The Appetites of Girls (29 page)

We made arrangements to meet at Brown’s Van Wickle Gates at half past three on Friday afternoon, but several hours earlier I selected my outfit. Then I changed my mind, replacing it with another. God, I was no better than Ruth! I recalled the clothes I had worn during my stay at the Dunhams’—a flimsy tank top, a low-necked blouse, skirts cutting mid-thigh like some show dancer’s—ensembles Daniel must have found distasteful. I was anxious to show him the more restrained style I had adopted over the past months. I selected an ivory turtleneck, a heather-blue Fair Isle sweater with a band of snowflakes, and a pair of beige corduroys—not baggy, mannish ones like those I had seen on the girls on campus who left their hair hanging in uncombed strings and preferred their legs unshaven, but a flattering tailored pair I had found at B. Clark’s. I tied an off-white silk scarf around the elastic holding my hair, removed it, then tied it again.

For two days before our date, I had added to my running route—hoping to soothe the jumpiness in my stomach—finding new side streets to proceed along until every muscle stiffened and solidified, until my thoughts seemed to calm. By midday Friday, some of my nervousness had subsided, and so I assured myself that once Daniel and I were in each other’s presence, any anxiety would fall away.

Browning seed pods crunching beneath my flats as I rocked on my heels, waiting for Daniel at the university’s main entrance, seemed the only sound aside from tires singing along the road down the hill. When a red Saab drove up College Street, I recognized the car belonging to Daniel’s brothers; but in picturing his arrival, I had imagined an entirely different kind of vehicle, though what, I wasn’t sure. He hopped out and simultaneously, awkwardly shook my hands and pecked my cheek. We grinned at each other silently for what seemed long minutes, then made
stuttering, blushing attempts at conversation, both of us kicking at dried leaves scattering the side of the road. He was taller than I remembered or more muscular or older-looking, and, watching him out of the corner of my eye, I had the sense I had never seen him by true light of day. He had cut his hair so that the longish curls were now short waves, drawing attention to the angles of his cheeks and chin. He was more handsome, I supposed, than before, and it would take me some time to feel that he was familiar.

As we climbed into his car, I told him I thought he had changed, but he rubbed the stubble of hair at his nape and laughed. “Not as much as you, though, Miss Collegiate!” He smiled broadly, but from the glance he gave my hair and face and clothes, I could not tell if he was pleased.

As I was about to pull from my pocket a leaflet announcing Edward Yan’s lecture in Sayles Hall and a brochure for the historical museum down the street, Daniel slapped the sides of the steering wheel with a sudden thought.

“Have you seen
The Poet
? That new movie? It’s supposed to be great. There’s a matinee in a theater over the border in Massachusetts, not too far from here. Do you want to go?”

“Sure, good idea.” I nodded in a manner I hoped seemed enthusiastic. I considered asking about the film, but it sounded intellectual (perhaps it had even been adapted from a book), and I was reluctant to reveal my ignorance.

For the first thirty minutes of the movie, I stole glances at Daniel in the dark for some indication that either we were in the wrong theater or that the film was not what he had expected.
The Poet
was a gory thriller about a writer plagued by violent visions. Soon fact and fiction became confused for him and he began to act out his madness in a string of brutal murders. But Daniel appeared completely unperturbed; in fact, he seemed to enjoy each bloody scene, sucking vigorously on his iced tea straw, his dark eyes shining in the gloom.

“What did you think?” he asked as we zipped our winter coats, filed out of the theater and down the block toward his parked car.

I cleared my throat to give my opinion, but just as I did so, Daniel opened the car door for me, watching to be sure I was comfortably settled before gently closing it. So, instead, I laughed away the question for fear of spoiling the remainder of our evening.

Dusk had fallen. The temperature had dropped, and black tree branches, their few remaining shrunken leaves curled inward, bounced in the wind. Daniel suggested dinner at Pilgrim’s Hearth, a few miles away, which he promised had good food.

The restaurant was a popular one, and by the time we arrived, most of the tables had already been filled, the chatter of overlapping conversations echoing off the walls and high ceiling. At Daniel’s request, we were seated near a back corner that afforded semi-privacy. Our waiter offered us two giant leather menus, and, looking around, I noticed that everything—the chairs, the hurricane candles on the tables, the platters of food—seemed to be of enormous proportions. I ordered pumpkin soup and a garden salad—the only vegetarian options I could find on the menu. But Daniel ordered sirloin steak with gravy, deep-fried onion rings, a bottle of Chianti for us to share.

