by James Renner
“Miss O’Donnell?”
“It’s a lie,” she said.
“I don’t follow,” the professor replied.
Elizabeth waved her hand at the stereo as if she were motioning to the place on her carpet where the cat had just barfed. “That,” she said, “is propaganda. Like religion. It’s supposed to create passion in the common man, the blue-collar worker, to push them to serve their country, like to join the Navy or Marines, or even just to keep working those long shifts at Taco Bell. It’s about the illusion of the American Dream.”
David watched the quickening of her breath, the way her chest pumped up and down with anger, the flushing of her face. And suddenly he realized two unpleasant truths. One: this woman was crazy. And two: he was attracted to her in some way he did not understand, and could not control, and didn’t that make him crazy, too?
“The American Dream is a myth,” she continued. “The few who are at the top want us at the bottom to think that we can rise in the ranks through hard work. But that’s just not true. This is like our version of Wagner. It’s twisted. And dangerous.”
“The American Dream is not a myth.” It wasn’t until the entire class—Elizabeth included—turned his way that David finally realized he’d spoken. He felt his face turn a dark crimson. Shit, he thought distantly, I haven’t done that since fifth grade.
Elizabeth rolled her eyes at him. “Grow up,” she said. “After your daddy finishes paying your way through state school, I mean.”
“Ah, snap!” said a large white man to her left.
“My parents aren’t paying a penny,” David said. “And I think you’re better than that, actually. I think that was just reflex and you didn’t really mean to say something that bitchy, so I’m going to ignore it.”
“What did you call me?”
“Okay,” the professor said, raising both hands, palms out. “Okay, let’s, you know, let’s find—”
“The American Dream is not a myth,” David said. “Not for me. Not for a lot of people in this room, I’m guessing. If you work hard enough, you can still make your mark in the world.”
“And how will you do that?”
“I don’t know. There’s a million ways to get to where I want to be.”
“And what if you get hit by a car or … or slip in your bathtub and break your neck on the way down, or you get cancer? There’s a million more random things that can go wrong before you do.”
“Look at Stephen Hawking,” he said. “Guy’s in a wheelchair. Can only move one finger. And he’s changing everything we know about the universe. You don’t have to be limited by the things that could go wrong.”
“You’re going to Kent State,” she said. “Where did he go to school? You’re proving my point. It’s too hard to get there for people who start on our level. Don’t you get it? We’re not going to be celebrities, we’re not going to be president, we’re not going to change the course of history. We’re the workers. We’re the Morlocks. And our children will be their children’s workers. And there’s nothing we can do to change our future. But music like this makes us believe we can.”
David shook his head. He wasn’t blushing anymore, he knew. He felt strangely calm. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“What?”
“Was it a bad breakup? Did your parents just get divorced? What I mean is, who did this to you? Made you so sad?”
“That—that’s enough,” said the professor.
“Life,” she said.
“Well, if it’s just life, I don’t see that you have any reason to complain,” said David.
“You don’t know me.”
David opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, Elizabeth gathered up her books and walked out of the room. The class watched her go and then, in unison, turned toward David. He shrugged and sank into his seat.
He sat there for only another moment. And then, before he could think better of it, David scrambled out of his seat and ran after her. But she was gone. He searched the staircase on one side and peered in the women’s room on the other. It was crazy, anyway. What would he have said?
“Over here, numbnuts,” Elizabeth said. She was sitting at a desk in the dark in the empty classroom behind him.
He stepped inside and closed the door. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “Or maybe I did. I guess I did.”
She sighed. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. It’s fine. Whatever.”
“I do know you,” he said, not daring to step closer. “I know that whenever you sneeze, you sneeze exactly three times into the crook of your left elbow. I know you’re right-handed but write like a left-handed person, which tells me you must have had a mom or a dad who was left-handed and who loved you enough to teach you how to write before you went to kindergarten. I know that when you get nervous, like when we’re learning something new, you whistle some Blink-182 song real low. I know you bite your nails but not in class. I know you used to smoke, because sometimes you pull out your purse and open the side pocket where you used to keep them before you realize you’re doing that and then look around to see if anyone noticed. I know that necklace you wear has some special meaning because every so often your eyes get this glazed-over thing about them and you reach to the necklace, twisting it in your fingers to make it go away.”
Finally, David paused. He felt light-headed, but needed to say a little more. There was a real chance, he realized, that he would never have another opportunity to do so. He knew how crazy he sounded. Crazy enough for a restraining order, maybe.
“The American Dream is not a myth,” he said. “It offends me when you say that, because I’ve worked really hard just to get here. One day I’ll do something that matters. I’ll have a big goddamn house and people will know my name. Someday I’m going to have all that. And I don’t really know how to prove to you that’s possible unless you come with me.”
Elizabeth didn’t answer. It was impossible to read her. Her eyes were cold brown pebbles.
“I think you are just about the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I am in love with you, even though we’ve never really even talked before. I’m in love with the way you are. Your bluntness. Your intelligence. Your fragility. You are … just … lovely.”
