The Appetites of Girls

by Pamela Moses

  This moment of brazenness only made my family scrutinize me more suspiciously. “Who was that?” Mama asked after I’d received two phone calls in a single weekend from Brad Lewitt, the class above mine in high school, who, to the Lewitts’ dismay, now managed the Red Moon Diner in midtown.

  “The Red Moon Diner? That grease-spattered eyesore on Tibbett Avenue,” neighbors wondered.

  “No. No, some place in Manhattan.”

  “I bet his parents wish they could get a refund on all that private-school tuition!”

  So went the gossip in town. And Mama had known it was Brad who had called, only she wished it wasn’t and awaited some confirmation that Brad and I would not be dating.

  During our teen years, my friends from Temple Beth Immanuel had complained about the ways their mothers were already probing for husbands, like gulls eyeing every silver ripple of water for fish. “You’re lucky, Ruth. Your mother leaves you alone,” they’d said, not realizing that it was only a trade-off, other things—my standardized test scores, my grades in trigonometry—occupying her thoughts instead. But now, suddenly, she seemed intent on finding some suitable relationship for me—someone with ambition, someone who shared our values, as if this would not only prevent me from veering wildly off track, but inspire me to pursue some worthy goal of my own. As if, then, my future would extend before me, a clear path solidly paved. So whenever I was home and accompanied her to services, she would point out someone new. Did I know Robbie Melzer had returned to Riverdale? Had she mentioned Lizzy Samuels’s oldest son—the one who’d just renovated a beautiful apartment in Park Slope—always asked about me? According to Lizzy, he’d been a political science major, too.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Ma.”

  “Really?” She was surprised. She happened to know that Alice Berger was interested in both of them. And Robbie Melzer had just started working in his father’s insurance brokerage firm, taking over the entire personal lines department. “He’s always been so refined. Besides, how many Jews are there to choose from in this world, Ruthie? A piddling fraction. That’s it!”

  A circle of pink shone at the back of Robbie Melzer’s head. By thirty he’d be as hairless as a newborn mouse. And there seemed something grim about David Samuels, dressed always in black suits, his cheeks long, as if he were perpetually sitting shiva. But when I wrinkled my nose at one after another, Mama cleared her throat, and I knew what she was swallowing down.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t bring me to temple if you find it an exercise in frustration. I can find someone for myself.”

  Mama snapped her tongue in a way that implied, A fine job you’ve done so far.

  But I held my silence, despite the drumming of my heart, the hot, pulsing anger.

  • • •

  In the fall of my final year at Brown, I won repeated high praise for my work in Advanced Fiction Writing—special attentions I had seen lavished on other students in other courses, but never expected to receive myself. Professor Wainwright, the author of Blue Hill Sundown and The Pulling Horses, read aloud in class my piece “Aside from Loss.” He complimented the discussion I’d led on Hemingway’s style as one of the most insightful he’d heard. And so I quickly forgot how, throughout the entire presentation, my words had echoed in my ears, trembling and thick, as if forming somewhere other than my throat.

  During one weekend at home, I left “Aside from Loss” faceup on my bedroom desk, its black-markered Outstanding! unmissable, even from some distance. Mama had come in and out more times than I could count, to return folded laundry, check the heat from the radiator, retrieve my emptied hot chocolate mugs. But even though I had caught her skimming the first page of my story, she made no mention of it. As if this were as common as pennies in a wishing fountain, as if I’d been bringing home victories like this every day for years. Nor did she betray any hint of having noticed, during one of my subsequent visits home, a handful of brochures given me by Professor Wainwright (duplicates of those I kept with me at school) for graduate writing programs around the country, though I’d fanned them out in the same prominent spot. So! I knew what she thought—that she could discourage me through indifference. But she’d underestimated me. I was no longer the self-doubting, malleable girl I’d been as a child!

