by Aimee Bender
Unfortunately for me, she seemed to get a lot more sex than I did. The brutish jocks were hell-bent on getting her into bed, perm and all, and half of the poets—who were not really poets but just had volumes of very nice leather-bound, nearly blank poetry books given to them by parents who were trying to be supportive, books partially filled with the same poem, over and over, called “Life” and/or “Life II” and/or “Why Love Is an Illusion”—these men didn’t always want to touch a woman, or a man, but, rather, mostly themselves. It took me until senior year to find a poet who actually wrote poetry, and he took off my clothes very gently and spent nearly an hour on my neck and back, and when we were done and I felt all my waiting had been worth it, he explained that part of his education as a poet was to meet as many women as possible, and so this was now to be goodbye. He suggested I pretend he was going off to war on a boat. “What boat?” I said, clutching the blanket. “We live in Ohio.” He left a leaflet on my bed torn from a three-ring binder. Your breasts are fortune cookies, full of small wisdoms, he wrote. I read it multiple times. I almost notified the English Department. I was very tempted to show Arlene, but she was busily documenting her outings and weekends in a photo album labeled College, Senior Year, and although she had never been anything but sympathetic about my history with men, I couldn’t bear the thought that she might laugh at me and not him.
One afternoon in late March of our senior year, just about two months before graduation, I wandered into the apartment I then shared with Arlene and found her standing at the fridge looking upset. She was rummaging around in the vegetable drawer, and her mascara was smudged. Mascara, like the perm, was part of her daily wear.
“What is it?” I said. “Is it Fred?” Fred was her latest jock, a wide-eyed, hurdle-jumping track star whom I found very attractive and who stoked my envy. I always harbored a secret hope that they’d break up.
“No,” she said, into the shelves. “Fred’s fine.”
“And?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The usual.”
She held up several thin plastic bags holding vegetables we’d bought and forgotten to eat: floppy green onions, a browning head of broccoli, limp kale.
“We never ate any of this,” she said.
“So throw it out,” I said.
She dragged a hand across her eyes. “This happens every time,” she said, shutting the fridge door. “Why do we even bother to go shopping?” She pulled on a coat and went outside with a shovel, picking and digging at the ground until she was able to bury the old vegetables under a bedraggled marigold plant. I watched from the window. She was often upset in these days, usually about graduating. Every night, she cried a little about the end of this phase of her life. What the changes would be like. How much she would miss me, and her classes, and our apartment. I would watch her cry sometimes, on the sofa with her tissue, and I’d say comforting things I’d heard other people say about the opening and closing of windows and doors, but mostly I just admired how she did it; she had this way of crying like she didn’t realize she was crying.
When she came back inside, she was gripping a yogurt cup someone had thrown near our side strip of garden.
“Plastic doesn’t cycle.” She shrugged off her coat. “Right? We recycle it, but it can’t do anything on its own, and all it can ever do is be itself again. It is the worst kind of reincarnation. Lame! That is so lame! And it’s everywhere!” she cried, going to the bathroom to splash water on her face.
Arlene didn’t usually get so worked up about things like the veggies or the yogurt cup, but her moods had been heightened in the weeks since our friend Hank had hit the doctor on his drive to the recycling plant. Hank was a nice guy who lived two apartments over with a mutt named Blooper, and the two of them came by often. Hank, like Arlene, was conscientious to a fault. In fact, he was so thorough that he did not trust that the big blue trucks would actually take his recycling to the plant, so once a week he drove it over himself. He crushed his bottles and folded up his boxes, and he said he found it very comforting to see the plant itself, those manmade cycles in action. “It’s called a plant!” he’d say, goofily, delighted. Had he not been gay, I’m sure he and Arlene would have fallen very deeply in love for a long time.
