Bodies and Souls (31 page)

The third boy I slept with at college is the reason I came home. At least he’s one of the reasons I drove home this weekend. Or perhaps it’s Paula Barry’s fault as much as Chad Bawden’s. Well, of course, part of the fault is mine.

Paula is going to be an art major; we have a lot in common, live in the same dorm. We have—had—an instant friendship, learned to confide in each other, to turn to each other when we wanted to celebrate or talk. So she knew about all the boys I dated, and she knew about the crush I had on Chad Bawden.

Chad’s a junior, a history major, and a basketball star. And he’s
nice
. He’s one of those rare men who can handle being handsome, popular, and a good jock without getting snobbish. He’s easy to be quiet with, and that quality reminded me of Michael. I smiled
at him until he asked me if I wanted to join him for a Coke, and I flirted with him over the Coke until he asked me to go to the movies. Part of the delight of it all was talking with Paula about it later. “Can you imagine!” I would say to Paula, smug with accomplishment. “I
saw
Chad, and I wanted to get him to date me, and I
did
it!” It was such fun listing each of Chad’s enviable qualities to Paula: His wealthy parents, admirable background, good grades, athletic honors, his easy kindness, his easy laughter. Chad was right for me. He was the person I should have fallen in love with and I wanted very much to fall in love with him. On our fourth date, we slept together in his apartment off-campus. We actually
slept
there, after making love, and woke up with each other in the morning. He brought me coffee in a cracked mug and told me I looked beautiful there in his messy bed, and I burst into tears which I could not explain to him or to myself. Why did I feel so bad when I had gotten what I wanted? Why did I wish that instead of being with this nice, acceptable man, I wanted to be with taciturn, difficult Michael—Michael, a
kid
! I drank my coffee and reached my arms out to Chad, determined to love this lovable man.

I’ll never know if it would have worked. For two weeks, we spent most of our time together. But Thursday my art teacher told me after class he wanted me to come back at four to discuss my project with him, and of course I agreed; I was excited by his special attention. I had told Chad I’d meet him at the deli at four, and I had no way to call him, so I asked Paula to go to the deli to tell him I’d be late. I had a great meeting with my art professor, who thinks I might be able to do something really fine, and I practically flew to the deli afterward. What a brilliant fall day it was—crisp, clear, sunny—one of those days when I felt the world has been created just to make a place for me to be alive in.

When I got to the deli, no one I knew was there. I went back to the dorm, and Chad wasn’t there. Neither was Paula. I waited around, feeling more and more whiny, and dinnertime came and I didn’t hear from Chad, and night came and Paula didn’t return to the dorm. I could hardly sleep that night, I was so suspicious—and my suspicions were correct. The next day Paula came into my room, glowing and pathetic with guilt. She told me she was in love with Chad and he was in love with her.

“I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I told him you’d be late, so we sat down to drink a Coke while he waited—and things just happened.”

I suppose if I’d really been in love with him I would have been too hurt to
confront him, but as it was, I was more angry than anything else. So when I passed him in the hall that afternoon, I stopped him.

“Hey,” I said, “what happened?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, looking embarrassed.

“I
mean
, why didn’t you wait for me?”

Chad looked truly puzzled. “Paula said you weren’t coming,” he said. “She said you had a date with someone else, someone important. She said—I thought—she said that now that you were seeing this other guy, I shouldn’t count on seeing you anymore. You sent her to—let me down easy.”

What could I have done? Yelled, “Paula is a liar”? I was so hurt and angry that I could only turn and walk away.

Later, as I was walking to my dorm, I saw Paula come out, and she couldn’t stop smiling. Chad was on the steps waiting for her; he bent to give her a quick kiss, then they walked off, holding hands.

I skipped my last class, threw my stuff into the car, and drove the hour’s drive home as fast as I could. Everything else faded in importance before this event, this double betrayal, and I couldn’t decide which was worse: Chad’s dropping me so easily for Paula, or Paula’s betraying me by lying to get him.

And at the very back of my mind, tempting as a fragrance, was the knowledge of Michael. Home was where Mother was, but home was also where Michael was.

Thank God Mother was home when I arrived. It was five o’clock when I burst unexpected into the house. Mother was sitting in her jeans and sweater in the living room, reading the newspaper. She took one look at me and rose up from the sofa, letting the paper scatter.

“Why, darling,” she said, “what’s wrong?”

That little overture of sympathy was all it took for me to burst into tears, and I raced to the sofa and collapsed in her arms. I told her all about Chad and me and Paula.

