The Undergraduates

by Steven Snell

  She turns and starts to walk towards her kitchen, “Help me?”

  “Of course!”

  She passes me a cutting board and a knife and vegetables to chop and she prepares fish and boils potatoes. We take our time. We snack on what we’re preparing. We talk about our day, our mood, the past week, the next one. We comment on the news in the background. She tells me she’s losing the plot at work and I tell her I’m not even cast in the story.

  She says, “I hate telling people what they should think.”

  “The people you work with?”

  “No, society.”

  I smile.

  She pushes a fork into a potato to check its firmness. Putting the fork back down on the counter she says, “I feel like I’m a fraud. I have a degree in Communications from a reputable university and all it has led me to is trying to inform a certain male demographic what deodorant will make their pits cause birds to chirp or intoxicate a partner to fall madly in love with them to make beautiful babies together.”

  She leans against the counter and looks at me. “I used to imagine that I’d work for some NGO doing good around the world but I’ll probably end up working for some PR firm lobbying for the lumber or housing industry to ensure a nice blend of suburban sprawl housing and low cost to profit margin.”

  “We tend to think highly while in university,” I say passing her a bowl of chopped vegetables.

  “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yah, how’s your job?”

  “Razor painful.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.”

  “That good eh?”

  “We can complain together,” I say smiling.

  She puts the vegetables in the wok and adds spices. They start to sizzle and she says, “You know … I’ve cooked with you more times than with Haiti.”

  I tell her to think of it as training for her life partner. She responds saying that with training there’s usually a goal, a game, a match, a regatta, a meet. There’s an end point. I nod. She checks the fish and says down to it, “I dropped out of track and field in high school because we didn’t race enough.”

  I wash the bowl the vegetables were in and look at Stonehenge posted on the wall. I say, “I’d like to bang a Brit.” Cynthia pulls open the fridge and bends over to pull out a bottle of wine. I say, “It’s a sort of post-colonial retribution thing. It’s my sort of war of independence without the shrapnel and field amputations, without the cannon fodder and patriotic speeches, and we’d ask each other permission before banging.”

  “I bedded a Brit. He was kind of a bore. Talked too much in bed. He kept insisting on things, never got into feeling it. And he was overly focused on my breasts and not my clitoris.”

  “All double A of them?”

  “Only with a push up bra on,” she smiles rummaging through a drawer for a cork screw. “Where did I put the bloody thing?”

  I look to the drawer she’s sorting through.

  “Sure – but my intent with the sex is not to enjoy it. Think of it more like tax collection on the feudal class. I’ve come to take their horses, but don’t need any more horses. I just want to ride around on something new for a while and then return it, or sell it for profit, because in the end, I’m sure it’s basically just like riding any other of my horses.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that you want to bed a Brit just for the sake of it?”

  “Well, yes, but that makes it sound so much more pedestrian.”

  We prepare our plates and sit down at the stools under the counter. She takes a bite of her food. “So sex isn’t just penis in vagina for you then?”

  “Sure, but it’s not always about pleasure. Sometimes it’s just about nudity, exposing something.”

  “Naked is a good thing.”

  I chew and take a sip of my wine. “Yes, it allows, and minus the pun, a deeper understanding of the girl.”

  “Not taken.” She crosses her legs and adjusts her skirt.

  “It’s like when a girl takes off her clothes, she’s opening up another corridor of access into who she is.”

  “It’s more entertaining than people watching at the mall.”

  A forkful of food at my lips. “It depends on the people, or the mall.”

  “You’ve had some terrible sex.”

  “And don’t you pretend to be any different!”

  “You have no idea!” She chews, takes a sip of wine.

  I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. I pull it out and look. It’s Karen and it’s evening. She should be with her husband.

  I silence the phone and return it to my pocket. “Question for you.”

  “Hit me.”

  She sits up and I look at her and then past her to a picture of a farmer digging a post hole.

  I look back at her. I pick up my glass of wine. “If you were hit by a car today, and in the ambulance you awoke to a dullness … a sort of numbness about your neck and limbs and in that moment you realized you were looking down at yourself and you see this woman working on you.”

  “Oooh, I like this story.”

  “She’s injecting something into you. She turns to analyze a machine that is wired up to your chest. Your blouse and bra cut from your body. You see your right then left eyelid stretched open and a flash of light shocking each pupil. Then she’s calling out, something to the driver and then there’s blackness and emptiness and knuckles are being rubbed on your sternum and you sharply regain consciousness and you’re back in your body and surrounded by people and alarming machines and you feel your chest. It’s not right. Then unconsciousness. Clear. Unconsciousness. Clear. Awake. You can’t speak. A tube is down your throat. Then you realize it. It’s time. You’re about to die. You’re about to die. What one memory do you cling to?”

  Cynthia looks directly at me. Takes a long sip of wine. She opens her mouth to say something, pauses, closes it. She says, “Good set up. … I … huh … I don’t know. … huh … maybe a green field … maybe I’m planting a tree or I’m staring at the stars on a moonless night. Maybe … hmm … maybe this moment. Maybe this room … our utopia … this bloody amazing fish. … You?”

