by Pamela Moses
Then before I reached the end of her essay, I felt what came when I least wanted it to: that unsettled sensation in my stomach that always turned to bottomless hunger. Mama’s second care package was stashed under my bed, out of sight to decrease temptation. Her friend Arlene, she’d heard, sent only junky chips and candy bars to Albert at Bates. But Mama packed stuffed dates, rosemary crackers, an expensive cinnamon swirl loaf from Zimmerman’s Gourmet wrapped in fancy royal blue tissue. How many of your classmates get this from home! she’d printed on the attached Broadway Paperie card cut in the shape of a heart—the closest resemblance to a love note I ever seemed to receive! I had noticed that my new jeans had begun to strain at the waist and across the seat. And that a few red pimples had sprung up at the sides of my nose—from too many fatty foods, I was sure. Still, I couldn’t help myself. And reaching behind the suitcases and extra shampoo bottles and my L.L. Bean duck boots, I pulled out the box Mama had sent. And I ate and ate and ate until I ached.
• • •
My suitemates and I began to spend our Saturdays together. Though we didn’t plan it, it became a habit, something we came to expect without advance discussion. With no classes or meetings to attend, we passed the morning over handfuls of Raisin Bran from boxes we’d smuggled from the Sharpe Refectory, reading each other articles from the last week’s Brown Daily Heralds or excerpts from the celebrity magazines Setsu occasionally picked up, finding the ones that most amused us. Later, we walked down the hill and across the river to the few downtown shops or, if it was warm, sought out a sunny section of the Green.
Then, eventually, for lunch, we made our way to the Refectory—or “Ratty,” as we soon learned students had nicknamed it. My roommates, I noticed, seemed unfazed by the sports teams who moved through the cafeteria as a single, solid force, their hair still wet from post-practice showers, or by the fraternity brothers or the older girls in their worn-in Brown sweatshirts who seemed to own the center of the room. Once we had found a table, Opal and Setsu constructed dainty, colorful mounds of lettuce and peppers and sliced cucumber from the salad bar, arranging their dressings on the sides of their trays in coffee cups as so many other girls did, ignoring the more filling choices I piled onto my own plate.
Soon the scale in our hall bathroom reported what I already feared—unless it was off by several pounds, I wondered, scrubbing my face at the row of scratched sinks. It wasn’t a fancy doctor’s scale, after all, just the cheap, unreliable kind you might find at a drugstore. Besides, the square of plastic covering the numbered dial was chipped, so goodness knew how old the thing was. As I mulled over these points, I spied Opal in the mirror. She stepped from the shower, her hair long dripping ropes, a large striped towel in her hands; and before she’d wrapped it tightly around, I glanced at the perfection of her. She glided to the sink beside mine, arranging her soap, a washcloth, toothbrush, and an assortment of tubes and bottles on the narrow shelf below the mirror, attending even to this with a flawlessness that made me wish I hadn’t made such a scattered mess of my own items, and that I wore something other than my old terrycloth robe, which stopped bluntly at my knees, always, somehow, making my calves appear thicker.
“It’s never the same as showering at home, is it?” Opal smiled, squeezing toothpaste onto her brush. She filled a small paper cup with water, then opened a white bottle and shook a brown capsule into her hand. “Vitamins,” she said, tapping the bottle after she’d swallowed the capsule. “A multi. You want one?”
“Okay. What’s it for?” I hadn’t had vitamins since I was a girl, but the thought that they might be part of Opal’s beauty ritual made them seem suddenly exotic.
“Oh, general health, I guess. They have a little of everything. The label on their container even claims they curb appetite.” Opal turned on the faucet and ran her toothbrush under the water. For a moment, her eyes met mine in the mirror, and I knew what she hinted at. Though I was usually careful to conceal my binges—brushing up every crumb before emerging from my room, spraying the air, to mask any scent, with the Bonne Bell perfume Sarah and Valerie had bought for my birthday two years before—she had caught me once, the door to my room having opened without my knowing. And she had seen everything.
With my hand towel, I blotted the last spots of dampness on my neck and forehead, glad for this brief excuse to hide my face. “Sometimes my mother sends enormous care packages. There’s probably enough in each one to sustain the entire dorm for a week! So—it makes it difficult. You’ve probably never had to think about your weight.”
