Gathering Clouds (3 page)

I was dying to tell someone, to talk about it, even to talk to Victoria about it.

She was doing homework at nearly midnight on Saturday night when I stopped in her doorway.

Any other sister in the universe would have looked up and asked, “How was the dance, your date?”

Any other sister would beg to know the smallest details.

Victoria glanced at me and then turned a page in her math text.

“We didn’t stay until the end of the dance,” I said. I thought that might just tickle her curiosity.

“I’m sure it was boring,” she offered.

“It wasn’t. It was fun. The band was great. Harrison wanted to be alone with me. We went to his parents’ guesthouse.”

She raised her gaze from the book and finally looked at me.

“Mother and Father would be upset to know that,” she said. It had the tone of a threat.

“Why?” I said full of disappointment and anger now, “we only played a game of Parcheesi.”

“I’ll bet,” she said and looked at her textbook again. I turned to go to my own room. “Who won?” she asked, not looking up.

“Neither of us,” I said. “We stopped before it ended.”

She looked at me again.

And for a moment, maybe a split second, she looked like she was really interested now and wanted to know, but she snuffed out her own candle of curiosity and returned to her private darkness and I withdrew to mine.

Mine wasn’t darkness exactly. I went to sleep that night thinking that maybe what the poets said about love and passion was true after all.

Maybe if they weren’t hand in hand you couldn’t get into that rocket ship and feel like you were almost having a heart attack.

Yes, I thought, perhaps I had learned a wonderful thing and I had not spent my precious treasure foolishly after all.

I vowed I would never hand another boy my keys without love.

I had my share of boyfriends throughout my high school life. I went to two proms and many dances and on dates. I was as popular as anyone in my class and was even elected class president in my junior year. On a two-week European trip our school sponsored, I had my most passionate romance. It was with the young French guide Julian Lambert. He was twenty-five, but I didn’t surrender my precious treasure again. We went from France to Italy to Spain and then to London. There were twenty of us, fifteen girls and five boys. I was a senior by then and had done well enough in my schoolwork to satisfy my parents, although my mother never ceased to tell me she thought I was underachieving.

She seemed finally to surrender it.

“Maybe you’ll always be an underachiever when it comes to academics, Megan, but you seem wise enough in other ways to do well for yourself.”

It was the best compliment she had ever given me and I was feeling good about myself by then. I knew I was very pretty. Most pretty girls pretend to be surprised when they’re told about their exceptional looks. They bat their eyelashes and bring on a blush and try to look humble when it’s pretty obvious they’re snobby and arrogant to the core of their bones. They act like they don’t even go to the bathroom.

Like most of my friends, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and what, if any career I wanted to pursue. Going to college just seemed to be the next thing to be done. If you weren’t getting married or joining the armed forces, or taking a position in your father and mother’s business, what else would you do?

My guidance counselor, Mr. Martin, visibly exhibited his frustration with me when he reviewed my grades and my extracurricular interests. He ran down a list of choices as if I were shopping the rest of my life that very afternoon in his office.

“Do you want to do something in the arts? Journalism? Television? Drama? Graphic arts?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Do you want to be in the business world? Banking? Finance? What about clothing, designer clothing, fashion? Cosmetics?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t want to do something in medicine, do you?” he asked, grimacing in anticipation as if he expected me to say yes and then he would have to tell me how difficult it would be for someone with my grades in science.

“Oh, no. I hate the sight of blood.”

He sat back.

“Teaching? What about that? You like working with young people?”

“I don’t know. I never have,” I said.

He stared. He had a habit of chewing on the inside of his mouth when he was annoyed.

“Okay, what do you want to do?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Why do I have to make up my mind today?”

“You don’t, but I can help you choose the right college for you if I have some indication of your interest. Some schools are better for this or that.”

“I’m going to attend the same college my mother attended and I’ll be in the same sorority she was in, I’m sure.”

“Um,” he said. “Okay, that’s a start, I suppose.”

“Start of what?”

“A future,” he said dryly. He wrote something in my folder and never called me into his office again. When he wished me luck on graduation day, he sounded like he really meant it, like he believed any success I might enjoy in my life was totally dependent upon luck and not effort. Maybe he knew more than I thought he knew about me.

