“Well, no, you don’t have to,” Nick said, sitting back again. “But since you’re discussing Iago, I don’t really see how you can’t. You can’t really discuss him in a vacuum.” Nick tapped his pen against his knee. “No, you probably have to mention Othello by name in the thesis if you want the paper to work. It’s not enough to mention the character alone.” Maddie looked at him blankly, trying to understand what he meant. He saw the confusion that she was attempting to hide. “See, you mention King Lear by name, so you need to mention Othello by name. Unless you mean King Lear the guy, not King Lear the play. If you mean King Lear the guy, and Iago the guy, then the thesis might work. But in that case it still needs rewriting because it’s not clear.”
Maddie hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant.
“So do you mean King Lear the guy, or King Lear the whole play?” Nick asked.
“King Lear the guy,” Maddie answered. “And Iago the guy. And how they are both tragedies.” She could feel the blood rushing around in her head. She was pretty sure she was on delicate territory. She knew she was one word away from saying something stupid, but she wasn’t sure how to avoid it. She decided she’d just speak carefully.
He nodded. “Well, rewrite it so that it emphasizes that you mean to compare the two characters, not the whole plays. And people can’t be tragedies. They’re ‘tragic figures’ so say that instead.” Nick gestured encouragingly at the laptop before turning back to his notebook.
Maddie gazed into the screen, but her mind did not adhere to Nick’s instructions about the thesis. She found herself thinking of other things. Other people. Raffie. Really, she already knew a lot about him, even though it had only been a couple of days. She knew that he was a landscaper and a hippie and that he hung out at places like Blubber’s, and that he’d do anything to create romance. She knew that he was a few years older than her and that he was handsome and kind. She wondered if he was at work today, a Saturday. Could she find him somewhere on campus?
“Don’t over-think it at this point, Maddie. Just type down a revision of the statement you’ve got there,” Nick urged. She sighed a little and figured that if she wanted to get this over quickly, she’d have to hurry up and type something. She tapped her fingers across the keyboard.
“How’s this?” she asked Nick, again sliding the laptop toward him.
He looked at her thesis and was quiet for a moment. “I think I’m going to have to skim your paper so I can get more ideas to help you,” he said. “I don’t usually do that, but I think I should.” He glanced up at her and said, “It’ll take a few minutes. Sorry.”
“That’s fine by me,” Maddie answered, relieved that Nick seemed to be caving. Perhaps he’d fix up the paper for her after all. “I’m going to go to the vending machines. You want anything?” He shook his head, already nose-deep in the essay. Maddie stood and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Where are the vending machines? Do you know?”
He nodded. “Third floor,” he said.
Maddie pursed her lips and shook her head a little as she walked away. Why would they put the vending machines on the third floor instead of down on the first? As she pressed the button on the elevator her mind rolled the problem around. She remembered that the library foyer had been converted into a little café. She decided that the school was trying to force students to buy overpriced snacks instead of using the vending machines. That must be why the machines were on the third floor.
The elevator opened and she stepped inside. With the problem of the machines solved, her mind returned to Raffie. Her compressed summer session would be over in a few weeks, and then she’d be free to spend all her time with him. In the meanwhile, she hoped that things would get serious enough with him that she could spend her class-time lunch breaks with him. In fact, that seemed romantic. Suddenly the little café downstairs didn’t seem like such a rip-off. It seemed like a sweet place to pass the lunch hour with her new sweetie.
When the doors slid open on the third floor, Maddie was surprised. She’d never been to the third floor. There was a great open area with cozy chairs and tables and a wall of windows that overlooked a vista on the campus. There were quite a few students scattered throughout the area, reading or typing. She crossed to the windows and looked down. She could see a little golf cart parked beside a flowerbed and a few landscapers raking mulch. Raffie wasn’t one of them.
