Stop That Girl (10 page)

“Never really have,” I admitted.

“Oh, man, you’re in for a treat. Let’s roll up a doob right now.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Might as well try it.”

Listening to “Miracles” on Hannah’s tape deck, I soon fell into a reverie about having sex with Archie. I tried to imagine all the things we’d never done—which included about everything. After a while I opened my eyes and saw Hannah organizing her string bikinis on her bed. It looked like she was spelling something with them. I changed into my suit, and off we went to sprawl beside the pool.

Letters soon poured in from Mom.

Please write and describe exactly what your room is like,
what pieces of furniture are in it, and what you’ve put on
the walls. What does Hannah look like? Do you eat together? Do you have nice conversations? What are her interests? How are your classes? Are you finding Art History
as interesting as you thought you would? What text is your
class using? Is your professor a real member of the faculty
or just a summer-school teacher? Does he/she know your
name? Is the food of good quality, and are the menus varied? Where do the other juniors come from? Do you think
you and Hannah will remain friends? Are the bathroom
facilities clean? Is there privacy? Do you keep your room
locked at all times? Have there been any thefts?

I’d stare at the letter, then fold it up and put it into a drawer.

Three weeks along, Archie arrived in his hiccuping old Saab. I couldn’t wait for him to see the new me. I was as tanned as Hannah by then, I’d learned how to knock down tequila in shots, and I’d been having fascinating discussions with a guy on my hall about how neither side of his brain was dominant, like Leonardo da Vinci’s. But Archie took all the changes in stride. Within the first few minutes of his arrival, he had pulled out a map to show me the routes he planned to cycle during his visit.

“This one’s an ass-buster,” he said gleefully. “My brother did it once. Up into the hills, along the crest, down the other side to the ocean. Maybe you could come pick me up.”

“But won’t that take all day?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ll get an early start.”

“God. I thought we were going to be hanging out together,” I said.

“We are! Why do you think I came all the way up here?”

“Oh, good,” I said. I kissed him.

That night in the dining hall I introduced him to my new friends. It made me feel important, having a visitor from the outside.

“Nice bike,” Dwight, a guy from our hall, said. “Is that the same kind of Peugeot Nils Brennerhof used for the Tour de France?”

“Exactly,” Archie said. “You into racing?”

“How much is that thing worth?”

“Got it used, fixed it up, and I could still sell it for nearly a grand.”

“Thought so.”

After dinner, Archie and I walked around the campus holding hands. His knuckles felt oversized. He was my first real boyfriend. He came all this way to see me.

“I ran into your mother last week at Gelson’s,” Archie said. “She turned around and went the other way.”

“Maybe she didn’t see you.”

“She saw me, all right. She hates my guts. Don’t worry, I think it’s funny. I wouldn’t
want
her to like me.”

“Why not?”

“Because then it would mean I was some kind of eunuch, probably.”

“My mother doesn’t like eunuchs.”

“I betcha she does,” Archie said.

It wasn’t the time to argue. We ended up back in my room, and I locked the door and turned out the lights. I was proud of the smell of the magnolia flowers drifting in through the windows, and proud to have all this freedom to offer, more valuable to me than gold coins in a purse. I led him to my bed.

“Come here,” I said.

Archie liked exploring my ears with his tongue. But when I tried to play with his belt, he giggled like I was tickling him.

“Whoa,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I’ll do it,” he said. But he didn’t.

“You know what I think is weird?” I said.

“What.”

“You know how, in movies, they often show wives not wanting to have sex, like pretending they have a headache or something?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I don’t understand it. If I were married, I’d never feel that way.”

“Oh. Really.”

We continued to kiss, but now he seemed on guard. He strayed from my lips and kissed my ears and suddenly the flickering of his tongue became a rope coiling into my head.

“Wait,” I said. “No!”

Twisting, coiling—his mouth swallowed my ear. The inner ear exploded. Something warm was running down my neck, onto my shoulder. I staggered up and groped for the switch. In the bright dorm-room light we found ourselves clotted with blood.

“Jesus!” Archie screamed.

“Oh, my God.”

“Oh, gross, do something!”

“What should I do?”

“Get a towel!” he said.

“Could you please get the towel?”

“Gross!” he yelled. “Gross!”

He was jumping and wiping himself off, clawing at his clothes. I found a washcloth and held it to my head.

“Why did you do that?” I said miserably.

“It’s supposed to feel good,” he said.

“I can barely hear out of it.”

“Get it to stop bleeding!”

As we headed for the showers, hustling out of my room, Archie pulled the door closed behind us. It locked.

“Oh, no!”

“Hey, cut the moaning.” He reared up on one leg and kicked. The door frame ripped and cracked and splintered. He kicked at it again and again. Finally the door fanned open, and a chunk of wood dangled and dropped to the floor.

“Oh, God, why did you do that?”

“Stupid door,” Archie said.

“What’s so stupid about it?”

“Screw this, I’m taking a shower,” Archie said.

Through the night my ear throbbed as if mounted on my head with a nail. The messed-up door rattled and banged. First thing in the morning I visited the campus doctor. She took one look and referred me to an off-campus specialist, and I was able to get an appointment immediately. My balance was a little off but I rode my bike in slow motion. The specialist cleared out some of the dried blood and peered at my eardrum and promptly told me it had been perforated. In addition to the perforation there was a large area where the tissue had been pulled apart, like layers of baklava. “How in the world did this happen?” he asked.

“It’s kind of unpleasant, but—well, my boyfriend was kissing my ear,” I said, “and then I guess he created some kind of giant plunger with his mouth.”

“Time to get a new boyfriend,” the doctor said.

