Her friend Shannon got her interested in the markers of academic excellence—dean’s list and Latin honors and Phi Beta Kappa. Things Sam had never given any thought to before, but now wanted to achieve no matter the cost. She sometimes felt like she and Shannon were competing, but in a healthy way. As Isabella put it, they were both destined to prevail in the nerd Olympics, it was only a question of who would win silver and who would win gold.
Isabella and Lexi periodically took an entire day off from classes. Mental health day! Isabella would declare, switching on the TV from her bed.
Lexi was adopted from Korea when she was a year old. Her mother was her father’s fourth wife. Lexi was her mother’s only child and her father’s fifth. They were divorced by the time she started kindergarten. From then on, she and her mother lived in a two-story luxury condo in Chicago, overlooking Lake Michigan. Lexi attended an all-girls high school that cost as much as their college.
“Everyone was either a shoplifter or a bulimic,” Lexi said once. “It was so dumb.”
Sam wondered which category Lexi had belonged to.
Isabella was the fourth generation of women in her family to attend the college. She bragged that she would have gotten in even if she had walked into the library and set it on fire during her campus interview. A chair in the French department was endowed in her grandmother’s name. (Sam wasn’t sure what this meant. If there was an actual chair with a plaque on it somewhere. She figured it had to be more than that, but didn’t want to ask.)
Sam had gotten in, she assumed, based on her essay. It was about President Washington—Shirley Washington, president of the college. Even when she wrote it, Sam knew the topic was a risk, bordering on sycophantic. But what she wrote was true: When Sam was in high school, President Washington had given a speech that went viral online. She talked about how she was the first in her family to attend college, how there should be no barriers to entry, how all women deserved a first-rate education, regardless of race, age, or ability to pay. When Sam saw the speech, it awakened something in her.
Once she was on campus, Sam learned that she wasn’t alone in her love. President Washington was a celebrity. A smile from her, a hello spoken in passing, were things a person held on to and talked about for weeks. When she addressed the student body in Driscoll Hall, they chanted her name: Shir-ley! Shir-ley! Shir-ley! They stomped their feet, and it seemed like the balcony might collapse beneath the weight of their enthusiasm.
Sam tried to read now, but she couldn’t follow the words on the page. She kept looking over at Clive, as if to be certain he was actually there.
Lately, she had been struggling against the sensation that her life here was second to her real life with him. But now he was here, and Sam felt strange. She needed air.
She went down the back stairs and through the dining hall to get outside. The room smelled like sweat and Axe body spray. Music pounded through her. She felt as if she’d landed here from another world entirely.
Tables and chairs had been stacked against walls to make space for a dance floor, which was full of underclasswomen from all over campus flirting with guys who claimed to go to State, though half of them were most likely still in high school.
Sam didn’t see any of her friends in the crowd. They were probably off in a corner, talking among themselves. Two or three years ago, a couple of them might have flirted, tried to meet someone, but they knew well enough now that there was no one here to meet. If a guy tried to engage one of them, the others tightened the circle.
Two bros leaned against a table, debating something, shoving each other every so often, sloshing beer onto the floor. When Sam got close, she saw that the short one in the brown jacket was dragging the sharp point of a bottle opener back and forth across the tabletop, carving a straight line into the wood.
“Do you mind?” she said. “People live here.”
He looked up at her. He slid the opener into his pocket.
“Sorry,” he said.
Sam was surprised at how direct she’d been. Impressed, even. She couldn’t wait to tell Gaby about the exchange.
Her friends on the kitchen staff would be the ones to have to deal with the mess in the morning. Maria often said she had raised two boys, but nothing had prepared her for how disgusting a bunch of college girls could be. After every Saturday night party, there were pools of vomit on the dining hall floor.
Each spring, there was an all-campus food fight in the quad. Nobody seemed to wonder who cleaned up afterward, but it was them, Sam’s friends, and the dining and housekeeping staffs of other dorms. She always went out and tried to help, though they shooed her away.
Gaby, Maria, and Delmi lived in Weaverville, a town thirty miles up the highway, that Sam had heard of but never been to. They took an hour-long bus ride to campus each day. Working an early morning shift, exhausted or hungover or both, Sam had always been careful not to complain. She had only had to climb out of bed, wash her face, and stumble downstairs to get to work.
When she first worked with them, the women talked mostly among themselves, ignoring the student workers in the kitchen other than to tell them what to do. For some reason, Sam wanted in on their conversation. At one point, she listened as they whispered about Delmi’s brother, who’d been injured on a construction site.
She blurted out, “My dad works in construction too, building houses.”
Actually, he was a contractor.
Sam added, “I’m the first person in my family to ever go to school at a place like this.”
She knew what she was doing. She was trying to say I am one of you, not one of them. A slightly desperate move, but it seemed to work. After that, they included her. They let her keep her frozen daiquiri mix and chicken nuggets in the industrial freezer, and even gave her a key so she could get her stuff out whenever she liked.