One afternoon, while on his drive to the recycling plant, Hank glanced down at the radio during a song he didn’t like and hit a doctor. The doctor, a young surgeon just finishing his residency, was crossing the road on a sunny afternoon on his lunch break, and he stepped into the street right when Hank was spinning the tuning dial. Hank knocked him to the ground, and the tires rolled over his hands. The doctor who had specialized in surgery for children with cancer.
Arlene did not appreciate my line of thinking.
“You cannot make an equation!” she said, coming out of the bathroom. “The doctor’s hands did not break because Hank was recycling!”
She adjusted the ribbon on her dress that she was wearing as a gesture of support for Hank, who was meeting that day with a lawyer.
“True,” I said, flicking on the light that she always flicked off, even when we were studying. “And yet, if Hank did not feel the need to drive his bags to the plant, then the doctor would be fine. Correct?”
“That’s fudging the data!” Arlene protested.
The doorbell rang. Fred came in. He was looking particularly strong and flushed that evening, having just finished lifting weights at the gym.
“It’s just so sad,” I said. “He saved children.”
“It’s horribly sad,” Arlene said. “But it is not a lesson. Hey, baby.” She turned away from me and leaned in to give Fred a kiss.
“Or how about the Litmans?” I said.
The Litmans were the liberal parents of a mutual friend of ours who had adopted a homeless kid with no family and raised him with love and care and good limits and kind gifts and progressive schools, and the kid had grown up to be a staunch ultra-right neo-con who believed in torture and wiretapping civilians and aggressive, preemptive warfare. The parents did not know what to do.
Arlene began to rub Fred’s shoulders. “Did you go to the gym?” she said. “You look hot.”
“Nice dress,” he said.
“Anyway,” she said to me. “You can’t predict the outcome. You can’t raise a kid and then tell him what to think.”
“No,” I said. “I’m just saying.”
“You’re saying we should all stay at home and do nothing,” she said.
“Claire’s not a shut-in,” Fred said, smiling at me.
“See?” I said, smiling back, although Arlene’s statement did sound a little true.
“What happened with Hank and the lawyer?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “He’s still not back.” She held on to the sides of his T-shirt. Her eyes filled with real tears. Fred kissed the top of her head tenderly, and for the umpteenth time, I wondered how Arlene, of the questionably toxic perms and mascara drips and yogurt cup righteousness, always got the better guys.
“He has to live with that his whole life,” she said.
Fred ran a hand through her hair. They left, to go to dinner.
“I hate you people,” I muttered as I shoved my eggshells into our small kitchen compost pile, which smelled like rotten food, which is just exactly what it was.
The building quieted around me. Saturday night. I had nothing to do. The latest guy I’d liked, a documentary filmmaker, had to work late in the editing room. I loved documentaries, but he said I couldn’t see his for two more months, and, like a sports star, he said it was better that he work solo and think solo until he was done. Due to dating choices such as this, I seemed to have more time than most of my peers, so I had pursued an addiction to crossword puzzles. When not studying, I opened up the newspaper and did the daily one each afternoon. I was not particularly good, and often could not answer the questions. I grabbed a pencil and curled up on the sofa and opened the newspaper to the puzzle I’d started the night before.
As I worked away, rereading the same clues, two thoughts commonly accompanied my work. One was my strong desire to finish as quickly as possible so I could do something else, who knew what. But finishing quickly was impossible, so I also found myself thinking that if someday I were taken by a dictatorship and shoved into a holding tank with only this crossword, and my only chance for survival was to finish this crossword, then and only then might I be able to figure out the answer to 12D: Lincoln’s controversial Cabinet member. Maybe it would take years, I considered, skipping that question, but as I continued to work the puzzle, I could feel that holding tank floating in the background, an Orwellian-style setup with a large crossword projected onto the wall as the world warred outside, and for some reason the future of humanity might even depend on whether or not I could plumb the depths of old history tests in my memory, and rustle up the answers.
Maybe then, I thought to myself, primly, I could finish.
