An Innocent Fashion

by R. J. Hernández

  “What happens if they don’t get it in time?” I whispered to George.

  George sighed deeply. “We have to get it on time. If we don’t, then—”

  “Ethan,” Sabrina said.

  I never found out from George what would happen.

  “Ethan, come now.” I hadn’t even reached her desk before her hand appeared in my face, holding a credit card with a yellow sticky note on it. “Here is my corporate card, here is the address, here is the tracking number. Get the McQueen package here as fast as possible. It must be here before the run-through.”

  Flowing with girlish loop-de-loops, Sabrina’s Post-it reminded me of the fake love notes cheerleaders slipped into the fat kids’ lockers in high school. I slipped her note into my pocket with her credit card (“Sabrina Walker, Hoffman-Lynch Publications”), and processed my task, turning back to retrieve my wallet from the desk. “Be right back,” I told George.

  He waved me away as Sabrina rolled her chair into the farthest corner of her cubicle. I checked around in case I needed anything else, and was grabbing my wallet when Sabrina exploded over the wall with the intensity of a jack-in-the-box. “What are you still doing here?!” she shrieked, her head swinging like it was attached to a metal coil.

  “I—?” I scampered out of the closet like a child from a haunted house, tripping over the Louboutins, and when I was just outside the Hoffman-Lynch building, amid the whir of cabs and gray suits, my cell phone vibrated with a message from George:

  Are you there yet?

  chapter three

  The girl with the mirror’s full name was Madeline Dupre, and she reappeared on our first day of classes. I had been hoping to see her before then around our residence hall, but in the two hectic days comprising freshmen orientation—a blur of welcome banquets and introductory meetings and mixers put on by the Student Council—I just never ran into her.

  Now, my heart jumped as I watched her tuck her white chiffon dress underneath her and take a seat opposite me at a round wooden table. She spotted me and waved; I looked hastily down. With a deep breath, I tried to redeem myself with a glance in her general direction, but she had turned red, and was embarrassedly avoiding me by engrossing herself in the erratic dillydallying of our professor, Lloyd Pemberton.

  Madeline and I were two of one dozen students gathered for his Political Systems course, a seminar, which thereafter would meet twice a week on the second floor of a hall called Lindsey-Chittenden. Having never been much attracted to politics, I had been invited to join the course by Pemberton himself, a jovial, tweed-loving Brit who served as a supervising dean of my residential hall and who, during the welcoming luncheons, had sat across from me and declined every dish except for four servings of bread pudding.

  We would begin with a quiz, Professor Pemberton now announced, which would place us on a political spectrum, essentially categorizing us based on our liberal, or conservative, persuasions. “It’s not a real quiz—no right or wrong, that is—although . . .” he added, twirling his gray-haired moustache as he helicoptered around the table “. . . the same can be said for any political matter—there’s never a right or wrong, and that of course, is the trouble with politics.” He stopped mid-putter and crossed one hand over his wooly suit, the other propping up his chin for one second, two seconds; made a “hmm” sound; then, remembering us, perking up with his wrinkled finger in the air.

  “Introductions first,” he said, and began scratching a long horizontal line on the chalkboard—the economic spectrum, buttressed on opposite ends by the words left wing and right wing, then crossed through the center with a vertical line denoting the social spectrum. “Before you take the quiz, I want you to tell the class where you believe you fall on the political spectrum.”

  Madeline’s crystalline voice resounded first. “I’m sorry to start us off, Professor, because—well, I disagree with both sides of the spectrum and I despise the current state of politics. I despise it so much, actually—I plan to be a senator, and turn the whole thing upside down.” She glanced around the table. “That might sound silly but it’s true,” she shrugged, “so nice to meet you all, and vote for me!” She flashed a consciously exaggerated politician’s smile, and the whole class laughed.

