Somebody must have had a deadline, because the suite was empty when I got back from the shower. Naked except for the towel around my waist, I stood for a moment in the common room, savoring the silence and the rare sensation of privacy.
Unlike most of my friends, who claimed they couldn’t get any work done in their rooms, I found it impossible to work anywhere else. The library was just too distracting—too many people, too many noises, too much searching eye contact with total strangers, not all of it friendly. I knew from bitter experience that it was possible to spend three hours in the main reading room and get about ten pages of reading done. The more remote corners of the library were no better. The carrels up in the musty stacks of Sterling, where Sang spent most of his time, were far too creepy and desolate for me. It was like a horror movie, the way you could hear footsteps echoing down the endless corridors as they approached, the sound growing louder and clearer by the second, until you expected a crazed fifth-year senior to yank back your head and slit your throat, leaving you to bleed to death all over your Tocqueville. The closetlike weenie bins in the Cross Campus Library were disconcerting for an entirely different reason. The partitions between the different bins didn’t reach up to the ceiling, so noises traveled easily. I often thought—sometimes with more certainty than others—that people in nearby bins were having sex rather than studying, a suspicion aggravated by Ted and Nancy’s frequent boasts of weenie-bin assignations. Whenever this happened, I found myself oscillating between intense self-pity and equally intense feelings of arousal, neither state of mind particularly conducive
to the kind of concentration demanded by a book like Middlemarch.
I had another problem with Middlemarch, though, one that afflicted me even in the safety and solitude of my own room, and slowed my laborious crawl through the novel to a virtual standstill. The problem was highlighting.
I had seen highlighters before coming to college; I just hadn’t understood what they were for. I thought of them, quite simply, as yellow Magic Markers, objects for which I had little use in the present, and for which I could imagine little use in the future. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me to mark up my books with them, or with any other writing instruments. My high school textbooks were school property; we weren’t supposed to deface them, period. This prohibition made sense to me. I was always annoyed when I received a book that someone else had underlined or commented on. My own reading experience was somehow diminished by the visible traces of a third party who was neither me nor the author. I spent more time than I should have wondering why the previous reader had marked one passage rather than another, or comparing my reactions to my predecessor’s, though, to be honest, the comments generally didn’t extend far beyond Yes! or How True!! or Hester Sucks Dick!!!
But then I got to college, where I suddenly found myself surrounded by an army of people wielding yellow highlighters, carefully illuminating the crucial passages in their reading, the main ideas, the provocative metaphors, the striking epigrams. Some highlighted judiciously, selecting only a key word here and there, while others did it wantonly, scribbling furiously over whole paragraphs. One of my freshman roommates used a ruler to keep his highlights straight; another guy I knew, who had taken an expensive class on improving his study habits, kept an array of highlighters at the ready to color code his texts for handy reference at exam time.
By the end of my first semester, I was already hooked. By the middle of my junior year, the period I’m referring to here, I could
no more imagine reading without a yellow highlighter in my hand than I could have imagined going to bed without brushing my teeth.
What happened with Middlemarch had happened to me with other books, but it had never caused me so much difficulty. Too much of the book seemed to demand highlighting. George Eliot wrote with such sustained profundity that I found myself coloring over line after line after line, sometimes covering entire pages with a thick coat of yellow neon. Every now and then I’d forget myself and absent-mindedly highlight a completely banal sentence, something on the order of: “I shall take a mere mouthful of ham and a glass of ale,” he said reassuringly.
After I had slipped up in this manner a number of times, I decided that I needed some other mark, some way of distinguishing truly important highlighted passages from the ones that were slightly less important or not important at all. Over the course of two hundred pages I had improvised a byzantine system involving highlighter, underlines, and marginal punctuation marks. What a truly major passage looked like is hard to re-create, though I can report that the people who sat next to me in seminar often felt the need to comment on my thoroughness.
In the end, my reading process had been warped into a strange kind of inventory taking, in which I was forced to divide the book into miniscule units, weighing the present sentence against all sentences that had come before, trying to find a place for it in my mysterious and ever-shifting hierarchy of classification. A more reasonable person might have simply declared a moratorium on highlighting, but that struck me as the coward’s way out, hardly better than not reading at all.