  • • •

  No classes were held during the latter half of Thanksgiving week. I was home for five full days. So I interrupted Poppy and Mama late one evening as they took to their usual after-dinner armchairs. I had a question for them, I explained. Still in the pleated drop-waist dress I’d worn to dinner at Aunt Helena’s—the one I’d bought the previous spring on a shopping outing with Setsu because it slimmed my hips—I recited the proposal I had rehearsed repeatedly, animatedly, convincingly (I believed) in my room. But it was clear Mama had anticipated this, had already made her case. And this time Poppy was as unyielding as she. He worked his section of newspaper into a tight scroll. They were both impassive, their faces flat as earth.

  Look how much had been handed to me, and I wanted to gamble it all on some remote seed of a notion a professor had planted in my head! It was the most unreliable of choices! Didn’t I want to have something to show for what I’d been working toward? “No.” Their answer was as simple as that. It was their hard-earned money. If I had the means to send myself, well, then, they supposed they could not stop me. But a single decision could change the course of everything. Surely I should understand this, Mama said as Poppy turned his eyes from me, rapping his fingers against his rolled paper. And so I knew. Mama had broken her promise. Fired her surest weapon. Revealed to Poppy what she’d sworn long ago she never would.

  For days, I fixed her with long stares, chilly as frozen snow, intended to fill her with guilt. But she only blinked at me placidly, unrepentantly, holding my gaze in a way that meant, I do what I have to.

  • • •

  Shortly after I returned to school, Mama phoned with “great news!” She had made a call to Julie Guggenheim, the old friend of Nana Leah’s who ran the entire Manhattan division of the Northeastern Jewish Federation but who was now planning a run for state legislature. “She said she can offer you a paid position working on her campaign. She’s very connected. This could lead to all kinds of possibilities.”

  Mama knew I had no further arguments, had come up with no better alternative. I had sat numbly when Dean Salkin had outlined for me the popular and logical choices for graduates with political science degrees: law school, business school, careers in policy analysis. How decisively my classmates seemed to claim what they were moving toward, easily and without looking back. But as Dean Salkin talked, I had wanted only to stop the days from tumbling forward, had wished the campus walls could rise up and enclose us, granting more time.

  Mama began, when we spoke, to refer cheerfully to the many things I would have to look forward to once I began work for Julie Guggenheim and returned to the apartment on West 256th Street, where it was assumed I would be resettling until I’d saved some income. “Over the summer, Ruthie, we’ll re-carpet your room and update the wallpaper. Maybe a stripe? Would you like that?” As if this bit of redecorating could make up for any disappointment. And, oh, as long as I was home, I wouldn’t have to worry about meals. It was fortunate, too, our apartment’s proximity to the bus and the subway. Made for a cinch of a commute. She would chatter on in this manner until I lied, suddenly remembering I had a class to attend, allowing the phone to drop back on the receiver.

  So the leaflets I’d placed on my desk at home remained in the exact array in which I’d left them, Mama and Poppy’s mute declaration that this conversation was closed. It mattered nothing to them that these were some of the country’s finest programs, the ones Professor Wainwright had specifically recommended and that Francesca (who had taken writing courses with me—“Whose life is it anyway, Ruth?”) had rattled off when I questioned her once earlier in the year. They did not know, did not care to know, that this was the thought my mind returned to obsessively,
as if having discovered some new chink of light in a solid wall. But I could be as stubborn as they. Without a word, using a portion of money I had made from babysitting to pay for processing fees, I mailed seven applications—one to California, one to Michigan, the others scattered along the East Coast.

