by Tom Perrotta
“Tonight?” I asked.
Vernon responded with a skeptical nod, and it wasn’t until then that I noticed the chopstick in his right hand. On the tip, impaled like a check on a spindle, was a tiny scrap of kimchi.
“That’s the plan,” he said, holding the chopstick in front of his face like a sparkler. “How hard could it be?”
Vernon was a short, powerful-looking guy with no neck and the suave baritone voice of a late-night deejay. He lived with Hank and Donald, but generally kept himself apart from the social life of the entryway. If you asked his roommates where he was, they’d just give a vague shrug, as if to suggest that it was a big world out there, and your guess was as good as theirs. Ever since I’d met Vernon freshman year and learned that he’d attended the same Jersey City high school as my mother, I’d been hoping we could become friends, but lately I’d begun to suspect that it wasn’t in the cards. I couldn’t seem to find a way of talking to him that didn’t transform even the simplest conversation into some sort of debate about race in America. He’d been steering clear of me since our last meal in the dining hall, when I’d pressed a little too hard to enlist him on my side of an argument about Richard Wright’s portrayal of Bigger in Native Son.
“You know what?” I turned to Donald, seized by a sudden jolt of inspiration. “I think I’ll try some, too.”
“You’re kidding,” said Sang.
I shook my head. “Why not? I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
“All right!” Sang congratulated me with an upraised fist. I was touched by how pleased he seemed. “I knew you could do it.”
Donald plunged a chopstick into the jar and speared a bite-sized morsel of cabbage. I took it from him and smiled at Vernon.
“Safety in numbers,” I said.
Vernon gave a barely perceptible nod. Then he brought the kimchi to his nose and gave it a little sniff.
“Here goes nothing,” he said, looking me straight in the eye as he closed his mouth over the tip of the chopstick. I followed his lead. He withdrew the chopstick and chewed slowly, his expression shifting from grave suspicion to cautious approval.
As soon as I bit down, my mouth flooded with powerful sensations. The kimchi was cold, briny, crunchy, and spicy, though not nearly as fiery as I’d expected. It was okay.
“Well?” said Sang. “What’s the verdict?”
Hank, Donald, and Ted leaned forward in their seats, as if something important were about to happen. Vernon and I traded glances, each waiting for the other to take the lead.
“Not bad,” we finally blurted out, almost in unison.
Something about our answer struck the other guys as funny. Sang slapped his leg. Hank and Donald traded high fives in our honor. Ted shook his head, an expression of solemn wonderment taking hold of his face. He held out both his meaty arms as wide as they would go, as if he were thinking about embracing all five of us at once.
“This,” he said, pausing to make eye contact with each of us in turn. “This is why I came to Yale.”
An hour or so later, I slipped away from the party. It was almost two in the morning, but my breakthrough with the kimchi had given me a second wind. Even after a couple of celebratory bong hits, I felt strangely alert, eager to resume my plodding trek through Middlemarch My mood was such that it didn’t even bother me to open the door and find Max sprawled out on my bed, his bare, not-exactly-spotless feet propped up on my pillow.
“Hey,” I said, “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a dump like this?”
Unaware of the emotional progress I’d made since our last encounter, he scrambled into sitting position, shielding his face with a fat hardcover.
“Sorry.” He peeked out from behind the book. “I would’ve stayed in my room, but Nancy wanted to go to bed early.”
“No problem.” I dismissed his concerns with a magnanimous flick of the wrist. “Whatcha readin’?”
“Something about Leon Czolgosz. The anarchist who shot McKinley.”
“Nice guy?”
Max didn’t seem to notice that I was goofing on him.
“I wouldn’t call him nice, exactly. But I’ll tell you what—that McKinley was a first-class dirtbag in his own right. You want to know what’s wrong with America, study up a little on the McKinley Administration.”
“Got what he deserved, huh?”
“That’s not for me to say. I’m just saying there are different ways to be a killer.”
“I hear you,” I said, thinking suddenly of my parents, and the way my life sometimes seemed to embody their worst suspicions about college. Was this what they’d scrimped and sacrificed for all those years? So their son could spend his Tuesday nights drinking beer, smoking dope, eating weird food, and learning to see the assassin’s side of the story?
Max rose slowly from the bed, a distracted expression on his face. He closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, as if he had a headache.
“Guess what?” I told him. “I just ate some kimchi. Me and Vernon.”
He let go of his nose and turned his attention to his navel area, which he scratched with more than run-of the-mill thoroughness. The skin down there looked pink and a bit rashy, like he had poison ivy or something. When he was done, he paused for a few seconds to examine his fingernails.
“Cindy called again. She sounded pretty upset.”
“I’ll call her tomorrow.”
He nodded and slipped past me on his way out, stopping short just as he reached the doorway. He glanced over his shoulder, forcing a quick smile.
“Hey,” he said. “That’s great about the kimchi.”
I’d only gotten through a couple of paragraphs when my eyes strayed to the pink envelope resting under the chipped hockey puck I used as a paperweight. The envelope contained Cindy’s most recent letter, the only one I’d received from her since we’d parted on bad terms over Christmas vacation.
