Been There, Done That (19 page)

I laughed. “And call ourselves the Sacrificial Virgins.”

They all smiled politely but, aside from the spiky haired girl, who snorted, looked mildly hurt. Someone actually sighed. I had hit a nerve. Perhaps they were collectively ashamed of their famed promiscuity. Yeah. That was it. Surely I wasn’t so stupid that I’d gotten myself into the wrong singing group.

Soft-spoken Shelby offered another idea. “We could just wear our old prom dresses. Mine was a Jessica McClintock. It was really pretty.” She smiled, revealing a mouth full of braces. I’d bet money Shelby was one of those students who treated every class as if it were a personal conversation between herself and the professor. Maybe she just spoke quietly so people would strain to listen to her.

The spiky-haired girl shook her head. The chain that connected her nose ring to her earring swayed gently. “Nuh-uh. The only way I’m putting myself into lace is if I get to accessorize with Doc Martens and biker gloves.”

I nodded. “I like it. Really. Taffeta with high-tops, a little leather here and there. It’s . . . ironic.” I nodded at my own choice of words. Irony was very big with this generation.

Penny shook her head. “People would laugh at us.”

I shook my head. “No, they wouldn’t. We’d be laughing at ourselves first.”

“The Red Hots might get away with a stunt like that,” Penny said. I sensed quiet hissing. “But we have traditionally been more conservative.” There were two singing groups. I had joined the conservative one. This was bad. Bad, bad, bad. I tried to convince myself that Gigi, Shelby and all the other gawky girls were closet tramps. They were so brimming with self doubts and poor body images, they were positively ripe for meaningless sexual encounters.

“I think Katie’s got a point,” Vanessa said. “It’s like we’re saying we’re so above that corny high school crap. And we are, aren’t we? I am, anyway.”

Before we began to sing, Shelby spoke again. “There’s just this other thing I wanted to ask? Our meetings? Are they always at this time? Because my Christian fellowship group meets now, and I’d really like to be able to do both.”

I was toast.

 
 
Jeremy poked his head out of his door as I walked past. “Hey, Katie. How’d the rehearsal go?”

“Okay.” I tried to sound nonchalant. He followed me to my room. I sat on my bed, leaving the maple desk chair for him. He perched on the edge, then sprang up, too antsy to sit still. He looked like he had something to say, but he didn’t say it. I spoke to fill an increasingly awkward pause. “We’re changing our name. The Wallflowers, I mean.”

“Oh?” He looked confused, as if I’d changed the subject, when, in fact, I had not. “To what?” He stuck his hands into the front pockets of his soft blue jeans. His forearms were brown and ropy with muscles.

“The Alternative Prom Queens.”

His eyebrows shot up. “I like it.” And then, “Tiffany told me you’re Jewish,” he said abruptly. Oh, God—he was here for another talk: it’s bad enough that you’re a lush, but this lying has got to stop.

“I’m not really,” I said, ready to come clean. I pulled my backpack onto my lap and opened the front pocket. I rummaged around the pens before realizing I wasn’t actually looking for anything. I was just trying to expend some of my nervous energy.

“Oh, I know.” He shook his head. “You’re just half, and you’ve barely even been to Temple, and you love lobster.” He smiled. “You’re like me.”

“No. I’m not.” I looked into his eyes. How could I lie to him? “I’ve never been to Temple,” I said.

He shrugged. “I’ve only been once. My grandmother took me, and I was so young, I barely even remember it. My mother had a fit.” He snorted. “All those Jewish mother jokes—my mother’s nothing like that. Which is the point, I guess. Growing up, she didn’t dream of being a teacher or a nurse or even a housewife. She just dreamed of being Presbyterian.”

“That’s awfully specific,” I said.

“Okay, she would have preferred Episcopalian, but this was close enough.”

