Only 250 meters to go, but it feels like a thousand. Usually when the buoys change from white to red in the last 250, you know you’ll survive. Christmas vacation starts in two weeks, but I swear the buoys are still white.
Carla came back yesterday. At least, that’s what Rambo told me.
No school car has come to pick me up and whisk me away, so she must not have told anyone I kissed her. No quarantine like Song’s. Maybe she didn’t feel it. Maybe she thought my lips were little bugs on her neck. My teaching’s done. The Children’s Hour plays in my head, and Shirley MacLaine keeps crying. Back so soon can mean that I was wrong, can mean that Carla tricked them. While she was gone, no students visited me. No trust.
There are only two entrances to the dining room, one by the Wyeth with all those faces the same, and the other, the dark archway on the far side. Seconds before Dorothy White gives the blessing, Carla walks in the far entrance, leading Donny Zurkus by the hand. The way she leans forward, she is a tug boat, and Donny is the load she tugs.
Two weeks in a psych ward, and she comes back in order to tow Donny.
Two weeks away and she’s showing off how normal she is.
Normal and straight in two weeks.
They find seats a couple of tables away, and Carla sits so she can’t see me. She knows where I am.
When I was in college, after late rowing practice each afternoon, there were always two seats waiting for Sarah and me at any dinner table in the cafeteria. We were a package. Everyone knew.
A few times a year Sarah brought Mark to dinner, the formal dinners: Homecoming, Winter Carnival, Spring Formal. Mark driving from med school, his hair clipped just right, and Sarah with eyelashes doing their star thing, they came in the cafeteria holding hands, stopping at the door to scan the whole place, and they’d find a table with other couples. Not with me.
At formal dinners, I sat with the rugby girls, ex-rowers who wanted to party more than train. By dinner, I had four shots of tequila, and by dessert, I had seven. By the time dancing started, I was on the floor doing push-ups with a clap in the middle. Sarah and Mark didn’t get to the dance floor until after I was taken to my room.
Carla with Donny is like a giraffe with a crocodile.
My eyes keep moving to her back, the black curls falling over her collar.
After mystery meat slopped by gravy, peas, and lumpy potatoes, after the Second Formers clear the dishes, I head back to my apartment. The outside door is heavy like a vault door, and the cold comes hard and chokes me. December is piles of leaves and clear nights and clouds of breath in the lights along the path.
Of course, they’re there between the dining hall and my dorm. Of course, she’s pressed him against a tree, and they’re sucking each other’s faces. She picked the path I’d walk after dinner. Carla is sending a message, of course. She’s normal. I’m not. She’s straight. I’m not.
I have no message to give her back.
The path with leaves and bare trees spins. The path back to the main building is a chute I fall through. Crisco told me it would be hard.
This is hard, like catching my breath right after the finish line. This is hard like being dumped. But how hard can it be to do the right thing, to turn away from something I shouldn’t have done in the first place?
After the whiskey and the reporter asking about Song and then Alex kicking up gravel with his car in front of the dorm, after Crisco helping me inside, I pinned her against the wall. Crisco’s breath was strawberry and soft. My smell bouncing off her skin was the way the beach smells after the tide goes down.
Unlike walls in a dorm, walls in people are unstable. Booze or loneliness or loss can bore through them. Teachers are supposed to have walls. Solid ones.
Crisco did a head-fake-sideways move.
“Whoa, tiger,” she said, “You’ve had a little too much.”
“Too much what?” I said.
“Everything.”
The door to the bedroom was on the same wall, and Crisco’s big hands, with big rower calluses, took my shoulders and put me in my room, on the covers of my bed.
My hands on her forearms, my eyes in her cornflower eyes, my hands and eyes a question. Crisco said, “Not this way.”
Beets. The color inside me was beets, the bile rising in my throat, the rosary and Father M in the background.
“What an idiot,” I said.
“Idiot, you’re not,” she said. “Cheap date, maybe.” Her sunflower face was full and moved away from my face.
That night I had thought of trying to make Alex want me, thought that whiskey-burn in the throat could make my thighs feel slick and warm, thought Alex wanting me might make St. Timothy’s feel like a home I had never known. Alex might fill the crack in the middle of my chest.
And whiskey and driving and raging against the reporter worked. Alex wanted me, but I was still that girl caught between her mother’s voice and her body, my mother saying, “You just haven’t met the right man,” and “You’re just different,” and my body saying, “Wrong.” My blood through its veins dragged, the drag filling my body with weird energy. Attraction was great to take me away from school. Alex was good for that. But when it came right down to it, my body kicked in, the body with all its weird messages.
My head, with Jack Daniel’s, still knew that the way through schools with stone blocks this way and stone blocks that way was to find the right man, the right look, like Alex with his sinew-rope arms, his fresh-cut hair. But my body, weird with booze and flight, wasn’t held to dress codes and St. Timothy’s. My body, wanting its own thing, said, “Crisco.”
And my body wanting girls was prickly, the blood too thick for the veins. My mother’s voice, “You’re immoral,” and the way my insides turned beets.
“Carla” was not what my body said. Carla was beets and my mother’s voice and the silence when Sarah left my dorm room after I came out to her.
If I could kiss a student, I could show everyone how bad I was. But they already knew.