by Pamela Moses
My father went on, he and my mother ignoring, as usual, the jokes Toru made at my expense. As he talked about Brown’s fine academics, its distinguished professors, its renowned collection of books, I watched Toru slurp from his cup, giving only slight nods to prove he was unimpressed. I poked and stirred the granules of sugar that had settled at the bottom of my tea, my spoon clinking angrily against the sides of my cup until my father stopped talking and I could feel three pairs of eyes on me.
My voice was almost no louder than a whisper, but I made myself heard: “Why do you insult me, Toru? Again and again!”
Toru laughed and let out a huff of annoyance, then for minutes no one spoke. My hands were quaking, hard enough that I could not replace my spoon to my saucer without it rattling. But I had done it, and when we returned to school, I would recount to Ruth this small triumph.
I had been the one to answer when Ruth’s call came, just days after she had returned home for Passover. She would be back in about a week or so, she said. And I knew from the dried-up sound of her voice the choice she had made.
“We miss you, Ruth,” I told her. “We’re thinking of you all the time.”
For a while she was as silent as the evening mist dampening the campus beyond my window. “Thank you.”
Then her mother’s voice came from some other part of her apartment—“Who is that? Are you on the phone?”—not flat like Ruth’s but fluttering and sharp, a mother bird protecting her young.
“It’s only Setsu, Mama.”
How bent on independence Ruth had seemed when Francesca and I had seen her off at the Providence station just the week before. But to be that cared for—Ruth was lucky in ways she did not know.
Summer break drew closer, and as I completed final essays and exams, attended the last classes of the freshman term, and, like my suitemates, packed my books and clothes and pictures into boxes, peeled posters from the walls, I thought of the stiffness I heard in my mother’s and father’s voices when I called home now, a change I had noticed since my outburst over Christmas. During telephone conversations, they were careful to avoid mentions of Toru, as if fearing my reaction.
Over the three-month holiday, Toru spoke to me only when necessary. I never apologized for the accusation I had made when I had last seen him. But now when he interrupted me, I kept the peace as I always had before. Perhaps some things were more important than pride, more important than proving assertiveness. And toward the end of the break, when my parents asked if Toru could have the violin I had not played since junior high—he knew someone at the conservatory who wished to buy it—I swallowed the bitterness rising to my throat. Perhaps they meant this only as a sensible solution, a means to take something useless off my hands. Still, I felt sickened at the thought of someone else playing the instrument that had once seemed an extension of my own body. “No, I guess I’ll keep it,” was all I said. And, at the end of August, before I returned to Brown, for no rational reason, I brought my violin to an instrument repair shop in Georgetown, changing the old worn strings for new ones, replacing the brittle horsehair of my bow. I set the violin beside the bags that would make the return trip to school with me, knowing, once I arrived, it would do little more than take up space.
Early in our freshman year, I had thought we might eventually go our separate ways for other terms of school: Francesca to room with Winnie and Kay in one of the large off-campus rentals on Prospect Street, Opal—liking independence—to one of the singles on the Pembroke Campus. But we had made a promise that April while Ruth was away: if she returned, and if she was willing, we would stay together our sophomore year as well. Perhaps I had suggested it first, but Opal and Fran did not hesitate.
“People offer help so easily without really meaning it, don’t they? But Ruth should know, really know, she can rely on us,” Opal had said.
“Yes, not just as roommates, but as friends.” This from Fran had surprised me at first, but I had begun to understand, from the many times she’d glanced at the phone in our suite during Ruth’s absence as if expecting it to ring at any moment, that, though she might not admit it, she was as concerned about Ruth as any of us.
We felt Ruth needed us, though she might never ask. And we had been right, Ruth’s eyes squeezing closed with relief when we made the suggestion.