He told me everything. How his mother made him take tennis lessons and dance classes (“You saw what good those did”). How she developed a passion for sailing and shrimp cocktail. How she tried to keep him from making friends with children of dubious ethnicity (“Anyone whose name began or ended with an
o
was automatically out”). How his mother, Sylvia, once told she looked French, started calling herself Sylvie. This after a phase where she tried to head off any ethnic connotations by saying her name was “Sylvia—like Sylvia Plath the poet.” As Jeremy remarked, “The suicide bit didn’t faze her. Sylvia Plath was a pure-bred WASP who went to a Seven Sisters school, and that was good enough.”

As for his father: “He sells life insurance, which explains a lot, I guess—everything’s very big picture, like how much are you going to have when it’s all over. Also, he’s a big believer in the American dream; anybody can work their way up, and all that. So he doesn’t care if someone’s Jewish or black or Chinese, as long as they’re not poor. He has no patience for poor people. He believes welfare shouldn’t be reformed, it should be abolished. His father was a roofer—my mother doesn’t like to talk about that—and he figures if he could make it to the middle class, why can’t everyone else?”

“And he thinks you should be a doctor.”

“No, he’s
decided
I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Why?”

“My second-grade teacher said I had this incredible aptitude for science. That pretty much sealed it for my dad. That’s what I get for being able to name all the planets.” As he talked, he walked idly around the room, examining the posters before settling on my bed, close enough to talk, but not awkwardly so.

I’d never heard Jeremy talk so much about himself. He told me that he wanted to travel after graduation, that he wanted adventure. He told me he wanted to “get more in touch with myself.” Then he laughed and said, “I can’t believe I just said something so trite.” But after all those years about not thinking about religion (“Officially, we belong to the local Presbyterian church, but we didn’t actually show up except for the occasional Easter”), he’d been wondering about his Jewish side. He told me about his mother’s parents, and about his cousins—how warm they were, how funny and open. How they made him feel he should explore his heritage.

This was so not the time to say, “The thing about me being Jewish? It was a total lie to avoid spending time with Tiffany.” Instead, I allowed a long, full pause into the one-sided soul-bearing discussion. “So, what’s your Jewish mother like?” he finally asked.

I tried to skirt the question. “It’s not my mother who’s Jewish, it’s my father.”

He wrinkled his eyebrows. “O’Connor?”

I couldn’t believe I’d made that mistake twice.

“Changed from Cohen.”

He nodded. Then he put his hand on my cheek and held it there. For a wild, incredibly stupid second, I thought he was giving me a Hebrew blessing. But then he leaned forward and kissed me. My lips tingled. My stomach warmed. Then I realized who and where I was, and I lurched away. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.” I put my hand over my lips in a bizarre gesture of modesty. I felt like a child molester.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought . . . I don’t know. We seemed to connect and—”

“Just because I’m—Jewish?” I asked.

“No, of course not. I’ve liked you from the beginning.” He stood up and tugged at his golden brown curls. He looked about sixteen years old. “I guess I thought it was mutual, but it’s not, I guess, and . . . and . . .” He let out a huge, agonized sigh. “I feel like such a jerk.”

“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s me.” And that was true, perhaps for the first of all the millions of times that line has been uttered.

“Right,” he said glumly. Good God, he looked like he was going to cry. I wondered if he’d ever said those same words to any of the leagues of girls who’d fallen in love with his J. Crew looks.

“No, really.” I put my hand on his arm, but when I realized I wanted to keep it there, I took it away. “I have this thing, this problem with men. I’m not sure how I feel about them.” Once again, I was allowing a speck of honesty to float up above the lies.

He blinked at me. “You mean you’re . . . gay?”

I opened my mouth to speak, and then I shut it. I could hardly explain that the love of my life had dumped me on my butt a week after my twenty-ninth birthday. I could hardly say that I’d vowed to only date men who I could conceivably end up marrying some day. I could hardly say that he’d be perfect if I were ten years younger—except that if I were ten years younger, he’d be eleven. I looked at the floor. “I’m not sure yet,” I whispered.

