by John Irving
"Oh, what are these?" Mrs. Elwood asked, moving warily to the desk.
"I had the nicest afternoon," Minna said. "I met one of the girls downtown and we went to Cambridge together, shopping, and we saw a movie and ate in a German place. I only got back a moment ago. Or, maybe, twenty minutes."
"I'd say it was more like twenty minutes," Mrs. Elwood said. "I saw you both come in."
"Oh, then you saw her. What is her name?"
"You spent the afternoon with her and you don't know her name?"
"I should have known it, really. She watches television. I just would have felt foolish to ask."
"Lord, Minna!" Mrs. Elwood said. "The girl is Molly Cabot, and she seems to spend more time shopping and moviegoing than she does in her classes."
"Oh, she was so nice to me," Minna said. "I didn't think about her classes, she was such a sweet girl. I did think she was lonely. But she's not in any trouble, is she?"
"Well, trouble," Mrs. Elwood repeated, turning one of the strange cans in her hand, scrutinizing the label and setting the can back in the row with a disapproving scowl. "I should say she's in trouble if she doesn't start going to her classes."
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Minna said. "She was so nice. I had a lovely day."
"Well," Mrs. Elwood said toughly, "perhaps she'll pull herself together."
Minna nodded, feeling sad, wishing she could help. Mrs. Elwood was still looking at the cans, and Minna hoped that she wouldn't notice the extravagant hors d'oeuvre fork.
"What's in these things?" Mrs. Elwood asked, holding another can in her lumpy palm.
"They're delicacies from other countries. Molly said they were very good."
"I wouldn't buy anything to eat if I didn't know what it was," Mrs. Elwood said. "Lord, they might be unclean! They might be from Korea, or somewhere."
"Oh, I just thought they were pretty," Minna said, and the familiar exhaustion seemed to numb her whole body and her speech. "It was a pleasant way to spend the afternoon," she mumbled, and there was something bitter which came into her voice and surprised her, surprised Mrs. Elwood, too, and brought an unsettling quiet to the small room.
"I think you're very tired," Mrs. Elwood said. "Let me put a note up for the girls, and you go to bed." The authority of Mrs. Elwood's voice seemed to fill Minna's exhaustion, so perfectly, and it made unnecessary any protest. Minna didn't even mention the Alec Guinness movie.
But her sleep was bothered by vague phantoms, in conspiracy, it seemed, with the occasional scratching in the dormitory corridor -- presumably the girls who came to see the news and shuffled, puzzled, around the note on the door. Once Minna was sure that Celeste was in the room, still awesomely naked and huge, surrounded by grotesque dwarfs. Once Minna woke, felt the warm weight of her tired hands against her sides, and felt repelled by her own touch. She lay back again, her arms outstretched to the sides of her bed, her fingers curled beneath the mattress as if she were manacled to a rack. If Minna had eaten one of the strange foods, which she had not, she would have attributed her nightmares to this. But as it was inexplicable, her troubled sleep struck her as somewhat of an enigma.
If Minna had any recurrent flickers of embarrassment, any lasting reservations regarding Celeste, nothing of the kind was at all apparent. If she was envious of Celeste's easy vibrancy -- her immediate intimacy with the girls, with gruff Flynn, especially with Angelo -- she wasn't conscious of such an envy. In fact, it was not until several weeks after the first, awful night that Minna recalled how Mrs. Elwood had not even asked her if she'd gone to meet Celeste. Also, Minna had occasion to see more of Molly Cabot; she felt obligated to see more of her, to mother her, in some small, inoffensive way. But Minna's sense of duty took none of the former pleasures away from Molly's company. Minna enjoyed the shy, secretive closeness of her times with Molly. As she saw more of Molly, she saw less of Angelo -- not that she stopped worrying about him. Angelo, as Mrs. Elwood had said, was "rather taken with" Celeste. He brought her flowers -- expensive, gaudy and tasteless flowers, which he couldn't have stolen in the Common but would have had to buy. And Celeste received other, less open admiration. On Saturdays the girls were allowed to bring their weekend dates to the dining hall for lunch, and Celeste certainly was noticed. The looks which the boys gave her were seldom casual; they were the penetrating weighted looks which Celeste, when her head was turned, received from Flynn -- darkly and stealthily watching her from behind various pots and counters. Minna, if she thought anything of this, thought it rather unbecoming of Flynn, and simply rude of the boys. If she worried about Angelo's adoration, she thought of it as nothing more than another example of Angelo's tragic exposure of himself. Celeste, certainly, offered no threat to Angelo. Angelo, as before, simply was a threat to himself.
