Joe College

by Tom Perrotta

  My father chuckled. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said. “It’s not very attractive.”

  “But who’s to say what beauty is?” Matt inquired. “Doesn’t it differ from culture to culture?”

  On another day I might have intervened to spare my parents the interrogation, but I was happy just then to let Matt give them something to think about besides what my father was going to do on Monday morning, his first official day as a lunch-truck driver without a lunch truck. They’d have more than enough time on the ride home to be alone with each other and their worries, and they seemed as grateful for the diversion as I was.

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” my father declared.

  “That’s original,” my mother told him.

  “You can quote me,” he said, winking at the mirror.

  My parents came up to my room to help me “get settled,” but they barely stayed long enough to marvel at what a pigsty it was, though I must say that it looked fairly clean to me. None of my roommates were around, and they were eager to get a jump on the long ride home. I offered to walk them back to the car, but they told me not to bother.

  “Stay put,” my mother said. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot to do.”

  Ushering them to the door, I was gripped by a feeling of wild desolation. Please, I wanted to tell them. Please don’t leave me here. I hadn’t felt anything like this since the first day of freshman year, when I waved good-bye and burst into tears on College Street.

  “You all right?” my father asked.

  I nodded, reluctant to open my mouth for fear of what might come out.

  “You sure?”

  “Honey?” my mother said. “Is something wrong?”

  I was mystified by their blindness. They didn’t seem to understand the first thing about what had happened. My father had been furious when he heard the highly sanitized account I’d given the police about my trouble with the Lunch Monsters—and even then he’d been more upset by my silence than my actual behavior—but aside from that one brief outburst, he’d absorbed the whole calamity with bizarre composure. My mother had been more openly shaken by it, but in all her dark mutterings, there hadn’t been a single word of blame directed at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice quivering like a child’s. “It was all my fault.”

  “What was?” my father asked.

  “The truck.”

  “That wasn’t your fault.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry about,” my mother told me. Her face was kind, and she spoke with such gentleness and certainty that I almost believed her. “You didn’t do a single thing wrong.”

  “Don’t worry about us,” my father added, giving me a supportive pat on the elbow. “You just worry about yourself.”

  I had just begun unpacking when the phone rang. It was Albert, the dining-hall manager.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been calling all afternoon. I need you to work the dish line.”

  “The dish line? Isn’t it Eddie’s night?”

  “Didn’t you hear? He’s in the hospital.”

  “He is?”

  “He got mugged last night. Beat up pretty bad.”

  “My God. Is he—”

  “No, no. He’s okay. Can you take his shift?”

  I looked at the clock. It was four thirty, and I was totally unprepared. I’d barely have time to change my shirt and grab a bite before being besieged by an armada of dirty dishes. The only thing worse was the thought of sitting alone in my room, doing absolutely nothing.

  “Okay.” I sighed wearily, as if submitting to his relentless pressure. “I’ll be right there.”

  In the dining hall I received the kind of warm welcome I’d been fantasizing about in the car. Albert shook my hand and thanked me profusely for bailing him out. Kristin and Djembe applauded when I sat down at the worker’s table, and Sarah inked the words “Our Hero” on my paper hat with a fountain pen and yellow highlighter. Even Nick seemed happy to see me.

  “Hey Pencil Dick, have a good time in Florida?”

  “Yeah.” I offered up a pasty arm for his perusal. “Like my golden tan?”

  Lorelei arrived a couple of minutes before five and glided past our table without a word of greeting, her face its usual mask of self-containment and private amusement. Looking at her, you wouldn’t have had any idea that her boyfriend had just been hospitalized after a brutal attack. I searched more closely for signs of distress when I bumped into her by the time clock, but there was only that faint mocking smile that was her basic response to the world.

  “How’s Eddie?” I asked.

  “Okay,” she said. “Much better since they took out his spleen.”

  “They took out his spleen?”

  “They had to,” she said, removing her time card from its metal sleeve. “It was ruptured.”

  “Jesus. Do you know what happened?”

  She shoved her card into the slot; the machine bit down.

  “He got jumped. In the lobby of his building.” She squinted at the card as if something was wrong with it, then slipped it back into the sleeve. “I wasn’t there.”

  “Was it your brothers?”

  She looked me square in the face for the first time, examining my face as closely as I was examining hers. Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact.

  “Probably.”

  “What do they have against Eddie?”

  “They’re just assholes. They think it’s funny.” She shook her head in disgust, like it wasn’t worth going into it. “What’s that on your hat?”

  “It says ‘Our Hero.’” I turned my head to give her a better look. “Sarah did it.”

  “How come?” Lorelei seemed annoyed, like this was one of those stupid college pranks we were always pulling.

  “Beats me.”

  “Hey.” She smiled like she’d just remembered something. “Who was that girl you were with the other night? Outside of WaWa’s?”

  “Her name’s Cindy.”

  “She’s not a Yalie, is she?”

