Isidore poured shots from his bottle into aperitif glasses set up on Grandma’s kitchen counter. The liquor tasted like thyme and caraway seeds and burned all the way down my throat. Griselda taught us a drinking song. We screamed the words as we danced around the room, spinning madly and jumping on the furniture.
Someone found an apple for Roth to eat.
Near midnight, we turned the television to MTV, where they showed the ball dropping in Times Square. We counted down with everyone else.
Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
We went crazy shrieking and blowing paper horns and kissing one another. People yelled out the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne,” Isidore singing lines I didn’t know. We two have run about the slopes and picked the daisies fine. And we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne. And then I found myself in the hall, kissing Joachim, a boy I barely knew, a boy with a pretend name and who might be a demon or a faerie or a disturbing hallucination.
My head was swimming. My hands were tangled in his hair, and I pushed him against the wall. His breath caught as I tugged his mouth to mine. I had no idea what I was doing.
Then Ahmet changed playlists to some louder, madder, midnight stuff, and we were dancing again. We danced and drank, drank and danced until the mix ran out and Ahmet fell asleep under the table, his arm thrown over Griselda.
At five in the morning, I found myself bundled up in a moth-eaten fur coat from Grandma’s closet, slumped in a chair at the plastic table as the sun began to burn the frozen horizon. I had a coupe glass full of cinnamon schnapps the color of Rudolf’s nose.
Joachim was smoking a cigarette of meadow grass and comfrey. He’d found a bottle of bubble solution and held up the wand, exhaling smoke into each delicate shimmering globe, grinning up at them as they got carried up into the dawn.
He was the kind of beautiful that got under your skin. Before, my crushes had been on normal-looking boys—pudgy boys and beanpole skinny ones, boys with bad haircuts and boys with shadowy mustaches they were trying to grow, boys with crooked teeth and spotty skin. No one would probably believe me, but Joachim’s ridiculous hotness made me uncomfortable. He was like a painting you wanted to burn so you could finally stop staring at it. Copper gold hair and copper gold eyes. Looping curls. He looked like something you were allowed to look at, but never touch.
I remembered the warm slide of his lips.
“Why Joachim?” I asked him.
He looked over at me, a little bit drunk and clearly baffled. It made me happy to know that whatever he was, however he looked, he still could get wasted on New Year’s.
“The name,” I said.
He laughed, throwing his head back and glancing up at the stars. “You bargained with the universe, remember?”
The words sent a shiver down my spine. I didn’t even remember exactly what I’d said or promised, but I knew I’d done it. “And the universe heard me?”
“Nah.” Above his head, a bubble burst, releasing a supernova of smoke before it was blown shapeless by the wind. “But I did. Lots of things hear when you make rash offers like that.”
“So you want—?” I was rigid with alarm, trying to think through the fog of alcohol.
He shook his head, throwing me an easy smile. “Not a thing. I just remembered the name when I saw you at the Krampuslauf. We don’t have names, not like you do. Isidore and Griselda have been called many things before and will be called many things again. Names, they just don’t stick to us. But I like Joachim, and I knew you liked it as well.”
I tried to imagine a name sliding off of me, as though not quite attached. It felt wrong, like losing one’s shadow. I’d always been Hanna, and I couldn’t imagine not being her. “Why were you even at that thing?”
“The Krampuslauf?” He had a rich throaty laugh. “I wanted to be among people without any disguise. It’s a great prank, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” I took a swig from my cup. It tasted like someone had melted those cinnamon hearts into a thick syrup. I wondered who’d brought it. I wondered why I’d decided to drink it and then took another swig.
“I owe you a gift,” he said, into the silence. “Griselda brought something and Isidore brought something. Now it’s my turn. Only name your desire, and I will do my best to give you its pale approximation.”
That made me laugh. “I’m glad you came. And turning Roth into a donkey was way more than enough.”