Minna was perfectly at ease with Celeste. In two months Celeste had made herself at home; she was jolly, a little raucous, always pleasant. The girls were obviously impressed with (or envious of) what Molly called "her Modigliani allure," and Flynn appeared to get great pleasure from his dark observations. Mrs. Elwood thought Celeste was charming, even if a bit bold. Minna liked her.
In June, with only a few weeks of regular classes remaining, Celeste bought an old car -- a dented relic of Boston traffic. Once she drove Minna and Molly Cabot to Cambridge, for an afternoon's shopping. The car smelled of suntan oil and cigarettes and, Minna noticed, of the curious heavy scent, coffee-rich, the musk of sheeted furniture in unattended summer homes. Celeste drove like a man, one arm out the window, forceful wrenches on the wheel, fond of shifting from third to second, fond of competing with taxis. The car labored and knocked with sudden acceleration; Celeste explained that the carburetor was dirty or ill-adjusted. Minna and Molly nodded their bewildered respect. Celeste took her days off at Revere Beach; she became deeply tanned but complained about the "pee-like" condition of the water. It was an eager and active time of year.
And June brought a certain impatience to the girls, an irritable quality to Flynn, who always was great at sweating but seemed to suffer most acutely from this in Boston's early and long summers. Minna had grown quite used to the heat; it didn't seem to bother her much, and she noticed that she rarely sweated anymore. Angelo, of course, was forever pale and dry, a completely a-seasonal face and body. Celeste looked damply hot.
June was an almost-over time of year, when the girls were brighter and more often in handsome company, when the weekend dining hall was something like a restless, overly chaperoned party. In a while, there would be different girls in the dormitory for the summer session, and summer sessions were so different anyway, lighter, breezier -- and from the kitchen's point of view, people ate less. Now there was a distinctly light-handed way about things. Angelo, during the presentation of one horrendous bouquet to Celeste, asked her to see a movie with him. Their heads struggled on either side of the flowers, Angelo peering for an answer, Celeste amused, both at the size of the bouquet and at Angelo's question.
"What movie is it, Angelo?" Her wide, strong mouth; her rich, good teeth.
"Oh, some movie. We'll have to find one close. I don't have a car."
"Then sometime let's go in mine," Celeste said. And then, looking at the ridiculous bouquet, "Where on earth shall we put this? -- by the window, out of Flynn's way? I like flowers in a window."
And Angelo scurried to arrange the windowsill. Flynn's following eyes, from somewhere out of the steam, found Celeste's long back and strong legs -- her broad, taut buttocks laboring under the weight of lilies and anonymous greens, lilac branches and unopened buds.
There were very few girls who came to see the news on this Friday night, the last Friday of the school year, the last weekend before the final exams. Presumably the girls were studying, and those who weren't had chosen to go out and really not study (rather than compromise with the news). It had rained that afternoon, a rain you could smell, steaming off the sidewalks and leaving the streets nearly dry -- only a few tepid puddles remained, and the evening air resembled t
he damp stuffiness of a laundromat. The heat was of that sensuous, gluttonous kind that people in Boston imagine is like the swamp-surrounded porches of a Southern estate, complete with a woman lolling nude in a hammock. Minna felt pleasantly tired; she sat by the window, looking out to the circular driveway in front of the dormitory. It was a private gravel driveway with a high curb, and from the window it appeared to be carved, or etched, through the rows of elms and the green, green lawn. Minna saw Celeste, arms akimbo, sitting with her back against a tree. Her legs were extended straight in front of her so that her ankles stuck out over the curb of the driveway. It would have been an entirely unbecoming posture for almost any woman, but somehow Celeste lent to it a kind of magnificence in repose; a figure in semi-recline that seemed not exactly sluggish but rather wantonly indisposed to any motion. She was somewhat arrogantly dressed: a sleeveless, high-necked jersey, untucked and fallen outside one of those wraparound skirts -- the kind that always had a slit somewhere.