  Professor Pemberton’s hand traveled over the board toward the farthest corner of the left-wing realm, where he chalked down a star with Madeline’s name. “We’ll put you over here for now. A rotten anarchist,” he winked, “but I’ll admit, a charming one.”

  I stared at Madeline. Her loose-fitting white dress had a neck tie and sheer billowing sleeves, and I wondered if, like me, she had once endured a confrontation with her own Cesar Montana, and decided that to dress like a lady elevated her to the last true bastion of humanity. The anticipation mounted as the class cycled through introductions: Katy McCutcheon considered herself a “boring liberal,” Anthony Griffith-Jones a “libertarian in a love-hate relationship with Marx,” and Anne Harrison a “Tea Party conservative, but please, no teabagging jokes, and no, I don’t hate gay people,” but to me Madeline Dupre could have been the only other person in the room.

  Madeline had no idea what she’d stirred in me when we met on the landing outside my dorm—that moment she misheard my name as “Ethan.” After she had left with her father, a chill had run through me as I thought: Why couldn’t I be Ethan? College was supposed to be my new life, my new chance—if I was so committed to leaving behind Corpus Christi, then why not leave behind Elián too? I ran to the bathroom and looked hard in the mirror at my generic features: white skin, dark hair. I could pass for an Ethan. Why not just become him right then, before anybody learned my real name?

  There had been a name tag on the door of my new suite, but I ripped it away and shouted, “Mom, Dad! I’ll be back soon!”—and the next thing I knew I was at the registrar’s office. “I want this name to appear on my ID,” I said, and handed the secretary a scribbled piece of paper. “I’d like it in my school e-mail, my transcripts, everything, and ideally, it would change before my professors got their class rosters.”

  She lifted a pair of pink cat-eye reading glasses from a chain around her neck, and inspected the paper.

  “What?” I asked. “Do my parents need to sign something?”

  She lowered the paper from her face, and said, “You’re an adult now. I could change your name to Martin Luther King if that’s what you wanted.”

  My parents didn’t protest. Through an explanation marked by ambiguity and feigned nonchalance, I misled them to believe the school had required the anglicized name change; less than a year later, I would file a legal petition with the court clerk’s office of Corpus Christi, and the transformation would be official.

  But by the time my turn to speak had arrived in my Political Systems class, freshman orientation—a two-day period featuring the endless exchange of introductions with new peers and professors—had already offered me innumerable opportunities to practice saying my new name.

  “I’m Ethan,” I said confidently now to my new class. “Ethan St. James.” Nobody questioned me, and I continued, “I guess I’m with Madeline, except I don’t want to be a senator. Maybe it’s simplistic, but governments rarely seem to do much good, for all the money they spend. If it were possible, I wouldn’t mind a governmental do-over.”

  “I should have guessed,” Professor Pemberton said. “With that ascot, you’re a threat to the establishment, or at least, to denim and 100 percent cotton. Hurrah! Another anarchist!” The class laughed as he put my star next to Madeline’s, and Madeline blushed across the room.

  For the rest of the class period I somehow knew she was aware of me, even though after my accidental rebuff of her greeting earlier, her every move now attested to the contrary. This went on for several class meetings, during which my desire to make eye contact was met only by fervent avoidance, so that our faces became like two magnets dancing in dipolar repulsion.

  I ALWAYS KEPT AN EYE OUT FOR HER AROUND OUR RESIDENTIAL hall, but only s
aw her once, when she practically ran away from me (“Hello!—I’m late!—Good-bye!”). Although it was unclear to me what kind of game we were playing, if any, what became quite clear was the extent to which Madeline was deadly serious about her radical politics. By the end of our second class she had established a habit, both endearing and exasperating, of usurping the round table discussion. It manifested in a galloping tangential rant, always scarcely related to the topic, which our professor indulged only in light of her heartbreaking sincerity. Her tirades began the same way every time: Some harmless comment would irk her, setting a timer in her head. She would start to fidget—one hand over the other on the table, then one hand under her chin, or in her hair, or flapping around on her lap while the other tried to contain it, and all along her weight would shift from side to side in her wooden chair—until finally she burst, as flustered as a wet bird, and with a look of breathless desperation thrust her delicate hand in the air.

