Moo (46 page)

“Where is Ivar?”

“The provost is taking some personal time this morning.”

“Have you seen this?” He set the flyer on her desk in front of her. “I’m sure there are university regulations against this sort of abomination?”

“University publishing restrictions do not cover ditto machines, as a rule. I could find out if the author used more than two hundred sheets of university-supplied ditto paper, but probably the provost would not act even if he or she did, since ditto paper costs only about a dollar twenty-five a ream.” Mrs. Walker smiled cooperatively.

“I’m talking about the disrespect! I’m talking about the damage to my reputation! I’m talking about the public disclosure of confidential information!”

“I hardly think this information is confidential. Have you seen this morning’s
New York Times
? I have it here somewhere. Let me see.” She thought her helpful manner was practically authentic.

“WHERE IS IVAR?”

Mrs. Walker gave Dr. Gift one of her dark looks. She did not care to have anyone yell at her, and she made a mental note to do a careful audit of all of Dr. Gift’s university accounts. More than one arrogant or disagreeable faculty member had sat in that hard wooden chair by her desk, kicking his heels while she asked, “Now, what exactly were
these ‘incidentals’ you charged to your university account while you were in Phoenix at that conference? Let’s itemize them, shall we, and then you can explain to me how each one relates to your research.” She said to Dr. Gift, “The provost is unavailable. I will have him call you when he gets in, shall I?”

“As SOON as he gets in, got that?”

“Oh, yes, sir, I certainly have got that. Thank you, sir.” Dr. Lionel Gift turned with what he considered to be emphatic dignity and departed. When he had closed the door behind himself, Mrs. Loraine Walker said to the other secretaries, “Do not mention this to the provost. Leave that to me.”

They nodded.

T
HEIR ROOM
in Dubuque House had not turned out to be the golden, lamplit haven that over Christmas vacation Keri had remembered it as being. Only a few days into the semester and everything about it was already getting on her nerves. Her mother, who had assigned her plenty of housework every day of vacation, and then followed after her, redoing everything “properly,” would have been astonished at the sight of Keri scrubbing the tops of moldings and spraying Tilex in the corners of the shower stalls and buying her own Windex to clean the windows. Sometimes her mother’s voice, rising to a whining pitch just below that of a silent dog whistle, came out of her own mouth as she said to Sherri, “Well, why don’t you pick that stuff up? Who do you expect to pick it up, me?”

The answer, of course, was no, Sherri didn’t expect anyone to pick it up. She expected it to remain on the floor. This was a dorm room, after all.

And therefore, Keri could have replied, abounding in fun and good-fellowship, four girls against the world, the way it had been in the fall. But NO! This semester the four girls were always in each other’s way and their friends were always around smoking cigarettes, casting suspicious glances, keeping their mouths shut, suggesting other places to go. Keri’s own friends did the same thing, except for the smoking cigarettes part.

The worst thing was that from time to time in the fall, she had longed to be back home on the farm, especially after harvest, when the pace of work would have slowed and her father would have been around and maybe her mother would have made something he liked for dinner, and they would have eaten at the kitchen table, then done the dishes together in water so hot that her father, who washed, would wear rubber gloves, and she and her sister would have pretended to drop the plates and then maybe they all would have watched something
on TV, but when she got home it never happened quite that way, and the farm seemed incredibly quiet and her days incredibly endless, so she longed to be back at school, with Sherri reeling out some story about how drunk she had gotten the night before, and Diane laughing, and Mary shaking her head in benign disbelief, but in two weeks back, that hadn’t happened, either. Mary always had friends with her, black friends, who gave off the distinct impression that they did not like Keri; Sherri had gained some weight and was spending what Keri viewed as a dangerous amount of time at the gym; and Diane had a new boyfriend, a Theta Chi with a Mustang. He and Diane were actively pursuing a merger of their corporate assets at the frat house.

Everyone had reverted to type, including Keri, who had spent her Christmas money on three crewneck sweaters in foamy pink, lemon yellow, and navy blue, colors none of the others could or would wear, as if she didn’t plan to loan out her clothes ever again.

