“What are you doing here?” Cheryl stood over her at the table. “Aren’t you coming?”
“To what?” Sometimes college seemed merely an endless exhausting string of appointments. She needed a nap already, and it was not yet ten o’clock.
“Section.” Cheryl pulled Flannery’s sweater. The girl couldn’t stop touching her. It was beginning to get out of hand. “For Criticism. Remember?”
“Oh God. Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.” Flannery swallowed a few more chunks of cranberry muffin, took a gulp of weak coffee, and cleared her dishes. “Thanks. I’d completely forgotten.”
They ambled over to a remote classroom across some foreign lawn. Flannery had to follow Cheryl’s lead there. She ought to be grateful to her annoying hallmate, really, for her organization, and to prove that she was, Flannery allowed Cheryl to flutter on chirpily about a date she’d had the night before with a cute Iowan named Doug.
Tuesday Anne. Right. And here it was, Tuesday. If this is Tuesday, it must be Anne, Flannery thought, entertaining herself sleepily with bad jokes of this kind.
Doug was still in the air between them as the two women found the classroom, but for Flannery their entrance was accompanied by a loud internal sound effect.
Fuck.
She had to be Anne, of course: Anne had to be her. Smaller in the large beige classroom, but just as vivid, as mouth-perfect; just as burn-bright. Sitting at the head of a broad seminar table looking through a folder of papers, handing a sheaf to a student on her right to pass around, giving Flannery a moment to look at her.
She had the same serenely clear skin, the same slick red-dark hair, straight to her chin. And she wore the same outfit. Black leather jacket, in a cut trim and feminine rather than motorcycle-like, silver-zippered in a few strategic places; close-fitting blue jeans, studiously faded; pointed, pretty, argumentative boots. Not high-heeled or spiky, and not black either—a deep animal brown—but certainly the kind that were made for walking. They brought a Nancy Sinatra shiver to Flannery’s hunched shoulders.
She stopped in the doorway, before she’d been seen. “I can’t . . . I forgot . . .” she stuttered to Cheryl.
“What? Come on. This is the right room. I recognize the lady.”
That’s no lady, Flannery wanted to say, but she kept quiet as Cheryl dragged her over to a corner chair. At least the closer seats were filled, so they could sit farther away, near the window. If worse came to worst, Flannery could always jump out of it. The act might have a certain poetry. Might reveal, all too late, her sensitivity to Criticism.
It had to happen. Once seated, Flannery tried to busy herself with her educational equipment, but all she really needed was a notebook and a pen. She placed these in front of her. Someone handed her another printed sheet of paper, which listed due dates for papers, Anne’s office hours, the exam schedule. It had to happen. There was nowhere else to turn. Flannery finally looked up.
And there she was, her tormentor, watching Flannery cannily with her glorious green eyes.
“All right, kids,” the instructor began, getting the irony in at the very beginning. “Welcome to the wide world of criticism. There are a lot of you, which is delightful, but it means extra work for me. Your job is to be able to distinguish, by the end of the semester, Derrida from de Man, Henry Louis Gates from Harold Bloom; mine is to be able to distinguish one of you from another. Sadly, that means roll call. Pretend you’re in the army. Amy Adamson? David Bernstein? . . .” And on she went, stopping after each name for a moment with each face, to lock it in her memory.
Inevitably she reached “Flannery Jansen,” a name that caused her to look around the room with a disbelieving half-smile. Flannery had no choice but to raise her pen in reluctant self-identification.
“You’re Flannery?” she repeated, bringing the rose of embarrassment once more to Flannery’s pale face. “Well, that gives you a kind of head start, doesn’t it, in the literature department?”
She carried on, mercifully, so that Flannery could keep her head down and devote the rest of the hour to not listening to anything else the woman had to say. The instructor went over the material of the first week’s lecture, adorning and explaining and encouraging questions. In spite of Flannery’s stubborn ears she couldn’t help noticing that the words were uttered with an easy wit and grace. She also couldn’t help noticing—it was her fingers that noticed it—a taunting intimacy between their two names. Without thinking about it, while not listening, Flannery decorated the instructor’s name on the printout with some extra letters, so that ANNE became FL-ANNE-RY. Having seen with horror what she’d done, she then had to scribble over the entire name, rather violently. Finally, ANNE ARDEN was wiped out altogether, lost to a block of blue ink.