Opal laughed and slowly combed fingers through her wet hair, checking her reflection—her narrow nose, the sweep of her cheekbones, her green-green eyes—as if she might possibly spot some blemish. “I can only imagine what my mother’s idea of a care package would be. Probably nothing legal for eighteen-year-olds! But to answer your question, I guess I’m just very careful, that’s all,” she said, as if it were nothing more than a choice. Did she think I wanted to eat as I did.
“You should come shopping with me tomorrow. I discovered this great health store off Wickenden Street, near the river. It’s amazing what you can find there.”
Opal used her walks to Wickenden as part of her exercise routine, wearing running sneakers and white spandex pants. As we crossed the campus, two older-looking boys in crew jackets turned, their eyes on Opal’s waist, her hips, her arms as she raised them to adjust the long-toothed clip in her hair. She hadn’t even caught them staring, but I saw in their faces a wanting no one had ever focused on me. Even other girls—a group of blondes with frosted lipstick—the California girls, everyone called them, though we knew they probably just looked it—studied Opal as they emerged from Chapin House. And I saw how their eyes contracted as if they were memorizing her—her shape and the rhythm of her walk, and how her shoulders swayed slightly, with a confidence even greater than what they exuded.
When we reached Hope Street, passing the French bistro where I’d heard couples on campus went for dates, Opal quickened her pace, her arms swinging energetically at her side. “Is this okay? I try to fit in aerobics when I can.”
“Oh, sure! This is great!” I said, though by the time we could make out the Seekonk River, I was gasping like a caught fish.
Opal’s route, which zigzagged along side streets to maximize the walk, took us past two Portuguese bakeries, a darkened tobacco shop, and a secondhand store displaying Mexican-printed ponchos and African masks, a sickly-sweet incense wafting from its half-opened door. We were now on a street almost empty but for a sallow-skinned man crouched near the narrow entry of Angel’s Sweet Shop, who spat noisily just after we passed. I turned, looking up the hill, no longer sure of the way back.
“Don’t worry. Almost there.” I thought I saw the beginnings of a smile at the corners of Opal’s lips. I wondered if my skittishness tickled her. Embarrassingly, I had reached for her arm like a frightened child when a group of men and women dressed in coal-dark jeans and boots rushed up behind us, only later identifying them as Brown students, residents of Machado House, one of whom Opal recognized, waving, exchanging words in Spanish.
Opal had brought a long shopping list with her to Eastern Garden. I watched as she scanned the shelves, checking off each item, then exchanged “hellos” with Lena, the pixie-nosed tennis player from our dorm who Fran declared had had implants: Either that or she’s packing tennis balls in her bra. They’re way too round and perky, and no one that bony-assed has a chest that size.
I trailed Opal through aisles of dried mushrooms and soy cheeses and turnip chips.
“May I make some suggestions?” she asked. Watercress soup cleansed the system, cranberries were a natural diuretic. And if it was weight loss I was hoping for, she said, nothing worked better than bran for breakfast and lunch, steamed veggie wraps for dinner. She had tried this, herself, and had immediately dropped three pounds.
For two weeks, I tried to follow Opal’s diet. But the needle of our bathroom scale refused to budge
. The bran muffins and cereals stuck in my throat, dry and rough as wood; and by each afternoon, the veggie wraps, when removed from their plastic covering, smelled of something rotting. By the end of the third day, I had polished off an entire coffee cake, a box of Golden Grahams cereal, and a bag of toffees from the convenience store on Thayer Street. I sat on my bed, my stomach bloated, knees tucked to my chest. I had promised myself that here, in college, my old weaknesses would not get the better of me. I blamed Opal for touting a diet that had made me hungrier than ever. Where did she find the discipline to stick with it? Was there some trick she hadn’t shared with me? That night I dreamed I disassembled our dormitory scale—spreading its springs and nuts across the floor until I discovered how they should have been arranged all along. Then, in nothing but my size large Bloomie’s panties and bra, I stepped on—Opal and Setsu, and Winnie and Kay, the two southern girls who lived across the hall, surrounding me as we waited for a number to appear.
• • •
In Providence, the cool of autumn seemed to turn cold more quickly than in New York. My roommates and I, in Fran’s parents’ convertible (which she was keeping in a garage near campus), drove to a pumpkin farm in Cumberland. We rode in a hay-filled wagon to the pumpkin fields and trudged up and down the planted rows, until we found an enormous though somewhat lopsided pumpkin, which we all agreed had character. Back in our suite that afternoon, we carved it with triangular eyes and a jagged grin.
