by Pamela Moses
Though I would stay only through mid-August, I dreaded the nightly shift at the restaurant and the way the men who came to dine winked at me across the room or tugged at the ties of my apron as I passed. What was it, I worried as I scrutinized my reflection in the mirrors over the bathroom sinks, that made them single me out, made them think I would like their overtures and that I might respond? I tried to walk quickly when I crossed the room, holding my hips straight and steady. I played a game with myself: if I could hold my breath from the moment a group of men entered until they were seated, they would be guided to another girl’s table; if I couldn’t, their table would be mine. Sometimes, however, they broke the rules of my game and made a special request. I could see them murmuring in Antonio’s ear, glancing in my direction. Some asked me riddles, or complimented my eyes or the way I wore my hair—far more, it seemed to me, than they did with the other girls. Occasionally I felt, from beneath the table, a knuckle grazing my knee.
The other girls at Paradise had countless friends, social plans every night after work. They made regular trips to the restaurant’s pay phone, arranging and rearranging their coming evening activities. So why did they pull me aside, seeking advice in rushed whispers? There were things they had done with the California men they dated, things their boyfriends wanted them to do. What did I suggest? Should they? What was it like? What did they see in me that made them disappointed and confused by my fumbling replies? And why did they stare at my high-heeled sandals and the chiffon of my shirt as if certain I was keeping secret knowledge?
It seemed they concluded I was experienced but aloof. I knew this from the snatches of conversation I overheard in the restroom stalls or from behind the kitchen’s swinging doors. In spite of my attempts at friendly chitchat, my offers to cover their shifts when they were busy, there seemed nothing I could do to improve their opinion.
“Don’t be sulky,” Mother would chide if she caught me rushing through an order, hurrying from a table of men. “Do you want to chase away good customers?” She pressed fingers to the corners of her mouth, lifting her lips, her signal for me to smile.
So I tried to look pleasant as I served. “See, Mother, I will be the picture of cheerfulness!” But I could not help my disgust with the way they tore meat from their chops and ribs, until nothing remained but tiny bloodied shreds. Drink glasses collected on their tables more quickly than I could clear them away. Their lips and fingertips glistened with gravy, with marinades, with butter, with chocolate mousse, and dark fruit juices, their eyes seeking, every now and then, to meet mine. I glanced at the other members of the waitstaff, who formed giggling circles near the kitchen sinks. But they had no such complaints or revulsions. So during lulls in our work, while they joked and gabbed, I hunched on the corner kitchen stool over a magazine or a book I had brought from home.
One late afternoon, as we were getting ready to leave the apartment to open Paradise Jungle for the evening, I knocked on Mother’s bedroom door. She was thickening her lashes with black mascara, massaging dabs of perfume behind her knees.
“What is it, dearheart?”
Feeling suddenly too uncomfortable to look in her eyes, I pulled at the ruffled edge of her bedspread. Did she ever tire, as I did, of the reactions of men? I asked. I never greeted the men at the restaurant or introduced myself. I said not a word until necessary. Maybe I gazed back too long. Or swayed my hips. Eduardo, a boy I had dated one summer in Acapulco, once told me my lips were like ripe berries and that my hips, when I moved, rocked like a boat on waves.
“Is that what’s bothering you? I thought Brown was so progressive, but old conservative New England must be taking its toll!” Mother pinched my cheek as if to show how I charmed her. After all of the people we’d met, all of the places we’d been, had I learned nothing? “Men will be men,” she laughed. “Most women would kill for a walk as sexy as yours, for pouting lips, for your figure.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, studying her reflection. She blinked slowly, pleased, I could tell, by what she saw. “Believe me, Opal, getting noticed more than other girls is something you will soon stop complaining about.
“Feel better?” She smiled as she clasped a silver choker, a carved tiger’s head at its center, around her neck.