My concentration was further disrupted by guilty thoughts of Cindy, whose calls I’d been dodging for the past several weeks. I knew we needed to talk, but I figured that if I avoided her long enough, she’d get tired of waiting and supply my half of the conversation
on her own, thereby sparing me the unpleasantness of having to be the bad guy. She wasn’t getting the message, though, and her persistence was starting to worry me.
Cindy was a girl from home. We hadn’t moved in the same circles in high school, hadn’t been well-enough acquainted even to sign each other’s yearbooks. I had forgotten all about her until my first day of work the previous summer.
God knows I hadn’t wanted to spend the summer riding shotgun in the Roach Coach, selling plastic-wrapped danishes to tired-looking factory workers. I would much rather have been in Manhattan or Washington, D.C., interning for a magazine or a congressman, but nothing had come through that paid enough to make either plan even remotely plausible. In the end, it had come down to the Roach Coach or the forklift for me, and the Roach Coach at least offered the promise of novelty, as well as a boss who wasn’t going to address me as “Joe College” and reserve the shit jobs especially for me.
I met her outside a small manufacturing plant in Union Village that looked like a scale model of our high school. I’d already made change for her dollar before I paid enough attention to her face to realize that I knew her.
“Cindy, right?”
She gave me back the same squinty look. I raised the bill of my baseball cap to help her out.
“Danny? What are you doing here?”
“Helping my dad.”
“Dante’s your father?”
I hesitated a second before saying yes, not because I was embarrassed or anything, but simply because it was hard for me to get used to hearing my father referred to as “Dante.” Like me, he normally went by “Danny” or “Dan,” but for some reason had decided to use his given name on the truck.
“He’s a trip.” She shook her head in cheerful reminiscence, as if she and my father were the ones who’d gone to school together.
I took a moment to really look at her. At Harding, she’d always just faded into the background, but out there, in that sunstruck
Monday morning industrial nowhere land, she seemed mysteriously vivid, a person worth getting to know.
“Aren’t you at Harvard or something?” she asked.
“Yale.”
“Wow.” She shook her head in sincere wonderment and glanced down at the coins in her hand. “I guess I don’t have to count my change.”
“You better,” I told her. “I’m an English major.”
Cindy was a religious coffee drinker and made it a point to stand on my line instead of my father’s. From our brief exchanges, I learned that she worked full-time in the office of Re-Coil Industries, a company that manufactured a revolutionary kind of nylon hose for use in a highly specialized machine whose name she could never remember. During the school year, she took night classes in accounting and marketing at Kean College. She still hung out with her high school crowd, but said it was getting boring. She went to the gym whenever she could and was thinking about buying a new car.
At the beginning of the summer, my attraction to her was tainted by doubt and disapproval. I was dismayed by her hair, the outdated Charlie’s Angels thing she was still doing with the curling iron and blow-dryer. She was big on pastels and had a weakness for matching culottes and blouses, an ensemble my mother referred to as a “short set.” She chewed Juicyfruit, painted her nails, and didn’t skimp on the eye shadow. The girls I liked in college favored baggy sweaters and objected to makeup on political grounds. On special occasions they wore thrift-store dresses and cowboy boots. They didn’t devote a lot of time to their nails, and a surprising number of them had mixed feelings about shaving their legs. I had the feeling they wouldn’t have approved of Cindy.
As the weeks went by, though, my reservations began to crumble. Who was I to be a snob about hairstyles and nail polish? Maybe I went to Yale nine months of the year, but right now I was back
home in New Jersey, spending my days speeding from one godforsaken industrial park to another in a truck with a cockroach painted on the front doors, trading stale quips about Jodie Foster with guys who wore their names on their shirts, and cultivating an impressive tan on the lower two thirds of my left arm. What did I care what the girls I went to school with—girls I hardly knew, from places like Park Avenue and Scarsdale and Bethesda and Newton and Buck-head and Sausalito and Saratoga Springs and Basel frigging Switzerland—what did I care what they would think about someone like Cindy, whom they were never going to lay eyes on or have a conversation with anyway?
I was lonely that summer, and her face lit up every time she saw me. She complimented me on my new glasses, asked what I did to stay in such good shape, made frequent comments about what a jerk her ex-boyfriend had been and how she hadn’t had a date for the past eight months.
