Blanche opened the fridge and located the half-empty bottle of wine. “Can I get you anything?” she asked Shipley.
“No, thank you.” Shipley swept her bag off the kitchen counter. It was best to leave before either of them noticed the rug burn on Beetle’s forehead or the smelly cigarette butts in the trash. “I have to go.”
“Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!” Professor Rosen shouted after her.
Tom was not under the covers. He was just getting started on a new painting. He’d brought over a fresh canvas from the art building and was busy mixing shades of apricot and taupe, trying to achieve the perfect match for his own skin. His pulse was raging. He gnashed his teeth and tore off his shirt. He could paint himself. He could paint directly on himself! He selected a new brush and squirted a blob of black paint on the palette. He would paint himself to look like one of those Greek statues, with pecs like fucking Hercules.
“What are you doing?” Shipley opened the door and stared at him as he traced the outline of his godlike nipples.
Tom threw down his brush. “You! You’re here! Oh, you’re so freaking beautiful.”
“No, I’m not,” she protested.
“Come here,” Tom said. “Take off your clothes so I can paint you.”
Shipley went over and leafed through the finished paintings on his desk, an assortment of Eliza’s outsized gory body parts in various stages of undress. She fidgeted with the zipper on her Greenwich Academy sweatshirt.
“Why don’t you just do my head, with the window in the background? That might look sort of cool.”
Tom came over and pulled down her zipper. He brushed her hair away from her collarbone. “I want to paint you naked,” he said, kissing her neck.
Shipley stiffened. Something about Tom was different. His whole body was covered in a layer of slick, cold sweat, and his voice was throaty and hoarse. “Are you okay?”
“I took some E with the Grannies. And I knocked the balls off of play practice. I fucking ruled.” Tom yanked off her sweatshirt and unbuttoned her jeans. “I want to paint you right now,” he told her urgently. “Naked.”
Shipley was no exhibitionist—she never even wore tight jeans. On the beaches in Martinique all the girls took their tops off. They lay on their backs in the sand, soaking up the sun in calm oblivion. But when Shipley tried it, she felt like she was being cooked. Her nipples had shriveled into raisins. She’d tied her top back on and splashed into the water, hiding her shame beneath the waves.
“Can’t I just wear this undershirt?” she asked, taking a seat in his desk chair. The undershirt was white and thin. So was her underwear. She was naked enough.
“No.” Tom stood a few feet away holding a white plastic paint palette. The muscles in his bare chest twitched beneath their war paint. He licked the tip of his brush. “Come on.”
“Come on yourself,” she joked.
He went over and pulled up on the undershirt. “It’s not like I haven’t ever seen you naked.”
“All right.” She took off the shirt and tossed it on his bed. Then she removed her underwear and crossed her legs, placing her hands, one on top of the other, on her knee.
“Too stiff,” Tom protested. “Just sit the way you normally would if no one was looking.”
She uncrossed her legs and allowed her knees to open a quarter of an inch. Fresh air violated the space between her thighs. She pressed her knees together again and folded her arms across her chest.
“I can’t do this. I’m tired. I’ve got baby throw-up all over me. I need to brush my teeth.” She glanced around the room, hating to disappoint him. She wanted to be a good girlfriend and she’d already let him down more than he knew.
“What if I covered my face with a fan, you know like a Japanese geisha? Or what if I was reading a book?” At least that would give her something to do so she wouldn’t feel so embarrassed.
Tom dropped his palette and got down on his hands and knees, crawling around and looking beneath the beds. Shipley recrossed her legs and picked at her cuticles. Someone whistled out in the hallway. There were goose bumps on her thighs.
“Okay, how ’bout this?” Tom held up a red paper Macy’s shopping bag pilfered from Nick’s side of the room. He grabbed a pair of scissors and cut out two eyeholes and a little round mouth hole. It reminded Shipley of Professor Rosen’s scarecrow, only more sinister.