He said it might take a few months to heal, maybe longer. He said to keep it dry in the shower and when swimming. He said the chances of permanent hearing loss were slim, but I might have ringing or crackling in my ears for some time to come. He whisked out more of the dried blood with a tiny vacuum. It hurt.

The bill was $127. I didn’t have it. I had only $56, to be used for miscellaneous necessities. All afternoon while Archie was out on his bike, I fretted.

“You’ll help me out with it, won’t you?” I asked Archie that evening.

“It’s a farce,” he said. “They’ll never make you pay.”

“What about part of it?”

“I don’t have it right now. I’m working full time and I owe my brother a thousand bucks for the car.”

“It doesn’t seem fair I have to pay it all.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” he said. “Don’t.”

Meanwhile, a large man in overalls came to fix the door frame. No small job. It involved several hours of fitting and drilling. A few days after Archie left, I found an envelope under the door. It contained a bill for $210, saying that failure to remit would result in the withholding of any transcript generated by my current undertaking.

I could be resourceful. This past winter, Mom was in and out of the hospital for tests. Something was wrong with her endocrine system. She started reading medical journals, coming to her appointments ready with the answers. “I’m convinced that the paresthesias and tetany I’ve experienced recently are a result of primary aldosteronism. My hypertension is resistant to medication. I’m highly edematous, and the levels of K in my urine are always high. I’d recommend a CT scan to detect the presence of adenomas in the adrenals and, if negative, pursue secondary aldosteronism as a sequela to renal vasoconstriction. Are we on the same page?” Doctors weren’t wild about her approach, and she was gloomy.

“Is it possible,” I’d said, “that you’re playing out your relationship to your absent mother with these doctors? Fighting with them or else showing off your medical knowledge as a roundabout way of capturing her approval?”

“I don’t want my mother’s approval!” she’d said, indignantly.

“Everyone wants their mother’s approval,” I’d said, accidentally.

To cheer her up, I had gone with my friend Roberta to find Bob Dylan’s new house in Malibu. I wanted to get Mom an autograph. She enjoyed the early stuff, especially when other people performed it. The house had been written up in the
LA Times
—a huge sprawling monster made up of different architectural styles. It even had a Russian onion dome on one side.

In Malibu it was easy to find, bathed in floodlights and surrounded by a chain-link fence. The grounds still had the rough appearance of a construction site. “Hard to believe no one else is here,” I said, as we parked on the quiet street.

“Yeah,” Roberta said. “I kind of expected a thronging crowd.”

“Me too.”

The gate was closed, the fence too shaky to climb. We clawed at the dirt instead. After a while, we pulled the links away from the ground and wiggled under like gophers. Inside, we brushed the dirt from our knees. We had soil jammed under our fingernails and rinsed our hands with a shiny brass nozzle on a garden hose. We combed our hair and put gloss on our lips. Then we sauntered up to the front door. Two guys were hammering and sawing just inside the entryway, one tall and blond, the other blond and tall, and when they spotted us, their tools stalled.

“What are you girls doing here?” said one.

“Um, we were driving by and saw you guys working, and thought it looked intriguing,” said Roberta.

“Yes, this is a very intriguing job,” the other said.

“It’s Bob Dylan’s house, isn’t it?” I said.

“No, it’s Mick Jagger’s,” the first said, very sarcastically.

“Right!” we laughed.

They introduced themselves as Edric and Fane, brothers from Jutland.

“Want a look around?” Edric said.

They gave us a tour through the whole place. The house was huge and ungainly. I wondered why Bob Dylan had chosen to spend his money this way. They showed us all the custom-made cabinets and fixtures and it bugged me to imagine Bob picking them out. There was an enormous bathroom with a tub the size of a pool, decorated with tile they said came from a pharaoh’s tomb. The grout glittered with real gold.

“So what’s he like?” Roberta asked, after they’d surrounded us in a swirling cloud of smoke.

“We’re not supposed to talk.” Fane coughed.

“Strict orders.” Edric inhaled.

“Oh, come on, just tell us one thing,” she said.

Edric said, “What can we tell them?”

Fane said, “Hmm. What about the cucumbers?”

“Yes, that’s right, he really
loves
cucumbers,” Edric giggled. “Come look.”

They led us back into a little chamber off the restaurant-sized kitchen. “This room will be solely dedicated to his cucumbers,” Edric said.

“It’s the cucumber room,” Fane said.

“You guys are comic geniuses,” Roberta said.

They both began to cackle. Fane grabbed Roberta and tried to kiss her. She screamed.

“We showed you the house,” he said. “Come on!”

“Can’t you meet girls any other way?” Roberta demanded.

“We don’t need to meet girls,” Edric said.

“They need to meet us,” Fane said.

“Look, I brought this,” I said quickly. It was
Tarantula,
a book of Dylan’s poetry and ideas, stuffed in an envelope addressed to my mother. “My Mom’s a big fan, in fact it’s one of the main things we have in common, and she’s been a little sick lately. I was wondering if he could sign this and send it to her.”

Fane shrugged. “What do we get in return?”

“All he has to do is put it in the mail.”

“You thought of everything,” Edric said.

“Almost everything,” Fane said, moving toward me.

“Let’s go,” Roberta said.

“Thanks, I really mean it,” I said, and we went running out the front door.

We drove back to the valley, laughing hard. At one point I said, “You think they’ll do it, even though we didn’t make out with them?”

“I’d say there’s about as much chance as me inviting Dan Rather to the prom, and him saying yes.”

We thought dark-haired Dan was a dynamo. “By the way, I still think you should.”

“Okay. And you can invite Walter Cronkite.”

“Ha-ha!” We snorted and laughed.

Even so, from then on, I would come home from school hoping Mom had gotten the package in the mail. Stranger things had happened. You never knew.