Penelope

by Rebecca Harrington

  “I can’t believe you left early, Penelope,” said Ted. “You really missed out. It was actually sort of fun.”

  “It’s true. After you left, it really became fun,” said Catherine.

  “We had a dance party and everything,” said Ted. “And you blew it off for a booty call?”

  “Ha ha ha,” laughed Catherine in a shrill way.

  “You must really like this guy,” said Ted to Penelope—meanly, she thought. “What is the deal with you two now?”

  “What do you mean by deal?” said Penelope, although she knew what he meant. This was not the first time Ted had posed such a question, but the public forum was a particularly vile new development.

  “Like, what is going on with that?” asked Ted,

  “I really want to get more chicken,” said Penelope, who got up from the table and left to get more chicken. When she came back, the conversation had blessedly reverted to everyone’s favorite topic.

  “Did you get your chem exam back yet?” Nikil asked Glasses.

  “Yeah,” said Glasses.

  “Oh, cool,” said Nikil. “I got mine back too.” Nikil’s tone of voice indicated a certain degree of satisfaction with his performance. Glasses’s less so.

  Penelope’s own exams came off with varying degrees of success. She did quite well in Images of Shakespeare, for example, and relatively badly in Counting People. Neither of these things was particularly surprising. Jared said her country report was “weirdly specific in all the wrong ways” and Penelope even agreed with that. In any case, it was a new semester now, spring was on the horizon, and there was no use crying over spilled milk.

  “I am going to start tutoring that chem class next year,” said Nikil nonchalantly

  “Nice,” said Glasses. “You know, that’s a good idea. I might start tutoring too. Just to pick up some extra money.”

  Nikil made a little sound in the back of his throat.

  “Well, I think it’s one of those things where the professor picks you to be the tutor. At least that is what my professor did to me. You have to get above a certain grade on the final to be a tutor. Not everyone can do it.”

  “Oh,” said Glasses.

  “Can you believe it’s almost next year?” wailed Catherine. “This year has gone by so fast!”

  “We still have a while to go,” said Ted. “It’s not over yet.”

  “It’s true,” said Penelope. “We still have to perform Caligula.” Penelope had found recently that she could not think about the future without realizing she would have to perform Caligula in order to get to that future. Her one comfort was that barely anyone would see the production. The poster advertising the play was really very off-putting. Lan designed it this way on purpose, she had told Penelope.

  “Plus, we still have to figure out blocking,” said Nikil.

  “Oh God. I know!” said Glasses. Blocking, Penelope recently figured out, was the process by which freshmen got into an upper-class house for their sophomore year. All freshmen organized into groups of up to eight people called “housing blocks” and put themselves in a housing lottery. The logic ran that that way, students could live with their friends in the same dorm. The majority of freshmen, not excepting Glasses and Nikil, were obsessed with what house they were going to get into. In order of conversational preeminence, it was right up there with exams.

  “I have figured it out,” said Nikil. He pushed his tray out of the way and daintily laid his elbows on the table. “I definitely have it figured out. I think, to get into Adams House, we should only block with five people.”

  “I thought you said we could have all eight,” said Glasses.

  “Yeah, you did,” said Ted. He, Nikil, Jason, and Glasses were all blocking together. This had been decided quite early on and Penelope often wondered how Ted felt about this arrangement. It never seemed that he liked Glasses or Jason very much. He actively hated Nikil. However, if he had other friends, Penelope had never seen them, and if a tree falls in the forest? It was very probable that he had no other options.

  “No,” said Nikil. “I looked at the floor plan last night and I did a little game theory. Five people is best.”

  “But you said I could have my two friends from Model United Nations come and live with us!” said Glasses.

  Nikil shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know why I said that. I really should have run the probabilities beforehand. I guess I could say I was sorry that I didn’t do them, but I didn’t see a copy of the floor plans until yesterday.”

  “But my friend had a brother who lived in Adams House!” said Glasses, agitated.