“I don’t know.” She pulled the bag on over her head. Her eyes were set close together and the holes were too far apart. The mouth hole was very small. “Don’t look,” she added, spreading her knees. Her thighs always looked fat, no matter how thin she was. Somehow the shopping bag made them even more embarrassing. Tom was looking at her legs, not her pretty face. And he was seeing them as they really were, compact drumsticks. Even her smaller than average breasts would look disappointing, she realized. But maybe that was the point? She wasn’t herself anymore, just the female form. After all, this was supposed to be art. But did it have to be a Macy’s bag? A bag from Tiffany’s would have been much better.
“Sit back.” He came over and pressed her shoulders against the hard back of the chair.
“I feel stupid,” she murmured, wondering how she’d gotten herself into this.
“Shush. You’re so beautiful. Besides, no one will know it’s you,” Tom assured her. “I’m just going to take a few Polaroids, and then we’re done.” He’d bought a vintage Polaroid camera at a local yard sale. He was very proud of it.
She closed her eyes, hoping that would help. The camera flashed, an explosion of white behind her eyelids.
“Just one more.” The floor creaked as he walked around.
She should have driven over to Adam’s, she realized. She could be kissing him right now, instead of this, whatever this was. She reached up and tugged on the bag. It ripped as she yanked it off. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Tom wasn’t even looking at her. He was tinkering with his camera. Shipley was so gorgeous, it was weird how plain her body looked without her head. But maybe he could do a series of the sum of her parts, putting her head in last. It would be like an economics equation, with the whole—head included—being the only viable commodity. Beauty is not a pair of nice tits or a cute ass or pretty feet. Beauty is the whole package. He could float the parts in on a seashell riding the surf, like Aphrodite. His Portraiture class was having an open studio next month. So far he had nothing he’d be willing to let the public see. This was just the thing.
“That’s okay, you’re done. Wow, this is going to be huge,” he said, suddenly inspired.
Shipley hurried into her jeans, anxious to run back to her dorm room, take a scalding hot shower, and lie down beneath her beautiful clean sheets.
“Yum,” Tom said, picking up her sweatshirt and giving it a good sniff.
She yanked it out of his hands. “I have to go do my laundry,” she said and bolted out the door.
Bitter wind lashed her cheeks as she raced across the dark quad. The streetlights lining the walks cast an eerie yellow glow that was both reassuring and frightful. Beyond the stalwart bricks of Coke she thought she saw the black Mercedes pull out of the parking lot and cruise slowly down Homeward Avenue toward the interstate. If this was what Maine was like in November, then what would December bring?
12
Tuesday was Election Day. The more conscientious students hurried back to their home states to vote or had already sent in their absentee ballots. The less conscientious ones pretended to have voted by asking everyone else if they’d voted. And the older students (who’d accidentally established Maine residency by living in run-down, off-campus farmhouses with names like Strawberry Fields and Gilligan’s Island for the past three years) voted at the high school, their first authentically local experience.
The day was filled with tension. Professors cut their classes short or canceled them entirely. Students lingered on the lawns, as if waiting for some divine directive. The library was empty. When the news that William
Jefferson Clinton had won resounded from TVs and radios all over campus, a feeling of euphoria set in, and even those students who never drank on weekdays stood around kegs and toasted the dawn of a new era. Those who’d voted Democrat but had Republican parents felt particularly smug. It was their turn to rule. Sea Bass and Damascus even put speakers facing outward in their dorm room windows and played Queen’s “We Are the Champions” at full volume on repeat.
When Thanksgiving came, everyone had something to be thankful for. Mr. Booth brought a live turkey to the dining hall to provoke Ethelyn Gaines, the ancient head of Dining Services, on whom he had a crush. “Oh no you don’t!” Ethelyn shrieked, chasing the turkey out of the kitchen, through the dining hall, and out the back door with her cleaver raised. The vegetarians were thankful that the turkey got away.
The Grannies were thankful for Grover’s satellite dish. They gathered at his house in Maryland to watch the Playboy After Dark rebroadcast of the Grateful Dead playing three of their favorite songs and chatting with Hugh Hefner at a party at the Playboy Mansion back in 1969. Hefner looked exactly like James Bond—all suave and cool in his tux. Jerry Garcia looked more like Juan Valdez by way of Haight-Ashbury with his long hair and woolly poncho. And Jerry was so young! It was awesome.