I put down the book and picked up the letter, though the actual document was something of a formality, since I had it pretty much memorized. Even now, a good three weeks after I’d fished it out of my mailbox at Yale Station, I still felt the urge to reread it once or twice a day.
Dear Danny,
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bruce lately, I’m not sure why. I think the song the River is about the saddest thing I ever heard my whole life. I love Hungry Heart though. That’s sad too if you think about it. the guy just gets in his car and ditches his wife and kid. He doesn’t think twice. It’s just who he is. Maybe the guy in the River should do that too. He seems so depressed as it is …
I always had this idea that if Bruce got to know me—to REALLY know me! then we would fall in love and be together. (I know this sounds kind of stupid, believe me!!! I never told anyone but you) Yeah, I know he’s this big rock star he can have any girl he wants. I’m not Cheryl Tiegs or anything but it’s like he says on Thunder Road, she’s not a beauty but that’s all right with him. Hey—he’s the one who said it NOT me!
This wasn’t some crazy fantasy. It was what I believed. I believe there’s one person in the world your meant for no matter what, and that he was the one for me (You know that song For You? I LOVE that song) I’ve felt this way for a long time, even before Born to Run. But then this afternoon I realized it was all just a big stupid joke. Joke on me. Even if he met me he’d just think so what? What’s so special about her?
I cried a little and then I was okay.
Sincerely,
Cynthia
On New Year’s Eve, Cindy and I had slept together for the first and only time. Her mother was out of town visiting relatives, and she invited me over for a quiet evening of champagne and Dick Clark. Around eleven thirty, we started making out on the couch. It was her idea to relocate to the bedroom, and the suggestion caught me totally off guard. By that point I’d pretty much given up on the prospect of ever actually having sex with her, a mental adjustment that had made our time together a lot less stressful for both of us. I hadn’t e
ven packed a lambskin.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I have something else.”
Already naked, she broke open a package she’d produced from one of her dresser drawers and turned away from me, squatting in a froglike stance. I heard an odd noise, something like the sound of shaving cream foaming out of the can. When it stopped, she turned around and approached the bed, wiping her hands across her thighs.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Birth control.”
I wanted to ask her what kind, but she’d already climbed into bed with me. There was no sign of the nervousness she’d exhibited at my house; she was in charge of the situation, utterly at peace with her decision. She looked up at me, and her face was pure invitation.
“Happy New Year,” she said, pulling me on top of her.
Her eyes widened as I slipped inside her, and she gasped, as if something profound and transforming had just happened, as though this were more pleasure than she deserved or could bear. I was startled by the urgency with which she met me, the frantic rhythm of our coupling. The noises that came out of her were heartfelt and unpredictable. Sitting at my desk two months later, I could still feel the tension of her legs around my waist as I came, the groan of desolation she gave when we slipped apart.
What I wanted to forget—for her sake as well as mine—was the feeling of wild emptiness that had come upon me the moment I entered her, the awful physical knowledge that she’d been right all along: this really was all I’d wanted, and now that I had it, I knew I’d never want it again. Her passion was embarrassing, not because of what it said about her, but because of what it revealed about me, the person who’d been willing to humor her and string her along for half a year just so I could fuck her and not feel a thing, except maybe that I deserved it for putting up with all those visits to the car lots, all the annoying chitchat, all those letters on pink stationery.
She must have realized it too, because as soon as we were finished she burst into tears and told me to please get out of her house. Five weeks later she mailed me the letter I was now slipping back into its envelope. Why such a shameful memory gave me an erection every time I replayed it, I had no idea, but that was how it always happened. I already had my pants open and the zipper down when my eyes strayed to the face-down copy of Middlemarch, the words “George Eliot” thundering off the cover like an accusation. Three hundred ninety-two pages to go.
Fuck it, I thought. I’ll just have to skim the rest over breakfast.
part two
The Return of the Repressed
roadkill manicotti
Between 4:30 and 4:59 the long table by the salad bar was colonized by dining-hall workers—students and full-timers alike—wolfing down last-minute dinners before the early birds started banging on the doors at 5:00 on the dot. I breezed in at twenty of, grabbed a tray and some silverware off the serving cart, and wandered over to the deserted beverage station. One of the perks of dining hall employment was that you didn’t get stuck in traffic so often at the height of the dinner rush, trying to appear unruffled as you waited for some weirdo to finish filling a dozen glasses with a precisely calibrated mixture of pink and orange bug juice, or for a chin-scratching professor emeritus of comparative religion to finally take the plunge and choose between the day-old tuna lasagna and tonight’s meat loaf with brown gravy.
I had just topped off my third glass of Coke when Matt emerged from the kitchen, already punched in and hard at work. A gigantic sheet cake balanced in his arms, he whistled the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show, with a chipper virtuosity he had successfully concealed from the world—or at least from me—until that very minute. He stopped as soon as he spotted me, but it was too late. We both knew he’d been caught in a moment of extreme uncoolness.