  I shake my head, “I don’t know.”

  “Not fair. Try harder.”

  “Let me stew on it a bit.”

  She finishes her plate. I set my fork beside my knife and push the plate a few inches away from me. I spin my glass on the counter. I’m quiet and Cynthia too seems to enjoy the silence. I look over at Ghery’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. I look at a still from American Beauty – a shopping bag dancing, suspended in an updraft. I look at an avalanche over a mountain hut, sea lions on a bare rock off the coast of Vancouver, a bicycle wheel spinning. I close my eyes. I say, “… I’d think about swimming at night in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Elba. I’m surrounded by every single person I’ve ever had a good conversation with and we’re all naked and smiling and we’re all effortlessly buoyant and floating with the tide and it smells like autumn in northern Ontario after a brief rain.” I take a sip of wine. “It feels like every time I’ve had Christmas breakfast with my family and drank freshly squeezed orange juice and I’m six years old riding a brand new bicycle around the family room and it sounds like I’m standing on top of a mountain without a breath of wind.” I finish my glass of wine and continue. I think about moments where my every sense is stimulated and transports me to somewhere else, to a different location, places of which many are on Cynthia’s walls. And I watch Cynthia finish her food and sit back and hold her glass to her chest. Behind her a pencil crayon drawing of a blue apple her niece drew. Under it a photograph of what she said was her first three-speed bicycle.

  “I love all of that,” she says.

  I smile. “Dishes?”

  “Later,” she says, “Grab the bottle.” She stands and I follow her to her couch. And we’re silent again, communicating in silence. We’re drinking wine and are deep into her sofa. The music ends. She leans forward and pushes a
button on a remote control and after a few moments the album Disintegration by The Cure begins.

  “So fucking perfect.”

  “Top three albums ever,” she says standing up. She walks to the washroom and leaves the door open. I hear her start to pee. She calls out, “And Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails.” I smile. I hear the toilet flush and the faucet turn on and then off. She crosses the floor sitting back down against me. She tilts her head to my shoulder and quietly breathes out into a deeper relaxation. Minutes pass in this ease and then she takes another long breath and quietly says, “I wish I was swinging on a rope attached to a tree that’s extended out over a great body of water and you’re treading water and I swing out and I can feel the velocity and I let go in the upward trajectory and I’m soaring and just for a second, a second I hover before descending into a giant splash beside you.”

  “Perfect.”

  “… Maybe that’s what I’d cling to before my last moment of life.”

  “I could cling to that too.”

  “I think it’s important,” she says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Clinging to one another. I think it’s a rare thing. I know many couples that don’t seem to make any sense at all.”

  “They just tolerate each other?”

  “Yah … My friends Allison and Greg shouldn’t be together, for example. I don’t think they belong together. It’s weird … I have no doubt that they love each other it’s just … it’s just, hmm, it seems like a friendship love, which I guess isn’t a bad thing but there’s just no chemistry there.”

  “… Yah.”

  “You know, they’ve been together for at least four years and I swear I haven’t ever seen them touch.”

  “Do you ever talk to them about it?”

  “A little bit, sometimes. Allison and I have talked about it. We were talking about relationships and she asked about Haiti. I just talked about the tribulations of a long, very long distance relationship. The standard questions: when we’re planning on seeing each other again, how often we talk, email, what we discuss. Then she asked me what I thought about their relationship. I hesitated, knowing that I’m not an authority on them. I ended up just sort of thinking out loud that it’s been going on for a long time. She asked me what I meant by that. I remember not really knowing what I meant. … Maybe that’s all they are, being together.”

  “Just existing.”

  “Exactly. They’ve been in each other’s past so they kind of grapple clinging to each other’s present. … I’m not sure if they really even talk anymore.”

  “At all?”

  “Talk as in TALK, express dreams and fears and what not. … Huh.”

  “What’s that?”

  She hesitates for a few seconds. “… I guess … oh just a moment of irony … self-reflective irony.”

  “Oh yah?”

  “Me and Haiti.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was talking about another couple and I wonder if I’m talking about myself.”

  “Ah.”

  She lifts her head and sweeps her hair off her forehead and settles back on my shoulder.

  “Shawn … I want … I want someone who will care enough to hold back my hair during morning sickness, rub my feet when they’re sore, be in the birthing room with me.”

  “I wouldn’t say you deserve anything less. You should be adored.”

  And then we stop talking. We let the night unfold; we’re just spectators in it now. Whatever day there was has been completely erased by dark.

  She starts to yawn.

  “Careful,” I say. “That’s contagious.”

  “Maybe I should go to bed.”

  “… Okay.”

  But neither of us move, we just let the night continue to unfold. Another song starts, it finishes. Another one begins. I whisper, “Love this track.”

  She says, “Want to hear another story?”

  “You’re the sleepy one.”

  She’s silent for a long moment and then says, “Have I ever told you about my parents?”