  “Hmm,” said Nikil. Although the housing was random now, many students felt, through anecdotal evidence, that legacy still counted for something in these affairs. “Well, maybe he can stay in. I guess we should kick out someone else.”

  “I have been to Adams House,” added Penelope helpfully. It was where Gustav lived. “It is really nice.”

  “I know!” said Nikil sharply. “That’s why we want to get into it.”

  “Cool,” said Penelope. Catherine had her eyes demurely cast down and was eating her peas. Penelope wondered whom she was living with. For her part, she had not really thought about blocking very much. She had been too much entangled with the throngs of romance. This conversation, however, was emphasizing to her why she really had to consider the subject. The due date was looming, and these things seemed to be deciding themselves, which was usually when Penelope absented herself from any decision-making process.

  “One thing I know is I am so excited to go to Caligula,” said Ted in a malicious manner.

  “Ha ha,” laughed Penelope mirthlessly.

  “I love existentialism,” said Glasses sincerely.

  All told, Penelope’s second semester was going far better than her first. She was taking new classes and they were not very hard. Jared was not her TF anymore. She also sort of had a boyfriend, in a way. Caligula was approaching, but not until the end of the year. These were Penelope’s thoughts on a positive day.

  The Gustav situation was confusing though. Penelope had seen him several times since she had been back at school. They had even fallen into a certain kind of schedule with each other, which was exciting. Penelope could be reasonably sure she would see him once or twice a week. Once she saw him three times in one week, but that was because she was going to a Gilbert and Sullivan concert by herself and he was lost.

  However, if Penelope was honest with herself, the reason she avoided Ted’s questions about her relationship with Gustav was because she didn’t know what the “deal” between them was exactly. She couldn’t really say they were in a relationship, since they didn’t really go on dates, and their arrangement seemed far less official than boyfriend and girlfriend. She also couldn’t say they were just friends, since Gustav mostly called her very late at night and she slept in his bed. It was an anxiety-provoking situation for the type of person who enjoyed a one-word answer.

  In many ways, Penelope had been preparing her whole life for a grand romance. Everything about one suited her down to the ground: the surprise trips to Malta, the avowals of continual affection, the heated sparring over pets and mink coats and rivals. Penelope knew she could have a grand romance with Gustav, but for some reason, she felt like she was spending a worrisome amount of time in the period before the romance was to begin.

  The problem was, it didn’t feel like things were becoming less casual as time marched on, as one would usually expect. If anything, it felt like they were becoming more casual. Gustav never saw Penelope during the day. He never introduced her to his friends. They very rarely talked about anything very much or for a very sustained period, which suited Penelope fine but also did not seem to be natural. On the other hand, Gustav was unfailingly polite when they did hang out, initiated all of their social intercourse with aforementioned regularity, and seemed to like her.

  Later that night, for example, Gustav invited Penelope over to his room
at two in the morning. He had gone to a benefit that evening in Boston for a charity that provided BlackBerrys to subsistence farmers.

  “It was really amazing, Penelope,” said Gustav, taking off his tuxedo shirt and laying it over a chair. “You would be shocked how many people in the world don’t even have BlackBerrys.”

  “That is amazing,” said Penelope, who was lying on the bed.

  “Boston is really so insipid though. The women all have terrible sloping shoulders. The food was too awful because it was ecologically sound. Still, that was to be expected.”

  Gustav sat on the side of the bed, shirtless but still in pants. Penelope wondered whether people wore undershirts in Argentina. It was hard to know.

  “Anyway, darling,” said Gustav. “How was your day?”

  “Oh, fine,” said Penelope. “Who did you block with when you were a freshman?”

  “Oh, it’s that time again, isn’t it?” said Gustav.

  “Yeah,” said Penelope. “Or for the first time.”

  “Do you know who you are going to live with?”

  “Well, no,” said Penelope. “I haven’t decided really.”

