Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) (12 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he pushed again.

Maybe we had the wrong angle, I thought. Maybe the
position wasn’t right. How did movie stars get by with just a tiny wince, followed by mind-numbing ecstasy?

And then, suddenly, he was in. I felt myself give down there and could feel him inside of me. The strain on his face and the way his head tipped back told me that he was coming. And then he collapsed on his elbows, his head tucked down by my shoulder against the pillow, and I nuzzled his cheek.

*  *  *

I think we both slept for a while, though at some point I went in the bathroom and cleaned myself up. I’d bled some, so I worried about the guest sheets, which we’d launder before we left. We should have put a towel beneath us.

Then I stopped and looked at my face in the mirror.

“Well,” I said to my reflection, “you don’t look a bit different.”

Sometime in the night Dave would have made love again if I’d wanted, but I was too sore. He offered to put his hand on me as Patrick had done, but I didn’t want any touching for a while.

“Just hold me,” I whispered, kissing him, so he did.

We mostly lazed around the next day. We danced and kissed and walked down to a stream and back. Dave drove to town later and brought back some gyro sandwiches and a Greek salad for our dinner.

The evening had cooled down enough that we could have a fire in the fireplace, and I helped Dave bring in wood and arrange it on the grate. Then we sat on the couch together, each with our separate laptops.

At one point Dave nudged me to look at his screen, and I leaned over. He had accessed his Facebook page and changed his status from “Single” to “In a relationship.” He was looking at me intently. “Okay?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said, and changed mine.

*  *  *

Gwen and Pamela and Liz and I got together one last time before we went back to school. Liz had been dating a number of guys up in Vermont, none of them particularly special, she said, so she focused more on the fun stuff to do there and told us how—after the first big snow last year—she and some of her friends had borrowed trays from the dining hall and gone sledding on a nearby hill.

Pamela had taken a course in modeling and another in advertising. Her big project last semester had been to film three short commercials, featuring herself in each one.

We gathered around the computer screen in my bedroom and played her DVD.

In the first sketch she was dressed in a leopard-skin bodysuit and was draped seductively, catlike, over the hood of a car. We laughed and cheered. It was so obviously sexist, so obviously Pamela, but she was good at it, I’ll admit. The next, surprisingly, was a commercial showing Pamela as a young mother with a five-year-old daughter, dressed in matching jogging suits and running along a neighborhood street together, their blond hair backlit by the sun, both of them the picture of health. This was supposedly an ad for a new protein breakfast
bar, and Pamela looked just as natural in that as she had in the first one.

The third commercial showed Pamela in a black formfitting dress, standing in an elevator, looking gorgeous. A business executive gets on, gives her the eye, and makes a comment, which she ignores. He follows it up with a suggestive remark, which she also ignores. Then her cell phone rings, and when she answers, it’s clear that she’s an executive in the same company he is, even higher up the corporate ladder, and you can see him electronically dwindling down to the size of a mouse in one corner.

“Pamela, those are good!” Liz said, speaking for all of us.

“So . . . so . . . Pamela!” Gwen said. “What’s your field now? Are you still in theater?”

“Oh . . . I don’t know,” Pamela said. “I’m going out with a guy in advertising, and he’s opening some doors for me, so I’m sort of leaning in that direction. It would certainly pay better than theater. But, work aside, how are things going with you guys?”

“Alice has been going out with a guy named Dave,” said Gwen. “In fact, she spent last weekend at his place.”

“His parents’ place,” I corrected as everyone focused on me. “But no, they weren’t there.”

“Aha!” Pamela said.

“He’s nice,” I told them, turning my chair away from the computer and meeting the gaze of all three friends sitting expectantly on the edge of my bed. “And yes,” I added, “We. Were. Intimate.”

“Well, well,” said Pamela. “You
have
been busy this summer.”

I couldn’t read Elizabeth’s face. Surprise, I guess. “Wow! So I’m the last one,” she said finally.