“Our fifth roommate,” Fran said, arranging a baseball cap on its head, inserting a cigarette in the gap between two of its crooked teeth.
In the warmth of our dorm, our jack-o’-lantern grew mold and had to be discarded after only two days. But outside the ground hardened, and patches of frost settled on the grass of the campus greens each night. I began to need my hooded parka even for the short walk to and from the library each evening. My assignments for Constitutional Law and European History had become longer and more complex, or perhaps I merely had other work I preferred to be doing. After hours on the library’s fourth floor, I would come away with pages of material for my fiction class but only unfinished notes for my essay on the Italian Renaissance.
“What topic did you choose?” Opal asked one evening. She was making final edits to her own Italian Renaissance essay at the carrel behind mine, barefooted—her pink flats tucked under her chair—and seated Indian-style in black leggings that made her perfectly skinny thighs appear even thinner.
“I haven’t decided which influences from classical antiquity to emphasize,” I told her. “I’ve gotten a bit of a late start. The next couple of nights will be long ones.”
“Would you like a second opinion? I’m happy to take a look,” Opal offered. But it irked me the way she chewed her pen cap as she read, scribbling little notes now and then in my margins as if she were my teacher.
“Never mind!” I almost snapped, almost snatching the paper back. But I refrained. And with a recommendation or two from Opal, this time I received a B.
“B is better than a Pass, I assume?” Mama asked over the phone. “So maybe next time another improvement . . .”
“Yes, maybe next time, Ma.” I had also finished another story for my writing class. I had entitled it “By the Light of Day,” I told her.
“Oh?” she said, in a way that made me think, for a moment, she would ask to hear it. But she had only a question about my upcoming psychology test.
• • •
In December, during the week before the winter break, the fraternities and social dorms on campus threw holiday parties. The high point, I learned, was Saturday night. This was when the houses along the quads decorated their patios with evergreen boughs and yards and yards of twinkling lights. Candles were placed in windows, bands hired to play jazzy renditions of holiday music. These parties were open to everyone, and according to Francesca, everyone attended. She and Setsu, along with Winnie and Kay, had driven Fran’s car to Boston’s Copley Square and purchased short Calvin Klein skirts and high boots with zippers on the sides—outfits I had never worn.
But Setsu and Fran had surprised me, knowing, I supposed, the prudish-looking contents of my own closet. “An early holiday gift,” Francesca laughed, and placed a silky, pearly-gray camisole top in my hands. It was similar to tops I had seen Setsu wear, and I gasped at their unexpected generosity.
“You really didn’t have to do this—”
“Just try it on.” Setsu kissed my cheek, then gave my back a small push toward my room.
I gingerly slipped the camisole over my head and stood before the mirror of my closet door. I looked nothing like Setsu or Opal would. The top pulled a bit across my chest and did nothing to hide the fleshiness of my arms. But the color wasn’t half bad with the dark of my hair, and I happened to have a velvet skirt I sometimes wore to dinners at Aunt Nadia’s that matched it.
Opal claimed she could think of better things to do with her evening—that nothing distinguished one campus party from the next. She was recuperating from a recent cough, her eyes slightly puffy, the skin at the corners of her mouth dry. Even her hair was messier than usual, still plaited in its nighttime braid and flattened on either side of her part. It was wrong, I knew, wanting her always to look this way. Wrong to hope Francesca and Setsu wouldn’t convince her to come along. Wishing she hadn’t, in the end, decided to fix her hair or highlight her cheekbones with pink blush, or root through her clothes until she’d found her jade wrap dress. I knew how I looked beside her.
The party Francesca and Setsu wanted to stop by first was at the Sigma Chi house; it was the one they had heard from Kay and Winnie was best. Snow was falling lightly, leaving a veil of flecks on the hair and overcoats of the arriving crowd gathered outside on the fraternity’s front patio. They were laughing, sipping punch from plastic cups, undeterred by the white flakes melting in their drinks. Two fraternity brothers in matching Sigma Chi sweatshirts stood on the patio’s low stone wall serenading all who approached with off-key versions of “Good King Wenceslas” and “Winter Wonderland.” Inside, a lanky boy with deep-set hazel eyes, whom I’d noticed on line at the Registrar during the first week of school, removed our wraps for us. I saw how his thumb brushed Opal’s arm, how he took more time with her coat and with Setsu’s than with Francesca’s or mine.