The worst thing was that the more she stayed around the room, waiting for something between the four of them to gel, the more it came to seem, even to her, that the room was her domain, a sign that she (1) had nothing better to do, (2) was too much like a mom and not enough like a kid, (3) had illusions about the others that would not be borne out by events, (4) had stalled in some stage of adjustment to university life that the others had passed through, (5) all, some, or none of the above.

But she stayed around anyway, studying on her bed with the radio on low, looking up and saying, “Hi!” if any of the others came in, “How’s it going?” getting, she saw in the mirror, the way she always got in the winter, pink and rabbity-looking around the eyes and nose.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER
with you?” said Sherri. “Are you sick or something?”

As usual, Keri just shrugged.

Sherri crossed to the refrigerator and took out her afternoon’s ration of cigarettes, three. What you did (this was all her own idea) was, you got something out of the vending machine whether you wanted it or not, but before you unwrapped it, you lit a cigarette and smoked it as fast as you could, then, while you were stubbing out the butt, and the taste of the cigarette was still in your mouth, you started eating whatever it was that you had bought, and you ate it quickly,
more or less stuffing it right down your throat. Then after that, you really didn’t want anything else, nothing to eat, and no more cigarettes, either. Sherri thought it was a brilliant dieting method. The psychological part was that you didn’t do the same thing when you ate something low-fat or good for you—you let yourself enjoy that. She hadn’t told anybody about it, though, and didn’t plan to until the effects were visible. A week or so? Well, who could tell, the whole method could turn out to be so great that she could patent it or something. She put the rest of the cigarettes back in the refrigerator and said, “You want to come to the gym?”

“Haven’t you been to the gym already today?”

“Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“I just rode the bike a little. It doesn’t count if I don’t go at least forty minutes on the stair climber.”

“That girl down on the third floor—”

“I know, that girl down on the third floor spent all her time at the gym and turned out to be bulemic and now she’s at Red Stick Hospital in an eating disorders program.”

“Well?”

“Well, we all saw her. She was thin already. She was crazy. I’m not crazy.”

“You—”

“I gained seventeen pounds in the fall. When I got home over Christmas, it just hit me that I was the same old Sherri as I used to be. I’m lucky to be here for the spring semester. I could be back there, taking night courses at the junior college. When I go home in May, I’m just not going to be the same old Sherri, I’m just not. So if I go to the gym and pay attention to that, all the other stuff seems to follow. If I don’t go to the gym and let all that slide, than all the other stuff slides, too.”

Keri sighed.

“So what’s the problem with you, anyway?”

“Nothing. It’s just that everybody seems to be going their separate ways all of a sudden.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I liked it the way it was the first semester.”

“You mean everyone hanging around the room?”

“Well, yeah, I guess.”

“It’s a big campus. It’s like a town, but all the facilities are a hell
of a lot newer and nicer than the ones in my town. You’re from a city”—(Keri blushed to think that Sherri still believed this lie)—“so maybe you don’t realize what a change it is, but when I got back to Fishburn over break and saw that the only thing to do was STILL hanging out at the A and W, I said to myself that I wasn’t going to waste my chances ever again. Come on, we’ll get suits and go swimming, too. You get to see all the old faculty members nearly naked. The women you can see really naked. It’s kind of scary what they’ve let happen to their tits.”

“I was going to study.”

Sherri pulled on her sweatpants. “Well, it’s up to you.” She shrugged, grabbed her bag, and slammed the door on her way out.

M
ARY HAD TO
admit that she was a little irritated to find Keri still there when she got back from her two o’clock English class. She had counted on having the room to herself. “How’s it going?” Keri said, just the way she always did, so Mary said, “I thought you had your lab Thursday afternoon.”

“It was changed to Tuesday.”

“I have art all afternoon Tuesday!”

“So?”

Mary recollected herself before she revealed the size of her disappointment. The fact was that it had gotten so that she only felt comfortable in the room when she was alone. She left right after breakfast and came back right before bed, but that schedule was beginning to make her feel homeless and she didn’t like that, either, hauling all her books with her all day, spending too much time in the library, hanging out with Hassan until he got a little bored with her.