Class was ending. Thank God. People were standing. The ordeal was almost over. Flannery leaned over to Cheryl.
“I’m going to have to switch into a different section.”
“You are? Why?”
“I just—can’t do this one. I remembered I have something else that conflicts.” She was not about to explain her reasons to distracted, Doug-stunned Cheryl.
“Oh well,” said Cheryl, and left in a down-jacketed huff, puffed up in offense. “Whatever.”
Flannery planned to make it up to her later; perhaps by sharing some sweet dried apricots Flannery’s mother had sent her from home.
“Excuse me.”
Flannery stood a good two feet away from where the beautiful woman still sat. Her voice had to be a little louder to cover the table’s distance between them; she would not risk anything like proximity.
“I have a problem.”
The instructor looked up with the mocking expression Flannery knew well enough from the other day’s uneaten breakfast. The TA—Anne—was silent, but her eyes weren’t. I know you have a problem, they said clearly. I can see it.
“I can’t do Tuesdays. I didn’t realize when I signed up for this section. How do I switch?”
The woman nodded, with mirth-suppressed seriousness. “Many more people are taking this class than we expected.” She sounded friendly, collegial. “We’ll probably have to add some sections. I’m sure I’ll run another one. How are Thursday afternoons for you?”
“Bad,” Flannery said, so fast it was clear she couldn’t have thought about it. “I could do Mondays, though. With the other guy—Bob.” She realized that the change might mean sacrificing Animal Behavior. So much for her science credit.
“Hmmm. Monday may be filled up by now.” But the instructor was getting bored with this teasing game. She put her papers away in the folder and said in a more businesslike tone, “Talk to us at the end of the next lecture. Everyone will be reshuffling their schedules, but Bob and I will stay after and try to figure out how to accommodate you all. We want to keep our little darlings happy.”
“Well.” Her rudeness freed Flannery somehow. “We’re all slavishly grateful to you, obviously.”
She turned to go, but not before seeing that elegant head snap back up. As Flannery moved toward the door she heard that voice again. It seemed huskier now, with a nicotined rasp. Oh, of course. It wasn’t enough that Tuesday Anne was beautiful; she had to have a sexy voice, too, one that Flannery might think about dying for.
“Where did you get a name like Flannery, anyway?” the voice asked Flannery’s walking-away back.
Flannery shrugged, her signature gesture, on her way out the door. She only half-turned her head.
“From my mom.”
The voice followed Flannery across the high-walled courtyarded campus, in and out of the stacks of the vast library, down the corridors of the fake-Gothic buildings. It became familiar with her educational geographies, just as Flannery herself did. She heard this voice in the granite-enclosed shower within the white-tiled bathroom (where driven girls performed their furtive rituals of purging); in the stained-glass-windowed dining hall, where she finally met surferish Nick. Loudest of all, she heard it on the thickening, fall-scatter
ed streets, where she walked for solace and thought, quiet spells when she made sure she was keeping up with her learnings and changes. As October took shape, Flannery looked back on her September self as if on a previous generation, one born long before the modern world had begun, when there was still innocence. (Flannery felt she had lost hers on her first trip to the Doodle.) If the then-early yellows and greens had stunned her, the trees’ colors grew only more glorious—mango and marigold, pumpkin and cantaloupe; even, in places, the pomegranate she’d hoped for—till Flannery wondered, numbly, whether they might stop her heart altogether, or blind her cold-tearing eyes.
She continued to hear Anne’s voice in her ear. How was this possible? Flannery hadn’t spoken to Anne since transferring out of her section into Bob’s. Bob made Criticism painless, if not entirely compelling. He had the greedy eyes of a squirrel and was brown-snaggle-haired, with a rough cut of near-beard almost like sideburns. It gave him the appearance of a German leftist from the 1970s, which in turn gave him a nice European authority as he deconstructed for the bewildered students the games and feints of Derrida and the others. Bob enjoyed guy-talk and wordplay and performing faux-casual postmodern tricks, like giving semiotic readings of the food sold at McDonald’s (“What signifies McNugget?”), or making fanciful claims as to the hidden subversions of Hollywood blockbusters. He claimed that those beefy-muscled action heroes could teach Hélène Cixous a thing or two about the meaning of the masculine.
