by Pamela Moses
“I think he’s looking at you,” Setsu hissed in my ear. “You should go talk to him.” And was it my imagination, or had he lifted the cup in his hand in a greeting—not meant for Opal or for Setsu, but for me?
Setsu grabbed Opal’s arm, leaving me alone with my drink and our shared plate of half-eaten cookies. Gavin’s voice was liquid and low, the words pouring, though his lips seemed hardly to move. “So you’re going to be my lab partner in Psych next term, right?” He tilted his chin, draining the remaining contents of his glass.
“I guess.” I did not think he knew me and had never imagined he’d given a thought to having me for a partner. I hoped he couldn’t tell how certain I was we had been paired, hoped he hadn’t caught me watching him in class. I felt for the feather-thin edge of my camisole, which seemed to cling to me now as closely as skin.
“You’ll regret it. I’m always weeks behind in the reading. You’d be far better off without me.” He let out a small laugh but without curving his mouth so that I could not tell if he was joking or sincere.
For an eternity I tried to think of something clever or interesting to say. I thought he would move on, find someone else to talk to. But he stayed, drumming his fingers against the rim of his cup, keeping the rhythm of the music. Was it possible he liked this—just standing side by side in silence? Was it possible, if I dared turn to him, I might find him gazing at me as boys so often gazed at Opal?
But when I finally looked again, he was gone. So he hadn’t been. Of course. And I had only been wishing—ridiculous things.
Through the open window, I saw that it was no longer snowing but that flakes still drifted from the tree branches. A few solitary flakes floated inside, one landing on my arm. As I turned my wrist to watch it melt, ice clinked in my punch glass. I had almost forgotten I was holding it, remembered taking no more than a taste or two. But when I looked down, I found it empty save for a few pink droplets running along the side. A radiant moon was visible through the white-dusted trees, a series of iridescent glowing rings surrounding it. As dazzling as in the TV romances my sisters and I used to sneak when Mama was out. Bright enough to make the night sky glisten with magic, and with the promise of bold, new things. But not yet for me.
• • •
After the winter break, my first shared lab with Gavin included an experiment on obesity in mice. Would I mind conducting it while he observed? Gavin whispered so that Professor Wren could not hear. As usual, he had neglected the previous night’s reading. Several days after completing each lab, we were required to turn in a report outlining the experiment and its results in detail. I wondered if Gavin would ask that I alone take responsibility for these as well, but instead, he offered his dorm room as a workspace. “My roommate’s never home. The place will be quiet, and there are two desks and two chairs.” He shrugged his shoulders in a way that made me feel foolish for ever hoping the things I had during our weeks away from school, for ever imagining his thoughts might match mine.
So every two weeks, I knocked on his door, my Psychology 20 text and lab notes in hand. In Psych, the course reading was straightforward, and with adequate hours of studying for the tests given periodically, I received high marks. It soon became clear that my understanding of the subject matter was greater than Gavin’s. So, often, he spent much of the time quietly watching from the chair beside mine as I, seated before his computer, perused the relevant materials, then typed out the various sections of our report. But one afternoon as I worked to phrase and rephrase a particularly lengthy report on the nervous system, I felt a whispery touch beneath my arm, along the side of my ribs, so light I thought at first I had imagined it. But then I felt it again and this time, the distinct press of fingers, sending through me an explosion of fear and heat. For some seconds I froze, my hands motionless over the keyboard, my mind spinning with fragmented thoughts. “You distract me, Ruth. Do you know that?” Gavin murmured. I nodded, though I hadn’t meant to. I was concentrating on keeping my hands from shaking, wondering if I should summon the courage for some similar declaration. But when the report was done and I stood to leave, he rose and leaned in the doorway, thumbs tucked in his woven belt, as casually as he had every time before.