My parents had a big party for me, as did many of the parents for their children in my graduating class. We all actually left our own parties to attend each other’s. Victoria didn’t want to come along, which was a relief for me. It was a night of traveling in a wild caravan, drinking and singing and kissing boys we wouldn’t say hello to ordinarily. When the night ended and the realization set in that we were all going our separate ways and our carefree days of irresponsibility might indeed be over, a dark sadness took over. It was as if someone had dimmed the lights, popped all the balloons, and sent home all the musicians in the world. The silence of early morning was deafening, a roar of emptiness and loneliness all wrapped into the approaching dawn. I embraced my bed like a long-lost lover and hoped I would sleep through the next day.

I didn’t. Or I couldn’t, was more like it. We were all going to spend the first few weeks of summer at a resort in South Carolina owned by a close friend of my father’s. Victoria hated the thought of it and tried to get left behind to apprentice at my father’s real estate office as she had done the previous summer, but this time Mother insisted we all be together. She said there wouldn’t be all that many times like this in the future. Victoria’s face was full of “So what?” I saw how important it was for Daddy, so I did my best to be enthusiastic.

For me the summer would be aborted anyway. I had to attend orientation at my college and would leave by mid-August. I was as excited about it as any of my other friends, even though I wasn’t sure what I intended to do with myself, and even though I wasn’t sure a college education was that necessary for me. When I made the mistake of voicing this thought, my mother pounced.

“What do you want to do, Megan, stay home as did Margaret Carlson and wait for your parents to find a suitable young man for her to marry? Accompany your mother as she does to all the events older ladies attend? Mope about the house waiting for this Prince Charming? I can’t imagine what she does all day, can you?”

Margaret Carlson had graduated the year before and was very shy. In the high school yearbook, there was only one extracurricular activity next to her name – Audubon Society. Watching and identifying birds was about as venturous as she would be.

“Of course not, Mother. I’m just confused,” I said.

“Eventually, you will become unconfused,” she predicted. It was more like a prayer.

In the end I was sure she wished I had been another Margaret Carlson.

Mother’s college was a small, all-girls’ private school near Jamestown. My friends thought it would be horrible to attend and all-girls’ school, but I knew from perusing my mother’s college yearbooks and periodicals that they were inundated with boys from nearby coed colleges. There was something mystical about an all-girls’ school as far as most boys were concerned. It was as if they believed that because we were surrounded most of the day by only girls, we would be easier targets for sex and romance, hungrier for their company.

Mother believed in a woman’s college, especially for me, because studies showed women were more apt to succeed and find their way and purpose at an all-girls’ school. She proudly rattled off the statistics that proved women were more serious about their studies, interacted with their teachers more, and generally were more successful in the business world.

None of that particularly impressed or attracted me, but I knew the school was very expensive and would probably be the most comfortable of any I could attend. Daddy gave me a car over Mother’s vehement objections. It was a red Jaguar. He wanted me to always have the option of coming home. She said it would only provide temptation, waste my time, and give more distraction just when I needed less.

Victoria agreed with Mother, but from a different point of view. Of all the cars to buy me, she said, this one made the least financial sense. It wasn’t fuel efficient and was too small for my bags.

Daddy ignored the both of them. He took me aside and said, “This is your time, Megan. Let your hair down, feel the wind, and enjoy. They’ll be plenty of time to be sensible later.”

If Mother had known what he said, she would probably have had him shot on the spot.

I did have an impossible time trying to fit the things I wanted to take with me in the car. Daddy told me he would have everything sent anyway, so I shouldn’t be concerned. In the end, I drove onto campus with the top down, the wind in my hair, just as he had urged. Some of the other girls had sports cars, too, especially the older girls.

I could have had a private room in the dorm if I had wanted, but I chose to have a roommate and I didn’t care who or what she was. As it turned out, she was an African-American girl, Lynette Robinson, the daughter of a famous NBA basketball player. She quickly became the school’s basketball star, having inherited her father’s talent and being five feet eleven and a half herself.