Professor Rosen was thankful for Progresso’s tasty lentil soup. Her recipe for seitan turkey—which required rinsing seven pounds of whole wheat flour in buckets of water until it formed a stringy dough, wrapping the dough in cheesecloth in the shape of a bird, and boiling it for three hours—had not turned out, and she no longer felt like cooking.
Eliza was thankful for the Darien Sports Shop.
Shipley had decided to drive home for Thanksgiving. She needed time to think, time away from Adam and Tom, but she couldn’t face going home alone, so at the last minute she’d asked Eliza to come with her. “Just to make sure I don’t fall asleep and drive off the road.”
No chance of that. Eliza’s constant questions were like a car alarm. “Do you shave your armpits every day? Do you have any allergies? How many fillings do you have in your teeth? Have you ever thought about plastic surgery? If you could change one thing about your body, what would it be? Have you ever been to see the Rockettes? How come you’re sleeping in our room now? Did you and Tom break up?”
Eliza had agreed to come for purely anthropological reasons. She needed to see firsthand the planet from whence her jeans-hanging, ironed-underwear-wearing roommate had come.
They left Dexter at eight o’clock on Thanksgiving morning and arrived at Shipley’s house at three o’clock that afternoon. Greenwich was lovely and clean. The Gilberts’ house was big and white and colonial, with green shutters and a red door, built on a rise with a backward C of a driveway curving in front of it. The hedges were neatly trimmed, and a pot of yellow chrysanthemums stood on either side of the front steps.
Shipley turned off the ignition, pulled down the driver’s side sunshade, and peered at herself in the mirror. She removed her dangly silver earrings and tossed them into her bag. Then she pulled back her hair into a ponytail and spritzed Binaca on her tongue. Finally she tucked her white turtleneck shirt into the waistband of her jeans.
“What are you doing?” Eliza demanded.
Shipley opened the car door and stepped out. “You know how moms are.”
Mrs. Gilbert greeted them with a glass of Chardonnay in hand. She was sinewy and blond and her clothes were made of silk and cashmere, in varying tones of champagne and French beige. She looked like she subsisted on white wine alone, with maybe an after-dinner mint or two thrown in. She opened her arms and pressed both girls against her skeletal chest. “I’ve put Eliza in the yellow room,” she said as she ushered them into the house.
The sofas were upholstered in green, gold, and cream Regency stripes, embellished with black throw pillows stitched with tiny gold pineapples. The wood floors were dark and polished, the bouquets of flowers perfectly arranged in crisp crystal jugs. It looked like a set from a horror movie. The palatial suburban wonderland—until the doorbell rings. Even Shipley’s room, with its white canopy bed and pink rose wallpaper, had a sinister air of too-good-to-be-true.
“Do you have a decorator or did you do this all yourself?” Eliza asked Mrs. Gilbert politely.
Mrs. Gilbert swilled her wine. “I worked very closely with the decorator. I was even thinking, now that the children are gone, I might take a decorating course myself.”
“Awesome,” Eliza said. The furniture in her house had been bought in sets from Sears. The shiny cherrywood TV cabinet matched the shiny cherrywood coffee table, which matched the shiny cherrywood dining room table they never used. The curtains and the carpet, the sofa and the armchairs all matched too. Nothing in Shipley’s house matched, not in an obvious way, and it definitely didn’t come from Sears.
They followed Mrs. Gilbert downstairs and into the kitchen.
“Look at that fridge,” Eliza exclaimed. “You could keep a pony in there.”
Shipley watched for the telltale twitch in her mother’s left eye, revealing her distaste for Eliza’s linty army jacket and dirty red Converse sneakers, but her mother actually seemed glad that Shipley had brought a friend. She’d even prepared the food ahead of time. The butcher block island was crowded with Tupperware and bags of vegetables.
“I just have to put dinner on the hotplates to warm up and throw together a salad,” Mrs. Gilbert said. “Why don’t you give Eliza a tour of the neighborhood and do some shopping for a couple of hours? We can eat when you get back.”