That night, I lay in bed watching the yellow glow of light that shone through my window from the quad below and listened to the late-hour sounds of students returning from Funk Night at the Underground and the pubs near campus. I recognized the voices of the European girls who shared the suite down the hall and dated only older boys, and of the field hockey girls from upstairs who’d claimed boyfriends within weeks of the start of school. And as they laughed over their shared escapades, a flutter moved through my chest with the thought that I might soon have my own taste of the things they knew.
• • •
Of my suitemates, I was fondest of Setsu. She was the easiest to talk to and, lovely as she was, always full of compliments—noticing a bangle I hadn’t worn before or a new hairstyle. On nights when Fran went out and after Opal was asleep, we often spent hours in her room or mine, listening to WBRU Radio, sprawled on the carpet, our feet tapping to the rhythms of Edie Brickell and Elvis Costello and the Indigo Girls. Sometimes Setsu talked of her brother, the violinist, or of the places they had visited where his youth orchestra had played. She was curious about my family, about what it had been like to grow up with so many aunts and uncles and cousins. “I think I would have liked that,” she said.
“It was never lonely, but my sisters and I couldn’t get away with a thing!” I told the story I had been too shy to relate our first night in the suite—of my afternoon in Mr. Gupta’s shop.
“You did not! Did you honestly run into a rack of cards?”
The ridiculousness of what I had done seemed to strike us simultaneously, and we howled until our ribs hurt. But even as I laughed into my cupped hands, I wished I had described it differently or hadn’t told it at all. I remembered how Setsu had danced at the Sigma Chi party and, modest as she was, known how to draw the attention of boys. She never would have said, but I knew the story made me seem such a baby. Maybe the next time I would tell her what had happened with Gavin just days before instead.
• • •
Before my next visit to Gavin’s, at my closet door mirror, I held against me in succession my turquoise turtleneck, my red sweater, a salmon-colored one, then one with brown stripes, trying to determine which best flattered me, disguised the lumpiness around my middle, narrowed the melony roundness of my backside. Finally I chose a loose white shirt with buttons down the front. To make it look more feminine, I unbuttoned the top button, then, my pulse speeding, slipped open the second button as well, revealing a generous vee of flesh.
“That looks pretty, Ruth.” Setsu was dressing, too, fastening a moonstone necklace she had bought earlier that week from a jewelry vendor at the student P.O. “Where are you headed?”
“Oh, nowhere. Just meeting my lab partner.”
“Really? Well, you look great.” She dabbed a finger to my cheek, showing me an eyelash that had fallen. “If you blow on it, it’s good luck,” she laughed, offering it.
“Thank you. I’ll take what I can!” I said, watching Setsu pull the ends of her hair forward so that it draped her shoulders rather than hanging down her back. Then she wound an ivory scarf around her neck, arranging it so that it showed the moonstones beneath. As she stroked the scarf’s fringed edges, I wondered if she had reasons she’d never told for making herself look lovely, and, shy as she was, if even she had done things I’d never dared.
Strains of music I’d heard before but couldn’t name—something Jamaican, maybe—sounded from Gavin’s room as I made my way down his hall, the bottom edge of my textbook pressing into my belly. I shifted it in my hands, afraid it would crease my shirt or, worse, leave a line of perspiration and cling in an unflattering spot. As I lifted my hand to knock, I noticed that Gavin’s roommate, Victor, a bassoonist for the Brown band, had taped to the door above the plastic note bo
ard new photos of himself and three other band members performing for a recent Brown Bears hockey game. The collection of snapshots below the board remained—of Victor and friends in maroon graduation caps and gowns—these encircling a bumper sticker with Indian Falls High School, PA in red letters. More than midway through the year, Gavin must still have felt no inclination to add anything of his own to Victor’s memorabilia.
“Hi there,” Gavin said. The music was no longer audible and he held some paper in his left hand, a letter, I guessed, and seemed so engrossed that I wondered, with a small, burning twinge in my throat, if my thoughts of the past days had been nothing more than fabrications. We began our work as usual, I making notations in the margins of our assigned reading, Gavin looking on. But after some time, he drew his chair closer to mine, so close I could hear his breathing, could feel the moistness of it on the back of my neck.