“Don’t do anything rash,” Gwen said dryly. “It’s not a contest.”

But Liz was still staring at me. “Do you hear from Patrick at all?” she asked. “I mean, are you going to tell him about Dave?”

“What do you suggest? A telegram?” said Pamela, and Elizabeth’s face flushed.

I was glad we weren’t back in ninth grade, because I would have been expected to give out details. But I knew how it felt to be considered the naive one, so I added, “We haven’t been in contact for months, Liz. All I know is what I read on his Peace Corps blog.” I turned back to the computer and typed in Patrick’s blog address.

What I didn’t tell them was that somehow I found it easier to deal with my feelings about Patrick by keeping up with his work in Madagascar, not treating his blog as if it were something dangerous I couldn’t bear to read. This helped me see him as another interesting friend in my life, one of many. When it came on the screen, I read it aloud:

“RICE TRAINING! It went so well. Even though the road is washed out at this point and no vehicles are going in or out, we managed to bring in a Malagasy man from Diego to do the training. I found two men who could read and write and were really interested in learning with me, and Jessica brought two women from her village. It was three days of
going into the rice field in the mornings, with lectures at the school in the afternoons. The guy was GOOD, and it was great to see people from my village frantically taking notes and asking questions. Basically, this is just a very regimented way of transplanting rice so that the yields are two times, four times, even up to ten times the amount of rice they would get from traditional methods.

I’m still extremely happy to be here. Jessica feels the same way. Yeah, I have my moments, but this is where I need to be right now.

“It’s
so
Patrick, isn’t it?” Pamela said. “He can make friends anywhere. I’ll bet you could plunk him down anyplace on earth and he’d pick up the language.”

“I wonder what he’ll do after the Peace Corps,” said Liz.

“He’ll find something,” said Gwen.

No one mentioned Jessica.

*  *  *

My own interests were closer to home as I started my junior year. I’d managed to snag one of the newer dorms, and this time Abby and Claire were rooming together, and Valerie and I were just across the hall. The four of us were in and out of both rooms so often, it was hard to tell who lived where.

I wanted to spend more time with Dave, but I was particular about where we made love. The only time I was willing to use our dorm rooms was when our roommates were away for the
weekend. I’ll admit that planning one of these nights together was pretty exciting, but as far as the library stacks or the dorm lounges, those weren’t for me. Dave claimed he could do it anywhere, and I believed him.

“Just think how exciting it would be to try it in the shower,” he said one night, nuzzling my neck. We were lying on my bed together, fully clothed, because Valerie would be coming in later.

“The one on the bottom would drown,” I said, pulling out one of the eyebrow hairs that grew in a different direction over his eye.

“No, we’d be standing. You against the wall,” he teased.

“I’m having a hard time imagining the choreography.”

“We could manage,” he said, and we kissed again.

I was feeling more comfortable with Dave—about my body, about his, about sex in general, even though I was still pretty new at it. I was really careful to take my pill regularly, and Dave never objected to condoms. I wondered what it would be like to be actually married and not have to bother with pills and condoms unless you wanted to. To have a place you could be together every night without worrying about someone walking in.

One of the things I discovered was that the more freedom you have—no curfew about getting in at night, no restrictions on whom you could have in your room—the more decisions you have to make for yourself. Whom you sleep with, where, what kind of birth control to use, how to respect your roommate’s privacy . . . all grown-up stuff, and no parent to make the decision for you.

I was ready.

The big event on my mind was Les and Stacy’s wedding coming up in November. True to his word, Les allotted four of the invitations to me. I wondered if I was going to be in the wedding party, but I found out there would be only one attendant, the maid of honor—Stacy’s best friend—and a best man, so naturally, I understood. With both Les and Stacy living in West Virginia, we were just happy that the wedding was to be here in Maryland. Even better, Stacy sent me a little note asking if I would be in charge of the guest book. She said that she and Les would like me to buy whatever dress I would like to wear—something I really loved—and to send the bill to them.
You’ll be the first beautiful thing people see when they enter the church,
she wrote. Wow!