  “Living with people is overrated, I think. I don’t live with anyone because I would probably die of rubella, but it has always worked out quite well, really.”

  “It’s too bad I was vaccinated,” said Penelope. She really meant this.

  “I know, dear,” said Gustav. “Not being vaccinated has saved me from most of the unpleasant things in life. I don’t really know what I would have done if I were vaccinated, aside from living to a more advanced age.” He bent down and gave Penelope a long kiss on the mouth. Then he stood up, took his phone from his pocket, and put it on his desk.

  “Of course, if you don’t have vaccination as an excuse, it is rather embarrassing to be a floater,” said Gustav.

  “A floater?”

  “Someone no one wants to live with, darling. It is quite shameful. Means no one likes you. Ahh, here are my cuff links. I could feel them digging into my thigh.” Gustav took two gold cuff links from his other pocket and put them on his desk.

  “You really shouldn’t worry about that though,” said Gustav, laying himself on top of Penelope in a very agile way. He kissed her again. Then he slowly slid one of Penelope’s bra straps off her shoulder and kissed her shoulder. “Just ask your friends to block with them, and I am quite sure you will have it all sorted by the end of the week.”

  Penelope nodded. This sounded like good advice to her. It was worrisome, this floater business, however.

  “My goodness darling, you look very nice tonight,” said Gustav, who took his mouth away from Penelope’s neck to look at her face in a friendly sort of way, like they were meeting for the first time. “Is this a new bra?”

  “I don’t know,” said Penelope blankly. It wasn’t.

  “Black is a very subversive color,” said Gustav, “except on nuns! I wonder when all this frustration will get boring,”

  “Ha ha ha,” laughed Penelope. But she was nervous. So you see the trouble.

  A week later, Penelope arrived ten minutes late to the required freshman-only expository writing seminar she was taking called Southern Writers Reconsidered or Southern Writers Revisited—Penelope had never caught which it was. And now she had lost the syllabus so she was never to know.

  As Penelope took her seat, the professor, a portly man with Darwinian sideburns, cleared his throat with displeasure. The first day of class he had brought his primary school uniform into the classroom and hung it over the back of the door. It consisted of pantaloons and a small blazer. He brought it in to show that “everyone had to start somewhere.” It was a metaphor for writing. Ever since then, he and Penelope had been enemies.

  “How nice of you to join us,” said the professor to Penelope. It was hard to tell if this was sardonic.

  “Oh, yes,” said Penelope. She sat as far away from the professor as possible. She really needed to start taking her showers at night.

  “All the King’s Men,” yelled the professor at the top of his voice, “American history through the looking glass?”

  The class looked at him, unmoved. They were assigned to read only the first one hundred pages of All the King’s Men. Because it was an expository writing class, they read only excerpts of books or parts of articles “just to get a taste of them,” as the professor said. Southern books are all very long, however. Quite often, Penelope didn’t get the best sense of what was happening in the plots.

  Penelope stopped listening to the professor and occupied herself by looking at the other people in the class. She had hoped that a compulsory course would be a good place to meet people you did not know already. However, it ended up that she knew quite a lot of her fellow students already, at least by sight, which was disappointing. Jason was in this class too. Sometimes he glared at Penelope when the professor was talking.

  “Your second paper is due in a week,” said the professor eventually. “You can go.”

  Penelope wandered out of Emerson Hall and cut across the Yard on the way back to Pennypacker. Jason walked a couple of steps ahead her. They never walked back together after Southern Writers Reconsidered/Revisited and never seemed to feel the lack of each other’s company on the way back to the dorm. This time, however, Jason slowed down so he was walking almost next to her. Penelope worried briefly that someone had died.

  “Hi, Penelope,” Jason said.

  “Oh, hi, Jason,” said Penelope.

  “I saw that guy who is supposed to be your boyfriend walking around with another girl. In the co-op,” said Jason breathlessly. It was the longest sentence Penelope had ever heard him utter.