Sometimes she wore a tight denim dress that buttoned down the front, and she always smelled like she’d just stepped out of the shower. Even in that little candy-striped jumper I hated, you could see what a nice body she had, that she worked out but wasn’t a fanatic about it, not like some of the girls I knew at school, girls who ran so much their bodies were just bones and angles. Cindy smiled a lot and had a distracting habit of touching me ever-so-lightly on the wrist as she talked, maintaining the contact for just so long, but not a fraction of a second longer. I’d spent my entire high school career pining for girls like her. Two years of college had changed me in a thousand ways, but not so much that I didn’t get a little dizzy every time she uncapped her cherry Chapstick and ran it lovingly over her dry, puckered lips.
My mother had been telling me all year that my father needed a rest, but I hadn’t realized how badly he needed one until I’d spent a few weeks on the job. He looked like he’d aged ten years
in a matter of months. He had indigestion from too much coffee, hemorrhoids from driving all day, and the haunted, jittery look of a fugitive from justice. He talked to himself more or less incessantly, often in a hostile tone of voice: “You idiot!” he’d say, slapping himself in the head the way they did on those V-8 commercials, “you forgot to refill the cup holders!” A slow driver in our path could trigger a rage in him that was frightening to behold, a teeth-grinding, horn-pressing, dashboard-pounding fury that made me think he was just a couple of red lights away from a massive heart attack or a full-scale nervous breakdown.
It was painful to compare this frayed version of my father with the optimistic, rejuvenated man he’d been the summer before, the risk taker who’d chucked his job as assistant manager of a Path-mark and gone deep into debt to buy the lunch truck and route from a guy who was calling it quits after thirty years in the business. You could see how excited he was by the uncharacteristic boldness of his decision, how proud he was to finally be his own boss, to own a truck with his name on it. He spent entire weekend afternoons washing and polishing it in our driveway, making that black-and-silver lunch wagon shine. His high spirits manifested themselves in the very name of the truck, which had previously gone by the more prosaic moniker of Eddie’s Breakmobile. If people were going to call you the Roach Coach anyway, he’d reasoned, why not beat them to the punch?
It wasn’t hard to see what had defeated him. Running a lunch truck is grueling, thankless work, marked by long hours, low profit margins, and constant time pressures. If a company’s coffee break is at 10:15, you’d better be out in the parking lot at 10:14, open for business. Nobody wants to hear about the traffic jam or the flat tire that held you up, though they’re more than happy to give you an earful about the sludgy coffee or how you supposedly shorted them on the ham in yesterday’s sandwich. It starts to grind you down after a while.
By late June I knew the ropes well enough for my father to start
taking Fridays off, leaving my parents free to spend long weekends relaxing at their campground near the Delaware River. (They loved it there, though Camp Leisure-Tyme always struck me as a grim parody of the suburban life they were supposedly getting away from, trailers lined up one after the other like dominoes, all these middle-aged couples watching portable TVs inside their little screen houses.)
My first day in charge, hustling from one stop to the next, singlehandedly taking care of the customers we usually split between us, I carried in my mind a comforting image of my father crashed out on his hammock in the shade of a tall tree, empty beer cans littering the grass below. The following Monday, though, he confessed that he’d been a nervous wreck the whole day, unable to do anything but deal out one hand of solitaire after another, mechanically flipping the cards as he tormented himself with elaborate disaster scenarios involving me and his precious truck.
Cindy asked me out on a Friday morning in early August, the third day of what turned out to be the worst heat wave of the summer. It was only ten o’clock, but already the thermometer was well into the nineties. I felt wilted and cranky, having awakened at four in the morning in a puddle of my own sweat. She worked in an air-conditioned office, and I could almost feel the coolness radiating off her skin.
“Poor guy,” she said. “Looks like you could use a cold one.”
“A cold two or three sounds more like it.”
“Why don’t you come to the Stock Exchange tonight? A bunch of us hang out there after work on Fridays.”
“I just might take you up on that.”
“Great.” She smiled as though she had a question for me, but then decided to keep it to herself. “I’ll keep an eye out for you. Come anytime after six.”