  • • •

  The letters arrived in early spring. But what was I to make of this? Was fortune playing games with me, or was this a blessing in disguise? A congratulatory letter from Georgetown University, Professor Wainwright’s first choice for me and the school where he had taught some years ago. But not only that—an attached page offering a generous scholarship. Georgetown—the one program I had applied to that did not provide a master’s in writing but in English literature. “This will give you broader options,” Professor Wainwright had explained. Georgetown’s program included courses on teaching writing, and he was certain he could arrange for me to study fiction independently with his former colleague Professor Brennan—“Worth the whole lot of writing instructors you might be assigned elsewhere.” With this degree I would be qualified to teach either writing or literature afterward. So wouldn’t Mama and Poppy find this choice more acceptable? And perhaps overlook what blinked up at me from the bottom of my letter: a reference to the school’s Jesuit tradition, its foundation in beliefs we did not share. But Georgetown’s students came from a diversity of backgrounds. I’d definitely read that somewhere in one of its brochures. So it mattered less than other things, I could argue, couldn’t I? Though the very thought of what Mama and Poppy might say to this made me flush with cold then heat. Still, this time I would not buckle. No, I refused to fold! Not now. Now I had a new resolve.

  • • •

  We sat robed and hatted and tasseled in long rows, in folding chairs perfectly spaced across the Main Green, on the day of our commencement. “You are new promises, your young lights beginning to flicker here,” declared to us the Nobel Prize winner who had been invited to speak. “So, now, fling yourselves out, as if into the heavens. And set the world ablaze.” The faces all around me tilted back, listening, shining, believing. I smiled to be as eager as the rest, to forget how Mama had looked when I’d turned—still and blank as glass in her section behind me. “I can only hope you’ll find some sense and rethink this,” she had said when I announced my decision to Poppy and to her two months before, explaining the package Georgetown had offered and my plan to use my savings (the remainder of my babysitting money and my modest inheritance from Great-Uncle Eli)—to find a work-study job, too, if necessary—to pay room and board. She had kept her voice even as sanded wood, but I had seen how she struggled to control the wobbling of her mouth. Despite what I said about options, she suspected it was still my writing I planned to pursue above all else. If I wanted to teach literature at the college level, I’d have applied to doctoral programs. She didn’t know everything, but that she knew. “It’s not enough to be able to turn a pretty phrase and put imaginings to paper, Ruthie. You could fill oceans with the littered dreams of men and women who’ve learned to do just that. And, you know, it’s still a Catholic university. It doesn’t matter all their claims about varied backgrounds. You want to abandon everything to chase some glittery dust your professor scattered in the air! How can you? Are you punishing me, Ruth, or punishing yourself!”

  “No! That’s not it at all!” I’d said. But she seemed not to hear.

  • • •

  Mama stood, her hand clamped to the edge of the living room piano as she watched me gather my bags near our apartment’s entry. In an hour, my train would depart from Penn Station and whisk me away, more than two hundred miles south to the campus on the hill overlooking the Potomac River. This would be the first time Mama would let me cross the threshold of our front door without embracing me, without pressing her mouth to my brow. But I would not crack. I would keep my shoulders even, my chin steady. Even when Poppy did not lift his eyes to mine, only fumbled to pat my hand with his. Even then.

  “You should pray you never have a daughter who treats you this way!” Mama called after the door had shuddered closed behind me. But then she could not see how my eyes burned, how my limbs shook like leaves in wind.

  In photos, Georgetown’s campus looked something like Brown’s, with its neat quadrangles, its majestic trees. But the simpler features of Brown’s buildings made them seem knowable even from a distance; while Georgetown’s Romanesque and Gothic structures, with their arches and towers, formed hidden corners and shadowy curves, resembling, more than anything, illustrations from the fairy-tale book Sarah, Valerie, and I had pored over together as girls, drawn to the mysteries that the vine-draped turrets, thick woods, and garden mazes surely promised. And had I found Brown’s layout this elusive when I first arrived? I took several incorrect turns before locating the Office of Student Affairs and then the most direct path to Thirty-ninth Street, where, with the help of the university, I had found an apartment just blocks from campus, which I would be renting along with another woman from my program. Angela McDermott had called me once over the summer. Two weeks later she sent a note on monogrammed, sherbet-orange stationery. Can’t wait to meet!! she’d written. She had included a snapshot of herself standing on a wide, pebbled beach, her straight yellow hair blowing off her shoulders in wisps, a pair of black sunglasses crowning her head. Some distance behind her, a retriever dug in the sand, and a small group—her family, I gathered—sat on beach towels that matched the one Angela had wrapped around her waist like a sarong.