“My people are often beseeched for favors, but seldom invited to share in feasts,” he spoke with a sly humor, as though he was talking formally half in jest—but only half. “Let me give you a gift for being made so much welcome.”
“Okay,” I said, relenting, looking back at the trailer. Faint music had started up inside, and I could see people moving around. They’d gotten a second wind. Soon someone would come outside and drag us back into the dregs of the after-after-party. Soon after that, I’d collapse in Grandma’s bed along with as many people as would fit. Soon it would be morning and for all I knew, Joachim and Griselda and Isidore would be gone at first light, like dew burned up in the sun. “Okay. What I want is to never forget there’s magic in the world. I get to keep my memories of tonight. I get to keep them always.”
His smile went crooked. Leaning over, he mashed his cigarette in Grandma’s heavy glass ashtray and pressed his lips to my forehead. He smelled like burning grass.
“I promise,” he whispered, mouth hot against my skin.
And, although I was, admittedly, not even a little bit sober, that was the moment I decided that since magic was real, since I conjured up Joachim by the sheer power of wanting him to happen, since I’d made this party out of two hundred bucks and sheer determination, then maybe I was wrong about the things I thought I couldn’t have, that weren’t for me. Maybe it was okay to imagine greater things. Maybe it was all for me, if I wanted it.
With dawn of the new year on the horizon, I resolved to exert my will on the world.
In the fifteen weeks since starting her freshman year at the University of Bumfuckville, Sophie had counted at least a dozen What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? moments. The first was when Sophie’s mother dropped her off at the dorms, which were covered in brick and ivy, just like the catalog promised. The rental car’s engine had not yet stopped ticking when Sophie understood that the idea of a college in the country, in the middle of the country—pastoral was how’d she’d been describing it to friends back in Brooklyn—wasn’t so much pastoral as it was foreign, as if she’d decided to enroll at the University of Beirut. Attendant sinking feelings in the stomach soon followed the revelation that really shouldn’t have been a revelation—it was so obvious. It had been obvious to all her friends, who were perplexed by her choice to go here, and to her mother, who wasn’t.
As she and her mother hauled her suitcases into the dorm, Sophie didn’t dare let her feelings show. It would only make her mother feel guilty. The University of Bumfuckville being pastoral wasn’t the real reason Sophie had enrolled.
The second What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? moment had come later that weekend when she’d met her roommates. Nice girls, pretty girls, welcoming girls, but that first night together—beer and pizza with crusts thick as the length of Sophie’s thumb—Sophie had had to say I’m kidding at least a half dozen times, a trend that continued well into the term until Sophie finally realized that sarcasm was like a separate dialect, one not universally understood. “You’re so big city,” one of the Kaitlynns (there were three on her hall) would say. Sophie was never quite sure if this was an insult.
Sophie had imagined she would be the mysterious one on campus—she was from the big city, after all—but it was the girls from the small Midwestern towns who had dreamed of going to college here all their lives, whose parents had gone here, who were inscrutable.
The guys were no better. Strapping and big-toothed specimens, with names like Kyle and Connor. At the start of term, one such g
uy had asked Sophie out on what she’d thought was a date, but what had turned out to be a group outing to play ultimate Frisbee. Sophie had been grouchy about it, but then to her surprise had gotten into the game, catching a scoring pass, talking smack against the other team. On the walk back to the dorms, Kyle/Connor had said, “You’re really competitive, aren’t you?” Sophie had no doubt as to whether that was an insult.
That was What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? moment number four—or maybe it was five. There’d been several with the boys here. She was starting to lose count. She’d long since lost hope.
* * *
She had no one to blame for tonight’s What the Hell Have You Done moment except herself. Finals had ended two days ago and most of the students had decamped for winter break. Flight prices back to New York halved if Sophie left the following week, so she had to stick around and twiddle thumbs. Earlier that day, Sophie had been selling her books back to the bookstore—getting a pittance in return, because two editions were about to be updated, the clerk explained, causing Sophie to get into an argument with the poor sap about why all textbooks should be digital and updated automatically, only it wasn’t really an argument because the clerk wanted nothing to do with the debate. On the way out she’d seen a flier for caroling on the quad that night. And for some reason, she’d thought: This seems like a good idea.
