Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) (5 page)

“Yeah?” said Pamela, waiting.

“Just the ‘nice friend’ category,” I said. “Come on, tell us about the guys in New York. There’s got to be someone other than your professor.”

“Well, there’s Jake. He wants to do repertory theater. Weird and passionate. Passionately weird or weirdly passionate, I’m not sure which.”

We just looked at her and grinned.

“Passionate with you?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yeah. We’ve slept together a couple of times,” Pamela said, and took another sip of her seltzer water.

For Pamela, sex was probably just part of her life now, I thought, but I didn’t feel quite as adult as I had before. Sometimes it seemed as though the whole world was divided into girls who had done
it
and girls who hadn’t. As though Pamela and Gwen were on one side of a wall and Liz and I were on the other, just looking over.

Liz must have been feeling the same way, because she said, “At Bennington that’s all some girls talk about.”

Pamela just shrugged. “No big deal. Stuff happens. That’s it.”

But I
wanted
it to be a big deal. I wanted it to be with someone I loved, anyway, someone who was more than weirdly passionate.

“Yeah,” Gwen said, “when you’re still a virgin, you obsess over it. It’s huge. But once it’s happened, there are so many other things to think about.”

What I was thinking as our talk drifted to “other things” was my conversation with Patrick the day before, trying to remember every remark, each reply. . . . I remembered saying, “Seven months till you’re home again,” but I couldn’t remember what he’d said next.

“I love you,” I’d told him.

And he said he was sending me a kiss by proxy.

We’d laughed.

It came on slowly.

I didn’t get phone calls from Patrick anymore, I got text messages and e-mails. Occasionally photos of landmarks and stuff—rarely of him. He’d tell me how busy he was, what he was studying, where he was going on his next expedition, how much he loved Spain.
He’s moving there for good,
I thought. Should I give him the dates of spring break and ask if he’d like me to come? Or don’t ask? Just say I’d be there, that if he had classes I’d be glad to tag along?

Then the tone changed ever so slightly:

Much as I love Spain, I’m feeling more and more unsettled. Like I’m still on some kind of academic track that’s going to
take me straight out of the University of Chicago and into a suit and tie.

I replied in a joking tone:
I don’t know—I think you’d look pretty good in a suit and tie.

But he didn’t joke back. A week later I got:

The students here are so different . . . they’ve seen so much, done so much. . . . Sometimes I feel I’d just like to take a couple years off and really
do
something different. With my hands, I mean. Where I can see I’ve done something constructive—made something, built something, planted something, I don’t know.

Am I making any sense?

And I answered:

It sounds a little like burnout to me. You’ve been going 90 miles an hour all your life, Patrick. No wonder you’d like a break. . . .

The perfect time for me to suggest a visit, so I did:

Speaking of which, spring break begins here on March 20, and I can buy my own ticket. I’d love to see Barcelona with you. Should I come?

There. No beating around the bush. I was free, I was flush, I could come.

It was another week before he answered:

Great idea, but our projects are due around then, and I’ll have to give mine my whole attention. Also, as I told you, I’ve been feeling pretty unsettled. Not depressed, just like I want to try something different. I’m even thinking about joining the Peace Corps.

I talked to a professor here, and he thinks there may be a way I can get at least a little credit for the Peace Corps toward my degree when I go back to Chicago. But the beauty of the PC is you don’t know where they’ll send you, and that sort of appeals. . . .

I couldn’t swallow for a minute after I read it. My throat was dry, like all the moisture in my body had been sucked out with a giant vacuum. It was what he didn’t tell me that felt like ice in my gut. He wasn’t coming home. And then it got worse: Patrick had mentioned a girl in his class who wanted to join the Peace Corps.

*  *  *

I squeezed as much as I could into spring break, and I had the funds to do it—from having saved part of my weekly allowance all through grade and high school, and the monetary gifts from relatives, to investing the money I’d earned working part-time at the Melody Inn and, for the last summer, on the cruise ship. I could afford to cut loose now and then, I decided.