Flannery didn’t actually hear Anne, but once a week she saw her sitting at the front of the lecture hall. She witnessed Anne handing out the exam questions for the midterm. While Bradley held forth, Flannery watched Anne brush her hand through her hair and sensed her fingers twitching for nicotine; she noted her occasional taking of notes; and she took in the curve of her leather jacket as she leaned over sometimes to whisper jokes to Bob, who nodded and grinned. Flannery couldn’t hear the voice or the jokes, mostly couldn’t even see Anne’s face, just the copper cut of her hair. But by a trick of her mind she could feel the woman’s breath in her ear, which made her own note-taking impossible, and melted her deeper, uselessly, into her seat.
Cheryl dropped Criticism, thank God, so Flannery was freed of any connection to Tuesday Anne. There was another class member, a sharp Korean woman named Susan, who was good to talk to in disentangling theory but had an unfortunate habit of telling bewitching tales of her TA—who happened to be Anne. “She’s so smart and funny, I swear to God she’s better than Bradley,” Susan had said once to Flannery Reluctantly, Flannery excused herself out of their study sessions together as a way of trying to regain her balance.
She couldn’t do it. It was unregainable. Flannery looked for Anne on campus even when she swore to herself that she wasn’t, and she found Anne in places she never would have looked. She saw Anne’s face through the window of a Japanese restaurant, where she was eating sushi with an unseeable companion; she saw Anne waiting to cross the street, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, looking impatient; and she saw Anne once in the all-night convenience store, buying cigarettes, when Flannery was there for detergent. Dressed in her laundry outfit—baggy gray sweats and her sheepskin boots, for God’s sake, with a dumb-logoed sweatshirt—Flannery had had to flee empty-handed, and was forced afterward to beg some Cheer from a friend.
Then there were the patterns Flannery had inadvertently noticed. Anne seemed to breakfast regularly at the Yankee Doodle, so that any morning Flannery “accidentally” passed the tiny diner, an internal battle waged whether or not she should look inside. (She had once been burned by Anne’s looking up, too, so their eyes met; humiliated, Flannery had to skip that day’s lecture.) Anne held office hours on Fridays and could be seen crossing the wide lawn toward the rust-colored corner building in the mid-afternoon light. And there was a section of the library—the underground, red-lit bunkerlike section, near the coffee and candy machines—where Anne could be found nights, reading and smoking. Occasionally with someone, often alone. Every time Flannery went to the library she had to ask herself: Are you really going to study? Or are you planning to find an excuse to go buy a Twix bar? Worse—are you going to try to study, only to torment yourself with cravings for chocolate, which you can’t then satisfy as it might mean seeing her face?
The simplest solution to this extravagant problem would have been for Flannery herself to drop Criticism. The approach of the drop deadline made her pretend to consider it. But, she argued with herself, she liked Criticism. Really! It was interesting. She was learning a lot; and she had done so well on the midterm. It seemed stupid to stop taking it just because of a slightly distracting infatuation, which would doubtless pass soon enough. Besides, it was a body of knowledge, she felt sure, she’d one day be glad to have.
But what did she want, really? What did she imagine?
It wasn’t as if, truth be told—and in the overheated darkness of her narrow room, she could tell the truth, at least to herself—Flannery knew. She did not know what she wanted. At a certain late point her mind willfully gave out, apologizing its way into a vague shrug of silence.
Do you want to have sex with that woman? Flannery tried to ask herself bluntly, staring at the dark ceiling, which vibrated with the loud explorations of her upstairs neighbor and his girlfriend. Flannery tried to shock herself into acknowledging a sexual awakening. Maybe that’s what this was—she had heard of such things. Do you mean to tell me you’re a lesbian? she demanded. Is that it?