Sophie wondered when was she going to learn that lots of things seem like a good idea but a small amount of analysis might uncover that such seemingly good ideas are, in fact, intrinsically faulty. Take communism. Seemed like a good idea: Everyone shares, no one goes hungry. But maybe give it a good think and you’d come away understanding for it to work you’d need an inhuman capacity for cooperation, or a much more human capacity for totalitarianism. Anyways, she’d heard Luba describe breadlines and bugged phones and Siberian gulags enough to know which way that went.
A caroling concert? She really should’ve known better. The entire point of a caroling concert was to join in. First of all, Sophie was Jewish. It was bad enough that she’d basically skipped Hanukkah this year, but to spend the last night of the Jewish holiday serenading the birth of Jesus.… Just. No. And even if they were to throw in “I Have a Little Dreidel” (they wouldn’t; dreidels were as foreign to Bumfuckville as moon rocks) Sophie wouldn’t sing. Not in public. Not here.
In her defense, she did like Christmas carols, not the horrible dirges sung over mall speakers, but people singing in pretty harmonies. Sophie remembered when she first heard carolers, wandering the streets outside her apartment in Brooklyn. They had harmonized so beautifully, Sophie had asked her grandmother if those were angels singing. “No, darling,” Luba had replied, “just gentiles.”
There was nothing wrong with the singing tonight. It was fine. But not remotely magical or angelic. And everyone seemed to be wearing Christmas sweaters. Like with appliques of Rudolph or Santa on them. One girl even had a sweater with a tree that actually lit up. If Sophie had gone to NYU, such sweaters would’ve been worn ironically. But here, they weren’t. Everything was so godddamned sincere.
Including the carols. Not that she expected ironic Christmas carols—Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg.… Wasn’t that how they sang it in elementary school? But there was so much eye-shining and heart as they pa-rum-pum-pum-pummed about Little Drummer Boys. Plus the sweaters. She couldn’t take it anymore.
“Oh, the Ned Flanders of it all,” she muttered to herself. Which was something she’d been doing a lot lately. When she admitted this to Zora, her friend had warned that it was a certain step on the road to Crazy Cat Lady-ism. Sophie had laughed but when she thought of her mother, alone in the apartment with only her sculptures, and now Luba’s cats, for company, it didn’t seem quite so funny.
“Yo, you just say something about Ned Flanders?”
Caught Cat-Ladying out loud? Oy. Sophie felt as though she’d been spotted streaking the quad naked. She pretended she had not heard the question.
“You did. You said, ‘the Ned Flanders something something.’”
She turned around. Standing about three feet away was one of the Black Guys on Campus. Sophie hated herself for thinking of him like that—she’d grown up on the Bed-Stuy side of Clinton Hill, after all—but here, it was hard not to. There seemed to be like twenty black students at the entire college, a lot of them scholarship students like her. She knew this because she’d met quite a few at that Dean’s Reception for Excellence the first week of school. She’d been flattered by the invite until she walked in and was given a handout with still-open work-study slots and understood that it was a get-together for all the scholarship students. She’d hid out in a corner, eavesdropping on a bunch of guys from the basketball team (basketball was huge here, she’d been surprised to learn) comparing notes about some of the sillier comments they’d gotten in their first week. Sophie had been dying to chime in with some choice examples of her own, but stopped herself. Though she may have felt like a minority here, she was still white.
She tried to remember if this guy had been at the reception. He was looking at her like he might know her. “I didn’t say it so much as mutter it,” she said, or, rather, muttered.