  “In fragmented parts.”

  “My dad cheated on my mom when my brother and I were young.”

  She looks at me. I think my expression says I don’t know what to say, I don’t. She continues. “I was eleven, my brother was eight. My dad moved away for a while after it happened. He told my brother and me it was for work. My mom was emotionless during that time. I don’t know if they talked much while they were separated. My parents never really spoke of it, never really told my brother and I what happened. It just happened and then something was made right again.” She hesitates staring off at something. “… It’s odd, I’m twenty-three and have this hole in my life where my parents took a pregnant pause.”

  I wait for her words to settle, maybe into both of us. I ask, “Did your mom and dad talk while he was away?”

  “A bit … that I know of.” Cynthia lifts her glass and takes a sip. She places it back on her thigh. “They didn’t at all at first. Then maybe a couple of times here and there, mostly to hand the phone over to me or my brother. I think they faked it pretty good. I have this feeling that my dad called everyday but my mom would just say, ‘Let it ring; it’s probably just someone wanting us to buy something.’” Cynthia smirks.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Buy something … if it was my dad he was trying to sell my mom something, sell himself.”

  I smile with her. “How long did your dad go away for?”

  “A few months.”

  “It must’ve been hard for your mom to keep up the charade.”

  “Oh yes, I can only now imagine, but she did okay. I think she was just trying to protect us. When he first left I asked how long dad would be away for. Mom just said that he’s very busy. She’d just say, ‘Let’s get your homework done or help me wash up, yes?’ Something to distract where I was going.”

  “Do you or did you resent your dad at all?”

  “Not really. … I guess I did in the beginning when I found out why he actually went away to work for those few months.”

  “And then?”

  “And then it just sorta stopped. I stopped thinking about it, why he was away. … Then he came home and it seemed just like that, that he was home. His work thing was done. His time away didn’t come up for some time later.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen. Mom was away with her sister; Dad and I were home together. Everything seemed fine and normal. I was making dinner and he was at the kitchen table. My brother was up in his room. I remember all these weird details, total minutia. I remember what I was wearing, what I was cooking, what Dad was wearing. I remember the song that was coming from my brother’s bedroom, what the weather was like, the exact temperature in the kitchen. Dad was chucking corn and I was cutting green beans and tossing them into a pot of water boiling on the stove. … I remember the look Dad gave me; I’ll always remember it. He had stopped chucking. He might have stopped for some time. I remember it was as though the sound had been turned off and I looked at him. I glanced up at him while I was cutting and saw his eyes and there was nothing at all but his eyes, his expression … my god … it was as though he had just been convicted. I asked him what was wrong and he just held my look. What? I asked him again and after a long moment he said, ‘Sit down, please, I need to tell you something,’ and as he pulled out the chair for me I felt the ground was going to fall away. I put the knife down and walked around the counter and sat down beside him and he turned his chair to face me. He looked away, maybe outside or something, just away not to look at me. I think he might have been holding back tears. I started to cry and he hadn’t even said anything yet. My heart was in my throat.” She goes quiet, as though reliving it. Through tears in her eyes she continues, “And then he told me what had happened. Why he went away. Who it was. How many times. All the details. He said why he thought he did it. How ashamed he had felt. How ashamed he was of himself for what he did to my mo
m, my brother and me. And … I just went completely numb. I cried and was shaking and started shaking more. I was angry at him. I was angry at Mom. I felt my life was a lie. And I didn’t say anything. I’ve never said anything. I just went up to my room and lay in bed crying. When I came out the next day I passed my brother in the family room watching TV and saw Dad and Mom sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast. Mom noticed first and she stood up and started to cry and I just turned away and left. That was how I dealt with it. … That’s how I ever dealt with it. They later tried once or twice to bring it up and I would just say if you keep talking I’ll walk away.” She goes silent again and we just sit here listening to the music. One song, another. “I love my parents,” she says. “I don’t know … my brother was younger and reacted differently. I see the relationship he has with them and it’s not what I have.”

  She moves over to me and pulls herself tight into me. “Hold me for a sec.”

  I feel her start to shake; she starts to weep. She takes a long breath and weeps and pulls tighter into me and empties what she needs to empty. She’s wrapped around me shaking and she’s revealed to me more than she ever has. Fully exposed.

  Time passes. It gets easier here on her couch. Cynthia’s meal in us, warming us. The past words. The music. Easy.

  She gently tears our silence, “Okay, maybe I really should go to bed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you going to head home?”

  “Probably.”

  “With anyone special?”

  “No, not special.”

  “… Don’t hurt her.”

  “What?”

  “Just don’t hurt her, Shawn.”

  She kisses me on the cheek.

  “Wait,” she says and pulls me into her. She looks at me and then hugs me tight. Holds me. She doesn’t say anything. Just holds me. Doesn’t say anything. We just sit here her holding me tightly.

  “Shawn?” she whispers.

  “Yes.”

  She whispers again so, so quietly, “Bye, Shawn.”