She had seen the signs around campus. There were signs up for everyone: Latinos and African Americans, Avant-garde Musicians and Bridge Players. In the post office, collecting lifeline letters from her high-school friends, who scribbled to her intensely from their exiles elsewhere, Flannery had noticed a bright purple sheet of paper stuck to the tape-and-tack-scarred wall. “Gay and Lesbian Student Meeting. FRESHMEN WELCOME!” The notice seemed slightly sinister and predatory to the prude lurking within her. She did not think about going to the meeting, but she found herself curious—mildly—about what sorts of people would be there.
The word didn’t appeal to her. “Lesbian.” She didn’t like the sound of it. It sounded slippery and gummy, or slightly nasal, like people with adenoid problems. Besides, if her back was against the wall, Flannery would have to admit that she found José, who was in her Intro to Art History class, also cute, handsome—whatever.
It was just—This much Flannery could say to herself, aloud, could allow into the full light of her wakeful hours.
It’s just simple. It’s simple.
I just want to kiss her.
Dreams said otherwise.
Inevitably.
That is what dreams love to do. Taunt you with a bawdy vividness you have forbidden by day. Rummage through your mind’s closets, dig through its storage drawers, finding hopes or perceptions you had not known you harbored. Colors you had not consciously seen. Jokes of a cleverness you had never suspected yourself capable of.
As the nights grew colder and November crept stealthily on, Flannery’s dreams grew hotter. Less inhibited. They threw off their coverings, stripping down at night even as Flannery was layering more on by day. As Flannery began to sense what might eventually be meant by winter, her dreams headed resolutely toward a bare-skinned summer.
Once, Anne was a small black terrier, and Flannery was stroking her. Cautiously.
Once, Flannery walked in on Anne and Nick. In her own room. Somehow she did not mind, but wished they had not chosen her room for their embraces.
Once, Flannery was still in Anne’s class. Bob was furious. She handed her paper in late and got a bad grade.
Once—
But that one caused a prickling flush when Flannery thought of it, a clutch in her gut and an undeniable heat in her thighs. She’d swallowed hard when she remembered it the next innocent morning. That one: she had to censor that one. In an effort to keep the internal peace.
They were—
It was—
And then, when she—
No, no. That one, without doubt, had to be censored.
Flannery couldn’t see any immediate solution to any of it but to dance. So she danced.
Anywhere she could. She danced at cramped freshmen parties in dorm rooms, at which people paired off with a prompt urgency brought on by the beat and the general beer-cloud of conviction that that’s what they were there for. She danced in daring, off-campus apartments on dark streets, where the students were older, the music was better, and Flannery saw two men kissing for the first time in her life. She even accompanied Nick—she and the bleach-headed math major had become wry outsider friends—to a nearby club, where up-and-coming bands tried out their new songs on effervescent students.
Flannery did not dance in order to pair off, which sometimes baffled her partners. For a while she would pay attention to whoever was dancing across from her, whether man or woman; she would nod, thrust her shoulders, slink her hips forward in sync with the other one’s movements. While dancing, she forgot her awkward feet and virginal modesty. She came closer to moving with the freedom she dreamed about. The rooms were hot, humid with gin breath and sweat and pickup lines shouted into ears, which were answered with grinning nods, as if the listener had heard, when, crowd-deafened, they mostly hadn’t. Like everyone else, Flannery wore scanty tops and jeans, sleeveless T-shirts and leggings: clothing that clung, and encouraged others’ hungering intentions. She was wanted. She knew it, a little, in the back of her shy mind, but she kept her distance and somehow stayed out of arm’s reach.
There always came a time in the night or the dance when Flannery retreated, fell back into herself. She’d close her eyes and go. Her partners, her company could feel it, as if they had just lost this lean, sultry girl over some unseen edge, and all that was left before them was a pretty shell, a body-ghost, someone empty to their touch. Sometimes it was so noticeable that they did touch her—her arm or her shoulder—to bring her back. She’d smile, open her eyes, and maybe toss her head, snap her fingers, take a few steps forward or back. But it was clear she remained unreached. And mysteriously unreachable.
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