I spent the first three days in New York with Pamela, meeting her new friends and going to shows; an evening in Georgetown with Valerie, Abby, and Claire, then an overnight back in Silver Spring; a visit to Valerie’s family in Frederick; a wild last-minute trip to Philly to meet Abby’s cousin on leave from the navy, just because she thought we’d hit it off (but we hardly had a decent conversation the whole evening); a Saturday helping out at the Melody Inn; and finally, the last rainy Sunday at home, helping Sylvia go through boxes of stuff in our attic that had been there for years—things that had been moved twice: once from Chicago to Takoma Park, then to our home in Silver Spring.

There were things that my mom must have received as gifts that she didn’t want—a silver-plated butter server, a decorative bread box. I found old Christmas decorations, framed prints that had hung in the hallway back in Chicago, an ancient potty chair. . . .

“Everything that’s going to Goodwill, I’ll put on my left,” Sylvia said, the sleeves of her blue shirt rolled up to the elbow. “If there’s anything in this batch that you really want to keep, Alice, just say so.”

I was perched on top of our “keepsake trunk,” because everything in there was a keeper. My little brown monkey that wore diapers, Lester’s childhood drawings, a tracing of Mom’s hand with my little hand traced inside of it. . . . I used to come up here on rainy days—just like this one—and go through them.

I surveyed the assortment of stuff in front of us. “Well, that
potty chair can go,” I said. “Les and Stacy may need it long before I will.”

“Hmm. Hadn’t thought about that,” she said, reconsidering it. She brushed one hand over the pink and blue bunnies painted on the lid. “But aren’t we being a little premature?”

“I don’t know. I just have the feeling Stacy’s ‘the one,’ don’t you?” I said.

“Lester’s had a lot of girlfriends.”

“True. And he almost married one. But . . .”

Sylvia slid the potty chair to the right. “What the heck. If I don’t have grandchildren, I’ll put it out in the yard and plant flowers in it.”

We laughed. “I’d still put my money on Stacy,” I said. “She’s got enough energy for both of them. Les told me they went on a scuba diving trip last month. Maybe they’ll move in together.”

“We’d be the last to know,” said Sylvia, reaching for another box and sliding it toward me to open.

“Tablecloths,” I said, lifting the flaps and holding one up.

“They’re all yours if you want them,” said Sylvia.

“I don’t even have a table,” I told her. “Out.”

When Sylvia pulled over the next box, she read the label and handed it to me. “Your mom’s,” she said.

I knew exactly what it was. It had been in our attic forever but I’d never opened it—a large flat box, the kind a winter coat might come in, all the edges sealed in blue tape.

“Her wedding dress,” I said, one hand caressing the lid. “Aunt Sally told me once that Mom found it in a secondhand
shop and fell in love with it.” I’d seen it in my parents’ wedding photo, but I hadn’t actually touched it. Sylvia waited, probably hoping I’d open the box, and I was tempted. But I couldn’t bear it if the moths had got it or it was discolored. That disappointment could wait for another day.

“Definitely a keeper,” I said, putting it in the pile to the right, and Sylvia only nodded.

*  *  *

One of the things I liked most about college was that we spent more time talking with guys than we had in high school. And when Gwen spent the night with me on weekends, we talked a lot about our futures, what we wanted out of life, not just Elizabeth’s or Pamela’s latest news.

“I keep thinking, okay, so I’ll have invested eleven or twelve years of my life earning the ‘MD’ beside my name, but when do I get to have fun? Am I sacrificing too much?” Gwen said once.

“Sometimes, when things get really crazy, I think about taking a year off,” I confided. “But then I wonder if I’d ever come back.”

With our new guy friends, we talked about an even larger variety of topics. When the high school gang used to sit around the Stedmeisters’ pool, for example, when did we ever talk about the Supreme Court’s ruling on health care or about gun laws or immigration? When did we ever all go to a Woody Allen film festival or a political debate? Or go on a crazy two-o’clock-in-the-morning search for vending machines on campus, looking for loose quarters so that one of the guys, who only washes
his clothes on found quarters, could do his laundry? College definitely had its benefits.

