The Appetites of Girls

by Pamela Moses

  We began with the long wall to the left of the entry, a series of acrylics by an artist named Carlotta Saunders, patterns of geometric shapes, the color of each square or triangle bleeding into the edges of its surrounding shapes. The first half of the adjoining wall displayed several large collages of street scenes, clipped from magazines and overlapping at unexpected angles. Then, beyond these—Setsu squeezed my elbow—a number of sketches, all pencil on paper, James’s works. She pointed to a drawing of a mirror reflecting two French doors, and to one of gnarled driftwood beside a clump of sea grasses. Then she stopped before a figure of a woman. A nude, reclining on a bed, dark hair spreading over the pillow like great bird’s wings. Setsu sipped her wine. She glanced at me quickly, then took a second sip. Oh! The facial features were blurred, too vague to discern, but I knew.

  “You let him? And display it for all these people!” An old familiar sickness coiled at the pit of my stomach.

  But Setsu just shrugged, her cheeks two red-pink blossoms as she pushed back her shoulders. “It was just a fear. Fears can be overcome, I suppose.” She tilted her head slightly and lowered her voice. “It’s like sex, I guess. You know, scary in the beginning, but after the first time, easier. Until everything is wonderful.” She glanced over at James, still engrossed in conversation with the group he had been standing with when I entered. She lowered her eyes, smiling down at her hands cupping her glass, as if she were too modest to boast of her happiness with James, too considerate to prattle on since she had him, and I was alone. How could she think I envied her? She had contorted everything she was to please James. I saw this more clearly now than ever, just as everything had seemed clearer over the last weeks. Even more than I, Setsu needed to understand. But she couldn’t, loving the water she was drowning in.

  • • •

  That same week, I was surprised to find, in my thin pile of mail, a postcard from Daniel. His message was brief, merely wishing me luck with my junior year, but he had signed it Fondly above his name, written in a beautiful script full of flourishes. For several days, I kept the card on the covered crate I had converted into a bedside table, examining and reexamining it, as if expecting the sentences to re-form themselves into some clue as to Daniel’s reasons for writing. Some days after, I received a second postcard and then a longer letter. In its four pages, Daniel described the foliage of the Amherst campus in autumn, the surrounding college town, a Victorian literature class he was taking that had become his favorite. On the envelope he had carefully printed his return address, and I spent hours considering my response.

  Perhaps he sought nothing more than friendship. But if he intended the letter as some romantic overture, he might be hoping for a signal, some words of encouragement. At his house, I had noticed, among the framed photos on the living room mantel, what must have been a fairly recent snapshot of Daniel and a girl about his age, sitting on the grass before a small white cottage, Daniel’s arm draped around the girl’s shoulders, pulling her close. But from his mother’s attempts to find us time alone together, I had wondered if Daniel and the girl were no longer attached. And now I was sure. But it might be easier—yes—to ignore Daniel’s letters altogether rather than to suggest I was interested in some relationship I wasn’t. This way there would be no complications, no misunderstandings.

  So I tucked Daniel’s letters away in a drawer and returned to my usual routine: morning and afternoon classes; evenings at the Rockefeller or Science Library; my daily run along Blackstone, its trees with leaves now thinning, softening from the vibrancy of weeks earlier. But as I jogged, I found my mind wandering now and then to my visit to the Dunhams, remembering Daniel after returning from his own long run. “The best way to spend a morning!” he had said.

  I turned down more of Fran and Ruth’s invitations to dinners and Setsu’s occasional invitations to lunch. “Opal, are you trying to make us feel guilty? There’s more to life than work, you know! Don’t you want to relax for a few minutes before you get back to it?” But I did not waver.

  After they had gone, often I remained alone in the suite, behind my closed door. The phone rang on occasion, but never for me. The electric clock click-clicked unceasingly on the common room wall above the sofa. Aside from this, silence. Sometimes, after preparing a tabbouleh or eggplant salad, I would wrap it in spinach leaves and eat en route to the library’s seventh floor, needing, at least for a time, some escape from my solitude.