  Angela, or Angie, as she insisted I call her, was even prettier in person, delicately featured and tanned. She embraced me as soon as she breezed into the apartment, smelling faintly of chrysanthemums, like those planted among the shrubbery of the homes along the block. We would be sharing the second floor of a two-story wood-shingled house with teal shutters. The owners of the home, Mr. and Mrs. Philips, occupied the first floor but only during certain seasons, spending the remainder of the year in California with their grown children.

  Angela’s mother and father had come along to help her get settled. From the McDermotts’ efficiency, their perfect coordination, it was obvious this was, for them, a familiar routine. Around Angela’s half of our large shared bedroom, in her closet, and on the bookshelves of the adjacent sitting room, they effortlessly found places for Angie’s shoeboxes and cardigan sweaters, shampoo bottles, for her poster of Degas’ ballerinas, her silver clock radio, her collection of photos in paisley fabric frames. In the narrow cupboards of our modest kitchen, they stacked her cans of sugar-free lemonade, her unsalted pretzels.

  After a lengthy exchange of endearments, an elaborate series of farewell kisses, Angie watched her parents disappear down the steps of our front porch, across the square patch of trimmed lawn, to their red Volvo parked down the street. Then she returned to the bedroom and plopped onto her white eyelet coverlet, propping her slender bare feet on the foot of her bed. “So, we’re here. I can’t believe it’s already September, can you? I was this close”—she made a pinching motion with her thumb and forefinger—“to forgetting the whole thing and moving to Illinois to be close to my boyfriend.” She rolled onto her side, then reached for an oval-framed picture that she had set on her small lamp table. It was of a young man with strawberry hair and full shoulders, in a racing scull, oars in hand. She brought her fingertip to her lips then touched it to the photo. “Evan’s at University of Chicago Law School,” she said. “We met four years ago on vacation with our church youth group. But my parents talked me out of it: You have too much talent to miss this! And if Evan’s the right one, he won’t be going anywhere until you finish.” She pronounced this in a falsetto then laughed, closing her eyes with a small shake of her head as if to say, “You know how parents are.”

  We talked about her younger brother, Allen—“Brilliant! An even better student than I”—the boarding school she had attended, her summer job at a girls’ day camp, her friends from home. “Sorry! I’ve been blathering on and on.” She blinked at
me, smiling, waiting. So I offered small tidbits: Brown—where I’d met Fran and Setsu and Opal, my professors there, New York City, of which technically, I explained, Riverdale was a part. But other things went unmentioned. I could think of nothing that wouldn’t widen the chasm separating Angie’s life from mine.

  “I think we have a lot in common.” Angie said my description of Fran reminded her of her friend Libby at Williams, and she’d always adored New York, though she’d only been a handful of times. She gave my elbow a gentle squeeze before changing into tennis sneakers and cotton shorts, which just covered the perfect grapefruit roundness of her buttocks, and heading for the door.

  So I nodded my agreement, though I imagined Angie would have offered this extension of friendship to anyone.

  After she’d gone, I studied her belongings: a small glass canister of beach glass on her desk, another of smooth, oval white stones, an amber, cube-shaped bottle of perfume with a gold ball of a top. Beside these, The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. “My favorite short story writer”—she had smoothed her hand across the cover of the book when, earlier in the afternoon, I had commented on it. “Do you know ‘The Ice Palace’?” I had frowned at the book as if trying to recall the piece, though I was certain I had not read it, only the Fitzgerald novels assigned in high school.

  At the center of her desk lay the salmon-pink telephone Angie and I had agreed she would bring from home for us to share. As I unpacked the last of my items, I was sure I caught, with each creak or rustle, the beginning of a ring: Mama calling with a storm of accusations. But my ears were playing tricks. No call came, and I spent the remainder of the afternoon arranging and rearranging my things in a vain attempt to make my half of the room as orderly and inviting as Angie’s.