“I’m surprised the four of you are sticking together,” Winnie said to us just after we announced our decision. She was skipping her Scandinavian literature class, failing to finish Miss Julie, and had plopped herself onto our couch with her ball of tan yarn, her crochet hook dipping up and down, forming the first several rows of a scarf. She swatted at her sun-blond bangs, brushing them out of her eyes. “It’s just unusual, that’s all I mean. Almost no one is staying with the roommates they were assigned freshman year.” She tilted her head, dimpling the corners of her mouth as though she meant nothing by it, but I knew Kay, at the last moment, had decided to room with Heather Kelly instead of Winnie, and that Fran had been Winnie’s last hope.
“I guess we’ve grown on each other.” Fran winked at Ruth. “Like algae, or crabgrass.”
Ruth and Opal and I laughed, but Winnie only studied her looping stitches. Some weeks before, Winnie had asked if I was planning to live with Kimi Endo’s group in the house on Brook Street. “No,” was all I’d told her. I would not share that they had not asked me anyway. Aside from my suitemates, Kimi had been my first friend on campus, inviting me to several parties and dinners sponsored by the Japanese Cultural Society. She and several of her Japanese-American friends attended these en masse, but despite our common backgrounds, conversations did not come as easily for me with them as they did with Ruth, or even Fran and Opal. I had little to add to their jokes about un-Americanized parents or the antiquated traditions of relatives still in the East. And when I missed a few dinners because I’d made previous plans with my suitemates, Kimi’s calls had grown less frequent. And she’d filled the eight spaces for her house with girls who spent all of their time with other Asians.
“I didn’t realize you’d become so close.” I heard the sizzle of Winnie’s words as she stood later in the doorway with Fran. Still, I felt a little sorry for Winnie. But we would not tell her we had reasons for the choices we’d made, sensed we knew something others around us had still to learn: how easily one’s life could fly into pieces. And because we had learned this, we would not abandon each other at the first spark of friction. We heard the rumors on campus: Riley and Dee, who lived down the hall, were no longer speaking, arranging their schedules around each other, together in their room only when they slept. Phoebe Locke had caught her boyfriend, Chip, with Ana Walters, Ana’s shirt open, her headband and stockings tangled in Chip’s bedsheets. Story after story of the way friends turned on one another, as careless as wildflowers twisting in the breeze. But real friendships did not last merely one year or two, Ruth and Fran and Opal and I agreed. We made this pact: regardless of circumstances, we would be able to count on one another. For all of our years here. And even beyond.
• • •
We received, through the housing lottery, what we had hoped for our sophomore year: a suite for four in one of the dorms off Hope Street, an arrangement similar to what we had been given the previous year but quieter, with only three other apartments per floor. We would do something more with our common room this time around, we decided—give it some sort of coordinated theme, rather than leave it a hodgepodge of our mismatched belongings. Francesca suggested Mediterranean touches, which we agreed to. And in her car, we drove to Swansea, Massachusetts, and bought beaded throw pillows for the sofa, a terra-cotta platter painted with bright yellow lemons for the center of the coffee table, posters of the Amalfi Coast and of a square in Naples, and a swag of blue-green material to hang from the curtain rod above the double window.
Driving back, our eyes tearing from the lowering sun and from the wind, our voices hoarse from laughing, shouting to one another above the cars and the rushing air, I felt, for a moment, h
ow it might be to have sisters. I had not told Ruth or Opal or Fran how thankful I was for the pact we’d made, for our choosing to continue as roommates. Setsu is a quiet girl, tentative in her relationships, my grade school teachers had commented repeatedly on my progress reports. But they mentioned it as if it were a choice, not understanding what I craved more than anything.
We spent much of the next day decorating, trading stories of the highlights and disappointments of our summer vacations as we arranged our couches and chairs, our photos and keepsakes from home, as well as our new purchases.