I drove through the day in a miserable heat daze, stopping every now and then to soak my head in the spray from someone’s lawn sprinkler. When it was finally over, I took a shower and fell asleep on the living room couch for a couple of hours. It was close to eight
by the time I finally made it to the restaurant, and Cindy was alone at the bar.
“I thought you stood me up,” she said, not even bothering with hello.
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a bunch of you?”
“They left about an hour ago. Jill’s brother invited us to a party down the shore.”
“You could have gone. It wasn’t like we had a date or anything.”
She nodded slowly, trying to look thoughtful instead of hurt.
“I see them all the time. I thought it might be nice to be with someone different for a change.”
I climbed onto the stool next to hers and played a little drumroll on the bar, feeling unexpectedly calm and in control.
“It is nice. How come we didn’t think of this a month ago?”
She reached down and squeezed my leg just above the knee. It was a ticklish spot, and I jumped in my seat.
“I’ve been waiting for this all summer,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
I wouldn’t have predicted it, but Cindy turned out to be a talker. She drank three glasses of rose with dinner and held forth on whatever popped into her head—her indecision about buying a car, her crush on Bruce Springsteen, a bad experience she once had eating a lobster. She had so many opinions my head got tired from nodding in real or feigned agreement with them. She believed it was better to die in a hospice than a hospital and thought tollbooths should be abolished on the parkway. She disapproved of abortion, loved trashy novels, and was angered by the possibility that rich people might be able to freeze their bodies immediately after death, remaining in a state of suspended animation until a cure was found for whatever had killed them.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “When you’re dead you should just be dead.”
“That’s right. It should be available to everyone or not at all.”
“I want to travel,” she blurted out. “I don’t just want to rot around here for the rest of my life.”
I looked up from my Mexi-burger, startled by the pleading in her voice. She smiled sheepishly.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m not usually such a chatterbox. I hope I’m not boring you to death.”
“Not at all. I’m happy to listen.”
And I was, too, at least most of the time. Even when she recounted in minute detail a complex dispute her mother had had with the cable company, or tried to convince me that I needed to read The Late, Great Planet Earth, I still found myself diverted by the unexpectedness of Cindy and touched by her need for my approval. I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as someone other people needed to impress. Until quite recently, in fact, I had generally felt the obligation moving in the opposite direction.
“Do I sound stupid to you?” she asked.
“What makes you think that?”
“I’m just going on and on. I’m not even sure if I’m making sense.”
“It’s nice,” I said. “I’m having a good time.”
She stuck one finger into her wineglass, stirring the pink liquid into a lazy whirlpool. Then she transferred her finger from the glass to her mouth, sucking contemplatively for a few seconds.
“You’re sweet,” she said finally, as if pronouncing a verdict. “You’re sweet to even put up with me.”
She decided she was too tipsy to drive and happily accepted my offer of a ride home. We maneuvered our way through the crowded parking lot, bodies brushing together accidentally on purpose as we walked. It was still muggy, but the night had cooled down just enough to be merciful. I reached into my pocket and fished around for the keys.
“Oh my God,” she said, grabbing me roughly by the wrist. “You’re driving me home in this?”
I had spent so much of my summer in and around the Roach Coach I didn’t really notice it anymore. But her startled laughter made me look at it as if for the first time: the gleaming silver storage compartment with its odd, quilted texture, the old-fashioned cab, the grinning cockroach on the passenger door, emblem of my father’s rapidly fading dream. The roach was a friendly-looking, spindly-legged fellow, as much person as bug, walking more or less upright, with white gloves on his hands and white high-top sneakers on his feet. He seemed to be in a big hurry to get wherever it was he was going. DANTE’S ROACH COACH, said the bold yellow letters arching over his head. Beneath his feet, a caption read, COMIN’ ATCHA!
“It’s all I have,” I said. “My parents took the station wagon to the campground. We can take your car if you want.”
“That’s okay,” she said cheerfully. “How often does a girl get to ride in a lunch truck?”
I opened the door and helped her up into the cab. Then I circled around to the driver’s side, climbing in beside her. An open box of Snickers bars rested on the seat between us, along with a parking ticket and a stack of coffee cups decorated with a Greek-column motif. Cindy helped herself to a candy bar. I started the truck.