Maddie found the vending machines and got a bag of M&Ms and a diet soda. She intended to sort her M&Ms on the desk while Nick fixed up her paper. As she rode back down in the elevator, she considered the Shakespeare class, deciding that from now on she should definitely sit next to Nick. It couldn’t do anything but help her performance. Maddie usually sat in the back, doodling in her notebook. She had dozens of little portraits of the Shakespearean characters she’d heard mentioned in Dr. Dull’s lectures. Her favorite in this series of little portraits was that of Big MacBeth, who was rendered as a large burger with a human head, arms, and legs protruding from the relevant spots on the bun. She decided that if she sat next to Nick in class, she’d have to quit the doodles but she might actually learn something. It was a good plan.
She dropped her M&Ms down next to Nick and watched him finish reading the paper. She thought about Raffie—Raphael—whose family was Colombian and who made an honest living in the sun, in the gardens. Nick squinted at the pages and shook his head a little. Sure, Nick was handsome, he was built. And smart and polite. But still, a guy like Nick was far too regular for her. She needed romance. She wanted special things.
He tossed the paper down on the table and said, “Maddie, I think you need to throw this whole paper out and start over.”
“What? No way. It took hours to write all that. That’s ten pages, dude,” Maddie answered, rejecting the idea of rewriting the paper. There was no way she was going to rewrite it. It just simply was not going to happen.
“Well, you see, in addition to it having no quotes or research integrated into it and no Works Cited page, it just doesn’t cohere,” Nick said almost apologetically. He leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands loosely. He squinted one eye at her and looked at her sideways. “Maddie, did you read Othello?”
“Why do you keep bringing that up? My paper is about King Lear. It’s pretty clear,” Maddie said, pouring her bag of M&Ms out on the table and beginning to sort them into color piles.
“But, how do you think Iago relates to King Lear?” Nick asked.
“He’s a tragedy, like King Lear. Excuse me, ‘tragic figure.’”
“Why don’t you tell me, in your own words, what you think Iago was probably like, as a person. Was he pleasant? Was he domineering?”
Maddie puffed out an exasperated sigh and let her head fall back on her neck. Her eyes bugged out at the ceiling as she dropped a few M&Ms into her open mouth. “Okay, genius, you caught me,” she said as she crunched the little candy shells between her teeth. “I didn’t read Othello.” She chewed and waited for Nick to respond. When he didn’t, she tipped her head back up on her neck and looked at him. “All I definitively know about Othello is that Iago is named after the bird from Aladdin.”
“Aladdin? Aladdin and the Magic Lamp? I don’t remember a bird in that story,” Nick answered, his face open but his tone disapproving.
“Well, there was,” Maddie said, tossing a few candies from the green pile into her mouth. “He was a parrot and he was grumpy.”
Nick started to laugh. He smiled and rubbed his hand across his forehead. Maddie liked making Nick uncomfortable and then making him laugh. It was a funny little one-two punch that took his face from bewilderment to happiness and it was a nice transformation. “Have some M&Ms,” she said, suddenly feeling very generous to Nick.
“You’re talking about the Disney film, not the story, right?” he smiled.
“Bingo,” she answered.
Nick shook his head a few times and clamped his lips shut, hiding his nice white teeth. “Maddie, you have to read Othello. Or s
ome other play, I don’t care which. But you have to compare two Shakespeare plays. Did you read King Lear?”
Maddie bobbed her head from side to side, her eyes rolling up to examine a spot on the ceiling. “More or less.”
“Okay. Well, look. I want you to pick another play, read it, and as you read it, think of which character has something in common with King Lear. King Lear the guy.” He slapped his laptop shut and started putting things back in his bag, then he folded Maddie’s paper up and stuck it in a side pocket of her purse. “If you’d have submitted that essay, you’d have earned a big fat F,” he said with a grin. “I can’t believe you tried to turn that thing in. Why are you even taking this class?” he asked, helping himself to the brown pile of M&Ms. Maddie thought that was actually pretty gentlemanly of him; he was leaving the pretty colors for her.
“I didn’t realize it would be so much reading. And really, the plays are kind of hard to follow,” she said, pushing the yellows with her finger so that they formed a little line. “All the sentences just blend into each other and I don’t know who’s saying what half of the time. I can’t keep the characters straight.”
Nick nodded. He wasn’t making fun of her and she was glad. “That can be tricky. Maybe you need to read the plays out loud, or get someone to read them with you. You know—act them out, kind of. I could help you with that,” he said, and Maddie immediately realized he was trying to put the moves on her again. She thought of the two of them sitting somewhere reading Shakespeare to each other. It was pretty funny.