He stroked my hair, much of his confidence clearly regained: it really
was
me and not him. “When you spent the night in Boston, I just assumed it was with a man.” He gazed at me, oozing sympathy. “I guess you’ve got a lot to work out.”

“I guess I do.”

 
 
Tim answered his phone on the first ring. “What’s new, Kath?” he asked. By now, I knew he had Caller ID, so I wasn’t surprised that he knew it was me.

I’d planned to make it all funny, and I didn’t know what to do about that catch in my throat. “I’m a Jewish lesbian,” I blurted out.

twenty-three

Okay, so I should have come clean to Tim about my screwup with the Wallflowers (which were, as I’d told Jeremy, henceforth to be known as the Alternative Prom Queens). I could have slipped it in: “The group that I thought were hookers? The funniest thing—they’re just a bunch of girls who like to sing!” But Tim was so sympathetic about my new identity crisis (“I’m sure there are plenty of Jewish lesbians who live happy, full lives”) that I didn’t want to ruin the moment, especially after he said, “Great work—I’m really impressed” when I told him about the incident I’d witnessed the night before. I was even dumb enough to feel all warm and tingly when he said he’d come up for my first concert. Maybe then we could talk about our kiss—and what it meant for our future. It wasn’t until I got off the phone that I realized what a disaster that would be. One look and he’d know what I should have figured out from the beginning: that I’d hooked myself up with a bunch of virgins.

I tried not to think about it. I was so busy with classes and rehearsals, I barely had time to think about why I was at Mercer in the first place. I began to envision a new kind of article, a human interest piece not unlike the one we had proposed to Dr. Archer: thirty-something career gal infiltrates freshman hall and tells all—how college kids have changed over the years, their priorities and their goals. I floated it by Tim, who said, “I hate those gimmicky pieces.” Then, to smooth my ruffled feathers, he added, “Though I’m sure you’d do a great job on it.”

The Alternative Prom Queens had scheduled a concert already, so we were rehearsing constantly. Add to that time for shopping and alterations, and I was hardly ever in the dorm. Our new look was a radical departure from the novitiate garb. We were to dress as, well, alternative prom queens. Taffeta was
de riguer
, but creative alterations and accessories were encouraged. After a night at my apartment, I claimed to have hit the jackpot at a thrift store and presented the group with three frilly monstrosities. “Can you believe anyone would actually wear these?”

In truth, they were former bridesmaid dresses. I don’t care how pretty something is at first glance (not that any of these were); once you’ve seen the exact same dress on three to ten other women (not to mention the occasional flower girl), it’s hard to love it. I unloaded a shiny turquoise tent, worn for my cousin Sharon’s wedding, and the purple velvet thing I’d worn as a bridesmaid for this girl called Celine. When Celine worked—briefly—in
Salad
’s advertising department, we went out for drinks two or three times. I was astonished when she asked me to be in her wedding—and had no prepared excuse for why I couldn’t do it since I never, ever could have seen it coming. She had ten bridesmaids at her wedding, though, and I, too, would have been hard-pressed to come up with ten really close friends. Still, I kept wondering if any of the others had ever seen her through a bad breakup or a death in the family or even a bad case of the flu, or whether she’d chosen us all because she thought we’d look good in purple velvet.

As for the third frilly dress, it came from Marcy’s wedding. That one I kept for myself. I was her maid of honor, after all. The dress was peach lace, and it looked downright fetching when I cut it to mini length and paired it with red high-tops.

Relations with Tiffany were becoming even more strained. She had a boyfriend—her first, as far as I knew—but instead of growing giggly and elated, she had become even more morose and nervous. Ethan and Tiffany had met in a study group, but from what I’d walked in on one afternoon, it appeared that they were engaging in some highly un-studious behavior. After that time, I jiggled my key in the lock for a while before entering. I never caught them again, however; he wasn’t around much. Tiffany, on the other hand, was almost always in the room, engaged in the age-old pursuit of waiting by the phone. When she did go out, to classes, mostly, the first thing she’d ask upon her return was, “Did I get any calls?”