  Upon professorial permission, Madeline would disappear behind a flutter of animated arguments—a series of haphazard gesticulations, her Tiffany bracelet jangling as she denounced the current political state and made frequent use of the ominously indefinite phrase: “The Institution.” Coming from her mouth, these truculent, almost mannish, diatribes only accentuated her dazzling femininity; the extraordinary contrast was rendered total when, at the end she always concluded that the only solution (it was so obvious to her) could be no less than the obliteration of the current governmental structure. Nobody had the heart to contest her, even though hers was obviously not a view shared by our entire class: Her guileless idealism made her so sympathetic that to oppose it with an appeal to conventional rationality seemed almost malevolent.

  Soon I had made a silent sport of predicting what would send her over the edge. In the fifth meeting of our class, we were discussing policies for raising the minimum wage, and I sensed Madeline would get worked up by Katy McCutcheon’s assertion that “a few extra cents could mean a new microwave for a struggling family.” Madeline’s face wrenched in regal horror, ignited the typical squirming, then—

  “I don’t see how these trifling policies solve anything!” she cried out. “Raising minimum wage can’t make a fundamental difference to human happiness, and isn’t happiness the true goal?” Whenever she passionately jumped in, the sun always conspired with the window to illuminate her with an aura of brilliance: Her hair would seem brighter, her eyes more piercing, and soon her whole body was glowing with otherworldly endorsement. “If the idea is to actually improve the quality of human lives, then the working class of America doesn’t need a few cents more so they can save up for a new . . .” she squirmed, her lips uncomfortable repeating a word so philistine as microwave, “. . . a new appliance,” she finished.

  Now her pre-Raphaelite hair seemed to grow longer and longer, every second spooling further downward over her shoulders.

  “The emphasis needs to be on culture—access to beauty and the arts, with enough time to enjoy them. In fact, more useful would be shorter work hours—no more overtime or corporate rat racing. We need a more natural human existence. What happened to being outside? Governments always underestimate the importance of natural beauty on the human psyche—of public parks and gardens and—”

  Unprecedented opposition came in the form of Grant Goodwin. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he began. His was a face of noble contours; an aquiline nose and strong, jutting chin, framed by blond hair, were features that made him a well-matched physical, if not philosophical, equal to Madeline. As such, he was perhaps the only other class member whose displays of political passion received a similar blessing, and the dozen faces around the table slanted toward him.

  “I appreciate your romanticism . . . I mean, who doesn’t like ‘culture’?” he continued. “But what you’re suggesting is beyond the scope of government. You’re talking about a total upheaval of social norms—a whole cultural shift which would devalue quantifiable measures like national income over abstract ideals like—‘happiness.’” At this last word, his face expressed a similar displeasure to that of Madeline’s over the crass-sounding “microwave.”

  Yet Madeline, excited to hear her own radical views translated through another person’s voice, failed to grasp that Grant wasn’t advocating for her worldview, but aggressively disputing it. “That’s exactly what I’m saying!” she said, with an eager nod.

  A lock of his blond hair swept into his eyes. “Well—that wouldn’t make any sense,” came his conclusive reply. “Think of Brook Farm, or Octagon City. All attempts at Utopia have failed—you can’t make happiness a law.”

  Madeline could only offer a stupefied cock of her head as the actuality of Grant’s position settled in her eyes like mercury in a thermometer.

  The faces turned to her.

  “Who said anything about laws?” she practically whimpered, too distressed to continue in an even tone. “If people just, I don’t know, picked some flowers, or watched a sunset every once in a while”—here there was a collective raising of eyebrows—“you wouldn’t have all these miserable people, putting in endless hours at these discouraging jobs all because they think somehow the solution to their unhappiness is more money, when of course it’s not. It’s just—obvious to me.”