“It looks so great!” Ruth said when we had finished, her words punching with enthusiasm. The summer had been good for her. “Time heals all wounds,” she told us when we asked. Still, the way she laughed, more loudly than the rest of us at every joke, made me think she needed to prove her happiness to herself. And I noticed a difference now in her conversations with her mother. They bickered regularly over all manner of things: Ruth’s neglecting to be in her room one Sunday night in time for her mother’s usual eight-o’clock call, the title of a movie they had once watched together, the name of a certain shoe store in Brooklyn. And especially over Ruth’s forgetting to phone home for her sister Valerie’s birthday. Still Ruth did nothing to make things right. I knew what she thought: that she was finding strength. But it seemed to me she was only drifting toward loneliness. In her position, I could not begin to know what I would feel. But I did know this: never, never would I cut myself off from concern, from affection that was offered. Sometimes compromises had to be made to hold on to love.
It was only a few weeks after the start of sophomore year when I met James. Francesca had convinced me to accompany her to an off-campus party hosted by some theater majors she knew, mostly juniors and seniors. “Their parties are far more interesting than what’s on campus. You’ll see,” she’d said. “You grew up near a big city, so you know what I mean. Fraternity parties can be so juvenile, can’t they?”
The house was south of College Hill, near Wickenden Street, and far enough from campus and from the shops on Thayer and Angell that I had never before had occasion to pass it. Light from a single street lamp shone on its tiny front garden where someone had arranged flat stones in the shape of a peace sign, and beyond it, a family of plaster gnomes, all in red jackets and pointed hats, the largest with a Brown University sticker adhered to its middle. “Very creative landscaping,” I said.
Francesca laughed and looped her arm through mine. “Actors. Everything’s very tongue-in-cheek.” As further proof, she pointed to the front door, which had been propped open by a chipped plaster owl. Below the circular knocker at the center of the door, someone had written Kiss a Thespian. Inside, the windows were framed by long drapes, their skirts forming dark fabric pools on the floor. The walls and ceilings had been painted deep maroon like the entrance to some underworld realm. “You’ll get used to it,” Fran smiled. I followed her through two smoke-filled rooms to a spot near the kitchen where three kegs of beer kept a flow of people coming and going. Francesca had immediately filled plastic cups for both of us. She leaned against the wall, her free hand resting on her hip as she waited to be approached.
James was a graduate student, a teaching assistant in the political science department, he informed Francesca and me. He had eyes as solemn gray as rivers and high cheekbones and a thick mustache that covered his upper lip. He stood shoulders above the other guests, and I had to tilt my chin just to speak to him. In the haze of cigarette smoke, the whirl of animated voices, I listened as James and Francesca compared stories of a few acquaintances they had in common and of recent summer trips each had taken to Argentina. They had even stayed at the same hotel in Buenos Aires. “With that horrible, nosy manager. She looked like a female Mussolini!” Francesca laughed, leaning close enough to James that her arm brushed his. James would be drawn to Francesca, in her tweed blazer, her jeans and wide, brass-buckled belt that flattered her larger size. She exuded a confidence, a maturity that reminded me how girl-like, how thin-boned and straight I had been since the age of fifteen. She was not a reed to be easily shaken, as Ruth or I seemed to be.
When James phoned our suite three days later, my roommates and I were watching Cheers—our Thursday evening ritual—an episode we’d seen once before.
“Let it ring. This is a good part,” Opal said.
But Ruth picked up the phone, afraid it might be someone’s parents, not wanting to cause concern. “Who? Setsu? Oh, yes, she’s here.”
And before I knew it, I found myself stuttering a surprised acceptance to James’s invitation to dinner at his home.
“Who’s James?” Ruth wanted to know.
I saw Fran’s blue eyes widen slightly, as if she were not sure she’d heard correctly.
“I didn’t expect it, Fran,” I said. “He talked with you all evening. I can call back—”
“Oh, God! Please!” She kicked at one of her leather clogs on the floor near the sofa and made a snapping noise with the gum in her mouth. “He really isn’t my type anyway.”