“I hope you don’t mind my making the selection,” he said, pouring two tall glasses, “but I’m sure you’ll like it. I tried it at a friend’s wine tasting and everyone there loved it. Cheers!” He tapped his glass to mine, though I hadn’t lifted it, then tipped back his goblet as if it were ice water. “I know you won’t be disappointed,” he said, plucking two plump rolls from our wire bread basket, smothering them with butter.

I had seen what the bottle cost and saw now how he watched me as though he’d chosen a present he worried I would not appreciate. So I sipped it, nodding, allowing myself this exception.

Daniel emptied his glass, and when our dinners were eventually served, he bolted his food in chunks, seeming to consume each mouthful
almost without chewing. He refilled his glass. And before I could stop him, he’d topped off my own glass, though I’d finished only enough to be polite. But my expression must have conveyed the queasiness beginning to spread below my ribs because, yanking his fork suddenly from between his teeth, Daniel asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, oh—nothing. It’s only . . .” I paused, wanting to find the right words. “I guess your habits seemed different when I stayed with your family, that’s all. And I thought you said you liked the article I mailed you—”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” He let out a guffaw and swallowed a hunk of meat so large I thought I could see the bulge of it slide along his throat. “I did like the article. It intrigued me, actually. But I’m no longer in training for cross country and, God, there are some things I would miss too much. I’m no masochist, you know what I mean?” He laughed and held up another forkful of steak as indication.

“But it’s not about giving things up,” I said. “It’s about what you
gain
.” It was the way it affected your sense of well-being, I explained, that made it worthwhile. I babbled on and on and could not stop. If I only talked long enough, about the things we had communicated in letters and the topics of my imagined tête-à-têtes with him, the first half of our date would sink into distant memory, and the rest of the night would unfold as I had pictured. I described the tranquillity of College Hill in early morning, the quiet, staid symmetry of its brick buildings, the New England maples and oaks whose stout, toughened trunks seemed impervious to the fluctuations of time and weather. The way, on clear nights, pale stars sparkled through the maze of overhead boughs. I chattered about Coleridge’s poetry, having read through much of a collection the night before, and about a chamber music concert I had attended on campus the previous week.

After a time, I noticed that Daniel had set down his fork and, having pulled his chair closer to mine, was leaning forward, concentrating. “Maybe we could do these things together sometime,” he said, smiling, his voice suddenly hushed, as though moved by the subjects of my conversation.

A happy relief washed over me.
This
was what I had envisioned;
this
was right. Releasing a small, contented sigh, I reached for the glass of lemon water beyond my goblet of wine, my fingers almost brushing Daniel’s. But before I had grasped it, Daniel’s hand stopped mine. And without warning, his lips pressed against me and, for a moment, a thrill fired through me as everything around us dropped away. I felt my fingers folding into his, felt my throat melting. But then with his free hand, he began to caress my knee and then the inside of my thigh. And as his mouth opened, I could feel the slipperiness of his tongue, like a panting dog’s, along my teeth, and his hand shifting higher.

“What are you doing?” I hissed loudly enough to draw the stares of diners at the neighboring table. They looked at me, at Daniel, at the overturned glass I had knocked with my wrist and the ice cubes littering our tablecloth.

“I . . . I thought . . .” Daniel’s face broke into a rash of crimson splotches. His lips hardened into a thin line and he began to carve furiously at a gristly bit of meat still left on his plate.

During the remainder of the meal, we exchanged not a single word. Daniel paid our bill without raising his eyes to look at me. In the car speeding back to Brown, we sat in silence, heavy and thick as a raincloud, both of us squinting through the windshield at the yellow shafts of light from the headlamps. Now and then Daniel lifted a finger to his mouth, chewing at the nail and skin. For an instant, I longed to comfort him, to apologize, to start over. But that was all it would take, wasn’t it? Just one instant of weakness to send splintering cracks through everything. With a man like Daniel, I could never maintain the serenity I had recently worked so hard to achieve. Why had I even gotten involved with him? Wasn’t it just to prove something to myself? Or to Setsu? Or Ruth? There was no use indulging the idea for another minute.