I did the crossword for a while, made a tiny bit of progress by asserting that Plato was Greek, and then wandered out onto campus. I didn’t feel like seeing the new movie or going to the new specialty-beer bar that had just opened up across the street.
Instead, I found myself pulled to the main quad of campus, an area of green that, with spring, was only just starting to lighten and brighten from beneath the layers of cold, dark wetness. Some kind of vigil was going on. Rows and rows of students were sitting with candles, wearing gloves and hats. It was colder than I’d expected. I was shivering in my coat and scarf, and Julian, the documentary maker, was tucked warm in a dark room with technology, and Arlene and Fred were going to “dinner,” which often meant they were just waiting for me to leave so they could return to the apartment and have loud sex. Twice I’d come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one’s roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through the fog of her pleasure she’d heard the front door open and close.
So there I was, at this vigil. I knelt down. A man on a podium was talking.
“What’s it for?” I whispered to two women wrapped up together in a bright-blue sleeping bag.
“The war,” they said.
“Which one?”
“All of them,” they said.
“How many are there?” I said.
One shrugged. “At least three.”
I tried to count the wars in my head. I could count two.
“What’s the third?” I hissed.
“Sssh!” said the sleeping-bag pair, in unison.
“So,” said the man at the podium, a man with a beard and a knit cap, “as murderers, we too should be punished. Look around! Look harder! Look at what you’re not seeing!”
“Why are we murderers?” I whispered to the two.
“Duh,” said one.
“It’s a wake-up call,” said the other. “Most of us forget we’re even at war at all.”
I nodded. In fact, I could hardly hold the thought about forgetting in my head. It seemed destined to be forgotten.
“Brring!” said the man at the podium. “I am your inner alarm clock. Brrring!”
The group rose to its feet and began marching, with candles, down the main walkway of campus. The duo, bundled in their sleeping bag, moved in a lump ahead of me. I began walking too. I knew no one in the war/wars and hardly thought about them, and when I did, I wore the guilt and outrage like an accessory I could remove the same way as a nice pair of earrings. I would let the outrage adorn and better me and then slide the wires from my earlobes and tuck them away in my jewelry box. I felt ashamed of this even as I did it over and over, and one could reasonably argue that the fact that I felt ashamed about it and still did it made it worse. At least the Litman kid had beliefs.
We walked in clumps, heads leaning forward. Was there a group plan? Should I call my one journalism friend? But more than anything, I was pulled by the movement of something happening, something where I could join a flow and participate in some way without notice.
We walked for fifteen minutes, and at times the man from the podium, now with a megaphone, would call out “Murderers!” and the crowd would respond “Yes!” and then the feet would pick up. I hid my face in my scarf.
On campus a few weeks earlier, there had been a real protest, a sincere protest, one I had attended with Arlene, who did seem able to remember that we were at war and had adopted a soldier online to whom she sent electrolyte-enhanced water and peanut butter cups and moisturizer for the desert. She wrote him long letters in response to his letters and once even spoke to his wife on the phone to make it clear she was not flirting. “I have a great boyfriend,” I heard her say, as I was walking into the room to retrieve my latest attempt at the crossword. “Fred.” She was tugging at a curl, and her brow was furrowed with concentration and concern. “I truly mean no disrespect,” she said. At that sincere protest, with Arlene shouting next to me, our shouts visible in puffs of cold, I’d felt a momentary crush of panic, like for one second I got it, grasped the stakes, understood that people my age were living a completely different and precarious life on my watch, but then it was over and the crowd dispersed and we went to have potato skins at the food co-op. “But what’s a person to do?” I’d asked Arlene, scooping up fake bacon bits with a bit of crisped peel. “Give up everything?”
She dabbed her mouth with a napkin. It was just the two of us. Fred was away at a track meet in Akron.
“No-o,” she said, slowly. “Give up something?”