Eliza couldn’t believe how shameless Mrs. Gilbert was about getting rid of them. Even her mom would sit at the kitchen table, smoking her Capris and pretending to be interested, while Eliza rattled on about the snake she’d seen at sleepaway camp or the asshole swim coach at the high school who’d been fired for being a perv. “How’s college?” her mom would have asked. But Shipley’s mom didn’t care.
Shipley could have driven to the Darien Sports Shop blindfolded. It was her favorite store. Three floors of shopping bliss. Lacoste. Lilly Pulitzer. Ralph Lauren. Patagonia. CB. Sportswear, skis, swimsuits, shoes, ice skates, tennis rackets, golf clubs. Everything.
Eliza trailed her while Shipley found a warm wool ski hat, insulated gloves, a heavy wool turtleneck sweater, and thick wool socks for the stranger who’d been stealing her car.
“Those for Tom?” Eliza asked.
“Uh-huh,” Shipley lied. She wandered into women’s sleepwear and picked out a pair of white thermal long underwear and a luxurious gray cashmere bathrobe for herself.
A saleslady came to unload the pile of clothes from Shipley’s arms. “I’ll just keep these at the register for you, miss.” She peered at Eliza over a pair of bifocals. “Anything I can hold onto for you?”
Eliza frowned. “No, thanks. I’m all set.”
Shipley hadn’t noticed until now that Eliza wasn’t shopping. She spied a pair of magenta rabbit fur earmuffs on a mannequin. “Hey, did you see those? Those are totally you.”
Eliza removed the earmuffs from the mannequin’s head and put them on her ears. They felt like headphones but softer. She checked herself out in the mirror. They were awesome. She took them off and examined the price tag: $224.95. “I guess not,” she said, putting them back on the mannequin.
“No way.” Shipley swiped the earmuffs away and tucked them under her arm. “Don’t worry. My family has an account here,” she confessed. “I usually get whatever I want and just sign for it. Pick out anything you like. Honestly. My parents won’t mind.”
Eliza hesitated. She’d been prepared to hate Shipley forever, but as the day progressed, she felt herself soften. She’d thought Shipley would be more spoiled. Sure, her house was a showcase, but there was no one in it to dote on her, not even a well-groomed Labrador. Shipley had invited her home for Thanksgiving because she couldn’t face going home alone. And she was totally right about the earmuffs. Maybe Shipley knew her better than she thought. “You can’t bu
y me,” she insisted halfheartedly. “I’m not for sale.”
“Oh, shut up.” Shipley slung her arm through Eliza’s and steered her toward the jeans. “Look. An entire shelf of black denim. Go on. You know you want to.”
They tried on twelve pairs of jeans in a tiny shared dressing room. Eliza decided on two particularly flattering pairs that she would have to cut up and distress herself. Then she broke down and picked out a camping stove for Nick, an insulated sports bra for the frosty-titted Maine winter, two black turtlenecks, six pairs of black wool kneesocks, and an ankle-length black down coat that was basically like a sleeping bag she could walk in. It occurred to her that she could zip her new coat right onto Nick’s sleeping bag so they’d have a double-wide in which to have hot and sweaty down-insulated sex inside his yurt. Or not.
The total came to more than $2,000. Shipley signed for it before Eliza could see. “There, that was fun, wasn’t it?” she asked as they carried their bags out to the car.
It was an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving, but Eliza wore her earmuffs and her new coat out of the store. “That was awesome.”
Shipley had a closet full of clothes at home, so she hadn’t bothered with a bag for the trip. Eliza had thrown her duffel bag into the backseat. And so, for the first time since she’d gone to college, Shipley popped open the trunk of the Mercedes to accommodate their large Darien Sports Shop shopping bags.
“Holy shit,” Eliza said.
The trunk of the car was full of food: bagels, muffins, donuts, rolls, bruised fruit, moldy cheese, bags of crushed tortilla chips, and a battered gallon jug of water.
Cum Laude Page 12