“No, I think I’ll get it right this time, since I only have to read one,” she said, sweeping the rest of the M&Ms into her palm and standing up. “Thanks for the help, Nick. Should I just call you when I’m ready? I have until next Monday to get this thing turned in.”
Nick stood too, and stretched. She wondered if he was doing it on purpose to draw attention to his nice chest. “Well, you should try to have the play read as soon as possible. Maybe by Wednesday. Can you do that?”
“We’ll see,” she said, as she gave Nick a little hug. “Thanks for all the help, and I’ll call you when I’m ready,” she said as she walked away, giving him a little smile over her shoulder as she left. She always enjoyed flirting with Nick a little. She hoped he’d be thinking about that hug for the rest of the day.
Chapter 5
“Just forget about it Karla; there’s no point in crying over spilt wheat germ,” Maddie called over her shoulder as she made her way through the den toward the front door. Someone was knocking. “Sweep it into the fern by the back door. The plant will love it.” She paused to peek at her reflection in a small mirror hanging on the wall. If her hair wasn’t co-operating, she wanted to pull it up into a ponytail before she greeted whoever was waiting. Her hair was being obedient; in fact it was behaving itself quite nicely. She nodded at herself and turned away.
The knocking resumed. “Hang on,” she yelled as she clasped the doorknob. It flitted through her mind that she should peep through the spyhole to see who was on the other side. She expected it was the neighbors. They were a lively little bunch who often partied with Maddie and Karla on the shared patio, setting lawn chairs in the breezeway and smoking cigarettes.
But Maddie didn’t go up on tiptoes to look through the peephole. She just opened the door, and found herself face-to-face with her new maybe-boyfriend, Raffie—standing right there in the perfect sunlight of a June afternoon dressed nicely with his hair down and his golden eyes twinkling.
“Maddie Watson, I’m here with this flower, and it’s for you because it is you,” Raffie said, tilting his head a little and squinting one eye against the sun. He held the biggest non-synthetic sunflower Maddie had ever seen. She hadn’t seen that many in real life; in her part of the world the sunflower fields of places like Kansas were only imaginary. You only saw a sunflower in an old lady’s garden now and then. Maddie was completely blown away. He held it out to her as if it were a single rose.
“This flower is me?” she asked, feeling a little dumbfounded. She watched as her arm reached out and her hand took the stalk in its fingers. The plant was hairy and thick and felt so alive.
“Yes,” he said, raising his hand to shade his forehead. “You and I, Maddie, we’re both born in August, the month of the sun, when sun gods and goddesses are created.” Raffie’s lip lifted a little and Maddie could see his teeth gleaming in the light. “And the sun gods are lions, lions rolling in the dust, licking their paws. They make the sunflowers, Maddie,” he said with a little smile.
Maddie stood and looked at him. Her mind insisted that something about what he was saying was nonsensical. But the larger part of her mind was caught up in the rhythm of it, in the broad strokes of artful color it painted, in the—yes, she had to say it—in the romance of what he was saying. It was a fairy tale, she thought, the picture of lions rolling in the dust, leaving sunflowers behind them as they walked away.
“And so it’s all coming together as it’s meant to be,” Raffie continued. “You, and I. We’re lions, Maddie. And so tonight, when our sun that we rule is setting, I’d like you to accompany me to the movies. Go to the movies with me, Maddie. Be Nala.”
“Be…Nala?” asked Maddie. She flew into an internal panic. What did that mean? Was that Portuguese or something?
“At the Dimestore Cinema, they’re showing The Lion King, that Disney movie. Have you seen it?” he asked, the smile broadening more across his face as he took a step closer to her. His chest was very close to hers, separated from touching only by the enormous sunflower held between them. “If you’ve never seen it, Maddie, you should. And if you have, you should see it again. It’s beautiful. It’s life changing. It’s truth. It’s true art.” Maddie looked up at his nicely-shaped jaw, always with a little shaving shadow on it, those slim dimples, the golden eyes. His dark hair. “Go with me and let’s honor the filmmakers with our presences, the presences of true sun-god greatness.”