Our goodbye was mumbled and hasty. Daniel pointed to the door handle, which I had been fumbling for in the dark, not bothering to open it for me as he had before. It had grown colder and drizzled steadily
during our drive, leaving the roads slick, so we had agreed that Daniel would let me off where we had met earlier that afternoon rather than risk the narrow side streets near my dorm. I set off along Prospect, dimly lit by the glow of the campus, but turned when I was sure Daniel could no longer see me in his rearview mirror. I watched the red of his taillights dipping, blinking, curving, until they disappeared in the distance. Then I listened for some moments after, distinguishing the faint whine of his engine, until that, too, had faded. It struck me, though I wasn’t sure why, as a lonely, lonely sound. And the absolute silence that ensued as even lonelier.

The sky had cleared and a silver half-moon had risen, softly illumining the arcing trees above me, their branches silhouetted against the star-dusted sky. As I gazed upward, a saying printed on my box of ginger tea rose to my consciousness:
It is better to be alone
and have harmony than to have companionship in disharmony
. With this in mind, I drew my coat closer for warmth and began trudging the path toward my dormitory, accompanied by the bobbing of my own shadow.

(Francesca’s Story)

•
Junior Spring
•

B
efore Ruth’s debacle during our first year, my complaints about Brown had been mere grievances, a topic for conversations during late-night phone calls to my high school friend Sharon. The university had a reputation for being a socially and politically enlightened institution. College guidebooks boasted of it to prospective applicants. It had been reiterated ad nauseam by my high school adviser. Besides its academics and its supposedly active social scene, this was the reason I had chosen it. There was plenty to do, of course—symposiums, theatrical and musical performances, nightly parties on and off campus. For the first few months, I’d gone out several evenings a week. But gradually I had begun to open my eyes. I was surrounded by a sea of single-minded hypocrites. “The men are hopelessly shallow,” I’d informed Sharon. “And half the women are like plastic mannequins. You know the kind I mean—skinny everywhere except for their high-perched breasts.”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” Sharon had laughed.

I’d considered hanging up. Sharon had the infuriating habit, when I was upset, of making a comment she knew would increase my irritation.

“No, that has absolutely
nothing
to do with it!” How did she know about the countless fraternity parties I had attended without being approached once, not once! Brown was just as bad as New York—maybe worse. Here the only girls visible to men were those who lived on diet shakes and salad greens to maintain their board-flat stomachs, their fleshless thighs, the ones who exercised more religiously than they attended classes, trotting to the athletic center in their shorts clingy as Saran, and who had memorized Cindy Crawford’s
Shape Your
Body Workout
but could not name a single poem by Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot. The closest I’d come to dating here had been the few desperate nights, post frat parties, when Dillon Mahoney had stumbled back to my room, or I to his on the third floor of the Delta Tau House, where the football players lived. His walls, I’d seen, when he turned on the lights, were plastered with posters of swimsuit models thrusting their balloon breasts. One night, he’d put his arm around me, his breath reeking of beer and garlic. “Now why can’t you look like that?” he’d whispered in my ear.

“You can get off on your damn posters!” I’d yelled, slamming his door with all the strength I could muster. That had been early January, the last ridiculous party I had attended, the last time I’d wasted myself on fools.

“What you don’t know,” I’d lectured Sharon, “is that the women are as guilty as the men. They encourage this, each one more obsessed with her appearance than the next. God, they remind me of Mother!”

From Sharon I had heard a halfhearted “hmm.” She believed my stories about Mother to be exaggerations. But Sharon had never been the victim of Mother’s superficiality. And Mother was relentless. Before my departure for school, she had collected, from various department stores, an assortment of slacks in blacks and charcoals, dark-hued cashmere V-necks and turtlenecks. “These are very figure-flattering,” she had
whispered, though there had been no one else around, draping them across my bed for me to see. From the way she’d sniffed as she smoothed the garments, I could picture her humiliation when she’d had to ask for a size twelve. She never once mentioned my weight, the twenty or so pounds I had gained in junior high and never shed. But previously, on a handful of special occasions—a Christmas Eve dinner at the Essex House, my sweet sixteen party at The Water Club, watching me dress for my senior prom—she had sighed and stroked my cheek with her fingertip. “What a pretty, pretty face you have, Franny.” This was her subtle hint she wished I had the body to match.