Those of us who stayed on campus over the weekend often plotted against those who had gone away. Like the guy who always spoke in clichés, his favorite being the one about not being able “to see the forest for the trees.” So when he was away one weekend, we went into the woods and gathered all the fallen branches and limbs we could carry, dragged them into his dorm late one night, and filled his room, floor to ceiling. Ah, the beauty of a no-curfew life!

Someone knocked on my door one evening about seven as I was madly typing the last paragraph of an essay I’d scribbled out earlier. Claire and Valerie were holding a bag of potato chips hostage until I finished, but
they
were eating most of them.

“Come in!” Valerie yelled, her nose buried in a physiology book.

It was my friend Dave; he wanted to eat off campus that night and was looking for company. A square-faced blond, only slightly taller than me, he had cobalt-blue eyes, large hands, and had been on the university wrestling team the year before but gave it up to raise his grade point average. Jag, a new friend who’d transferred from a university in Bombay a year ago, was with him.

“Anyone interested in
food
?” Dave said, looking at me, then at Claire and Valerie. “We’re heading for Ledo’s.”

Val held up the bag of chips. “Dinner,” she said. “No, seriously, I already ate. Want some?”

“Hey! You’re giving away
my
dinner!” I yelped.

“I want real food,” said Dave.

“Doesn’t have to be pizza,” said Jag. “We could go somewhere else.”

“Pizza’s fine; I’ll go,” I said. “I’m starved. Claire?”

“Nope. Val and I are going to a movie at the student union. Enjoy!”

I went in the bathroom and put on some lip gloss, combed my hair, and then the three of us went out.

It was a gorgeous spring night, and there were couples all over campus. I walked between the guys, and we jokingly jostled each other for room on the sidewalk. Both of them were business majors, and Dave was a sophomore. Last semester he’d taken sociology as an elective, and that’s where we’d met.

“Cold?” Dave asked. “Want my jacket?”

“No,” I told him. “I’m okay.”

The air was heavy with a damp sweetness that mingled with the smell of wet concrete and earth. The smell of spring. The night breeze was like a caress through my hair—the kind of breeze, the kind of night that could make you feel in love even if you weren’t.

We decided against driving to Ledo’s and went to a neighborhood café where they had the best Monte Cristo sandwiches, a favorite of mine.

“So . . . ,” Dave said when he’d finished his sandwich. He’s a fast eater, and I’m usually only halfway through by the time he’s done. He sat tweaking a plastic straw in his hands. “Any idea what you’re going to do this summer?”

“Something different, but I don’t know what,” I told him. “What are you guys going to do?”

“My uncle’s a painter. I’m going to work for him. Slave wages, but it’s better than nothing,” Jag said.

“I usually work for my dad in his music store, but I’d like to do outside work. Your uncle doesn’t need another helper, does he?” I asked.

“Unfortunately not.”

“Sign up with a temp agency,” Dave suggested. “That’s what I do.”

“How does that work?”

“You tell them what you can do—type, file, cook, paint, whatever—and if a company needs a temporary employee, the agency will send you there for a week or however long they need someone.”

Jag saw some friends at another table so he excused himself, and Dave ordered a piece of pie.

“Somehow I thought you’d be traveling this summer,” he said, studiously carving out a forkful of apple and crust.

“No . . .”

Without looking at me directly, he asked, “What about that Patrick guy?”

I didn’t answer for a moment. “What about him?” I said finally.

His blue eyes studied mine. “Well, is he out of the picture? Just wondering.”

“I still hear from him,” I said. “I got a postcard last week.”

“Hey! A postcard! He’s got class!” Dave grinned, but he let it drop.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I was hoping he’d be back in the States this summer, but now he’s talking about joining the Peace Corps.”

“Hmmm. That’s a two-year commitment, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, offering nothing more.

Dave studied me thoughtfully for a moment or two. “Why don’t you come to the mountains sometime for a weekend? My folks would be glad to have you.”

“What mountains?”

“Blue Ridge, western Maryland. We could do whatever you like—hike, swim . . .”

“Well, maybe,” I said, and was embarrassed to discover that my first thought was where I would sleep. “Do you have room?”

“A bedroom all to yourself.” He gave me a playful grin. “Of course, if you’d like to share mine . . .”