“Your skin is the color of white marble,” he murmured. “Has anyone told you that?”
“No.” I shook my head. When I was younger, Mama, in the summertime, had slathered all of us with sunscreen to protect what she called “the Feldman and Leiser women’s milky complexion.” But always I had regretted the paleness of my face and limbs, that even after hours at the beach my skin darkened only slightly, bubbling with pink blisters if I was not careful. I had envied girls who wore shorts and sleeveless tops to show off their amber-gold skin. I bit my lip too hard, tasting blood, not sure whether or not to believe Gavin’s compliment when his fingers clasped me again. This time they lingered longer, bit by bit inching forward, his wrist squeezing my ribs, his hand then moving upward to the back of my neck, winding through my hair. “Pretty girl,” he whispered. Shayna Maideleh, my aunts had said, pinching my cheeks when I was younger, and I had never believed it, but I wanted to believe Gavin now. I could not stop the small wheeze that sounded from my throat but did not pull away as my mind began to fill with new desires.
This became our ritual: sometime before I left his room, before our lab report was completed, Gavin, with calloused palms that smelled of the pink liquid soap from the bathroom dispensers, would take my wrists, pulling me toward him. “I thought of you all day, Ruth,” he would say as his hand slid under my sweater, under the elastic of my bra. We never kissed as I left or made any other plans to meet. Still, when I passed the Alpha Chi girls trading secrets behind the stacks of the Science Library, I smiled to myself over the things we shared. With the pocket money Poppy and Mama provided for me each month, I began to buy luxuries I had seen my suitemates tote in their wire baskets on their way to the shower—fragrant lotions that promised to keep my skin soft, lilac-scented hair conditioners, cleansers in tinted glass jars. I massaged each product into my face, my legs, my neck until they glistened and wondered if Gavin would like the smell, the feel of them, if he would notice and know it was for him I did these things. In Professor Wren’s lecture hall, we still sat rows apart, but I remained conscious always that, at any moment, from his seat in the back, Gavin’s eyes could be on me. And when, on occasion, his name was called to answer one of the professor’s questions, my chest rose with a secret pride.
The summer before I’d left for college, Jeanie Rosenberg from 9B had stopped by with juicy gossip for Mama, her voice a low buzz: Daria Weiss had left NYU, home, every promise of a future, for some waiter who fancied himself an actor—a nobody. The Weisses were beside themselves, and now Carly, the younger daughter, had been spotted traipsing all over the city at ungodly hours with boys she had no business being with.
Yes, Mama had already heard.
“Can you imagine?” said Jeanie.
Mama shook her head and pressed a finger to her lips. I knew what she held in, what the whole building knew: Jeanie’s own seventeen-year-old, Cecily, made midnight trips across town to meet her boyfriend while her parents slept, bribing Ferdinand, our late-night doorman, not to tell.
“Such a shame. It must be awful for all of them.” Mama offered Jeanie hot tea, and as she walked to the kitchen to start the kettle, she paused, cupping her hand under my chin, as if to say to Jeanie Rosenberg that she and Poppy were the lucky ones, never worrying about such troubles with me. Then later, after Mrs. Rosenberg left, Mama repeated the story to Poppy, pronouncing each detail carefully, slowly, enjoying the triumph, I knew, of our superior family.
So I could not tell Mama about Gavin. But almost all girls did these things. Even shy, sweet girls. These things and more every day.
• • •
For my second-semester fiction writing class, I wrote a story about a Russian girl and her young husband who, while fleeing the pogroms in their homeland, become separated during a storm at sea. The words seemed to rise out of me like birds taking to air. Four pages became eight and then twelve.