We hit it off immediately. Aside from her obsession with basketball, she was just an ordinary girl, unspoiled by her father’s fame. Her mother was a very attractive woman who was nearly five feet eleven. One thing I loved about Lynette and her parents was how at ease they made me feel by not being in the least defensive or concerned about our racial differences. When Victoria discovered my roommate was black, she grimaced and asked me how I dealt with it, as if I were rooming with a disabled girl or something.

“To tell you the truth, Victoria,” I replied, “I don’t even think about her being black. We just have a great time together. She’s a lot smarter than I am and usually helps me with the homework and research. Even though she’s so tall, she and her mother are very fashion-conscious. We love the same designers. Like me she loves wearing stylish hats. It’s just too bad we can’t share clothes.”

“You would share clothes with her?”

“Why not?”

Victoria shook her head and looked at me as if I were a truly different animal. Once again, I felt sorrier for her than she would have likes, but all I could think was
Victoria has so many hang-ups, she’ll never be happy.

She visited me at the college only once, and that was two months after the school year had started. She came along with our parents to Parents’ Day at the school when they were shown around the campus, attended some classes, and heard in more detail about the subjects we were taking and the objectives and goals the college board had set out for all the students. There was a basketball game that night and they attended with me and watched Lynette play. She was the highest scorer and responsible for the team’s victory.

There were a number of boys from area schools attending the game, some of whom who were already seeing the older girls at our school, and some “just fishing,” as Tami Ryan, the president of the sorority that Mother wanted me to join, put it. I thought she was clever and funny, actually.

“They come here, cast their rods, dangle their bait, and hope one of us will bite,” she said.

Every even that attracted boys from area colleges was exciting for us. Despite Mother’s claim that all-girls’ colleges was exciting for us. Despite Mother’s claim that all-girls’ colleges produced more serious-minded students, it was clear to me from day one that everyone was looking for and hoping for a wonderful and exciting romance.

I dated four different boys the first three months, but found each of them to be clones of Harrison McAlester. They talked so much about themselves, I wondered why I was even necessary. Money, the prestige around who their parents were, had shaped them into arrogant little princes. Being with them actually made mo more self-conscious about my own arrogance. Mother’s claims about my being spoiled resonated. I had come here blown up about myself, just as many of the other girls, and suddenly, seeing all that reflected in the high-society dates that were arranged for us disgusted me.

I had finally found some ambition. I wanted to be different.

I suppose that feeling, that desire, was a primary part of why I ended up dating Larry Ward, a friend of Lynette’s boyfriend Marcus Wells. It was truly unplanned. One Saturday in early November, Marcus and Lynette were going to take a ride to the beach to have lunch and walk along the beach. The day before, I had decided not to accept a second invitation for a date from Philip Rockingham. I suspected he was just the type of young man Mother would want to see me marry. He wasn’t bad-looking, but he never let me forget it either. In fact, I thought he was more enamored with his own looks than he was with mine. He bored me into a comatose state with his talk about his cars and boats and vacations on the French Riviera with his parents.

Maybe I was too spoiled to be spoiled. He took me to a very expensive restaurant on the first date. He had a Mercedes convertible. Afterward, I met some of his fraternity friends, one of whom was as self-absorbed as the next. I actually found them to be childish, immature, with their silly antics and dirty jokes and their efforts to impress each other and me by how much they could drink or smoke dope.

“I hate leaving you here,” Lynette said. “Why don’t you come with us?”

“And be a third wheel?”

“Marcus wanted to bring his friend Larry Ward,” she said. She let it hang in the air for a moment.

Lynette had this wonderful, healthy and bright smile highlighted by her impish ebony eyes and soft, full lips. She really looked more like a model than an athlete.

“Larry is very studious, a national achievement scholar and a published poet. Marcus is always trying to get Larry to ease up and have a good time. He might be fun to talk to and be with, knowing how you can unravel someone.”

“Unravel?”

“I see how you twist and turn some of the other girls, here, Megan,” she said laughing. “You come out with things that absolutely confuse them sometimes.”

“I had a lot of practice growing up with the sister I have,” I said.

“So? What do you say? It’d be just an afternoon. Nothing serious intended,” she added thinking she had to promise such a thing. “Of course, if you think your parents might not approve because he’s an African-American, I understand. It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”