  After many days, I began to notice a reserve in Ruth and Fran. Their smiles, their passing comments to me were suddenly overly courteous. But they had misinterpreted my choices. “It’s nothing personal. Believe me. It’s just there’s a diet I’m following—”

  “It’s okay, Opal. Sure, we understand.”

  But it was what I said of James—stupidly, stupidly—that made things far worse. Only rarely did he come to our suite to pick up Setsu. But one Wednesday evening the spicy sweetness of his patchouli cologne filled our rooms, filled my nose, even my mouth. Setsu had called to me to get the door since she was still dressing. I offered James a seat on the couch or on one of our two chairs. “I’m okay,” he said. “We’ll be sitting all evening. Ballet tickets.” He grinned, revealing only his bottom teeth, even but faintly yellow. “Coppélia.” He pulled at the curls behind his ear. “Bores me, honestly, but Setsu likes it.” He stepped slightly nearer. “How about you? How do you feel about the ballet?” He tapped my wrist with his hand, making me start.

  “Yes. Yes, I like it.” What could possibly be taking Setsu so long?

  “I get discounted season tickets through a friend, so we go regularly. You could be a dancer yourself, actually.” His eyes were on my knees, my thighs, my hips in my leggings. “Do you know that? Anyway, if Setsu can’t make it sometime—” I heard the opening and closing of Setsu’s closet door, knew he could, too. Still he didn’t turn but watched my face, waiting. His tongue darted out from between his teeth and touched his upper lip.

  “No!” I mouthed. “No, no.” And then Setsu emerged.

  Setsu did not come home that night, so I found her in the morning, after Fran and Ruth had left for classes. She was seated at the foot of her bed near her window. I saw that she had moved to her windowsill a framed photo of her brother, Toru, though I remembered she’d once kept it in a less visible spot, on her dresser behind a snapshot of the four of us taken freshman year. She was now holding a compact and dabbing her cheekbones with peachy brown rouge. In the clear sunlight, I could see what I had never before noticed, gray shadows of fatigue beneath her eyes. She looked irritated before I began, almost as if she expected bad news. “I just thought you had the right to know. If I were you . . . I guess I would want to.”

  But her face twisted with a bitterness of which I did not think she was capable. “James would never—” Setsu stood to make herself taller, but she gripped the windowsill for support. “You see faults in everyone, don’t you? You think you’re superior to me, to James, to all of us. You think you are strong for the things you abstain from—even men! But it is not your strength. It’s your weakness.” Her voice came from deep in her throat. Each word a small scrape. “You even try to make yourself unattractive. What normal woman does that? Punish yourself if you want, Opal, but don’t punish me!” She threw the compact on the bed and rushed past me out the door, leaving me alone in her bedroom.

  God! How dare she! How dare Setsu turn this around as if I were the one with the problem, as if I were making self-destructive choices? Damn her! Damn her for stalking out when I had only wanted to help her see she’d get hurt! I should track her down and tell her so. But I was so dizzy with fury, I knew tears might come instead of words, and I would not break down in front of her. I moved to the bed where she had been. I should have known better! I should have known how, with me, these things always seemed to get distorted. I pressed my head to the cool of the window.

  Was there something wrong in me? Some reason I always, always drove people away? In Acapulco, I had found Mother on
e morning after a date with Gerard, this time with a bloodied lip, and cheekbones black and swollen behind her sunglasses. “It’s nothing you need worry yourself over, Opal.” She had begun to bustle around our apartment, watering the potted hibiscus, fluffing the red throw pillows on our sofa. But I could see she moved stiffly and paused now and then to press fingers to the side of her face. So when Gerard phoned later in the afternoon, I lied. “No, no. She’s not here. She’s left town unexpectedly. I’ll be staying with my uncle, and I can’t tell you when she’ll return.” Days later, Mother learned of my deceit. For two days and two nights, she spoke not a word to me, would not even look at me. “Mother! MOTHER!” But she went about her business as though she’d heard nothing. A punishment far worse than any scolding or accusation I could have imagined.