“It’s just as bad at Vassar. I guess there’s no escape.” Sharon had decided to sound more agreeable now.

“Even my own suite has not been spared.” I opened my door and peeked out to be sure no one could hear. “Setsu’s as bony as a stray cat. She never eats more than a few bites at a sitting. The longer she stays with her boyfriend, James, the more emaciated she looks. And he likes it! And Opal with her obsessive running. She’d probably major in aerobics if the school would let her. And she eats the most disgusting health food crap! She might as well eat the grass on the quad! It would be cheaper!” And then Ruth—still trying to make herself attractive to snakes like Gavin. You’d think she’d have learned her lesson. Gavin’s life had hummed along without one skipped beat. He knew
nothing
of what Ruth had endured. For him, their encounter had been only a fleeting indulgence. Days later, he’d started dating Gina Whitaker, chipper and chesty, with legs skinny as candy sticks. And
this
was more his style. Opal had heard him with a friend.
The heavier girls are easier because they’re lonely but just a little too much woman for me. Know what I mean?
He’d grabbed his haunches, laughing.

I told Opal, “If I come across him, I’ll flay him alive!”

Even recently—during the last winter break when the four of us had spent a few days at the cabin in Stowe my parents had rented for the ski
season—Ruth had confessed to Opal she thought maybe if she were prettier, at least if she were slimmer, things would go differently for her with men, might have gone differently with Gavin. Lowlife that he was and she still continued to question herself! While the rest of us skied, she’d stayed in the lodge, cocooned in her large brown duffel coat reading some corny novel. But we knew it wasn’t just inexperience with skiing that kept her indoors. We all saw how she scrutinized Opal and Setsu in their snow pants, sleek as winter ermines. She ate grapefruit breakfasts and lunches, but later would tear open bags of chips or packages of cream-filled cakes she bought at the lodge, cursing herself and her lack of self-discipline. “You don’t need to change a thing,” we told her. But she must have known if we were not trying to protect her, we would have admitted the truth: she
was
being passed over. Males had minds as closed as mollusk shells! And until women stopped torturing themselves to appeal to
men’s
preferences, nothing would ever change!

At Vassar, Sharon said, several women shared my views and were banding together to educate their community. “Maybe you should consider something similar.”

Yes! Sharon was right. There was influence in numbers, and women at Brown needed to be encouraged, to be empowered, to no longer be conformers. They needed to claim their strength.

Not long after the new semester, and with the thawing of the cold, I learned of a march being organized through the streets of Providence. Thousands of women, it was hoped, would take over the city, moving as one like a river—forceful and uncontainable as surging water. We walked at night, not for the cover of darkness, but because these were the hours when some of us had been heinously assaulted, targets simply because of our sex. Our voices rose in great waves of sound—
Take Back the Night!
—reverberating, it seemed, through the whole of the city, each chant pulsing through me like an electric charge. We, as women, needed always to be this bold.

•   •   •

I
n March, I procured a campus post office box and a weekly meeting space in the basement of Barbour Hall for the organization I had decided to call BREMUSA, for the Amazon warrior whose name meant “raging female.” I regretted that my suitemates had not shown up for the first meeting. I thought I would at least have persuaded Opal. She understood the lustful biases of men and had even changed her appearance to avoid unwanted attentions. “You’ll be interested in this,” I’d told her. But she claimed she was trying to simplify her schedule rather than make it busier. It was Ruth, though, I was most disappointed not to see; more than anyone, she needed to hear our discussion. But ten students attended the first meeting on a Thursday evening, and the following week, thirteen. Three of them women I recognized from my Women in Fiction course—friends who sat together in the front row in patched jeans. I’d appreciated them, how quickly they raised their hands to refute the comments of bubblehead Loni Greves with her mascara and hair combs and sleeveless pastel sweaters, they seeing as I did that she spoke only to be noticed by the few men in the class rather than because she
cared
about the circumscription of women’s roles in literature or the marginalization of the female voice. On that first night, we pushed the furniture to the far wall, enlarging the space where we would sit, speaking over the radio sounding from some room above us—Van Morrison at a volume that made the floor beneath us vibrate. But we would be louder. And we shared stories of our frustrations, the ways in which the media celebrated only one female form, a form we deemed unrealistic, even unhealthy, the ways our friends, our families ignorantly perpetuated these so-called ideals.