The girls stayed after the news to hear the weather report, and to see the dapper little man in the weather station at Logan Airport tediously interpret his complex map. The girls' plans for the weekend obviously hinged on the good weather, and they were all there, Minna still at the window, Celeste still at the tree, when a motorcycle, the gas tank painted fire-engine red, neatly cornered the right-angled entrance to the driveway, leaned cautiously into the gravel circle, and stopped (sliding just a little) in front of the dormitory. The motorcyclist was a young man, very tanned and very blond, with a remarkably babyish face. His shoulders were almost pointed and his head seemed too small for the rest of him; long, thin arms and legs, snugly fitted in a beige summer suit, which sported a wild silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. He wore no tie, just a white shirt open at the throat. His passenger was Molly Cabot. Molly skipped lightly away from the cycle and the curb, then waited for the driver to step off his machine, which he did quite stiffly and slowly. He walked with Molly into the front lobby of the dormitory, walking in the manner of a stoically injured athlete. Minna turned, to see how the weather was progressing, and saw that all the girls were surrounding her at the window.
One of the girls said, "So she did get a date with him!"
"We'll never hear the end of this," another girl added.
Everyone sat or stooped rather gravely about the window, waiting for the cyclist to reappear. He wasn't long inside, and when he came out he looked all around him and fiddled with several small parts of his motorcycle. His gestures seemed hurried and not really intended to fix anything; they were the gestures of one who was conscious of being watched. He rose up on the seat and came down heavily on the kick starter; the report which followed the first sucking sound was startling to those in the window. It even caught the attention of Celeste, who straightened up from her repose against the tree and sat a little farther out on the curb. The motorcycle moved around the driveway in Celeste's direction, and when it was a few feet past her the brake light flickered, the rear wheel slid gently sideways toward the curb, and the cyclist brought his right foot to the ground as the machine stopped. He then straightened up off the seat and walked the motorcycle backward to where Celeste sat. One of the girls moved away from the window and shut off the television; then she came quickly back to her position in the huddle. No one could hear what the boy was saying because he kept the engine running. Celeste didn't seem to be saying anything. She just smiled, engaged in looks of practiced scrutiny of the motorcycle and the boy. Then she got up, moved in front of the cycle, moved her hand once or twice in front of the headlamp, touched one of the instrument dials mounted on the handlebars, and stood back from the boy and his machine-- giving what appeared from the window to be one last appraisal of everything that met her eyes. At that moment, or so it seemed to the window watchers, Molly Cabot knocked once on the door of Minna's room, entered and said, "Wow!" Everyone stood up and tried to be doing something; one girl made an awkward move to the television, but Molly came directly to the window and looked out to the driveway, asking, "Has he gone?" She was in time to see Celeste offer her hand to the cyclist and deftly swing herself up behind him -- it was a move executed with surprising agility for her long weight. The skirt was a slight problem; she had to twist it so that the slit was directly behind her. Then she gripped the seat and the driver with her strong legs, rolled her long arms completely around him -- her head was a full two inches higher than his, her back and her shoulders seemed broader, stronger than his. The cyclist shifted all his weight to his left leg, held the motorcycle up with some difficulty, and with his right foot shifted the machine into gear. They pulled away slowly, weaving slightly to the end of the driveway; then, once free of the gravel, and with a minimum of fishtailing from the rear wheel, the cycle lurched into the traffic on the broad street. From the window they were able to follow the sound through the first three gears; then the machine and its riders either stayed in that gear or were lost to the window watchers and listeners in the random blaring of horns and the other sounds of traffic in the night.
"That bastard," Molly Cabot said, coolly, analytically -- and, from the faces of the other girls, expectedly.
"Maybe he's just taken her for a ride around the block," someone said, not too convincingly, not even too hopefully.
"Sure," Molly said, and she turned from the window and walked directly out of the room.
All the girls went back to the window. They sat for another 20 minutes, just looking into the night, and finally Minna said, "It's surely time for the movie. Will anyone stay and see it with me?" It was suddenly a night when something extraordinary was called for, Minna thought, and so she considered the extravagance of asking all of them to stay for the movie. If Mrs. Elwood came, as she might, she would not be pleased about it; she would speak to Minna about it -- after the girls were gone.