There was nothing she could say except for yes. Nothing at all. So that’s what she said: “Yes, I’ll go.”
He leaned his face close to hers, tilted it downward as if to kiss her.
But he didn’t. He turned his mouth so that he breathed onto her cheek. “This: this is us,” he sighed as he cradled the sunflower bloom in his hands for a moment. He pressed it into her palms. Then he retracted, retreated and turned. After he’d walked a few feet away, out into the grassy courtyard, he turned back to her and said, “I’ll be back at 6:00, when the sun is getting low. We’ll walk over to Dimestore.” He gave her the fullest smile.
“I’ll be ready,” she said, her voice a bit thinner than usual. He’d made her lightheaded.
She turned away from the door to find Karla standing gape-jawed. “Did I hear all of that right?” she asked. Maddie nodded, pressing her fingers to her throat.
“Was that romantic or what?” Maddie said, a little breathlessly. “At first I didn’t know what to think.”
“He compared you guys to lions, Maddie. And he said that your blooming love is like a sunflower,” Karla said in reverent tones, gesturing to the sunflower that Maddie still clutched in her hands.
“Do you think that’s what he meant?” asked Maddie, feeling strangely like she was floating in the air above herself. “We haven’t even been on a date,” she said breathily.
“Yeah, but that’s what he meant, all right,” Karla said, crossing to the doorway and grabbing Maddie by the shoulders. “Maddie,” she blurted, “it’s already almost three o’clock!”
Maddie stood in uncomprehending silence for a moment. “Oh my god,” she exclaimed. “That’s not much time at all!”
“No, it’s not,” uttered Karla. “Get your stuff, get in the car! We have so much to talk about, so much to buy, and so little time to get you ready! Don’t you realize,” she said as she dashed across the room to grab her car keys, “that this is it? This is your summer of love moment, the moment women always dream of, the moment that never happens for most pe
ople. It’s happening for you, right now!”
“Yes,” breathed Maddie as she fell atop the sofa and tugged on a pair of shoes. “I know. It’s happening!” She popped up from the sofa and bounced a few times, waggling her little fists in the air. “It’s actually happening! Oh my god, oh my god…What will I wear?” she shrieked.
Karla hustled Maddie out the door. “Don’t worry, don’t worry. You look good in everything. We’ll find something, lickety-split, and you’ll be home in time to shave your legs and everything else.”
At their favorite boutique, which was really just a chain outlet but seemed posh, they dove through the racks, holding things up to each other and rejecting things without trying them on. Maddie and Karla had decided that Maddie needed a causal look as it was only an evening movie, but she also needed to look sexy because if this really was her summer of love moment, there was a great possibility that it would end in the bedroom.
Finally, Maddie decided on a handkerchief shirt in a white-and-brown cow print. It draped in the front and left her back completely bare, with only laces crossing it at a few points. She would pair it with nice trendy jeans, she decided, and a pair of cowboy boots she’d bought with Daddy’s credit card a few weeks ago. He hadn’t said anything about it, so she presumed he hadn’t noticed the $300 purchase at a western-wear shop. Western-wear wasn’t Maddie’s style at all, but these were no ordinary cowboy boots. The leather embellishments were so divine that she could just envision those boots walking around at the bottom of her long legs, with a miniskirt fringing around her thighs. But tonight, they’d be perfect with her outfit; earthy enough, perhaps, to connect with Raffie’s sense of style, but paired with the kerchief shirt they’d be racy enough to show her own special personality as well.
Back at home, she flung herself into her grooming. She shaved her legs, then shaved higher up her legs. Then she thought about sex again and evaluated her bikini area. It looked scraggly, so she shaved there, too, and took a little pair of scissors and cut all the remaining hair shorter. The little strands, with their newly clipped ends, immediately curled around and began to rub and itch. She resolved to ignore the itchiness. Guys, Maddie reminded herself, are visual animals. It’s important that I look absolutely perfect—well, as perfect as I can look, she amended, knowing that she had a few body flaws she could do nothing but camouflage with careful clothing and sexy angles.
Peace of Her Heart Page 4