I nodded, but the loose, watery feeling in my stomach had only grown worse. The notion that I might somehow be contributing to the urges of “men being men” sickened me. “Don’t you think there can be consequences to enticing a man?” I asked Mother. I thought of Ruth and Setsu and the notions they had picked up in school about how to dress, how to carry themselves—small sparks that had ignited roaring fires. But Mother was rummaging through her closet in search of shoes that matched her outfit and had not heard.
• • •
Before I returned to Rhode Island, Mother took me shopping for some early-fall items—a stylish trench coat, two silky, light wool skirts, and what Mother referred to as “a lady’s bathrobe,” a thin, satiny one to replace the frayed cotton one I wore around the apartment.
In the car on the way home, stopped at a red light, she squeezed her fingers to my wrist and whispered, “If you like, Opal, I can make an appointment for you with my doctor before you leave. You know, if there’s anything you might need.”
I knew what kind of doctor Mother meant and exactly what kind of things the doctor would give me. “There’s nothing I need!” I shook my head vigorously as I gazed out the window at a group of schoolchildren walking in double file behind their teacher.
During the last few days of August, Mother had arranged for us to visit her East Coast friend, Marla, and her family before classes resumed. “Marla and I haven’t caught up in years, and I know she’s looking forward to seeing you. You were just a bit of a thing the last time we were together!” But at the last moment, Mother’s plans changed: Antonio’s brother, whom she’d never met, was flying in from Rome. She absolutely had to stay to meet him. “Marla’s still expecting you, though.”
The Dunhams lived in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Marla and her husband had three sons. The youngest, Daniel, was my age, and when I arrived, he was filling duffel bags in preparation for his own return to Amherst College in Massachusetts.
“Did you remember your windbreaker, Dan? And those all-weather boots we just bought?” Marla dashed in and out of his room a number of times, checking his progress.
“She still worries I can’t organize my own belongings,” he laughed after Marla’s last trip upstairs to be sure I had everything I needed in my room across the hall from Daniel’s, then bringing him a folded stack of laundry. “Mothers! They just can’t help themselves, can they?”
“I guess it goes with the territory,” I answered, laughing agreeably, though I could not remember the last time Mother had overseen my packing.
The Dunham home was rambling and old, with sloped floors and ceilings, and more corridors and staircases than I could follow. There were fireplaces everywhere, their mantels cluttered with family photographs and children’s artwork. Three little-boy handprints in plaster casts hung on the wall near the door of my guest bedroom. Despite the late-summer heat, the Dunhams used no air conditioners, only a few dusty window fans.
Marla called us to the table at seven my first night, the regular dinnertime in the Dunham home, she mentioned. “It’s such a treat to have you here, Opal. I wish your mother could have joined you. How is she? I haven’t seen her in eons. I want to hear all about her restaurant. Oh, and I want to hear about Brown! My niece is applying for next year—such a great, great school.” Marla smiled and set her fork down, tucking her thin, yellow, chin-length hair behind her ear. In her striped Izod shirt and her belted Bermuda shorts and her pea-shaped pearl earrings, it was hard for me to imagine she and Mother had once been close. She seemed like the women whom Mother rolled her eyes at in airports, toting their golf bags or tennis rackets in zippered cases, and their compact suitcases that matched their husbands’. “You look at them and you just know nothing in the
ir lives ever distinguishes one day from the next. God, I think I’d shoot myself! If my husband didn’t do it first!”
But I liked the way Marla talked to me, wanting to know about my suitemates, my decision to major in art history, the way she looked up from her plate as I answered, as if she wanted to be careful to catch my words. After we had sat for some time, she offered seconds, even thirds of pork tenderloin and rice pilaf. But Daniel, I noticed, turned these down, to my surprise, eating with none of the abandon of the men at Paradise Jungle. He refused the Bordeaux his father served the rest of us. “Daniel’s in training for cross country,” Marla said as explanation for his restraint. “He’s very dedicated. Did he tell you he was the captain of his high school varsity team?”
