where, by the way, is this girlfriend of yours?” He hadn’t said anything about her all through dinner.

  “She was busy tonight.”

  “Too busy to meet us? Sounds like a nice girl.” Sharon brushed the tabletop with the palms of both hands. Wheat germ fell like sawdust around her. “Another one of your nice girls.” She smiled at her son.

  “She is nice. You’d totally like her.” Benji remembered the glass jars lining the door on the refrigerator—Kretschmer wheat germ, with the red label. His mother had started using it like bread crumbs, on chicken and fish, rolling anything she could in it, just to coat her food with it and shove it into them. No wonder his sister was so messed up about food.

  “So where is she, Ben?” Dennis was starting to lose his temper. He’d had it with his children and this little frigging road trip.

  “We got in a fight, okay? We had a fight. All right? Happy?” Ben said, as if stealing his father’s thought.

  Sharon paused and sat back. “Of course we’re not happy to hear that, honey. We’re very sorry.” She looked at Dennis and then at her son. “Very sorry.”

  “Hmm,” Benji said.

  “Do you think you two will be able to work it out?” Sharon asked. “You really like this girl, don’t you?”

  “Woman. I really like this woman.”

  “Mom’s just trying to help,” Dennis said.

  “Anyway, can you guys take us back to campus now?” Benji asked.

  “Okay.” Dennis looked at his watch. “Let me just pay here. Share, what do you want to do? It’s early.”

  What brings about negative feelings? Sharon tried to call up something from her training, anything that might indicate that those sessions had been purposeful and transformative. Most often, negative feelings come from the way we think things should be, she thought. Let perfectionism go. It’s up to you—it’s up to me—to decide; resentment, is my own interpretation. Sharon threw her balled-up paper napkin, veined with sauce, onto the aluminum pizza tray, making a mental note to suggest to Marlene that they make mini-spinach-and-ricotta pizzas for their next outdoor affair. Elegant, and also comforting, she thought as she slipped the wheat germ back in her purse.

  “Get back to campus on your own,” she said. She held an image of her rage: there she was in her own home, punching out the windows of the living room. You are being reactive, Sharon thought. And then she thought, Damn it, this isn’t working! Even Elias had packed off for another way. Least that’s what she’d heard—someone from their basic training had said he had started over at PRISM, which espoused a totally new philosophy based on the play of light as taken from Genesis. Perhaps it had potential, she thought, trying to pull her hands away from the shattering glass in her imagination. “We’re not your chauffeurs.”

  “Mom!” Vanessa said.

  “Seriously, go on, go to your party.” Sharon motioned for Dennis to stay seated and she smiled at them both. “Have fun!”

  “Yeah.” Dennis also smiled up at them. “Have a groovy time,” he said sarcastically.

  “You’re not serious,” Benji said. “Right?”

  “No, I am serious,” Sharon said. “Serious as a heart attack. We came all this way, and what have we done? We’ve waited for you at the dorm, we’ve waited for you at the student center, and now we’re supposed to go back to the hotel and wait for you some more?” Sharon couldn’t believe she was staying at yet another Marriott. Because it was such a long drive from home, they hadn’t been there yet. They’d driven straight to Ben’s dorm, but Sharon could imagine it with the same stain on the stucco ceiling as in Silver Spring. She remembered pulling back the thick polyester curtains for a view out onto the parking lot. “Well, we’re tired of waiting for you. Your dad had a lot of work to do—you know there has been just so much stress with the embargo still on. Do you know what this has meant for your father’s career?”

  Dennis looked at her. What had it meant? he wondered, motioning for her to stop. “It’s okay, it hasn’t been that bad,” he said, though he was tired of being in flux; he was tired of waiting to see what would happen.

  “No, I won’t stop,” Sharon said. “It has been awfully stressful and it’s just wrong, Benjamin, really, really wrong.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “But I hardly think you can blame me for the grain embargo.”

  “You should have boycotted that,” Vanessa said as an aside. “You can be the boycotting boycotts specialist.”

  “I don’t think I was blaming you, Benjamin, I’m merely explaining the context of the trip.” Sharon tuned Vanessa out. “This was supposed to be fun!” she said, placing both palms gently on the table.