We began during the morning and afternoon rush between classes to stake out posts where we could not be missed. We handed out flyers with sketches of skeletons in skirts,
Is This Where We Are Headed?
printed across the top. We held rallies on the Main Green; standing on desk chairs we
had dragged from our dorm rooms, we shouted statistics of girls who had starved themselves in pursuit of impossible dreams, of large women who swallowed pills to relieve their feelings of worthlessness. “Men don’t suffer for their appearance. Why should women?” we asked when onlookers paused to listen.

In the Brown dining hall, the members of BREMUSA ate collectively. Our plastic trays in hand, we jostled past soccer, lacrosse, rugby players with their muscles flexed in their varsity jackets, their faces still flushed from afternoon practices. Just as they did, we lined up for hot food, avoiding the salad-and-fruit bar most other female students on campus favored. We paraded to our seats, our plates piled high with spaghetti marinara, turkey tetrazzini, chicken pot pie. On Sundae Night, while other girls warily tiptoed around the tables spread with cartons of ice cream and bowls of sweet toppings, dropping tentative teaspoons of caramel or mere dribbles of hot fudge onto saucers, giggling guiltily, we scooped three flavors into bowls, smothering them with whipped cream, almonds, two kinds of sprinkles. What did we care that the only boys who approached asked for our unused chairs, preferring to join the “lettuce-eaters”—as we had dubbed them—at neighboring tables? We ignored their laughter. We ignored the way they gazed at their girlfriends, patted their feeble thighs, their buttocks compact as coconuts—pint-sized as mine had been in elementary school, I guessed, but not for a single day since. If these men were too narrow-minded to see that beauty should be measured by character, not by the circumference of chest, waist, and hips, then we had no time for them anyway.

When I was not busy with BREMUSA, I sprawled on the couch in my suite, with my Ancient Civilizations and Intro to Chemistry assignments, my pages of econ problems. I sped through the majority of my work, eager to dive into the reading for my women’s studies course: pieces by Mary Wollstonecraft, the Brontë sisters, Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein. I was fascinated by their daring—Charlotte Brontë using a male
pseudonym to publish her novels, the provocative subject matter of Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
, Stein’s naked professions of love for another woman. What pioneers they had been, and I read long sections of their writing aloud to my roommates.

“Are we getting credit for this course, too?” Opal teased. “I think we’ve learned all of the material.”

Bored by the subdued outfits Mother had bought me, I took trips to Boston and purchased a hip-length brown leather jacket, brown boots with buckles, suede pants, a red suede skirt with a fringed hem, a series of hats—a maroon beret, a checkered cap, a coffee-colored brimmed hat with a thin ribbon, which I was quite sure made me look like a female Indiana Jones from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

I wore my new red-fringed skirt everywhere and ordered others in olive green, deep purple, and gold. I wore them with my buckled boots, loving the way my heels pounded against the cement campus walkways, ignoring Mother’s old warnings that mid-length skirts with tall boots accentuate the fleshiness above one’s knees. I ignored, too, my suitemates’ surprised expressions as I emerged from my room each morning with my leather jacket on my shoulders, stiff as any military aviator’s. “Where are you jetting to today, Captain?” Setsu joked once when I’d added mirrored shades to my ensemble. This sent Ruth into an epileptic fit of giggles before she apologized: “Sorry, Fran. Sorry! But do you think this is your most becoming look? It’s just quite a
statement
,” as if she were only being helpful, as if this made up for her laughing—an annoying reflex Ruth had developed since the pact we’d all made early sophomore year, the little “truths” she now felt safe, even obligated, to share in the name of lasting friendship.

“Did I
ask
your opinion, Ruth?” It didn’t take much to shut her up. Anyway, what difference did it make if the jacket added bulk? What did it matter if the hat dulled the blue of my eyes, cast shadows on my nose and mouth, the features everyone agreed were my finest? I had priorities of greater consequence.