by Carol Snow
Until I threw up.
nineteen
Life circles back on itself. Here I was, once again, mooning over Tim. Was he thinking about me right now? Did he like me as much as I liked him? Where was this going to lead? At least my virginity was no longer an issue—not that either of us had removed a single article of clothing before I upchucked.
He’d had an early flight back to Washington. When I woke up, he was gone. I didn’t get to see his reaction to me in the sober light of day. I didn’t know whether he felt sorry or relieved to be leaving my apartment. He left a note, at least: “Never did get to hear you sing. We’ll have to reschedule. Take two aspirin and drink lots of water. If that doesn’t work, try a Bloody Mary.” He signed it, “L., T.” What, exactly, did the “L” stand for, I wondered. Love? Like? Left you again?
I missed my morning classes but made it back to Mercer in time for lunch. The cafeteria offered a choice of boiled hot dogs or rectangular pizza so greasy that it would take a fistful of napkins to blot the excess oil. Since both options made my stomach churn, I made my way over to the all-day breakfast bar, where I retrieved yogurt, an English muffin and coffee.
Once again, I was breaking the “never eat alone” rule. And, once again, Jeremy stepped in to relieve me of my solitary state.
He looked solemn. “You had us worried.”
I squinted at him. “Why? Who?”
“Tiffany and me. She said you were going into the city to have dinner with your brother but that you’d be back around eleven.”
“It got late. I stayed over. What are you, my mother?” I tried to sound amused, but it came out snippy. All I really wanted was to be left to suffer in silence.
“You told me your brother lives in Denver.”
I stared at him. He stared back. I shifted my gaze down to the table. It was dark brown and bore a thick wax coating from decades of use. “I wasn’t with my brother. It was—an old friend. We got talking and it got late and I just, you know, crashed at his place.”
“Talking.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s all you were doing.”
He didn’t sound like my mother, after all. My mother had never been this invasive. “You know, Jeremy, I like you and you’re a great R.A., but I don’t think this is any of your business.” I was in no mood to listen to a speech about the importance of condoms in the age of communicable diseases.
He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his fingers over his eyelids. When he looked at me again, he said, “I don’t mean to butt in. But it’s part of my job. R.A.’s are trained to recognize substance abuse problems.”
I gawked at him. “You think I’m doing drugs?” It seemed funny all of a sudden, and I cackled. Had I not been so nauseous, I would have let out a belly laugh.
“Alcohol is a drug,” he said. He wasn’t laughing.
“Oh, that,” I sighed. “Okay, I’m hung over. Jeremy, let’s get real. It’s the first week of classes. Half the campus is hungover.”
“It’s your second hangover of the week. And your drinking is already causing you to miss classes.”
“I know,” I said. “It was stupid. And I didn’t mean to—last night, things just got out of hand. I don’t have a drinking problem, I swear. Aside from these two times, it’s been years since I’ve had a hangover.”
When I realized what I’d said, my first thought was of Tim and how disappointed he’d be that I’d slipped up so easily. My second thought was that I needed to cover my ass—quickly. “Well, a year, at least,” I said. “My friends and I, we had this schnapps phase junior year, but last year I stuck pretty much to Coke.” Jeremy looked horrified. “What?” I asked.
“You were doing coke in high school?”
I dropped my face in my hands and took a deep breath. Finally, I leaned toward him. “Not coke—Coke! Big C! You know, as in, ‘I’d like to give the world a Coke,’ ‘It’s the real thing,’ ‘Give yourself a break today.’”
“That last one would be McDonald’s.”
“You watch too much television,” I snapped.
He placed his tray carefully on the table and sat down. His chair shrieked as he scooted closer to the table.
“Ow,” I yelped at the sound. We locked eyes. “I am not an alcoholic.”
He shrugged and took a long drink of milk. He looked at the ceiling. “If you say so.”
I looked at his plate: three hot dogs on doughy buns. “A little alcohol is good for the heart,” I said. “Nitrates can kill you.”