Elizabeth looked back at him for a full ten seconds before saying anything. Finally, she said, “You can go.”
Later that night there was a knock on David’s dorm room door and he knew who it was without looking. When he opened it, there she was, her red hair bristly from the humidity. A cream-colored angora blouse clung to her body like a thin mitten. She set her book bag on the floor outside his room.
“I hate you and everything you’re about,” she said.
“No, you don’t.”
She stepped into his room. He closed the door. Even before it latched, her hands were on his body. They made love. When they finished, she took off her blouse and they fucked. Still later, they made love again, to the blue light of a television screen.
Lying in the dark, her head on his chest, long after he thought she had gone to sleep and he had passed the point of coherent thoughts, Elizabeth whispered, “I had a twin, once. An identical twin.”
“Shhh,” he said and stroked her hair. “I love you,” he said.
“You shouldn’t,” she replied.
* * *
He awoke in the darkness and he was alone.
No note, no lipstick on his dorm room mirror, no sign at all that Elizabeth had even been there except for the faint lingering of her scent, soap and melon.
David found her name in the student directory, called her dorm at Prentice Hall, got no answer. The next day she did not come to class. He had a girl he knew from History of American Lit escort him to Elizabeth’s room, but if she was there, she didn’t come to the door. He left more messages on her answering machine.
Around nine o’clock, three nights after they slept together, the phone in his room rang. She was c
rying.
“What?” he asked calmly.
“David, I’m sorry,” she managed. “I’ve been so mean to you.”
“It’s fine.”
“I didn’t know who else to call. I need your help.”
“What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
“I … I ordered pizza from EuroGyro. They always send out Catherine for me. She was supposed to work tonight. But when I called in my order, they sent some guy. I couldn’t open the door. I just ignored him until he went away. I don’t have anything left in my room to eat. Can you come and get me? Take me somewhere?”
David didn’t question it. Didn’t want to. This was her mystery, after all.
He picked her up five minutes later. Her lovely red hair was disheveled and he could tell by the clutter of her room that she hadn’t been outside in days. He took her to EuroGyro, where he paid for her pizza—which they shared at the bar, over a pitcher of beer. Afterward, they went to Palcho’s, a one-room donut shop on Main Street, near the university. Elizabeth listened while David talked about his family and his attempts at writing something meaningful. Whenever he asked about her childhood, she deftly spun the conversation in a different direction. He let her.
“I never answer the door for men,” she said finally.
That night she stayed in his dorm room. And the next morning she was still there.
* * *
“No, no, no,” she said, flipping through his CD case. “David, this is just awful.”
“What?”
“Cranberries, Enya, They Might Be Giants. There’s nothing in here older than 1990. It’s like some horrible teen girl’s CD collection.”
He shrugged. They were on his bed and she was leaning back against his chest, his legs crossed over her pale thighs. He loved the weight of her against his body. When she was done, Elizabeth tossed the binder across the room and pulled away from him, slipping on a pair of Keds.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
She returned twenty minutes later with a stack of CDs in her arms, held sturdy by her chin. She dumped them beside his radio, selected a disc, and turned the volume up louder than he’d ever pushed it. A gentle guitar riff; a tap-tapping of some percussion instrument—he pictured a man hitting a wooden spoon against his legs; a solid male voice, and the song broke into something more, a beat that filled his head with cool images and colors.
“What is it?”
“Led Zeppelin,” she said. “‘Ramble On.’”
He sat against the wall, his eyes trained on the space in the corner, while she selected more songs, rocking back on her legs and staring at him intently. “Free Bird.” “Roundabout.” “Sympathy for the Devil.” “Time.” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” “Brass in Pocket.” “Bad Company.” “Limelight.” “Crazy on You.” “Voodoo Child.” “Take the Long Way Home.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Where have I been hiding all this time?”
* * *
Elizabeth’s life was divided into manageable and repeating segments, and any derivation from her charted schedule seemed to lock her away into herself for a bit.
Every morning she drank a single cup of hazelnut coffee, which was dispensed from her single-cup machine. Then she signed online and checked the same four sites in order: the Plain Dealer, the Beacon Journal, Hotmail, and Drudge. Each afternoon, after classes, she got lunch from the Prentice Hall cafeteria, and took it back to her room on a beige tray, except for Wednesdays, when she treated herself to a take-out meal from Chipotle, eating in her locked car while she read the new weekly Independent. One Wednesday, they arrived at Chipotle to find that all the spots in the lot had been taken, and, instead of driving to another restaurant, she had taken them back to the dorm and slipped under the covers, without eating, complaining of a headache until he went away. At seven-thirty, five days a week, she stopped studying and turned on Jeopardy!, but never said the answers out loud. For a snack, at ten o’clock, she ate cinnamon toast. She spent most of the weekends in the library. But on Saturday nights, she always disappeared.