  “Oh,” said Penelope. “OK. Really?”

  “Yes!” said Jason.

  “Well, that is OK,” said Penelope. It was probably Bitty. Penelope knew that she had to be a modern woman and not overreact to this news. Seeing Gustav with a woman didn’t mean anything. Women were equals in society now and could be platonic comrades. That was the good and bad thing about the women’s movement.

  “Are you living with anyone?” asked Jason.

  “No,” said Penelope. “But I will find someone soon.”

  “It is the worst to be a floater,” said Jason. He broke out into a run and ran all the way to Pennypacker.

  Penelope decided she would take Gustav’s advice and ask one of her friends to block with her instead of waiting around like a discarded Victorian companion for them to bring it up with her. It was not her first inclination to be the aggressor, but when had her first inclination ever been correct or appropriate? Besides, she didn’t want to be a floater, and as time marched closer to the date that housing forms were due, it was becoming increasingly likely that if she didn’t take some sort of initiative she would be.

  Penelope was going to ask either Lan or Emma to block with her. They were her closest approximation to friends, and all told, living with them this year had not gone too badly. Penelope was an inclusive soul and would have preferred that they all block together, but recently the tensions between Lan and Emma had reached some sort of apotheosis, especially since Lan taught Raymond two dog tricks.

  So accordingly, and later that week, Penelope seized upon Lan while she was walking to the bathroom. Lan was wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt that had the words “I am ambivalent about” written above the band logo in marker. Raymond was following behind her, carrying Emma’s copy of Democracy in America in his mouth.

  “Hey, Lan,” said Penelope. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  “What?” said Lan. She stopped walking and looked at Penelope. It was a scary look, but Penelope continued.

  “How are you?” asked Penelope.

  “Fine,” said Lan.

  “That’s good.”

  Lan shrugged.

  “Wow. Can you believe Caligula is coming up so soon?” asked Penelope.

  “No,” said Lan.

  “I hope they find someone to play Craig’s part,
” said Penelope, more to herself than Lan. “I thought they would have found somebody by now.”

  “I knew they wouldn’t,” said Lan. “I said that.”

  “I am troubled by some recent developments in the play,” continued Penelope quickly. “For example, that play within a play they put in the third act. That wasn’t in the original script. I don’t get why it is a puppet show either.”

  “That was my idea,” said Lan. She started walking toward her room.

  Penelope took a deep breath. It was time to confront the real situation. This was very frightening. More frightening, even, than the imaginary scenario, which involved a slap.

  “Do you know what you are doing for housing?” asked Penelope.

  “Oh,” said Lan. “I am moving to the co-op.”

  “Oh?” said Penelope. “What is that?”

  “It’s this place off campus where everybody cooks their own vegetarian food and lives together and rides bikes. It’s disgusting.”

  “Oh, really?” said Penelope. “So you are not moving into one of the houses?”

  “No,” said Lan.

  “Why not?” asked Penelope. She was really disappointed. She had not realized how much she had counted on living with Lan. She had pictured the two of them celebrating Raymond’s birthday and eating in silence for many years to come.

  “It’s just really hard to keep a cat secret,” said Lan. She said this almost apologetically.

  “Oh,” said Penelope. “I can see that.”

  “Well, I am going to my room,” said Lan.

  “OK,” said Penelope. And then Lan walked to her room.

  Penelope sat in the common room by herself. She was stung and upset. Still, on further reflection, it was a foolhardy enterprise to ask Lan to live in the confines of the dorms for another year. Lan would have never had agreed to their strictures. She was an iconoclast. Penelope was not, however.

  “So how do you like living in America?” said Penelope to Gustav. She was sitting on the couch in his common room and sipping a flute of champagne. It was three a.m. Gustav was preparing to hit a golf ball into a putting green he installed near his desk. Gustav was often silent when playing golf. Thus Penelope had ample time to think of a conversational topic.