“Kinda melted,” she informed me, struggling with the taffy-like strand of caramel produced by her first bite. “You should keep these things out of the sun.”
Five minutes later we pulled up in front of her house. I shut off the ignition and headlights, turning to her with one of those dopey what-now shrugs that was the best I could muster in the way of a suave opening gambit. She nodded yes, sliding toward me on the seat. I moved the candy bars and coffee cups on top of the dashboard, out of harm’s way.
I hadn’t been kissed all summer, and the first touch of her tongue on mine released me from a prison I hadn’t even known I was in. All at once, the boundary between myself and the rest of the world disappeared; a sudden weightlessness took hold of me, as though I were no longer a body, just a mouth filled with tastes and sensations. For some unidentifiable period of time, I lost track of who and where I was.
When I could think again, my first thought was, This is amazing! My second was, She’s a secretary! The thought was so jarring, so ridiculous and uncalled-for, it made me pull away in confusion. We sat there in the humid cab, separated by a distance of maybe a foot, breathing so hard we might as well have just delivered a refrigerator. She ran one hand through her formerly neat hair and looked at me as if I’d said something peculiar.
“What do you want?” she asked, her voice low and urgent.
“Want?” I said.
“Why are you even with me?”
Instead of answering—or maybe by way of answering—I kissed her again. This time it felt more like real life, two bodies, two separate agendas. I put my hand on her breast. She removed it. I groaned with disappointment and tried again, with the same result. Instead of backing off, though, she kissed me even harder, as if to reward my persistence. I wrenched my mouth away from hers.
“My parents are away for the weekend,” I whispered. “We’d have the whole house to ourselves.”
She ignored the invitation. Her face tightened into a squint of pained concentration.
“Tell me what it’s like,” she said.
I didn’t bother to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. In some strange way, we’d been talking about it all night.
“It’s just college,” I told her, leaning back against the door, trying to calm my breathing.
“How’d you get in?”
“I applied.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I did really good on the SATs. Much better than I expected.”
This was my standard answer whenever anyone at home asked me how I’d gotten into Yale. It was easier to write it off as a fluke than to go into all the other stuff, the AP classes I’d taken, the papers I’d written for extra credit, the stupid clubs I’d joined just so I could list them on my application, all the nights I’d stayed up late reading books like Moby Dick and The Manic Mountain with a dictionary beside me, the endless lists of vocabulary words I’d memorized, the feeling I’d had ever since I was a little kid that I was headed out of town, on to bigger and better things.
“But it’s hard, right? They give you a lot of homework?”
The word “homework” seemed jarring to me; it had dropped out of my vocabulary the day I graduated from high school.
“I didn’t know what homework was,” I admitted. “High school’s a joke in comparison.”
“It must be fun, though. Living in a dorm and everything.”
“It’s okay. The food’s a little scary.”
“I did really bad in high school,” she said. “My mother was sick a lot. Then I got involved with this older guy. Before I knew it, the four years were gone and I hadn’t really learned anything. Now I feel so stupid all the time.”
“An older guy?” Just the phrase made me a little queasy.
“I was a cashier at Medi-Mart. He was one of the supervisors.”
I remembered seeing her a lot at Medi-Mart back when we were in high school, thinking she seemed more at home behind the register than she did walking the halls of Harding.
“How long’d you go out?”
“Two years.” She looked away; all the life seemed to have drained out of her. “He was married and everything. You must think I’m horrible.”
I reached for her face, gently steering it my direction. She was teary-eyed, but happy to be kissed again. This time I tried some new strategies, nibbling on her lips and licking up and down the salty length of her neck. Within minutes she was breathing in
quick, trembly gasps, murmuring encouragement. When she seemed ready, I tried maneuvering her onto her back, but she went rigid, not resisting exactly, but certainly not cooperating.
“What’s the matter?”
She gave me a glassy-eyed smile of incomprehension.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I love this,” she said, running her tongue around her chapped and swollen-looking lips. “I could kiss you forever.”
Three weeks later, I was starting to believe her. All we ever did was kiss. Nearly a month of heavy making out, and I hadn’t even succeeded in getting my hand up her shirt. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.