“Lovely use of metaphor,” Professor Richards praised as he returned the story to me. I saw that he had placed check marks, their long tails streaming like blue comets, beside the passages he thought best.
“My fiction teacher liked my last story,” I told Mama when we next spoke. “It’s a tale of romance.”
“Oh?” I could hear the soft slurp of her tea.
“I could read it—”
“How tragic,” she said before I reached the end. But that was all. She wondered if she’d told me of her conversation with Babbie Schafer. She’d bumped into her grocery shopping at Zimmerman’s. Robert, now a sophomore at Cornell, had just begun a research project with his biology teacher in addition to his assigned classes. “Babbie says it will help with his applications to graduate schools in a couple of years. Very smart, don’t you think?”
“Yes, Ma.” But what I really wanted to say was that maybe if she listened to my story in its entirety—and this time more carefully—she might hear something to compliment.
• • •
Days later, before any of us had dressed for classes or breakfast, Opal raised the window behind the couch and held out a hand to check the outdoor air. “It’s warm for February.” She peered out. “There’s Jess. God, she’s out early, isn’t she?”
“She must be coming back from Cory’s.” Setsu worked the belt of her pale blue cotton robe into a pretty bow. “She told me they’ve been spending every day together.”
“And every night apparently, too. Ha!” Francesca laughed, pulling at the Cat Stevens T-shirt, which just covered her bottom, and poured Pepsi into her chipped china mug as she did every morning. “Well, good for her. I’m glad someone around here is enjoying herself.” She grinned at Opal and Setsu as if they, but not I, could appreciate her joke. Only days before, I had interrupted Francesca with Winnie. They’d been standing in the entrance to Winnie and Kay’s room, laughing about the medical student Winnie had been dating for a few weeks. I had seen the foil rectangle studded with plastic-coated pink tablets in Francesca’s palm.
“Out! Out!” Francesca had shooed me away as soon as I’d entered the room. “We don’t want to corrupt innocence!”
Winnie had laughed. “Oh, don’t listen to her,” she’d said with her hint of a southern accent. “Of course you can stay.” But Francesca had tucked the pills back into the pocket of her French designer jeans, and the conversation had ended.
So I knew what they all thought. But they were wrong to think they had to exclude me from their secrets. And I could prove it.
“I guess I haven’t told you, but I’ve sort of started seeing someone, too,” I announced to my suitemates. I described my meetings with Gavin, the things between us that had now become expected.
“That’s it?” Francesca plopped onto our sofa, curling her bare toes around the edge of the coffee table. She removed a black elastic from her wrist and wound it around her hair.
“Don’t make fun,” Setsu defended. She patted my arm with her thin hand as if to say, “There was nothing wrong with your story.”
But I wished I had made it sound more mature, or told it in a more dramatic way that even Francesca could not criticize.
• • �
�
Some time later, for our report on consciousness, I agreed to meet Gavin in the evening rather than the afternoon. I’ll be out during the day, he had scratched in high, angular letters on the only remaining blank corner of our memo board. How ’bout seven instead? When I knocked on his door, fingering the tiny amethyst pendant on a thin silver chain (which I had eventually decided earlier in the evening was the prettiest of the modest items in my jewelry box), he motioned me inside with a sweep of his arm. I noticed he had styled his hair differently: it was neatly brushed back and seemed to shine with something damp. And when he moved, a sweet cologne odor I had never smelled on him before emanated from his khaki shirt with its turned-up collar. A quiver of happiness darted through me at the thought of him standing before his mirror preparing for my arrival.
The room was dim. Victor’s bassoon in its case was a black shadow against the far wall, and the collage of photos above Victor’s desk and Gavin’s framed print of a desert with its fork of a cactus were only dark rectangles.
“I prefer the lights low in the evening.” Gavin flashed me an odd smile. “It’s more mellow.” He flicked a thumb toward his drawn, brown-stained window shade and the T-shirt he had draped over his desk lamp to soften the glow. “Don’t you think?”