  Attention turned back to Grant, while Professor Pemberton hovered behind him, loathe to interject.

  “But people can’t be counted on to do anything themselves, even if it’s for their own good,” Grant said. “To force them, you need laws. And if not laws, then what? You would kindly encourage people to pick flowers every day? Suggest they ‘look up’ more at the sky?”

  “Well, sure, and drink more wine and take more trips and have more great romances! Healthy, life-affirming things! It can’t be more difficult than funding all these futile government programs, or spending years trying to pass a bill that will only add an extra dollar to people’s paychecks. How can you not see my point, that the root of every problem is this system we’re all stuck in, this crass worldview, that all that matters is people’s credit score? People die everywhere without ever experiencing the breadth of human emotion, because nobody considers there’s another way.”

  Grant now manifested his own handsome version of flabbergastedness. “But . . . what about our capitalist infrastructure?”

  “Infra . . . structure?” Madeline was scarcely able to push out the syllables. “How about human worth and meaning? That’s what government should be trying to raise. If not to be alive, then people are living for the sake of what exactly? Some imaginary bottom line?” She was on the verge of sputtering deflation, pricked by the disheartening realization that anyone could be so staunchly opposed to the ideas she held as truth. “It’s the infrastructure that needs to be knocked out! It’s like this concrete building that’s getting bigger and bigger—it’s blocking out the sun, so the government just keeps shuffling people around, from one room to the other, but of course that can’t solve anything. The problem is the whole building.”

  She was so vulnerable—hands flailing, cheeks flush with the heat of philosophical passion—that, before I could help myself, it was my own hand flying in the air, and the words came spilling out. “She’s right, you know.”

  The spectators snapped in the unexpected direction of my seat. I hadn’t spoken much in class before, still accustoming myself to the expressive intellectual atmosphere of college; it was all so unlike my listless hometown that I spent most of my time just listening to everyone else.

  “It’s not like she’s making this up,” I said now. “There’s loads of precedent for these ideas—think of everybody from Plato to Kant, and nearly every Renaissance poet—they all held beauty up to the highest order of truth. Every great thinker has agreed—human life is nothing without the aesthetic experience. Arts, culture . . . they’re not frivolous at all if without them there’s no meaning. And if realizing the aesthetic potential of human life is a basic need, and a government has a responsibility to meet the b
asic needs of its people, then culture should be at the heart of governmental policy . . . Beauty—”

  My voice cracked. Madeline was finally looking straight at me, her eyes shining out of the blur of other faces. Before I had even planned the words, I heard myself share my own conviction aloud: “Beauty moves the whole world.”

  Professor Pemberton tapped his flat hands on the round table. “Very good, everyone. I think we all know now which two among us will be starting a revolution,” he smiled. “But alas, Ethan and Madeline, I’m afraid to inform you—the Romantics have already beaten you to the punch, and you’re almost two centuries late to join them.”

  A light ripple of laughter diffused the tension, which rose upward through the air to the crown molding. The professor took the opportunity to herd us back inside the perimeter of our selected texts, and for the rest of the class, I finally had no doubt that Madeline was looking at me. A few times, I had the courage to look up; I tried to be quick, to catch her gaze, but she was always quicker, and the moment my eyes reached hers they were met with a rustling of golden hair and a sudden devotion to the chalkboard, as if her life depended on the memorization of what was there.

  After class: the rattling of pens and notebooks into bags. Madeline took an especially long time packing up her things, neatly organizing her materials—pens, papers, sticky notes—first into a well-orchestrated square on the table. She kept her face glued to the pile, as though she hoped somebody might tap her shoulder so that she could look up in surprise, and utter a startled, “Oh!” through her plump lips and the gap between her white teeth.

  I started toward her, building up the courage to restore communication between us, when like a thumb over the lens of a camera, Grant Goodwin invaded my view.