At the end of each week, when they emptied the refrigerators, Maria wrapped up any decent-looking leftovers so she and Delmi could take them home. Sometimes there would be a third foil-wrapped parcel on the counter for Sam.
“I saved you some of your favorite,” Maria would say, squeezing her hand.
* * *
—
Sam sat on the stoop, ignoring the crowds coming and going from the party.
Ramona’s Volvo was parked out front. Sam recognized it by the slightly askew OBAMA ’08 bumper sticker. It was entirely possible Ramona herself had put it there, even though she could neither drive nor vote in 2008.
All of Sam’s friends regretted not being born four years sooner, so that they might have been a part of that historic night. Sam was fifteen when Obama was elected. She remembered hearing horns honking, voices cheering, on their quiet suburban street. Shannon said it was the first time she ever saw her father cry. To have a president who looked like him, he said, was one of the great surprises of his life. He hadn’t thought it possible until it happened.
In 2012, they went to vote as a group. They took pictures in front of the school gymnasium where they cast their first ballots, lined up shoulder to shoulder like high school seniors before the prom. It was somewhat exciting, but it lacked the drama of the previous election. They had paid vague attention to the polls. They knew already who the winner would be.
Sam thought of texting Isabella now to come outside and talk. Isabella always had good things to say about Clive, which Sam knew was entirely for her benefit. When Sam asked if she thought she was rushing into things by agreeing to marry him, Isabella said, “On the one hand, definitely. On the other hand, six months together when you’ve lived together for part of the time is different than just six months. Cohabitation is like dog years.”
Sam didn’t text her. She was almost positive that, soon enough, she would feel normal again. She didn’t want Isabella to have a bad story about Clive to file away and offer up as proof of something later on. Besides, Isabella woul
d try to drag her into the party, and that felt like a betrayal of Clive somehow.
After ten minutes or so, she felt a familiar desire to be with him. It was a feeling she was used to having to endure. But this time, for once, Clive was right upstairs.
When she got to her room, he was awake. Lying in bed with his arm flexed, his head resting on his fist, waiting for her. He gave her a familiar grin.
A pulse of desire went through her.
“Where’d you go off to?” he said.
“Just needed a little air. I thought you’d be passed out till morning.”
“Nope. I’ve got my second wind. Let’s take that walk you promised me.”
Sam smiled. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
They walked downtown, holding hands, laughing. Every business was shut besides the fancy Italian restaurant and Lanchard’s, a dive bar where local guys hung around shooting pool, watching ESPN, eating bowls of cold popcorn, and smoking in the bathroom. Sam and her friends went there often, but only because some of them weren’t twenty-one yet, and the doorman accepted even the worst fake IDs.
She and Clive sat on a bench outside the post office, talking, huddled together, his arm around her shoulder. It was just like it had always been when they were alone. Sam felt drunk with love.
When they got home, they brushed their teeth together, each with an arm wrapped around the other’s waist, as ridiculous as that was. They had sex in her bed, then watched an old episode of Frasier and ate the package of chocolate digestives he’d brought.
When the credits ran at the end of the show, Clive said, “Oh! I have something for you.”
He got out of bed, still naked, reached into his suitcase, and pulled out a little hardcover book with a print of roses across the front.
“Not what I was looking for, but this is also for you,” he said. “Spotted it at my mum’s house, and I figured you’d probably never read it, but that you’d love it. It’s a nearly perfect novel.”
He handed the book to her.
Sam read the title. Angel by Elizabeth Taylor.
Just as she was opening her mouth to ask the question, Clive said, with a hint of condescension, “No, not that Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Obviously,” she said.
“That name was a curse for the poor woman,” he went on. “Had she married someone else and had some other name, she might not have ended up one of the most underrated writers of all time.”
Sam considered this strange form of bad luck as Clive continued to rummage around in the suitcase.
Finally, he found a cardboard tube, and took from it two pieces of rolled-up construction paper.
“From Freddy and Sophie,” he said.
She had drawn a rainbow and he had drawn a bird, and they had both written the words I LOVE YOU, AUNTIE SAM.
“I miss them,” Sam said.
Twice over the summer, Clive’s brother and sister-in-law had come to visit them in London with the kids for a weekend. Nicola and Miles went off on their own for one night each time, and Sam and Clive took Freddy and Sophie to the toy store and out for dinner. Unlike many other people in their families, the children had no judgment about Sam and Clive as a couple. He was so good with them. Sam could easily picture a whole, happy life with him in those moments.
“I’m going to tape these up first thing,” she said. “Let’s FaceTime them tomorrow, yeah?”
“Sure thing, babe,” he said.
Sam fell asleep soon after, more content than she’d been in weeks.
* * *
—
She awoke the next morning to the unmistakable sound of someone trying to be quiet. She heard drawers open and shut and opened her eyes to see Isabella, rifling around in her dresser.
