Joe College Read online

  “Where’s everyone else?” I asked. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a bunch of you?”

  “They left about an hour ago. Jill’s brother invited us to a party down the shore.”

  “You could have gone. It wasn’t like we had a date or anything.”

  She nodded slowly, trying to look thoughtful instead of hurt.

  “I see them all the time. I thought it might be nice to be with someone different for a change.”

  I climbed onto the stool next to hers and played a little drumroll on the bar, feeling unexpectedly calm and in control.

  “It is nice. How come we didn’t think of this a month ago?”

  She reached down and squeezed my leg just above the knee. It was a ticklish spot, and I jumped in my seat.

  “I’ve been waiting for this all summer,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”

  I wouldn’t have predicted it, but Cindy turned out to be a talker. She drank three glasses of rose with dinner and held forth on whatever popped into her head—her indecision about buying a car, her crush on Bruce Springsteen, a bad experience she once had eating a lobster. She had so many opinions my head got tired from nodding in real or feigned agreement with them. She believed it was better to die in a hospice than a hospital and thought tollbooths should be abolished on the parkway. She disapproved of abortion, loved trashy novels, and was angered by the possibility that rich people might be able to freeze their bodies immediately after death, remaining in a state of suspended animation until a cure was found for whatever had killed them.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “When you’re dead you should just be dead.”

  “That’s right. It should be available to everyone or not at all.”

  “I want to travel,” she blurted out. “I don’t just want to rot around here for the rest of my life.”

  I looked up from my Mexi-burger, startled by the pleading in her voice. She smiled sheepishly.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m not usually such a chatterbox. I hope I’m not boring you to death.”

  “Not at all. I’m happy to listen.”

  And I was, too, at least most of the time. Even when she recounted in minute detail a complex dispute her mother had had with the cable company, or tried to convince me that I needed to read The Late, Great Planet Earth, I still found myself diverted by the unexpectedness of Cindy and touched by her need for my approval. I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as someone other people needed to impress. Until quite recently, in fact, I had generally felt the obligation moving in the opposite direction.

  “Do I sound stupid to you?” she asked.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I’m just going on and on. I’m not even sure if I’m making sense.”

  “It’s nice,” I said. “I’m having a good time.”

  She stuck one finger into her wineglass, stirring the pink liquid into a lazy whirlpool. Then she transferred her finger from the glass to her mouth, sucking contemplatively for a few seconds.

  “You’re sweet,” she said finally, as if pronouncing a verdict. “You’re sweet to even put up with me.”

  She decided she was too tipsy to drive and happily accepted my offer of a ride home. We maneuvered our way through the crowded parking lot, bodies brushing together accidentally on purpose as we walked. It was still muggy, but the night had cooled down just enough to be merciful. I reached into my pocket and fished around for the keys.

  “Oh my God,” she said, grabbing me roughly by the wrist. “You’re driving me home in this?”

  I had spent so much of my summer in and around the Roach Coach I didn’t really notice it anymore. But her startled laughter made me look at it as if for the first time: the gleaming silver storage compartment with its odd, quilted texture, the old-fashioned cab, the grinning cockroach on the passenger door, emblem of my father’s rapidly fading dream. The roach was a friendly-looking, spindly-legged fellow, as much person as bug, walking more or less upright, with white gloves on his hands and white high-top sneakers on his feet. He seemed to be in a big hurry to get wherever it was he was going. DANTE’S ROACH COACH, said the bold yellow letters arching over his head. Beneath his feet, a caption read, COMIN’ ATCHA!

  “It’s all I have,” I said. “My parents took the station wagon to the campground. We can take your car if you want.”

  “That’s okay,” she said cheerfully. “How often does a girl get to ride in a lunch truck?”

  I opened the door and helped her up into the cab. Then I circled around to the driver’s side, climbing in beside her. An open box of Snickers bars rested on the seat between us, along with a parking ticket and a stack of coffee cups decorated with a Greek-column motif. Cindy helped herself to a candy bar. I started the truck.

  “Kinda melted,” she informed me, struggling with the taffy-like strand of caramel produced by her first bite. “You should keep these things out of the sun.”

  Five minutes later we pulled up in front of her house. I shut off the ignition and headlights, turning to her with one of those dopey what-now shrugs that was the best I could muster in the way of a suave opening gambit. She nodded yes, sliding toward me on the seat. I moved the candy bars and coffee cups on top of the dashboard, out of harm’s way.

  I hadn’t been kissed all summer, and the first touch of her tongue on mine released me from a prison I hadn’t even known I was in. All at once, the boundary between myself and the rest of the world disappeared; a sudden weightlessness took hold of me, as though I were no longer a body, just a mouth filled with tastes and sensations. For some unidentifiable period of time, I lost track of who and where I was.

  When I could think again, my first thought was, This is amazing! My second was, She’s a secretary! The thought was so jarring, so ridiculous and uncalled-for, it made me pull away in confusion. We sat there in the humid cab, separated by a distance of maybe a foot, breathing so hard we might as well have just delivered a refrigerator. She ran one hand through her formerly neat hair and looked at me as if I’d said something peculiar.