Other than that, we had a pretty good time together. Sometimes we went to the movies or out to dinner, but mainly we just shopped for cars. It was the consuming quest of her life. We read the stickers, quizzed the salesmen, took demos out for drives—Civics and Corollas, Escorts and Omnis, K-cars and Firebirds, Mustangs and Rabbits. But despite all our work, she seemed no closer to making a decision. New or used? Automatic or stick? Foreign or American? Hatchback or sedan? Every night we started from scratch. There was always another dealership, new variables to ponder. I started to wonder if she saw car shopping and kissing as ends in themselves—wholly satisfying, self-contained events—rather than starting points on the road to bigger things.
I think I would have lost patience with her a lot sooner if the end of the summer hadn’t been looming over us from the start. Every day, in some process of withdrawal that was as subtle as it was relentless, I looked upon her less and less as my actual girl-friend and more and more as a potential anecdote, a puzzling and amusing story I would share with my roommates in one of those
hilarious late-night conversations that I missed so much when I was away from college.
Cindy saw it differently. As I retreated, her attachment to me intensified. She hated the idea that I was just going to pack my bags and disappear, leaving her right where she was at the beginning of the summer. The average night ended with her in tears, me awkwardly trying to comfort her. Shyly at first, then more insistently, she began to explore the possibility of continuing our relationship after I returned to school. We could write and talk on the phone, couldn’t we? I could come home for occasional weekends and vacations. It was do-able, wasn’t it? Then she brought up the idea of visiting me in New Haven.
“It’s not far, right? And I’ll probably have my new car by then.” I saw how excited she was by this prospect, and how hard she was trying not to show it. “It’ll be really cool, don’t you think?”
I didn’t think it would be cool at all, but it seemed even more uncool to say so.
“Where would you sleep?” I asked, in a tone that suggested simple curiosity.
“Where would you want me to?” she asked, her excitement tempered by caution.
“What I want doesn’t seem to matter.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice was quiet now, a little defensive.
“What do you think I mean?”
“Tell me.” Even in the darkness of the Roach Coach, I could see that she was getting ready to cry again. I hated it when she cried, hated how guilty it made me feel, and how manipulative she seemed in her misery.
“My parents are away,” I told her. “We can do anything we want to. So why are we sitting here arguing about nothing?”
Something suddenly seemed very interesting to her outside the passenger window. I let her stare at it for as long as she needed to.
She came over the following night. It happened to be the Saturday before I left for school, our last chance to take advantage of the empty house. She made the decision herself, after I made it clear that I wasn’t much feeling like going anywhere.
I had everything ready when she arrived. Hall and Oates on the record player, Mateus in the refrigerator, candles in the bedroom. In my pocket I carried two Fourex lambskin condoms. (Fourex were my condoms of choice in those days. They came in little blue plastic capsules, which, though inconveniently bulky and difficult to open, seemed infinitely classier than the little foil pouches that housed less exotic rubbers. I used the brand for several years, right up to the day someone explained to me that “lambskin” was not, in fact, a euphemism.)
We drank a glass of wine and went upstairs. I lit the candles. We kissed for a while and started taking off our clothes. Her body was everything I’d hoped for, and I would have been ecstatic if Cindy hadn’t seemed so subdued and defeated in her nakedness. She sat on the bed, knees drawn to her chest, and watched me fumble with my blue capsule, her expression suggesting resignation rather than arousal. Finally the top popped off.
“There!” I said, triumphantly producing the condom.
She watched with grim curiosity as I began unfurling it over the tip of my erection, which already seemed decidedly more tentative than it had just seconds earlier.
“This is all you wanted,” she said. She stated it as a fact, not a question.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I muttered. I found it hard enough to put on a condom in the best of circumstances, and almost impossible while conducting a serious conversation.
“I should’ve known,” she said. “This is all it ever comes down to, isn’t it?”
The condom was only halfway on, and I could feel the opportunity slipping away. I tried to save it with a speech, telling her that
sex between two people who liked and respected each other was a natural and beautiful thing, a cause for celebration, and certainly nothing for anyone to be ashamed of, but by the time I got to that part the whole issue was moot anyway. I watched her blank gaze travel down to the deflated balloon dangling between my legs and then back up to my face.
“There,” I told her. “You happy now?”