Meanwhile, there was school, and I lucked out on some of the most popular classes, especially Human Sexuality, for which the two hundred seats usually filled up within the first three days of registration. I also loved Fundamentals of Design, one of my electives, and even the classes for my major were becoming more interesting, more specific: the Autistic Adolescent and the Social Basis of Behavior. Now that I’d flirted with the idea of changing fields and turned it down, I felt recharged, more certain I wanted a job working directly with people. Maybe that’s why a note on the bulletin board at the student union interested me. Both Valerie and I stopped to read it:
Need to be needed? Your school needs you. Hear us out over pizza and calzones.
And it gave a time and place, a conference room in the administration building.

It’s a fact that almost any offer of free food on a college campus will attract at least a small crowd, but perhaps the suggestion of work involved kept this one to about thirteen people. Val and I knew only one, James Whitney, whom we’d shaved last November. Platters of pizza slices and calzones were on the conference table, along with a coffeemaker and a note that told us to help ourselves. The organizer herself, one of the assistant deans, was late, and three of the guys devoured a calzone each and edged out the door before anyone could pin them down.

After seven minutes had passed and the organizer still hadn’t shown, a tall guy in a Terps sweatshirt, coffee in hand, looked about the room and said jokingly, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I called you here today,” and we laughed.

So did the assistant dean, who came in just at that moment,
professional-looking and cheerful in her black slacks and gold sweater, her dark hair swept away from her face.

“Sorry. A meeting ran over, and I finally just had to bolt, but it looks like you were in good hands here with . . .”

“Marcus Kelly,” the tall guy said.

“. . . with Marcus. Have a seat, everybody. Introduce yourselves and have some more food. There’s another pizza in the warming oven.” She poured a cup of coffee for herself as we told each other our names, and then she sat down. “I’ll be brief and give you the basics. We can get into specifics later. The university is starting a new initiative, and we need your input. We’re concerned about our image and want to improve relations with the residents of our College Park community, not just by what we don’t do—hopefully, no more overturning cars after a football game or leaving beer cans on neighborhood lawns after parties—but by establishing interactions with residents in a constructive way. Students and residents as neighbors, not strangers. This is just a brainstorming session, so I’d like to hear any ideas you might have, no matter how far-out.”

Someone suggested a volunteer cleanup brigade after games, but the dean said that was still just a breaking-even kind of thing. She was looking for plusses—making a difference by adding something that wasn’t there before.

“Maybe transporting elderly or handicapped people around?” red-haired Samantha said.

We vetoed that. “The only free time students have is on
weekends; the elderly don’t have doctor appointments then, and most of us don’t have cars,” someone said.

“Plus, liability if anyone got hurt,” Marcus added.

Another ten minutes of debate, another few slices of pizza. If there’s anything college students hate more than warm beer, it’s boring meetings that go nowhere.

Devon, the guy next to me, said, “If we’re looking at service projects, they need to be something that the Kiwanis Clubs and churches wouldn’t already be providing.”

“Car wash?” I offered.

“Or a free raking job when the leaves fall,” suggested another girl.

Then we started to come alive.

“Yes! Something that’s outdoors, where we can meet the whole neighborhood—anyone who stops by,” said James.

“I like it,” said the dean. “If expenses are minimal, the university will spring for it. And of course we can provide the buckets, the rags, the rakes . . .”

“The pizza?” asked Marcus. “We’ve got to have bait.”

“And the pizza,” said the dean, and checked her watch. “I’ve got to pick up a kid at soccer. You guys are great. Could you work out the details and leave them with my secretary?”

I thought about the Saturday Market in Eugene, people selling what they did best—baked bread or woven baskets.

“Why don’t we start a . . . a sort of registry?” I suggested. “Get students to sign up for whatever they do best.”

And guess who got appointed registrar?

Marcus agreed to be chairperson.

“We going to have a name for this?” James asked, eyeing, then reaching for the last calzone.