She pursed her lips in annoyance and hung up her coat, then climbed onto her bunk with her statistics book. Keri had apparently gone back to reading, and maybe it would be okay if she really had, but she kept sighing and fidgeting and bouncing on the bed. She was eating something, too. She rustled the paper very softly, clearly trying not to disturb Mary, but the very softness of the rustle made Mary feel crazy. And then she coughed a tiny, martyred cough into her hand or her pillow or something. Mary said, “You can cough in a normal tone of voice if you have to.”

“That’s all right.”

Whining again, thought Mary.

More silence, silence that distracted Mary until she couldn’t even focus on her statistics textbook enough to recognize the words.

But she didn’t want to talk. That’s what Keri wanted her to do, to talk about something, and that’s exactly what she herself did not want to do, what she had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to do anymore. It was just the way her friend Divonne said it was: First of all, none of them knew any other black people, so you had to explain every little thing (“And even after you do that, they get half of it wrong,” said Divonne), then they assumed that you were talking not just for yourself but for all black people, so they got nervous or offended or something, so then you had to explain more. It was too time-consuming and wasn’t getting her anywhere. Her plan for the next fall was to live with Divonne and some other black women in an apartment they knew they could get about three blocks from campus. “The whole idea of that dorm is typical of them,” said Divonne. “They
pay
you to be like them.” At this apartment where they would move, the women celebrated Kwanzaa and other African holidays, and two of the women had actually been to West Africa on a tour last summer.

It was a good plan, but not one that she intended to divulge to Carol. For one thing, it would cost her about a hundred dollars a month more to live away from Dubuque House—that was twelve hundred dollars a year that Carol would resent, and her resentment earned interest depending on the prime rate. Twelve hundred dollars now amounted to a certain larger amount later that they would need to move to that terrific kitchen-bath combination, or else a certain longer time that it would take them to get there. One or the other—that was how the numbers worked. Or maybe she expected Malcolm or Cyrus to make up for her? Oh, Mary could hear everything Carol would have to say on the subject, but Carol wasn’t here, and she didn’t understand living in Dubuque House the way Divonne did.

Mary’s main problem this semester was that she was irritable. It was like being premenstrual all the time. No, her main problem was that she felt guilty about being irritable. For that reason, she had come to especially admire Divonne, whom she had found hard to take in the fall. Divonne claimed irritability as her birthright, and made an art of it, rather the way Carol did, but with this difference, that Divonne supported her and agreed with her rather than criticizing and prodding her.

Keri sighed. It was a long, vulnerable, unhappy sigh that seemed
to re-echo off the walls and resonate with all the self-pity that white girls had for themselves. Mary slammed her book shut.

“What’s the matter?” Keri’s voice rose, anxious and sheepish. That’s what white girls were always asking their boyfriends. Every time you eavesdropped on a conversation between a white couple, she would be saying, “What’s the matter?” or “What are you thinking?” or “Are you upset about something?” and he would be saying, “Nothing, no problem, don’t worry about it.”

Mary said, “Nothing.”

“You sounded like you were mad about something.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Then you are mad about something?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because if you weren’t mad about something, then you would have said so, but you said, ‘Don’t worry about IT,’ so I know there’s an ‘it.’ ”

“There’s no ‘it.’ ”

“Okay.” Another whine, then another sigh. Mary sat immobile, paralyzed by tension, pressing her back against the wall. She found herself counting. Maybe she was counting seconds? At any rate, just as she reached thirty, Keri’s voice pierced her again. “Really, what’s the matter?”

Mary flopped down on her chest and hung her head over the edge of the bunk. Keri was propped on her elbow, looking up at her, a textbook open on her pillow. Her look was anxious and supplicating, asking for something, whatever it was, that Mary didn’t have to give, so she said, “Stop whining all the time! WHAT do you have to whine about? Your parents are paying for you to go here, they give you an allowance and all these clothes! You look like a Barbie doll, so all the guys are slobbering over you. Good Lord, girl, isn’t that enough for you?”