“Damn,” I said. “That’s some mighty fancy whistling. Did you pick that up in Mayberry?”
Matt set the cake down on the stainless-steel countertop and tried to look unruffled.
“And how are you today, Brutus?”
“Seriously,” I said, “where does a fellow like you learn to whistle like that?”
He stalled for time, bending to retrieve a trowel-like serving implement from the shelf below the counter.
“Prison,” he finally replied, straightening up and gazing at some point above my head with a vaguely troubled expression. “Gotta do something to fill those long hours in the hole.”
“I’m sure the other inmates found it very attractive.”
“Some of us juggled,” he said with a shrug, “and some of us whistled. Some of us fashioned deadly weapons out of small pieces of rusty metal.” He shook his head wistfully. “I miss those guys.”
He turned his attention to the cake, slashing it up and down with a series of what I assumed were meant to be perpendicular lines. I grabbed my plate and looped around to the other side of the steam table, hesitating between one uninspiring entree and another.
“Go with the bourguignon,” he advised.
“You think?”
“No contest. The manicotti’s a little gamey.”
I plopped a pasty tangle of egg noodles onto my plate, then smothered them with a ladle’s worth of beef and gravy. After a moment’s reflection, I added half a spoonful of succotash to the mix, plus a single tube of the questionable manicotti. I was always hungry, and appreciated the mix-and-match, all-you-can-eat spirit of the dining hall.
Matt lifted a small slab of cake out of the grid and deposited it on a dessert plate. Pivoting gracefully, he slid the plate onto the second shelf of the display rack, which was already half-filled with parfait glasses containing butterscotch and chocolate pudding. The top shelf was reserved for desserts provided by the Green Jell-O Fund, a substantial endowment dedicated to the purchase, in perpetuity, of this once-popular foodstuff. As usual, many servings of Green Jell-O had gone uneaten for several days running, and had been poignantly adorned with a last-chance dollop of whipped cream.
“Sorry about the other night,” I told him. “Polly called me out of the blue.”
“I’m over it.”
“You sure?”
He gave me a look.
“I called the crisis hot line. They talked me down from the ledge.”
Upon further reflection, I speared another unit of manicotti. My plate was starting to get a little crowded.
“I warned you about that crap,” Matt reminded me.
“But I like it gamey,” I insisted.
Albert, the dining-hall manager, chose that very moment to burst into the serving area. Ninety percent of the time, Albert was a mellow, easygoing guy who liked to kid around with his employees. The rest of the time he looked like a man being chased by a team of trained assassins.
“Gamey?” He fixed me with a look of wild panic. “What’s gamey?”
“The manicotti,” said Matt. “Did you fill it with possum or squirrel?”
Albert glanced quickly over his shoulder.
“Don’t even joke like that. That’s how rumors get started.”
“You’re right,” said Matt. “Our customers can be picky about their roadkill.”
Albert let out a deep breath and reached up to massage his tired eyes. He couldn’t have been much older than thirty, but the strain of running the dining hall was starting to take a toll on him. Sometimes he reminded me of my father.
“You guys seen Lorelei?” he asked.
Matt and I shook our heads, but that didn’t stop him from peering over the top of the steam table, as if he expected to see Lorelei crouched on the floor by the short-order grill, dreamily filing her nails.
“Excuse me,” he said, his focus shifting suddenly to Matt. “What the hell is that?”
“What the hell is what?” Matt inquired.
“That thing you just cut. Give it here.”
Matt handed the dessert plate to me, and I passed it along to Albert, who squinted for a few seconds at the peculiar wedge of cake resting on top of it.
“I’m cu
rious,” he said. “What would you call this?”
“Angel food?” Matt guessed.
“No, shapewise.” Albert tilted the plate so we could get a better look. The cake stuck there as if it had been glued on. “Is there a name for this shape?”
“It’s almost like a rhombus,” I ventured. “Except for that curved part.”
“Why does everything have to have a label?” Matt asked. “Why do you think that’s so important to you?”
Albert looked like he was about to say something nasty, but then thought better of it. He banged the plate down on top of the steam table and turned to Matt with a plaintive expression.
“Just cut it straight, okay? Is that too much to ask?”
Nick didn’t normally work Thursday nights, so I was surprised to see him sitting at the worker’s table with Kristin, Sarah, Djembe, and Brad Foxworthy, the weekend dishwasher, who was subbing again for Dallas Little. Dallas weighed three hundred pounds and was supposedly having trouble with his feet, though Milton, the usual Thursday-night chef, viewed this complaint with a certain amount of skepticism. “Oh, yes,” he’d mutter, whenever the subject of Dallas’s podiatric ailments surfaced, “the man’s feet hurt. You bet your feet hurt, you spend all day on the corner with a can of malt liquor in your hand. Bet your head hurt too.”
I took the first available seat, next to Brad and across from Nick, who acknowledged my arrival with his customary curt nod. His face was utterly blank, a practiced mask of boredom and reserve. With Kristin just a few seats away, I knew better than to refer, even ellipticallv, to our strange encounter outside her window on Tuesday night.