"Why not?" someone said.
The movie, as if things weren't cruel enough, was an old musical. The girls commented harshly on each scene and song. During the commercials the girls went and sat by the window, and whenever there was a likely roar in the street they ran over, regardless of what new horror in song the movie then explored. When the movie was over, the girls were unwilling to leave (some of them had rooms that didn't face the driveway), and they appeared bitterly resolved to a nightlong vigil. Minna asked politely, shyly, if she might go to bed, and the girls straggled into the corridor, aimlessly bitching. They didn't seem angry at Celeste, or angry because they felt badly for Molly; on the contrary, it struck Minna that they were almost glad about it, and certainly excited. Their anger came from a feeling that they had been deeply cheated out of witnessing the climax to the show. They'll be up all night, Minna thought. How awful.
But Minna waited up herself. She occasionally dozed at the window, waking every time with a start -- ashamed at the thought that someone might see her there, watching. It was after 3:00 when she went to bed, and she didn't sleep well. She was too tired to get up at every sound, but listened intently to them all. Finally she woke to a sound which was unmistakably the motorcycle, or at least some motorcycle. It was stopped at the beginning of the driveway, she could tell, still out on the street, the engine still running. It growled warily out there, making funny, laboring sounds. Then she heard it pull away, heard it pass through three gears again, and lost it as all of them had lost it before, many blocks or even miles away. She listened for the driveway itself now, for the little crunching sounds it made while supporting feet. She heard the little pops and snaps of the stones, the grating sound of feet and stones on the cement steps. She heard the screen door open, the main door open (she had thought, horribly, intriguingly, that it might have been locked), and then she heard, sometime later, the door at the end of the corridor. It was light in her room and she saw that it was nearly five o'clock. Angelo and Flynn would be in the kitchen soon, perhaps they were already there. Then she heard other doors open along the corridor, and the hurried bare feet of the girls padding from room to room. She heard w
hispering and then she fell asleep.
Saturday morning it rained. A fine, inadequate kind of summer rain that did nothing but fog the windows and leave tiny beads of sweat on everyone's upper lip. It might just as well have been sunny and dazzling for all the difference it made on the temperature, and on Flynn's disposition. Flynn remarked, shortly before lunch, that there hadn't been so few people to breakfast since the flu epidemic in December. It always irritated him to prepare a lot of food and have no one there to eat it. Also, he was bothered by the luncheon menu, angry that they were still serving soup when it was so damn hot (and no one did anything but spill it anyway). Despite the weather, there were a lot of boys and parents in the dining hall. Minna always thought this odd, that everyone spent a year talking about the final exams, and that the weekend before the exams was invariably most festive.
Minna watched Celeste rather carefully that morning, wishing she could say something, although she couldn't think of what on earth she even wanted to say. It hadn't, of course, been wrong of Celeste, but Minna had to confess that Celeste just hadn't looked very nice. It was only sad because everyone had to see it, had to be hurt or angry because of it. And there wasn't much you could say about that. A peculiar uneasiness passed over Minna -- some warm remembrance of a pervasive scent, fecund and coffee-rich, which quickly evanesced.
There was lunch to get ready. Most of the girls had filled the dining hall before the soup was served on every table. Angelo looked sadly at the drooping flowers on the many windowsills, and received angry commands from Flynn that he finish serving the soup. Celeste worked steadily, carrying trays of potato salad, tureens of soup; every time she returned to the kitchen from the dining hall she took one luxurious pull on her cigarette, left dangling over the counter during her exits. Minna neatly arranged the lettuce in pretty patterns around the rim of the salad trays, being careful to hide the wilted and brown parts under the potatoes.
Celeste was taking what had to be the last drag on her cigarette when Molly Cabot swung open the aluminum door to the kitchen; she stepped inside, biting her lips, and allowed the door to swing closed behind her. Angelo, with a handful of flowers, turned to see who'd come in. Flynn stared indifferently. And Minna felt a tremendous weight on her diaphragm, pushing in or pushing out -- it was hard to tell where the force was coming from. Molly Cabot, unsteady and small, stepped a little forward and away from the door. She squinted painfully at Celeste, in what might have been an attempt to intimidate the long, calm woman.