  Setsu should have come to me. She should have apologized for the things she’d said. I certainly should not have to be the first to offer peace. But would that be a worse torment than enduring the tension now between us? Could I ever make her see how wrong she was about me, how absurd the things she’d said about weakness and self-punishment? And what about the pact we’d made as suitemates the year before? She brought it up more often than I. In the end, I left a brief note for her under her door apologizing, telling her my intention had never been to offend, that I hoped we could let it go. But she never responded.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t waste a minute feeling sorry. Sometimes there are consequences when you stand up for your convictions.” Francesca had poked her head into my room on her way to a feminist rally on the Green. Clearly Setsu had told her of our argument. “You did the right thing. James is a creep. I always knew Setsu was better off without him. I know I’m usually happier without a man,” she laughed. But somehow I did not quite believe she meant it.

  I vowed to give no further thought to Setsu’s insults, but they were not so easy to expunge. It had been two weeks since Daniel’s last letter, and small doubts began to scratch at me. I began to wonder if my decision not to respond was genuine or weakness, as Setsu had said. I decided to write him a note. Coolly, cautiously, impersonally, referencing little more than the courses in which I was enrolled and an article I’d recently read about the history of the town of Amherst. Then, a week later, he wrote again, and then again, until after a brief time we began to correspond regularly, and I began to anticipate the arrival of his notes in my mail. I developed a ritual: rather than immediately unsealing the envelope and pulling out the pages inside, I forced myself to wait until I had returned to the quiet of my room. There I would heat a cup of ginger tea and, after a few sips, carefully study every line of his letter to be sure no implications of his words escaped me.

  Though we exchanged no phone calls, over time I began to feel comfortable with Daniel, as if we had spent months, even years, as friends. He asked about my professors, a sketch I mentioned I’d been working on, the route where I took morning jogs. He included in his letters titles of books, names of songs he had recently discovered, details of his own favorite running routes around Amherst. We seemed to share a curiosity and certain appreciations, sympathies of mind. In the library I made a copy of “The Many Virtues of Exercise,” the article from Eastern Garden I still reread from time to time. I sent it to Daniel folded neatly with a note attached: Dear Daniel, I thought you might like to read this. Please let me know what you think. Yours, O.

  Opal, thanks for the article, he replied. Yes, very interesting and I’m glad to have a copy. Fondly, D. As I read his now familiar, precise hand, I reached for my cup of warm tea and imagined that Daniel could be sipping his own in his dorm room at the same moment I sipped mine. A clean, mild soap scent emanated from the notepaper—Daniel’s scent, I believed—and I breathed it deeply.

  As I walked the Brown halls, crossed the Brown quads, I thought how different Daniel was from the male students here. During an early December warm spell that drew students to the quads in herds, I passed a group of boys sprawled on the Main Green in their sweatshirts and sneakers; I watched as they devoured sub sandwiches as thick as their forearms, their chins shiny with oil, and I shivered at their animal appetites, content that Daniel would never be so coarse. Nor would he waste himself in drunkenness like the partiers I passed on my way back from the library each night or the men at the Mexican discotheques Mother had frequented.

  • • •

  Not long before the winter break, Daniel wrote to say he would be home the following weekend for his cousin’s wedding; if I was free, he could stop through Providence on the way. So I penned a few short lines accepting his invitation, careful not to ramble on in eagerness.

  For the next several days, I could think of nothing but our meeting. In the mornings, I allowed myself extra minutes in bed, turning onto my side, my bare legs hugged to me, my eyes still closed in half sleep, imagining how we would spend our time. So ridiculous, wasn’t it? Still my chest rose and fell with unexpected anticipation. In the library at night, bent over my usual heap of books and papers, the black and white of the printed texts blurred like swirled snow as I made mental lists of what Daniel and I might do—a lecture by a new novelist named Edward Yan, a tour of a nearby historical home, an evening walk under the still canopy of winter branches.

  In preparation for his arrival, I scoured my room, dusting the shelves, scrubbing smudges from the windowpanes. From the school bookstore, I bought two volumes of poetry—one of Shakespearean sonnets, the other, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. I set them prominently at the center of my desk with the thought that Daniel would see them and perhaps want to browse through them.