He tore open a package of mustard, and it squirted his T-shirt. I smirked through my pain. He swiped at his chest with a napkin. “And what should I have instead?” he asked. “An English muffin and coffee? What kind of a lunch is that—the anorexic special?”
“Now I’m an anorexic?” I laughed, all hostility gone. Come to think of it, my pants were getting a little loose. Next time I went back to my apartment, I’d pull out that box of clothes that I never really believed I’d fit into again but couldn’t bear to give away.
He rolled his eyes. “No, I don’t think you’re an anorexic.” He needn’t have sounded like it was such a preposterous idea. “Listen,” he said, his voice softening. “A group of us were thinking about going out for burgers tonight. You want to come?”
“Thanks, but I’ve got a, um, study thing tonight. Maybe some other time.” In truth, I had my singing audition. I knew what Jeremy thought of that crowd; I didn’t want him to launch into a speech about why I should steer clear.
Eager to avoid another lecture on the evils of alcohol, I had my story prepared for Tiffany. “What a night,” I said as I walked into our room. “My brother and I ate dinner at this Chinese place. I think I’ve got food poisoning.” It was fairly safe to assume that Tiffany and Jeremy wouldn’t compare notes on my alibi. I dropped my backpack on the floor and placed the laptop beside it. I collapsed onto the pink and turquoise bedspread, which still carried the stench of artificial materials. “My brother had an old laptop he wasn’t using.”
Tiffany barely looked up from her textbook. “Jeremy was worried about you.”
“Yeah. I saw him in the dining hall.”
“He thought something might have happened.”
“Nothing happened. I stayed at my brother’s. I’m sorry.” I tried to sound genuinely contrite but sounded about as annoyed as I was. “I should have called,” I continued. “It never occurred to me that you might be so worried that you’d report my absence.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t report anything. Jeremy came looking for you, then he got all—weird.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
She closed the textbook, ran her finger along the cover. “If I disappeared, no one would worry. No one.”
I rubbed my temples. “Of course they would,” I said with the patience usually reserved for an exasperating but well-meaning child. “Jeremy would worry about you just like he did about me.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “No way.”
My head hurt more by the moment. “Of course he would. Jeremy’s a really nice person. And so are you,” I added quickly and unconvincingly.
She leaned forward, tantalized by the possibility of bonding through gossip. “He is so fat.”
I squinted at her. “I don’t follow.”
“You know. FAT!”
“I, um, I don’t know. Jeremy’s a lot of things, but fat is not one of them.”
She slumped back on her pink bedspread, deflated. “Fat with a P.”
“Pat?”
“No! P-H-A-T. Phat.”
“Oh, right! Like, cool or something. Phat. Yes. Jeremy is phat.” I squinted at my Matisse poster. It really was very pretty.
“I am such a geek,” Tiffany whined. “If anyone else said phat, you’d know right away they meant phat and not fat.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said slowly. “It’s not you. It’s me. Let’s just say I’m not as tuned in to popular culture as the average eightee
n-year-old.”
twenty
These girls did not look like hookers. The leader, Vanessa, looked like my high school French teacher, a skinny, lank-haired, twittery woman named Mademoiselle Shlott. One day, in the middle of conjugating the verb rire, Mademoiselle grabbed her shrunken cheeks and yelled, “Why can’t you pay attention to me for five goddamn minutes!” In shock, we halted our note passing and whispering. Her shoulders began to shake and her face grew wet with tears. “How do you think it feels to be standing up here, day after day? Don’t you think I know what you say about me? DON’T YOU THINK I KNOW?” She ran out of the room, and we never saw here again. (For the rest of the year, the softball coach, who confessed that escargot was the only French word he knew, supervised the class.) In retrospect, perhaps the saddest thing was that Mademoiselle Shlott had it all wrong: we never said anything about her. In fact, until her breakdown, we never thought about her at all.