  “Well, to be honest, Mom, I didn’t ask you to come this weekend. If that’s how you feel about it, we’ll walk.”

  Vanessa looked at him. “Maybe I should just stay with Mom and Dad.”

  “Whatever!” Benji threw up his hands. “Do whatever.”

  “You should go too, sweetie,” Sharon said, appealing kindly to Vanessa to increase the effect of her anger at Ben. “If we can’t all be together, you should at least be able to spend a little time with your brother, whom we never see anymore.”

  “Okay, we’re going,” Benji said, not moving. “We’re going to walk back to campus now.”

  Sharon ignored him. I choose not to risk vulnerability, she thought as she looked straight at her husband. She pictured him that first night in her Georgetown flat, looking down to unbutton his pants, a shock of hair falling over his eyes. Through the large window she could see onto the street; a young couple watched a police car whiz by. She wondered now where the couple had been headed. She was moments away from excruciating pain; how had she thought losing her virginity would be pleasurable? When, she thought now, was losing anything pleasurable? I want to take a risk, this is my choice. She remembered drinking wine with her husband, and eating foie gras on toast in the plaza of Sarlat after the day of boating so many years ago, and how all the buildings surrounding the plaza seemed so old and perfect they looked fake, drawn in by Walt Disney himself. When will this seem real? she had thought then. Her marriage? she had wondered. Her life? Or just that town?

  We all have the possibility to break through. Sharon ran a finger along the fake wood of the pizza-parlor table. The pizza had been good, she had to admit; Ben had been right about the pizza.

  That night in France she and Dennis had stayed in a castle outside town; the travel agent had told them it was advertised as haunted, by a woman from the sixteenth century whose husband had found her in bed with her lover. She’d been imprisoned there for more than twenty years. They had thought it would be fun to see a French ghost; a change from small-town American Gloria. Why not see as many ghosts as possible? Sharon had thought, before she became one herself. She and Dennis had sex in the enormous bathtub and, lulled by the warm sparkling wine they had bought in Vouvray and had drunk in their bathrobes, they went to sleep only to be awoken by streaks of lightning flashing in the room, while outside it was
a clear, starry night. Then in the early hours of the morning a bat swooped in and flapped its wings over their bed. After Dennis had swept the bat out the window, he told Sharon he had felt a presence on the bed, a comforting weight seated next to him.

  She had thought that the weight might be an omen to the future—everything that was to come. Now she saw so vividly that this ghost was not friendly—she was angry and spurned and wanted escape, and her weight was the unshakable weight of the past.

  “It’s far, you know—campus,” Benji said. “It’s pretty far and it’s kinda cold out too.”

  “Hmm.” Sharon ignored Ben. “What do you say, Dennis, wanna hit the town?”

  Vanessa cleared her throat.

  “Why, darling,” Dennis said to his wife, “that sounds like the most marvelous idea.”

  After watching their children storm out of the pizza place, after they’d paid and gone to the parking lot, where they sat in Sharon’s Volvo, waiting for the heat to kick in, Dennis came up with the idea.

  “Let’s go to the bar at the Ritz.” He gripped the cold steering wheel tightly. The Ritz, on the Commons, was where Len used to take his Radcliffe girlfriend—one of the many Seven Sister coeds he’d dated—back when women were only allowed at the bar when escorted by a man. He didn’t mention this part to Sharon, though he was sure the seventies had to have feminized the place.

  “The Ritz-Carlton?” Sharon turned to face him. She looked down at her jeans—Calvins, yes, but not exactly Saturday night at the Ritz. “I’m not really dressed.”

  “Who cares?” Dennis could feel the moment deflating. Soon there would be endless debate, then it would turn into a search for another, more appropriate place somewhere deep in a city he barely knew. Dennis recognized that he would soon be sent back in to look in Franca’s yellow pages, or worse, Sharon would ask people on the street without discretion. Well, he’d rather go watch the evening news at the Marriott on Route 128 and call it a night. But in an effort to abort what would surely be a depressing evening, what he said was “Don’t be silly, you look great!”