At this second rally, I continued to follow the sleeping-bag twins as they rustled along the sidewalk. This protest had a completely different feel than the last one, more like we were sleepwalking into a dream where death was only a Jungian symbol made into a colorful illustration on a tarot card. It was, by now, probably ten-thirty, and the regents were asleep in their white houses. We walked off campus, down a residential street to an empty dirt lot buttressed by two tract homes. Soon the lot would grow a house that exactly matched the ones on either side.
“Go!” said the man with the megaphone.
It was like watching a dance in slow motion. As if they’d all planned it in advance, which clearly most of them had, the marchers began shedding their clothes. The night was thirty or forty degrees, probably less, but off came the sleeping bags, the sweatshirts, the hats, the scarves, the shoes. I wasn’t sure what any of it had to do with dead soldiers, but it certainly was interesting. “Off!” yelled the man, and soon there were over a hundred naked coeds, their clothes in heaps. “Show your true selves!” he yelled, and they put their bodies on the lot, which I now realized was probably the largest plot of dirt around, since the campus was covered in concrete, brick, and grass, and all the students rolled in the dirt—“This is what we need!” he said—and they were rolling, and kissing, and kicking aside clothes, and warming up skin on skin, and shivering, trying to reclaim a decade long past. I was now standing in the veranda of the next-door neighbor’s house, which, as far as I could tell, had a still-up neighbor in it, due to the flickering light of the flat-screen TV I could see through sheer white curtains. Did the neighbor know that one hundred nubile twenty-year-olds were rolling in the dirt next door? I thought not. It seemed he was watching Law & Order.
The man with the megaphone backed off. He watched the bodies rolling and reaching. He watched piles of bodies start kissing. He saw me over in the veranda and glanced at me for a moment, I suppose to see if I was the type to tell. And it seemed he decided no, because then he began to pick his way through the bodies and clothing and with nimble, practiced fingers lifted over fifty wallets from the stack, tossing them into his backpack. Sighs and grunts erupted around him as he threaded through the piles and then tiptoed away. He’d read me right; I didn’t say a word. It seemed, in its way, a fair exchange.
When I woke up, the lot was clear. No naked bodies, no police, just one leftover sock in the dirt, lit by the white disc of moon. I’d fallen
asleep sprawled out on the porch with my scarf wrapped tightly over my head. It was cold out, but tiredness had overtaken me, swallowed me, as it sometimes did, and so I hadn’t gotten to see the marchers finishing, or getting dressed, or yelling about their wallets.
I blew on my hands. Stretched. The whole elaborate thing—from protest to empty lot—had done nothing but make me irritable. There were real deaths happening, after all. Hard to imagine from our dorm apartments and fifty-minute course lectures. And on a pettier and slightly more distracting level, I also didn’t like having stood, as always, so everlastingly, to the side. I was certainly not doing my share to help out the world in any way, and neither was I doing my share by having fun as a naked college coed. I was basically sleeping through all of it. Was I really a nothing-doer, an apathetic blob? Was Arlene right? She planned most of our weekend activities. She adopted the soldier and called the wife. She had sex with Fred. When people danced at weddings, I would stand on the side grimacing, but not because I did not want to dance. I just couldn’t seem to. Cousins and happy types would cheerfully grab my hands and draw me into the center, but even with that encouragement, with smiles like fields of daisies surrounding, I could only make it through half a song. The magnet inside the wall was too strong. I liked Julian, tucked in his documentary office; he was the perfect boyfriend for me, similar to that magnet—someone I could not touch but who, with a pull from beneath a surface, still kept me from the activities at hand.
This all left me so cold and cranky that I decided right then and there to make something happen, because it is always possible to make something happen, and there was no reason that I had to go home right then with my hands jammed in my pockets and say hi to Arlene and Fred all cuddled up warm watching late-night comedy TV with their hair so mussed and gleaming and not have participated in anything myself. It was this reason, and perhaps others I did not understand, that led me to turn to the front door of the house attached to the porch upon which I was standing, square my shoulders, and knock.