“My mother likes to brag about me.” A deep crease formed in Daniel’s left cheek as he smiled.
After my second day in the house, Marla began to drop hints to Daniel. “Dan, why don’t you take Opal for a drive around town today?” Or, “Honey, show Opal the stream out back. I’m sure she’d love to see it.”
I denied the small pull of disappointment in my chest as I watched him push his tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses closer to his face and frown as if his head were too full of other thoughts to find room for her suggestions. At night, from my bedroom, I could hear soft strains of music as Daniel thrummed the strings of a guitar. While his brothers sped off in their shared convertible Saab, he played songs by Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor and Crosby, Stills and Nash, now and then quietly humming snatches of the melodies. Once, waking from sleep to use the bathroom, I glimpsed him through the door, which he had left slightly ajar, seated on his braided rug, under the soft light of a single lamp, his head bent toward the guitar still cradled in his arms. The following evening, rather than playing music, hair falling in a dark fan of curls across his brow, he pored over the pages of a thick hardcover book resting on his knees and nodded to himself as if in agreement with the material in his lap, oblivious to my presence. He seemed different, more likable than most boys. Still, I was not interested. Unlike Setsu and Ruth, I would be in charge of my own life.
It seemed to me that friends washed in and out of one’s life like pebbles tumbling in the surf. You were tossed together for a while and then circumstances swept you apart. This was what my suitemates and I had promised to avoid. But to succeed was another matter, wasn’t it? So I was relieved Fran and Ruth and Setsu had wanted the same living arrangement for our junior year, in the dorm near Hope Street we’d had the year before. They had always assumed we would stay together, they said. Hadn’t I? Didn’t I wish it, too? “Yes, of course!” I told them. I could not say that perhaps I had even wished it more, that I had worried they might have a change of heart. Still, I sensed they were different from me, a part of something I was not. It seemed easy for them to join in what was popular or communal on campus. Last April, waving their Brown banners during a Spring Weekend concert on the Green—some band in black army boots and slashed camouflage shirts—they had tried to get me to dance with them. “Isn’t this fun?” I had not told them how I could not take my mind off the stale smell of the crowd, how the pounding of the amplified music made my ears throb. I pretended to enjoy myself as much as they did at Acoustic Night, at the few campus parties I attended.
• • •
Always, growing up, in every school I had been the “interesting new girl,” never sticking around long enough to fit in. College would be different though, I’d thought—all of us brand-new from the beginning, all of us staying four years in the same place. It was the wanting to be part of things that mattered, I was learning. An ease, a readiness to join what others did, breezily, cheerfully. This was how you were enfolded into the social swirl, into happiness. I understood these things, still there must have been something I was not doing. I had heard references to multiple phone calls between my suitemates over the summer, though I’d spoken to each of them only once. And when Fran and Setsu had spent the weekend at Fran’s house the winter before, their assumption that I would not wish to go along had been obvious.
So I joined Fran and Ruth (and Setsu when she was not with James) for regular meals at the Ratty. I did not admit that the heavy smell that wafted over the steps leading to the dining hall still nauseated me. Or that I had never grown accustomed to the din of voices and clanking silverware inside, the mess of crowded tables, the oiliness of the food. Cattle heading to the trough! I would think as we stood on line with our scuffed trays on which we balanced scratched plates and glasses.
Each morning before we left for classes, Francesca would check the second page of the Brown Daily Herald and report to us the school’s menu for the day: “‘Ham and Macaroni Casserole, Franks and Beans, Potato-Zucchini Hash.’ Another gourmet dinner tonight, ladies!” But as much as they mocked the cafeteria’s offerings, Francesca and Ruth seemed to polish them off without complaint, Francesca often returning for second helpings—“Amazing what we can adjust to when we’re starved, right?” she would snort. And when Ruth abstained from large portions it was only because she had finished off two chocolate doughnuts or carrot muffins from one of the snack bars before we came and had more wrapped in a paper towel back at the suite. Was she hoping to fool us or herself that these would be saved for some other day?