  I shook my head. Lorelei narrowed her eyes and studied me with a newfound interest. Her voice was playful, laced with a tiny dose of sarcasm.

  “I didn’t know you dated townies.”

  Like “weenie,” “townie” was one of those words I’d never heard until I got to Yale, and it still had the power to make me wince. I was about to object on the grounds that Cindy wasn’t from New Haven when I realized that it didn’t matter. By Lorelei’s standards—and my own too, now that I thought about it—Cindy was a townie.

  “I date all sorts of girls,” I said with a shrug.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, brushing past me on her way to the front desk.

  I punched myself in and headed over to the dish line. As the workers’ trays floated lazily in my direction, I replayed Lorelei’s last statement in my mind, amazed that she could sink so low as to flirt with me while her boyfriend was in the hospital, and even more amazed that I could sink so low as to like it.

  Max was sitting in the common room when I got back, reading The Wretched of the Earth while Ted and Nancy fucked in the double. I knew they were fucking because Nancy kept saying Fuckmeohfuckmepleasefuckme while Ted kept answering with these weird little grunts, like he was trying to lift something that was bolted to the floor.

  “Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  Max looked at me for a second or two before responding. The look wasn’t friendly.

  “Fine,” he said.

  I sat down on the armchair and tried to ignore the noise.

  “How was your vacation?”

  Max stared at his book and pretended not to hear me. Before I could repeat my question the action in the double kicked into high gear, a shift signalled first by a rhythmic pounding on the wall and followed almost immediately
by a pronounced change in Nancy’s monologue.

  “Ted,” she began chanting. “Ted, Ted, Ted …”

  She didn’t say it exactly the same way every time. Sometimes it was Ted? and sometimes it was Ted! Every once in a while it even sounded like TEEEDDD!!! And then tedtedtedtedted. She said his name like she was talking to him across the room and like she was calling him from down the street. She said it like he’d done something cute, and also like he’d done something stupid. She said his name like she hadn’t seen him for years and then again like he was getting on her nerves. She sang and muttered and chortled it. Once she even yodeled it. She said Ted like it was the only word she knew, like it had to do the work of the whole damn dictionary. And then finally she screamed it so loud, with such ecstatic finality, that even Max had to look up.

  “My vacation sucked,” he told me. “How was yours?”

  I thought about calling Polly, but decided to pay her a surprise visit instead. I had the feeling that what was required of me was some sort of grand spontaneous gesture, something that would throw her off-balance and give me at least a small amount of leverage over the situation, and just showing up at her door was the only tactic I could think of. And besides, I had important news for her, news I wanted to deliver in person and as soon as possible.

  I moved across the campus in a blur of anticipation, a sudden and unaccountable surge of optimism inspired by Ted and Nancy. After all, Ted was nothing special, just an all-around regular guy, slightly out-of-shape and a little on the boring side when you got right down to it. And yet, there was Nancy, this intelligent and attractive and charming woman, crying out his name as if he were the God of Love lowered down from the clouds to give her a taste of heaven on that rickety old bunk bed. If Ted and Nancy were a plausible couple, why not Polly and I? If they could make each other happy, why couldn’t we?

  Yale was security conscious, and I would normally have had to get through a locked gate and locked entryway door before reaching my destination. That night, though, people were still moving back in, and everything was wide open. I passed through everyday obstacles as though on an errand in my dreams, barely registering my good luck. On top of everything, Polly’s room door was cracked open too. I could hear her inside, laughing with her roommate.

  “I can’t believe he did that.”

  “Well, he did.”

  “Oh, Ingrid, that is so gross.” Polly’s giggly voice was almost unrecognizable to me. “That is so unbelievably disgusting.”

  It was there that I hesitated and almost lost heart, partly because I was reluctant to intrude on a private conversation, but mainly just because of how happy she sounded. I couldn’t remember Polly ever laughing like that with me, like she was a goofy high school girl and not some earnest would-be intellectual clutching her head about Peter Preston or Wallace Stevens. She seemed so far away just then, like I barely even knew her, like there was a lot more separating us than one partially open door. What right did I have to think that I knew the first thing about her or had the first clue about how to make her happy? I took a step backward, uncertain whether to knock or retreat. Before I had time to choose, the door flew open and I was face-to-face with Ingrid.

  “I gotta pee so bad I can taste it,” she said, talking to Polly but looking straight at me. She stopped short, her face turning an instant crimson. “Oh, hi.”

  “I was just about to knock,” I told her.

  “Ingrid?” Polly called. “Is someone there?”

  Ingrid poked her head back into the room.

  “You know what?” she said. “I’m just gonna run upstairs and see if Chitra’s back.”

  My plan worked in the sense that I clearly caught Polly off-guard. She was sitting on her couch in a pair of baggy sweatpants and a pink thermal undershirt, one arm buried to the elbow in an econo-sized bag of nacho-flavored Doritos, and staring at me in naked confusion, as if she’d misplaced the word for hello.