“I don’t want to go back to college,” I said. “I can’t stand the thought of living in that place. Every day I’d have to see Paula and Chad mooning around with each other. Every day I’d be reminded of—of everything. She
lied
. How could she
do
that when she knew how I felt about him? How could
he
do that when we’d been so close? Oh, I hate them both. Mom, I really don’t want to go back there. I want to stay here or switch colleges.”

“Mmm,” Mother said. “I see. Do you think you’ll find a college where this sort of thing won’t happen, where everyone is perfect?”

By then I was lying on the sofa with my head in Mother’s lap, and she was smoothing my hair with her hand. I was calming down, feeling safe, there on our old comfortable sofa, staring at the pine coffee table whose grain and knicks were as familiar to me as the creases of my hand.

“You’ve been betrayed before, you know,” Mother said.

“Nothing like this,” I replied.

“At the time it seemed even more important,” Mother said. “Remember when you were in the first grade? Cindy Patten was your best friend. You girls were inseparable. You and Cindy went to the drugstore. Cindy stole some lipsticks, then told her mother that
you
had taken them and put them in her coat pocket without her knowledge. She swore you took them. You swore you didn’t. It was hard knowing whom to believe—”

“Well,
Mother
!” I said, halfway sitting up with indignation. “I
didn’t
take them.
She
did. I saw her!”

“I know. I know. I believe you, for heaven’s sake. But think about it—you were so mad at Cindy you didn’t speak to her for a whole week. Then little by little the two of you drifted together again. And that’s just one incident I can remember. That sort of thing happens all the time, everywhere.”

“Then it’s a rotten world.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s pretty good. Be careful in your judgments—he who is without sin casts the first stone—”

“Mother! I’ve never done anything like this!”

“Oh, nonsense. Of course you have. We all have. Remember the time you and Diane Maloney went to the library? You were in the sixth grade then, and you were best friends. The library had just gotten in a huge new book on fashion, hairdos, finding your own style, beauty hints, all that stuff, geared to young teenagers. Diane found it first. She called you over, all excited. ‘Look what I found! This is the only thing I’m going to check out today. I’m going to take it home and read every page.’ And you looked so superior; you said, ‘I can’t believe you’re really interested in that. How embarrassing. Well, if you’re going to carry it around, you can walk home by yourself. I don’t want to be seen with you.’ You psyched her into putting it back on the shelf, and when she did, you grabbed it, said, ‘Ha-ha, now
I
get to read it
first
!’ ”

Mother and I both began to laugh. “That was a terrible thing to do, wasn’t it?” I said. “I’d forgotten about that. But I was so scared about going into seventh grade; I wanted so desperately to look gorgeous and sophisticated—”

“And Diane didn’t?”

“Well, Mother, we ended up sharing the book, after all. She came over and we looked at it together!”

“That’s true, but don’t miss the point. You
did
do a sleazy thing to get what you wanted. Maybe Paula wanted Chad more desperately than you did. Maybe they really fell in love. Anyway, you can’t stop going to that college because of that. If everyone ran away because of one or two betrayals—well, civilization wouldn’t function at all.” Mother was quiet for a time, stroking my hair. Then she said, “I think you should go to church on Sunday.”

So here I am. Sitting here, I feel safe, at home, yet I can’t help seeing things from a new perspective. I guess I’m growing up, getting jaded. Everyone in this church must at one time or another have betrayed someone. Everyone must have lied or cheated.

Several of the married men in this church have tried to have affairs with Mother. I can remember her refusing gracefully on the telephone, at the swimming pool, embarrassed because I was listening. I remember, when I was about fourteen, how Mother cried for weeks because Jake Vanderson had been calling her. His wife was off in Bermuda at a women’s golf meet. Mr. Vanderson took Mother out to dinner at a restaurant way down in Southmark so that no one would see them. Mother came home that evening and started crying so hard she could scarcely make it up the stairs. I was terrified. She had never been this way before. I kept asking her what was wrong, and she finally told me.

“I want to have an affair with Jake,” she said. “He’s handsome, intelligent, witty, sexy. Oh, God, I’m
so
attracted to him. And Lillian is such a drip. All she cares about is spending money. She has no compassion, no charity. I don’t owe her a thing. But I made a promise to myself when your father and I were divorced that I would
never
have an affair with a married man. And I won’t, I swear I won’t. But oh, Mandy, how I would like to spend just one night in his arms. He’s so tall—”

It was weird to see the Vandersons in church after that. They always looked so proper, so perfect. He wore such elegant clothes—tweed suits with vests, silk ties, and everyone, even the minister, treated him with such respect. For a while I lived in fear that
some Sunday I’d jump up in the middle of a sermon and yell, “Mr. Vanderson, how dare you look so perfect when you’re really such a creep, trying to have an affair with my mother, making her cry!” But I don’t know, after a while Mother got involved with someone else, and it all just faded in importance. Now when I see the Vandersons, I think nothing much except “Well, there are the Vandersons.” Of course, now I also think of Mrs. Vanderson laughing and trying to look seductive at Mrs. Halstead’s party with the male stripper. People are so strange.