For the first couple weeks, he didn’t ask. When Saturday night came around and she told him she had plans, again, he found something else to do. But he knew she must leave campus because when he would go out to the bars with friends later, her car was always gone from the lot. And then, one Saturday night, just as he was steeling himself for the customary brush-off, Elizabeth said, “David, how much cash do you have on you?”
“About forty dollars,” he said. “In the bank, I mean. Nothing on me.”
She smiled. “You can borrow some of mine,” she said, pulling him off the bed. She reached into her panties drawer and pulled out a folded wad of twenties and tens.
“Jesus,” he said.
“It’s my bankroll.”
“Your what?”
“Bankroll. It’s not … well, it’s not real money. You can’t think of it like that.”
“It looks like real money.”
She shook her head. “You only use it to get more money.”
Elizabeth drove them to the Walmart in Ravenna, and parked behind a long charter bus surrounded by last year’s sedans. “Red Hats,” she said, as if that explained anything. “I like to play the ponies. Have you ever been to a track?”
David shook his head.
“Dark, smoky places. Full of men. But if you know what you’re doing, the odds are in your favor if you play long enough. I needed a group to go with me, because I couldn’t ever go alone, but I don’t have anybody. So I found them.”
The Red Hats, it turned out, were a kind of sorority for retired women who wore red hats instead of fezzes. There were more than twenty on the bus and they waved at Elizabeth as she entered, and cooed at David as he followed her to a seat in the back.
The bus took them to Northfield Park, a wide concrete coliseum a half hour away. Elizabeth stayed in the center of the Red Hats, leading David by the hand as he watched prissy horses pulling little carts through tiny gates. Inside the restaurant, the air was thick with the smoke of cheap cigars and thin cigarettes. They took a section of tables by a window and ordered food and beer while Elizabeth read through sheets of what looked like random numbers to him.
Betting on harness racing, like all horse racing, like life, she explained, was something called pari-mutuel gambling. Unlike betting on football, the odds changed based on the number of people betting. She tried to walk David through the basics of handicapping—something about pacing and whether or not the horse had tripped in the last race—but it was too much for David to keep straight.
“Look at this one,” she said, pointing to the stats on a horse called Santa Vittoria’s Secret. It was at ten-to-one, but had placed in a quarter of its last dozen races. “It has good value.” Instead, he put ten on Fatty Lumpkin, a horse at three-to-one, because he’d recognized the name from the Lord of the Rings.
Four hours later, they got back in the bus with the Red Hats, David in a daze, his head heavy on his shoulders. He’d lost $240 of his girlfriend’s money. But she’d left happy, and $800 richer.
“Probability won out,” she said. “It usually does.”
* * *
She practiced the piano in a cramped room in the Music and Speech Building every Tuesday and Thursday. Sometimes he would arrive early to watch her through the square window, watch her lovely calm as she folded herself into some Poulenc or Chopin. That was when she was at rest enough to smile.
When they took a trip to Niagara Falls and she thought he’d gone out for booze, she had sung loudly in the hotel shower, sung with a girlish confidence that busted his heart. “Castle on a Cloud,” from Les Misérables. He’d taped her performance with his microcassette recorder.
He stole glimpses of her when they got ready for dates in her dorm room, as she looked in the mirror at herself and made her lips into a silent whistle as she brushed her hair.
Only he knew these moments. Let others have their low-rent women, he thought. Eliz
abeth was worth more because only he knew how to find her. And only she knew how to find him.
* * *
“Where’re we going, Dad?” asked Tanner.
David knelt in front of his son, tying the boy’s Converse high-tops before zipping his coat and ruffling his hair. “Out,” said David.
“But where?”
“On a little adventure.” He took his son’s hand and led him through the kitchen to the garage, where the restored canary-yellow Volkswagen was parked.
“Ugh!” said Tanner, trying to pull his hand away from David. “Is this like the museum trip where you wanted me to see Mayonnaise on the wall?”
“Manet,” corrected David with a smile. “No, buddy. We’ll suspend your art lessons until you’re five.”
“What does suspend mean?”
“It means ‘delay’ or ‘wait until later.’” David opened the door and pushed the seat up for Tanner, who climbed into the booster seat in the back and buckled himself in.
“When do I get to sit up front?”
“When you’re a little taller,” David said. At the last visit to the pediatrician’s, the doctor had said the boy was in the twenty-fifth percentile as far as height, small for his age. It had been weirdly alarming and David had stayed up well into the night wondering if he’d somehow neglected the boy’s nutrition or stunted his growth by letting the boy sip his Coke whenever David had one with dinner.
The car’s ignition fired with a noise that sounded like the coughing of a fat smoker after a flight of stairs. He didn’t like taking her out of Akron, but he’d just had the Bug tuned and figured she could get them to Mansfield and back in one piece. In a moment they were bounding down Merriman, feeling each chuckhole and patched bit of pavement along the way. David stole a quick glance at the house on Primrose Lane as they passed—there was no sign of life there. The yard of Kentucky bluegrass was overgrown. Then again, so was his. He guessed it must still be empty—which would make it the only vacant property this side of town. There was no FOR SALE sign out front, though.