  My plan failed in the sense that I was just as tongue-tied as she was. I’d never visited her in her room before—had never seen her in sweatpants or a thermal shirt, for that matter—and was overwhelmed by the unexpected intimacy of the situation, the simple, enormous fact of Polly in person again, after a separation that felt like months instead of weeks.

  “It’s me,” I told her, just in case she was wondering.

  She withdrew her hand from the bag and licked her fingers clean like a cat, watching me the whole time.

  “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

  “I should have called.”

  “That’s okay.”

  I understood that it was my turn to talk, but the effort of conversation seemed utterly beyond me. I just wanted to sit down next to her and hold her hand.

  “I like your shirt,” I said finally.

  She looked down at herself, checking to make sure we were talking about the same piece of clothing.

  “Really?”

  “Not every girl looks good in thermals.”

  She smiled, but it was a headachey sort of smile, the kind you get from someone who’s trying to be nice.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  She lowered her voice, as if there were a third party in the room. “Is she getting the abortion?”

  I shook my head, wishing I could just skip over the whole mess, pretend that none of it had ever happened.

  “She’s marrying an old boyfriend. This guy named Kevin. He’s an assistant manager at Medi-Mart.”

  “Huh.” She made a face. “That’s weird.”

  “Tell me about it.” Seeing it through Polly’s eyes made it seem even weirder than it had before. “He really loves her, though.”

  “Does she love him?”

  “Not really. But at least she won’t be alone. The baby will have a father.”

  Polly took a few seconds to absorb this. She looked like she was about to protest, but then thought better of it. When she looked up again, her expression had brightened. There was a finality in her voice that made me nervous.

  “So it worked out for you.”

  “Kind of. It was a strange vacation. These bodybuilders torched my father’s truck.”

  “Bodybuilders?”

  “From Staten Island. They call themselves the Lunch Monsters.”

  “They burned his truck?”

  “Right in our driveway,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  She didn’t invite me to elaborate. “That’s quite a town you live in.”

  All I could do was shrug.

  “What about you?” I asked. “How’s it going with that Stevens paper?”

  She looked at me a long time before answering, long enough for me to identify the emotion she was beaming at me as compassion. It was coming off her like a radio signal.

  “Peter came up for a visit,” she said. “He really helped me out.”

  “Peter?”

  It wasn’t until I said his name that I noticed the bouquet of tulips on her coffee table, and the sight of them struck me with shame. Some guys show up with flowers, I thought; other guys just show up.

  “We had a really good talk,” she explained. “I was imagining all sorts of bad stuff that just wasn’t true.”

  “So you’re back together.”

  I’d meant it as a question, but it came out as a statement. Polly couldn’t have looked at me with more kindness if I’d just lost a leg.

  “I’m sorry, Danny.”

  I would have preferred to make a clean getaway, but she insisted on hugging me good-bye at the door, a gesture that I guess was meant to make me feel better, but only made me that much more aware of what I was losing. I’d done the exact same thing to Cindy only a week before, a painful memory I tried to erase by grabbing two handfuls of Polly’s shirt and pressing my face into the springy tangle of her hair, murmuring her name over and over again with such mournful intensity that she finally had no choice but to pry herself loose and send me on my way.

  m
ercy

  Mostly what I was that spring was lonely. Just when I needed my friends the most, they suddenly went AWOL on me. Much to his own amazement, Sang had fallen madly in love with Katie Kim, and when he wasn’t visiting her in Middletown, he was hiding out in Machine City, making feverish declarations into a pay phone. Max, who wasn’t feeling particularly well-disposed toward me in any case, had decided to ditch the Hinckley project and make up for a semester’s worth of slacking off with a few weeks of heroic cramming. Ted and Nancy had gotten hold of the library’s dog-eared copy of The Joy of Sex, and were holing up in the double every night, practicing exotic positions and bursting into frequent, irritating fits of laughter. When the phone rang for me it was either Matt, trying to apologize, or Eric Storm, hoping to continue our recent and highly rewarding discussion of Socialist Realism.

  Even my father seemed to be having a better time than me. Only a week after the Roach Coach had gone up in flames, he’d taken a job as manager of the Deli Department at Stop & Shop. My mother said he was in his glory, supervising a staff of hardworking middle-aged women, garrulous semi-retired men, and a couple of cranky part-timers. He loved the hours—banker’s hours, he called them—and didn’t mind spending a good part of the day on his feet behind the meat case. He also enjoyed walking back and forth to work and listening to the morning weather report on WPAT with the bland curiosity of someone whose day could no longer be ruined by it. The insurance company had paid off on the truck, and he had sold a good portion of his route to Chuckie at what he said was a more-than-fair price, so my parents actually had some money in the bank for the first time in recent memory. He said he had half a mind to send a thank-you note to Vito Meatballs.

  The trouble with Matt started on a Friday afternoon about two weeks after we’d returned to New Haven. Friday was laundry day for me, and I was alone in my room, sorting through my vast collection of white tube socks, when Peter Preston called. He said he needed to see me immediately.