He laughed. A big, open-chested laugh, and for a second Sophie felt the tiny thrill of landing a successful joke, but it was followed by doubt because people here didn’t get her humor. When she made people laugh, she suspected it was after she’d left the room. Which annoyed the shit out of her. Back home, people at least had the decency to laugh in your face.
This caroling thing was a supremely bad idea. She turned to walk away.
She felt a hand, a huge hand, on her shoulder. “Sorry. I’m not messing with you. For real. Just I was thinking the same thing.”
She turned around. “You were thinking about Ned Flanders?”
She waited for him to say “Diddly-oh,” or some such. It would be exactly what the Kyles or Connors would say. Then they’d ask her major. But he just smiled, a slow oozy grin, too hot for this cold night. “Yeah. Ned Flanders,” he said. “Among others.” He made it sound risqué, the among others, and Sophie felt herself flush.
He stuck out a hand, sheathed in a fingerless glove. “Russell,” he said.
She looked at him, or rather up at him. He was very tall, a whole foot taller than Sophie, at least, and Sophie was five feet five. Tall enough to play basketball. Maybe he was on scholarship, same as her. The thought was as reassuring as his grip, which was firm, not crushing; he wasn’t one of those guys who had to break your hand to prove just how much they treated you as equals.
“Sophie,” she said.
“So, Sophie.” He opened his arms wide. “What brings you here?”
It felt like a variation of the What’s your major? query, the implication really being, What are you doing here? Sophie hated being asked her major. (She didn’t have one; she was a first-term freshman for Christ’s sake. Not everyone had their lives figured out by the time they exited the womb.)
As for what was she doing here … A year ago, she hadn’t even heard of this place. Her high school guidance counselor suggested it, apparently knowing the ins and outs of obscure colleges with ridiculous endowments. When the school made a financial aid offer so generous, so above and beyond anywhere else, Sophie simply couldn’t turn it down. Before she’d had time to think about what it would mean—all this pastoralia, et cetera—she had enrolled. Now she found herself checking off days in the calendar, awaiting her parole. (And yes, she knew she was being hyperbolic and dramatic and it was a free fifty-grand-a-year education and she should be grateful, but no matter how many times she told herself that, it didn’t erase how unhappy she was.)
“I believe in the value of a liberal arts education,” Sophie said now. It was her standard response to the annoying question she’d grown accustomed to, along with iceberg lettuce in the salad bar and cheese served on top of things that wouldn’t seem worthy of dairy.
Russell laughed: “I meant her
e, at the Ned Flanders-ist Christmas Caroling Concert of All Time.”
There was something about the way he said it, as if he and Sophie were on the same side. It loosened something in her.
“I’m doing anthropological research,” she said.
“An ethnography of sorts?”
“Yeah,” Sophie said. “I’m particularly interested in the sweaters. The symbolism of the light-up ones.”
Sophie paused a beat, waiting for the blank expression and the really? she would’ve gotten off a Kyle or a Connor. To which Sophie would’ve had to say, no not really, just kidding and the conversation would’ve fizzled.
But Russell was nodding along, stroking his chin in exaggerated professorial motions. “I believe those represent a mating ritual.”
“A mating ritual?”
“Yes. You see the male lights up in order to attract the attention of the female so that procreation may ensue.”
“Like fireflies?” Sophie asked.
“And anglerfish,” Russell said.
“Here’s a question: are the sweaters mating, or the people in them?” Sophie asked.
When Russell grinned, he no longer looked professorial. “Couldn’t tell you, Sophie,” he said. “But both prospects scare the shit out of me.”
Sophie laughed. Not fake-laughed or polite-laughed, but her real laugh, with the almost snort at the end. It had been awhile.
“You wouldn’t find it so funny if you knew the rest of the ritual,” Russell warned, a hand over his mouth, all conspiratorial.
“I’m almost afraid to ask.” Sophie tilted her head up to listen. She was flirting a bit, something else she hadn’t done in a while.
My True Love Gave To Me: Twelve Holiday Stories Page 19