Liza Howard is another one. It’s like having a cheetah lounging over there in the pew, some sleek cat who doesn’t belong in church. When I was little, I used to wish I were the most beautiful woman in the world. But after seeing Liza Howard, I wonder if amazing beauty isn’t a kind of curse. At least it must be a responsibility; she must feel she has to make use of her beauty in some way. She doesn’t seem to be interested in politics or feminism or art or a career or the town or anything except the way she looks. And the few times I’ve seen her in town she’s always been doing something like vamping the UPS man. I think she’s trapped by her beauty. There’s no way she could ever live like a normal person, because she gets treated the way celebrities must—when people are confronted with her, they get tongue-tied and act silly. She is so absolutely beautiful that she makes everyone else feel inferior, and embarrassed as if we chose the looks we were born with. So we are dazzled and inept in her presence, and furious at her when released from that presence.

Most beautiful people—fashion models, movie stars—give us hope, because they are human, and we think, well, maybe if I had my hair cut that way, or wore that shade of lipstick, I could be beautiful, too. I think that trying to be beautiful is not just vanity, it’s a celebration of existence. We are fluffing up our feathers against the cold of life, we are shining as brightly as we can while we can. I love seeing people at Mother’s cocktail parties, or the people I babysit for when they are dressed up to go out for an evening. They are not dressing to show off or attract; they are dressing up in order to make their existence gleam, as a sculptor will polish stone to make the surface shine. They must be thinking: Here I am. I’m alive, a unique reality in this world. And in this way we encourage others, because being human is usually such a difficult task, and we are so fragile and transient. Every human being who shines warms us, and makes us feel the glitter of being alive.

But Liza Howard’s beauty is not generous in that way. It is demanding, obsessive,
extreme. I think that absolute beauty is as terrible as absolute ugliness, just as great wealth is as destructive to a person’s soul as great poverty. Liza Howard is a person who has been gifted or cursed with an extravagance, and like any person who stands outside the bounds of normal society, she is an outcast, and deserves to be.

And yet—and yet. I sometimes feel that with my sculpting I am also standing at the brink of a life that would be demanding, obsessive, and extreme. If I turn to art with the devotion I know it needs, will I be making myself an outcast? Is this why Mother worries that I might be an artist?

Mother and I watched Liza Howard enter church this morning, and I leaned to Mother and said, “Why does she keep coming to church? She doesn’t belong here.”

Mother said, “Oh, leave the poor woman alone. We’re all orphans in this world, all struggling to pretend we’ve found a home.”

I’ll have to ask her sometime if she thinks that statement is true of the Bennetts. There they sit, the perfect Bennetts, except that dumpy Cynthia’s off at college, winning honors so she can be written up in the local paper. A great deal of my childhood was spent wishing that I had Mrs. Bennett for a mother instead of my own.
Now
I’m beginning to appreciate Mother and be grateful to her for the way she raised me, but for years I’ve longed for Mrs. Bennett. Mrs. Bennett is
perfect;
she’s just like someone from a magazine ad. She always looks serene, organized, gentle, and quiet. Mother, even when she’s sitting perfectly still,
looks
noisy. When you look at Mrs. Bennett, you can tell just by watching her sit that she doesn’t even
own
a pair of ripped underpants. I’ll bet her underwear is folded up neatly in her dresser drawer with a bag of fresh sachet tucked alongside. I’ll bet her shoes are lined up in her closet instead of tossed in, and the good ones are carefully tucked into a quilted shoe bag. I can imagine her bedside table: it is surely not cluttered, but neither is it dull. I’ll bet she has a clock, a lamp, a Wedgwood dish, and a leather-bound book on her bedside table. I can’t imagine her sitting the way my mother does, surrounded by books, magazines, letters, pillboxes, photographs, memo pads, pens, telephone books, tissue boxes, ashtrays and cigarettes and matches … Mother always has two or three liqueur glasses sitting on her nightstand with a residue of sticky liquid coating the bottom of the glass and filling the air with the smell of crème de cacao or Baileys Irish Cream. Mrs. Bennett undoubtedly takes her nightcap in the living room with her husband and rinses out the glass and puts it in the dishwasher before going to bed.