“He’s probably a pledge. He won’t officially be a brother until next year,” explained Francesca. As roommates, we had attended a few parties in our dorm—a Halloween costume party on the floor above ours, a sixties party for which Setsu had made us tie-dyed shirts, a few impromptu all-female gatherings in Kay and Winnie’s room over berry wine coolers and fat-free popcorn. But Fran had been to several more fraternity parties than the rest of us. “Let’s go to the back room. That’s where all the food and drinks will be.”
The back room was dimly lit. A Christmas tree adorned with plaid ribbons and silver tinsel stood in the corner. At the center of the drafty room’s wooden floor danced tight circles of girls in their low-backed holiday dresses, flimsier than my top despite the cold. Some were girls I recognized but had seen before only in school sweatshirts and jeans, their hair bound up in ponytails rather than curled and falling past their shoulders. Near them danced couples with foreheads touching, legs rubbing. Among them, though I would not have known her at first, transformed, shimmering in gold sequins, Nora, our head counselor, clasped her hands behind the neck of someone tall, his head bowed toward hers. We followed Francesca through the milling guests and past beer kegs to a table laid with cheese cubes and pretzel sticks and star-shaped cookies. She filled a plate for us to share then moved to the far end of the table, where we could choose from every kind of alcohol: a display of bottles like those at the weddings and birthdays, the bar and bat mitzvahs, where my cousins and I had sneaked half-glasses of Manischewitz or splashed rum into our Coca-Colas. But never so much that our parents would notice. I knew the things Mama said of the Wolmans’ daughters, who shamed themselves and their family. She had forbidden me
to attend high school bashes even though my friends were permitted: “I wasn’t born yesterday, Ruth. I know what goes on at those parties. Someday you’ll thank me for wanting you to be better!” But now Francesca, chuckling, handed me a glass of red punch before crossing the floor to greet her friend Jackie—“Remember, Ruth! Vodka and fruit juice—it slides down like candy!”
Nibbling the star cookies sprinkled with green sugar, Opal, Setsu, and I watched the dancers from the edge of the dance floor. After several songs, the music softened and slowed. The crowd thinned, leaving only couples, who pressed closer, their fingers intertwined. Setsu was swaying to the rhythm of “What a Wonderful World,” humming lightly under her breath with Louis Armstrong’s raspy voice. From the way she arched her back, one hip jutting out, I could tell she was hoping someone would invite her to dance as well.
The boy who had taken our coats when we first arrived reappeared and now stood near the doorway. He was taller, his shoulders squarer than I had at first noticed. Despite the semidarkness, I could follow the path of his eyes over the heads of the dancers, around the room. When he noticed the three of us, he smiled, but I knew for whom it was intended. And then, to my surprise, just behind him—though I’d never dreamed he’d be caught dead at this kind of thing—I spotted Gavin Rutledge, a sophomore from my Psychology 10 class. He leaned against the wall, the heel of one foot, in its hiking boot, kicking aimlessly against the other, one hand tucked in the back pocket of his jeans, the other swirling and swirling a drink, as if he were too bored even to swallow it.
Earlier that week, I had learned that for Psychology 20 the following semester Gavin would be my assigned lab partner, as Georgie Farnsworth would be transferring to another section due to a scheduling conflict. But I had noticed Gavin long before because he had sat alone at the back of the auditorium, slouching slightly in his chair, a checked scarf wound around his neck despite the warmth of the room. He had a thin face, thin nose, fidgeting legs, and a hairline that was beginning to recede ever so slightly at his temples. He wore silver wire-rimmed glasses, which he tapped occasionally with his forefinger. “A few rungs short of drop-dead handsome!” my sisters and I once would have said. In no way did he resemble the boys on campus I knew my classmates murmured about. There was nothing chiseled about his face like the pledge with the hazel eyes or like Matty Cronin, whom, I knew, Francesca, earlier in the fall, had followed around for weeks. But he stretched his arms so decisively across the empty seatbacks on either side of him and squinted with such intensity throughout Professor Wren’s lecture that I could not help turning to stare.