  “What do you want?” she asked, her voice low and urgent.

  “Want?” I said.

  “Why are you even with me?”

  Instead of answering—or maybe by way of answering—I kissed her again. This time it felt more like real life, two bodies, two separate agendas. I put my hand on her breast. She removed it. I groaned with disappointment and tried again, with the same result. Instead of backing off, though, she kissed me even harder, as if to reward my persistence. I wrenched my mouth away from hers.

  “My parents are away for the weekend,” I whispered. “We’d have the whole house to ourselves.”

  She ignored the invitation. Her face tightened into a squint of pained concentration.

  “Tell me what it’s like,” she said.

  I didn’t bother to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. In some strange way, we’d been talking about it all night.

  “It’s just college,” I told her, leaning back against the door, trying to calm my breathing.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “I applied.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I did really good on the SATs. Much better than I expected.”

  This was my standard answer whenever anyone at home asked me how I’d gotten into Yale. It was easier to write it off as a fluke than to go into all the other stuff, the AP classes I’d taken, the papers I’d written for extra credit, the stupid clubs I’d joined just so I could list them on my application, all the nights I’d stayed up late reading books like Moby Dick and The Manic Mountain with a dictionary beside me, the endless lists of vocabulary words I’d memorized, the feeling I’d had ever since I was a little kid that I was headed out of town, on to bigger and better things.

  “But it’s hard, right? They give you a lot of homework?”

  The word “homework” seemed jarring to me; it had dr
opped out of my vocabulary the day I graduated from high school.

  “I didn’t know what homework was,” I admitted. “High school’s a joke in comparison.”

  “It must be fun, though. Living in a dorm and everything.”

  “It’s okay. The food’s a little scary.”

  “I did really bad in high school,” she said. “My mother was sick a lot. Then I got involved with this older guy. Before I knew it, the four years were gone and I hadn’t really learned anything. Now I feel so stupid all the time.”

  “An older guy?” Just the phrase made me a little queasy.

  “I was a cashier at Medi-Mart. He was one of the supervisors.”

  I remembered seeing her a lot at Medi-Mart back when we were in high school, thinking she seemed more at home behind the register than she did walking the halls of Harding.

  “How long’d you go out?”

  “Two years.” She looked away; all the life seemed to have drained out of her. “He was married and everything. You must think I’m horrible.”

  I reached for her face, gently steering it my direction. She was teary-eyed, but happy to be kissed again. This time I tried some new strategies, nibbling on her lips and licking up and down the salty length of her neck. Within minutes she was breathing in quick, trembly gasps, murmuring encouragement. When she seemed ready, I tried maneuvering her onto her back, but she went rigid, not resisting exactly, but certainly not cooperating.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She gave me a glassy-eyed smile of incomprehension.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I love this,” she said, running her tongue around her chapped and swollen-looking lips. “I could kiss you forever.”

  Three weeks later, I was starting to believe her. All we ever did was kiss. Nearly a month of heavy making out, and I hadn’t even succeeded in getting my hand up her shirt. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.

  Other than that, we had a pretty good time together. Sometimes we went to the movies or out to dinner, but mainly we just shopped for cars. It was the consuming quest of her life. We read the stickers, quizzed the salesmen, took demos out for drives—Civics and Corollas, Escorts and Omnis, K-cars and Firebirds, Mustangs and Rabbits. But despite all our work, she seemed no closer to making a decision. New or used? Automatic or stick? Foreign or American? Hatchback or sedan? Every night we started from scratch. There was always another dealership, new variables to ponder. I started to wonder if she saw car shopping and kissing as ends in themselves—wholly satisfying, self-contained events—rather than starting points on the road to bigger things.

  I think I would have lost patience with her a lot sooner if the end of the summer hadn’t been looming over us from the start. Every day, in some process of withdrawal that was as subtle as it was relentless, I looked upon her less and less as my actual girl-friend and more and more as a potential anecdote, a puzzling and amusing story I would share with my roommates in one of those hilarious late-night conversations that I missed so much when I was away from college.

  Cindy saw it differently. As I retreated, her attachment to me intensified. She hated the idea that I was just going to pack my bags and disappear, leaving her right where she was at the beginning of the summer. The average night ended with her in tears, me awkwardly trying to comfort her. Shyly at first, then more insistently, she began to explore the possibility of continuing our relationship after I returned to school. We could write and talk on the phone, couldn’t we? I could come home for occasional weekends and vacations. It was do-able, wasn’t it? Then she brought up the idea of visiting me in New Haven.

  “It’s not far, right? And I’ll probably have my new car by then.” I saw how excited she was by this prospect, and how hard she was trying not to show it. “It’ll be really cool, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t think it would be cool at all, but it seemed even more uncool to say so.

  “Where would you sleep?” I asked, in a tone that suggested simple curiosity.

  “Where would you want me to?” she asked, her excitement tempered by caution.

  “What I want doesn’t seem to matter.”

  “What do you mean?” Her voice was quiet now, a little defensive.