But Vanessa possessed something that Mademoiselle Shlott did not: a voice like Ella Fitzgerald. It was astonishing to hear a voice that big coming out of a body that skinny. Vanessa sounded like she weighed two hundred pounds. Also, she didn’t dress like Mademoiselle Shlott, who favored knee-length skirts and cardigans. Vanessa wore frayed jeans and a pale pink baby doll top that offered a peak at the hoop in her navel.
Penny was Costello to Vanessa’s Abbott. All bulges and curves, she probably did weigh two hundred pounds. She had big blue eyes, a tiny bow mouth, and a sweet baby-girl voice. She was quite striking, in a sixteenth-century kind of way, but I was surprised that the local johns were so enlightened. Unlike a lot of heavy girls, she dressed to accentuate her curves and possessed the self-confidence to wear thigh high boots over her generous legs.
There were six more girls in the group, none of them especially beautiful. I wondered if the less attractive girls were drawn to prostitution because they longed to feel desirable. Briefly I worried that I was on the wrong track, that these girls were just here to, well, sing. But I’d mentioned the audition to Amber—“That girls’ singing group we talked about? I’m auditioning. I know you said they’re a little, well, wild, but I really love to sing.”
She gawked as if I’d just confessed to eating a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. “Those girls are bad news, Katie. Seriously.”
The auditions were being held in a dorm common room that appeared to have been decorated in the seventies: orange vinyl cushions, brown industrial carpet, the very same molded plastic chairs that Richard had in his office. Then again, given the popularity of anything “retro,” the room could have been decorated in the last year, eradicating all traces of late-millennium mauve. The chairs were arranged in a horseshoe. Following a couple of songs intended to give us an idea of “what we, ya know, do,” the existing Wallflowers had taken up residence on the couches. There were openings for four new members—a soprano, two altos and a tenor. That was good news for me, an alto.
They had us fill out index cards with our name, graduating year, phone number and experience. (Mine: “Lead alto in my high school’s a capella group; member, choir; first runner-up, All State Choir.” I wondered briefly whether there was any such thing as All State Choir. I figured I was pretty safe as long as I left out which state it was in.)
We handed in the cards. There was a lot of throat clearing and paper shuffling. Some of the girls had brought along class work. I figured they’d be automatically excluded for their poor prostitute potential. The Wallflowers sifted through the index cards and sorted them. I wondered if the sorting served any real purpose or if they were just enjoying the power gained from making twenty-five girls test the staying power of their Teen Spirit antiperspirant, a sample of which we had all received on our first day of school.
One by one, the Wallflowers called up the hopeful girls. In sync with the demonstration, they sang the forties: “Someone to Watch over Me,” “My Funny Valentine.” Some of these girls could actually sing. My chances were looking dim.
Tiffany sang before me. She had come on a whim. During our dinner the other night I had stupidly mentioned the audition. She’d said, “Oh, fun! I’ll do it, too!” I didn’t know how to discourage her without sounding like I didn’t want to spend time together, which I knew from experience would send her into a depression, complete with a wailing-women soundtrack. I just hoped she couldn’t sing. Leading her to a life of prostitution was even worse than making her feel unpopular.
She stood in the middle of the horseshoe. She wore black leggings and a long red cable sweater. When she’d gotten dressed, she’d asked, “Does this make me look even fatter than I really am?”
To this, I had no reasonable answer save the obligatory, “You’re not fat!”
Doing her makeup (which was far too heavy), she’d remarked, “I wish my eyes were green. Or blue, even. Anything but brown.”
I’d come back with, “But your eyes are such a pretty shade—almost gold.”
Then, predictably, came the hair. “I wish my hair were curly.”
It took every ounce of strength to say, “Isn’t it funny how everyone with straight hair wishes it were curly, and everyone with curly hair wishes it were straight?” when I really wanted to advise her to get tinted contacts, a perm and a membership to Weight Watchers.
Vanessa glanced up and said, “Okay . . . Tiffany? Go ahead.” Tiffany began to sing. A few notes in, I gasped. It wasn’t that Tiffany’s voice was especially good or bad—it was breathy but tuneful. It was that she was singing my song, “You’re Mean to Me,” a song she had never even heard of until I sang it for her two nights ago. She’d told me she was going to sing a show tune, something from “My Fair Lady” or “The Music Man.” Imitation may be the purest form of flattery, but I hadn’t sung yet. It was going to look like I was imitating her.