Aside from accompanying him to our senior prom, I had never had an official date with Gerald, my high school boyfriend, nor with the few boys I’d spent time with freshman year of college. Opal and I had gone out a few times with Clay and Andy—brothers in the class ahead of ours—but we had only played foosball and eaten cold pizza in the basement of their dorm. “We’d have had more fun if we’d stayed home and studied for Friday’s history test!” Opal had whispered to me the last evening as we stood to leave.
So I was not used to dressing for an occasion like my dinner with James. But Opal had a wardrobe of stylish clothes, so the morning of the dinner, I found her in her room. She was stretched on her stomach across the white duvet cover on her bed, reading Dubliners. Her feet were up, her ankles crossed in cotton leggings that showed the long curves of her thighs.
“It’s amazing, Opal. You always look so glamorous,” I said, as part of my explanation for seeking her advice. I spoke quietly. Ruth’s room was beside Opal’s, and for some reason I did not want her to know my plans.
Opal rolled onto one elbow and blinked at the sun that was now slanting through her window and with the boredom of someone who’d heard the compliment too many times to care. I felt silly for having made the observation. “Maybe I’m interrupting you—”
“No. No, stay. I’ve been reading for hours anyway.” She stood, squaring her pretty shoulders, running her thumb and forefinger along the narrow line of her nose.
“Always start with your hair and face,” she said, seating me at her desk chair, adjusting the tilt of my head to suit her, then pulling a brush and a quilted bag of cosmetics from her top desk drawer. “Your face is like a canvas. Makeup can bring your features into focus, but the colors must work together.” She poked at my brows with tiny strokes from a brown pencil, lined my eyes, coated my lashes with quick, curling motions from her mascara wand. I sensed she would rather be doing something else, but this was work she nearly could complete with her eyes closed as she tipped my chin up and then down, turned my face to one side and then the other. I tried, in the meantime, to think of some topic to pass the time. “Are you going to any of the homecoming games this weekend? I know we all missed them last year, but I thought I would at least try to make the football game this time. I think Ruth is, too. If you want to come—”
“Not really my cup of tea,” she said, without looking up.
So, indicating her book, I asked if she still liked her James Joyce class, if after Dubliners they would be reading Ulysses, which I had attempted once in high school but failed to penetrate.
“You tackled it on your own? That was ambitious. Well, if you took the course, you’d understand it,” she said, though I wasn’t so sure.
Another lull in the conversation followed. I could think of nothing to say to interest her. I mentioned the small unframed watercolor to the left of her window. It had not been there the day before—a new addition to her mostly bare w
alls—the silhouette of a boy, all angular, spare lines, behind him black rocks and a slab of gray ocean. “Is that yours?”
“It’s not finished,” was all she said, making it clear she was no longer in the mood for chitchat. With deft fingers, she swirled creamy powder over my cheeks, dabbed gloss on my lips.
Opal approved of the dress and fitted, mandarin-collar coat I had considered but not of the flat shoes I had chosen to wear with them. “Why don’t you borrow these?” She took from her closet a pair of black patent leather sling-back heels. “You can keep them if you like. I really never wear them anymore.”
“Oh, thank you, Opal, but I couldn’t.”
“Of course you can.” She moved her hand wearily over her hair, and I knew I had tried her patience.
On the phone, James had given directions to his apartment, a ten-minute walk from campus, off Benefit Street, toward downtown Providence. He was renting the first story of a dilapidated blue Victorian house with a sagging veranda. Wet leaves coated the steps, and large chinks where the wood had rotted pocked the porch’s floorboards. I tiptoed to the doorbell, afraid of tripping or snapping a heel from Opal’s dress shoes.
James arrived at the front door in jeans, a braided leather belt, and a cantaloupe-orange shirt, its cuffs rolled back, its top two buttons unfastened. “Did you find the place without any trouble?” When I removed my coat, he smiled at my sleeveless silk frock and heels.
“Oh, yes, the directions were perfect,” I nodded, embarrassed by how ridiculously formal I now looked as I stood in his foyer, clutching the scented candle I had brought as a house gift.