“Sorry!” she whispered. “I’ll be out in a sec. Trying to find my headphones. You haven’t seen them, have you?”
“No,” Sam said. She pulled the comforter over Clive’s bare back.
Of course, she knew that Isabella would need access to the room sometimes, but still she was annoyed—headphones hardly seemed essential.
“How was the first night?” Isabella said, whispering, but loudly. A stage whisper.
“Good. How was yours?”
“The usual. Lexi split a bottle of Goldschläger with some frat boy and ended up puking these beautiful gold flakes.”
“Hmm,” Sam said.
Clive stirred beside her.
She willed him to stay asleep. But instead he woke up fully and said, “Hello there.”
“Hiya,” Isabella said. “Welcome to America!”
“Thanks.”
They had spent very little time together in London. A week after Sam arrived for the summer, Isabella went home. Isabella and Clive had never quite clicked, but they tried to be nice to each other for her sake.
Clive reached his arm down to the floor and scooped up his boxer briefs, then shimmied into them under the covers.
Sam felt like there was something indecent about it. She wished Isabella had knocked before coming in, or that Clive would have had the good sense to pretend to be asleep until she left.
When he stood and said, “I’ll just pop to the loo,” Sam blurted out, “Wear pants!”
He gave her a funny look. “Did you think I was going to go wandering pantsless down the hall?”
Clive found his jeans and T-shirt from the night before slung over a chair. He put them on and left the room, whistling.
Isabella said, “He’s got a really good body for an old guy.”
Sam threw a pillow at her.
She was totally naked under the comforter. She held it up to her chin. Her friends here were all so casual about nudity. Isabella would spend entire mornings sitting around in just panties and a bra, like some man’s fantasy of what a college girl did in her spare time.
“Should I wait for you two for breakfast?” Isabella said.
“No,” Sam said quickly, deciding on the spot that there was no way she was taking him into the dining hall if she could help it.
Isabella shrugged. “Okay, see you later.”
For a moment, Sam was alone. She looked out the window, down at the cars whizzing along Main Street. She felt certain that every one of those drivers had themselves figured out in a way she never would. How was it possible to be happy with someone one minute, and mortified the next? To feel at once like a woman, and like a stupid kid? Would it ever get better?
Yes, she reminded herself. When she was no longer living here, in this in-between place. When they could be together again for real.
When Clive came back, she said, “I was thinking breakfast in bed could be fun.”
“Mmm,” he said, nodding approvingly.
“I’ll go down to the dining hall and get us each a plate. You want a bagel? Eggs? French toast? Potatoes? Bacon?”
“All of the above,” he said. “But first, there’s something else I’d like to do in your bed.”
“Oh,” Sam said. She pushed the comforter onto the floor. “By all means. Have at it.”
* * *
—
Over the course of the weekend that followed, Sam thought often of a line from one of Gil’s picture books: The walls became the world all around.
They never left her room. They spent Saturday and Sunday in bed, with hardly any clothes on, just talking and watching movies on TV and touching at all times, as if to make up for the days and weeks they’d been forced to spend apart.
They ordered Chinese delivery on Saturday night. Otherwise, Sam went to the dining hall at mealtimes, before it got crowded, and filled a Tupperware with enough food for them both.
The women in the kitchen made fun of her when she ducked in to grab coffee on Sunday morning, holding a container heaped with toast and fruit and eggs.
On the other side of the door, students could get coffee from a machine by pressing a button, but it was watered down, bitter. Sam had gotten used to drinking the good coffee they brought from home and brewed for themselves, back when she worked the early morning shift. She still drank it most days.
“Looks like you’re working up an appetite,” Gaby said, nodding toward Sam’s plate.
“Let us see him!” Delmi said. “Are you keeping the man tied up, like he’s your prisoner?”
“Kinky,” Gaby said.
The older women didn’t laugh. Perhaps they thought it was inappropriate, or maybe they just didn’t get the joke.
“I want all the details,” Gaby said, quieter now so that only Sam could hear. “Come on. I live in my mother’s spare bedroom with a toddler. Let me live vicariously!”
Sam laughed. “We’re just—reading a lot.”
Gaby smirked. “Right.”
Sam thought their dorm-room hideaway was romantic, at first. But by the third day, the room smelled like sex and pizza. Clive’s open suitcase and dirty clothes seemed to take up every available inch of space on the floor. She kept climbing and tripping over his things. There was a stack of dishes by the door, which she kept forgetting to bring downstairs, as if by magical thinking she might summon someone from room service to come pick them up.
On Monday morning, Sam surveyed the room and said, “Why don’t we go out and do something?”
Elisabeth had given her the day off when she heard Clive would be visiting.
They decided on a hike. She packed a picnic in the dining hall just before lunch, filling her backpack with sandwiches and cookies wrapped in paper napkins. She added two shiny red apples.
Friends and Strangers Page 11