  We made arrangements to meet at Brown’s Van Wickle Gates at half past three on Friday afternoon, but several hours earlier I selected my outfit. Then I changed my mind, replacing it with another. God, I was no better than Ruth! I recalled the clothes I had worn during my stay at the Dunhams’—a flimsy tank top, a low-necked blouse, skirts cutting mid-thigh like some show dancer’s—ensembles Daniel must have found distasteful. I was anxious to show him the more restrained style I had adopted over the past months. I selected an ivory turtleneck, a heather-blue Fair Isle sweater with a band of snowflakes, and a pair of beige corduroys—not baggy, mannish ones like those I had seen on the girls on campus who left their hair hanging in uncombed strings and preferred their legs unshaven, but a flattering tailored pair I had found at B. Clark’s. I tied an off-white silk scarf around the elastic holding my hair, removed it, then tied it again.

  For two days before our date, I had added to my running route—hoping to soothe the jumpiness in my stomach—finding new side streets to proceed along until every muscle stiffened and solidified, until my thoughts seemed to calm. By midday Friday, some of my nervousness had subsided, and so I assured myself that once Daniel and I were in each other’s presence, any anxiety would fall away.

  Browning seed pods crunching beneath my flats as I rocked on my heels, waiting for Daniel at the university’s main entrance, seemed the only sound aside from tires singing along the road down the hill. When a red Saab drove up College Street, I recognized the car belonging to Daniel’s brothers; but in picturing his arrival, I had imagined an entirely different kind of vehicle, though what, I wasn’t sure. He hopped out and simultaneously, awkwardly shook my hands and pecked my cheek. We grinned at each other silently for what seemed long minutes, then made stuttering, blushing attempts at conversation, both of us kicking at dried leaves scattering the side of the road. He was taller than I remembered or more muscular or older-looking, and, watching him out of the corner of my eye, I had the sense I had never seen him by true light of day. He had cut his hair so that the longish curls were now short waves, drawing attention to the angles of his cheeks and chin. He was more handsome, I supposed, than before, and it would take me some time to feel that he was familiar.

  As we climbed into his car, I told him I thought he had changed, but he rubbed the stubble of hair at his nape and laughed. “Not as much as you, though, Miss Colleg
iate!” He smiled broadly, but from the glance he gave my hair and face and clothes, I could not tell if he was pleased.

  As I was about to pull from my pocket a leaflet announcing Edward Yan’s lecture in Sayles Hall and a brochure for the historical museum down the street, Daniel slapped the sides of the steering wheel with a sudden thought.

  “Have you seen The Poet? That new movie? It’s supposed to be great. There’s a matinee in a theater over the border in Massachusetts, not too far from here. Do you want to go?”

  “Sure, good idea.” I nodded in a manner I hoped seemed enthusiastic. I considered asking about the film, but it sounded intellectual (perhaps it had even been adapted from a book), and I was reluctant to reveal my ignorance.

  For the first thirty minutes of the movie, I stole glances at Daniel in the dark for some indication that either we were in the wrong theater or that the film was not what he had expected. The Poet was a gory thriller about a writer plagued by violent visions. Soon fact and fiction became confused for him and he began to act out his madness in a string of brutal murders. But Daniel appeared completely unperturbed; in fact, he seemed to enjoy each bloody scene, sucking vigorously on his iced tea straw, his dark eyes shining in the gloom.

  “What did you think?” he asked as we zipped our winter coats, filed out of the theater and down the block toward his parked car.

  I cleared my throat to give my opinion, but just as I did so, Daniel opened the car door for me, watching to be sure I was comfortably settled before gently closing it. So, instead, I laughed away the question for fear of spoiling the remainder of our evening.

  Dusk had fallen. The temperature had dropped, and black tree branches, their few remaining shrunken leaves curled inward, bounced in the wind. Daniel suggested dinner at Pilgrim’s Hearth, a few miles away, which he promised had good food.