“Aren’t you hungry, Opal?” she and Fran would ask as I poked at my food.
“I had a late lunch,” I would say, not wanting to admit I could swallow only small servings of what they gobbled down. So I would think of other things to talk of. Like pocketing shiny stones, I would collect amusing anecdotes throughout the day to share with Fran and Ruth later: I had caught Cleo Parker last night locked out of her room, in poodle pajamas and matching powder-puff slippers, of all things! (Her roommate, Noelle, had tied a ribbon around the doorknob, and we all knew what that meant.) And in Ethics class I had accidentally referred to Professor Reinhart as “sir.”
“You didn’t, Opal!”
“If you saw her, you’d understand! She has hair cropped like an army sergeant’s. I think she might even shave her upper lip!”
As we laughed over my stories or theirs, I would forget any sense of separateness. For that time, I was as much a part of the hum of the room as the girls from the social dorms at the table beside ours, discussing their plans for the weekend as they ate bowls of cold cereal and disemboweled bagels, the innards balled up in napkins. Or the European transfer students and their boyfriends on the other side of us with their matching loose hair and clingy dark shirts and scarves, telling jokes in French and Portuguese.
To belong, though, to really belong, always meant to talk of men. The way the girls from the social dorms watched every fraternity brother who passed as if they would bait them just by looking. The way Setsu gushed every time she mentioned James. Even Fran and Ruth bounced out stories of one boy after another—Kevin Starr, who Fran said kissed with the finesse of a bowling ball slamming pins. Malcolm Kingson from Ruth’s political science seminar, who had a reputation as nothing more than a charmer—but was it true? Then sometimes they seemed to be waiting for something from me. “You could have anyone you want,” Ruth had said to me once, intending it as a compliment.
• • •
A party in our suite had been Fran’s idea. Or Fran’s and Ruth’s together. Fran wanted wine, and beer from bottles, not the gutter runoff they served from kegs at most parties, she said. Ruth was considering inviting Malcolm Kingson. And Setsu thought if James came he would invite some of his grad school friends—a more interesting crowd than most, according to her. I had not shared my suitemates’ enthusiasm when the plan had first been made, disliking the idea of a swarm of guests I hardly knew stuffing themselves into our private space. But as we’d pushed our furniture to the edges of the common room, looped streamers from our ceiling, and set votives along the windowsills, singing with the U2 album sounding at top volume from Fran’s CD player—“With or Without You” and “Red Hill Mining Town” and “In God’s Country,”
until Kimberly from the adjoining suite pounded on the wall, making us curl over with laughter—I thought perhaps, perhaps I could enjoy myself, too.
Fran mixed fuzzy navels as we waited for our guests to arrive. When we’d lived in Mexico, they had been Mother’s favorite. They were sweeter than I remembered and cool along my throat. Somehow I finished a second, started a third.
“Are you going to wear your red cocktail dress?” Setsu and Ruth had wanted to know.
“It’s a little much for a dorm party, isn’t it?” I thought I had protested. But with the fuzzy navels—had I finished a third?—and the music and the excitement of my suitemates, the fragments of our conversation would not stay threaded together in my mind.
The dress was too short, it seemed to me, and everywhere too tight. “No, it looks so great on you!” they had insisted. They would wear dresses, too.
“I’m glad we decided to do this,” I thought I remembered saying to Fran as we sat on the couch with Kimberly and Christie, who’d come from next door. Others from our hall had come, too, and from upstairs. I had arranged the crackers and cheeses we’d bought earlier on our terra-cotta platter, passing it to each of the guests. But the door to our suite kept opening, more and more people squeezing in, until I couldn’t stand without pressing against the bodies of strangers. Their sour beer breath in my nose, their smoke in my eyes, someone’s fingers on my thigh, on the hem of the dress I should have known not to wear.