As Tiffany sang, the girls on the couches smiled. They could all be called Mona, so complete was their collective mastery of the don’t-you-wonder-what-I’m-thinking? smirk. I’d been checking them continually, hoping to catch even one of them in the act of eyeball rolling or eyebrow raising. As yet, they had given not the slightest clue of whom they did or didn’t like.
When Tiffany finished, she flushed with pleasure and, eyes to the ground, scurried back to the seat next to mine. “Do you think they liked me?” she whispered.
“That was my song,” I hissed.
“I didn’t think you’d mind.” Not only didn’t she sound sorry, she was actually smiling a little. Another Mona: she’d fit right in.
“Katie? O’Connor? Is Katie here?” It took me a minute to remember that that was supposed to be my name.
“Here!” I popped up.
“You ready?” skinny Vanessa asked.
“To sing, you mean?” I asked stupidly.
“Yes. To sing.” At last—a raised eyebrow. Goody.
I walked to the middle of the horseshoe. During Tiffany’s solo, I’d been so busy thinking venomous thoughts that I hadn’t had time to think of another song to sing. I’d have to pull an instant replay, I thought miserably. There simply wasn’t another song I knew well enough to perform, unless you counted “I Will Survive,” that silly song from the seventies. After Tim dumped me, Marcy bought me a tape of the song and forced me to drink vodka and cranberry juice until I stood on my bed and belted it out. From then on, every time I got depressed about Tim, she made me perform. I sang the song a lot. Marcy was really supportive during that time. She gave me endless pep talks about how men are scum and how I didn’t need a man. Of course, she was already married to Dan, which didn’t do a hell of a lot for her credibility.
Still, no matter how many times I had sung that song, I never quite pulled it off. I needed something easier, catchy and simple and not too challenging. Only one song came to mind. I tried desperately to think of something else, but time had run out. What the hell. At least I could say I tried. I put my hands on my hips and flapped my elbows back and forth. “Cock-a-doodle,” I began. “Cock-a-doodly-doo . . .”
As I
sang, some of the Mona’s mouths began to twitch, then they revealed, miraculously—teeth! They were smiling! There was even a little finger snapping. When I finished, I grinned at them. They grinned back. As I walked back to my seat, I looked at the girls on the folding chairs and knew that, for that one glorious moment, every one of them hated me.
After that, I couldn’t face another dinner with Tiffany—I couldn’t face another minute with Tiffany—but I feared the repercussions of slipping out with any fellow hall mates. So, rather than heading back to the dorm after the auditions, I walked in the opposite direction, to where my forlorn Civic sat in a vast lot, and drove to the A&P on the edge of town. In Mercer, the service and retail hot spots—the A&P, the Jiffy Lube, the Denny’s—had all been banished to the border. As such, there was surprisingly heavy traffic for such a small town.
The A&P was old, scruffy and underheated. The fruit was underripe; the lettuce was wilted. There was no organic milk or fat-free cream cheese. It was the only grocery store in town, though, so it was packed.
I filled my handheld basket with a bag of Hawaiian sweet rolls, an apple and a rotisserie chicken so hot that steam coated the inside of its hard plastic container. I was well within acceptable express line limits: “12 Items or Less.” (It should be “12 Items or Fewer,” a detail that never fails to annoy me, although I know I should get over it.) In front of me, a little girl with carefully styled corkscrew curls and perfectly straight blond bangs turned around and smiled. She had pale blue eyes fringed with eyelashes so light they were almost invisible. Her lavender T-shirt read PRINCESS. I smiled back.
Her blond mother gently stroked the girl’s silky head. The girl leaned against her instinctively. The mother turned just enough for me to see her face. I stepped back in shock, knocking into the man behind me. “Sorry,” I murmured as I scurried off to join another line before Chantal could see me.