  “What do you think I mean?”

  “Tell me.” Even in the darkness of the Roach Coach, I could see that she was getting ready to cry again. I hated it when she cried, hated how guilty it made me feel, and how manipulative she seemed in her misery.

  “My parents are away,” I told her. “We can do anything we want to. So why are we sitting here arguing about nothing?”

  Something suddenly seemed very interesting to her outside the passenger window. I let her stare at it for as long as she needed to.

  She came over the following night. It happened to be the Saturday before I left for school, our last chance to take advantage of the empty house. She made the decision herself, after I made it clear that I wasn’t much feeling like going anywhere.

  I had everything ready when she arrived. Hall and Oates on the record player, Mateus in the refrigerator, candles in the bedroom. In my pocket I carried two Fourex lambskin condoms. (Fourex were my condoms of choice in those days. They came in little blue plastic capsules, which, though inconveniently bulky and difficult to open, seemed infinitely classier than the little foil pouches that housed less exotic rubbers. I used the brand for several years, right up to the day someone explained to me that “lambskin” was not, in fact, a euphemism.)

  We drank a glass of wine and went upstairs. I lit the candles. We kissed for a while and started taking off our clothes. Her body was everything I’d hoped for, and I would have been ecstatic if Cindy hadn’t seemed so subdued and defeated in her nakedness. She sat on the bed, knees drawn to her chest, and watched me fumble with my blue capsule, her expression suggesting resignation rather than arousal. Finally the top popped off.

  “There!” I said, triumphantly producing the condom.

  She watched with grim curiosity as I began unfurling it over the tip of my erection, which already seemed decidedly more tentative than it had just seconds earlier.

  “This is all you wanted,” she said. She stated it as a fact, not a question.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I muttered. I found it hard enough to put on a condom in the best of circumstances, and almost impossible while conducting a serious conversation.

  “I should’ve known,” she said. “This is all it ever comes down to, isn’t it?”

  The condom was only halfway on, and I could feel the opportunity slipping away. I tried to save it with a speech, telling her that sex between two people who liked and respected each other was a natural and beautiful thing, a cause for celebration, and certainly nothing for anyone to be ashamed of, but by the time I got to that part the whole issue was moot anyway. I watched her blank gaze travel down to the deflated balloon dangling between my legs and then back up to my face.

  “There,” I told her. “You happy now?”

  slices are ready

  The phone rang a few minutes after ten. I hesitated, thinking it was probably Cindy, but then picked up anyway. Those were the days just before answering machines really caught on, and if you were curious you didn’t really have a choice.

  “Get your coat on,” Matt barked in my ear. “I’ll meet you at Naples in ten minutes.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Whaddaya mean, you can’t?”

  “I told you. I’ve got a date with George Eliot.”

  “Fuck George Eliot.”

  “I’ll be lucky to get to second base.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Seriously, I’m supposed to read up to page six eighty-seven.”

  “So?”

  “Right now I’m on page two seventy-two.”

  “See? You’re halfway there. Just skim the rest over breakfast.”

  “Sure,” I said.
“What the hell. It’s either that or the Cheerios box.”

  Matt sighed to let me know how badly I was disappointing him.

  “Listen,” he told me. “I don’t usually do this, but I’m gonna save you a lot of trouble. You want to know what happens at the end of Middlemarch?”

  “I’d prefer not to.”

  “Ha, good one. You know the main character? What’s her name?”

  “Dorothea?”

  “Yeah, her. She throws herself under a train.”

  “That’s Anna Karenina, asshole.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry. I got confused. There’s a big sword fight. Everybody dies.”

  “Goodbye, Matt.”

  “You’re not gonna do this? You’re gonna make me go to bed hungry?”

  “Go yourself. You don’t need me to hold your hand.”

  “Yeah, right. I’ll really go to Naples by myself at this time of night. First I’ll have to make a sign that says,”I’m Pathetic,” so I can wear it around my neck.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I assured him.

  “Touché,” he said, grimly conceding defeat. “Enjoy your reading, weenie boy.”

  Cindy and I had ended the summer on bad terms. I came back to school and threw myself into my classes with renewed passion, thanking God every chance I got for releasing me from the bondage of the lunch truck, though my happiness was diluted by the hot flashes of guilt I felt for abandoning my father. Now that I knew what his days were really like, I had to trade in the sustaining illusion of him as a happy and prosperous businessman on wheels for the more accurate and distressing image of him as captain of a sinking ship, an angry, itchy, dyspeptic man tailgating some terrified geezer as he tried to make up for lost time between the perforating company and the lumberyard.

  That fall turned out to be a breakthrough semester for me, the first time I ever really felt at home in college. As thrilled as I’d been by the intellectual challenges, my freshman and sophomore years had been emotionally and socially difficult. I felt trapped and resentful a lot of the time, marooned within a small circle of friends and acquaintances, cut off from the wider life of the college, which seemed to be dominated by overlapping prep school cliques I wouldn’t have known how to penetrate if I’d wanted to. Junior year, though, the whole place just cracked wide open.