Autobiography of Us (7 page)

I admired her enormously for that, for her ability to simply, unapologetically, disappear. But it must be clear by now that I admired everything about her, that she was everything I was not.

I did try to tell her once. Alex, I mean. It was our junior year at Windridge—spring, it must have been, March or early April. We were on our way home from school when it began to rain, one of those sudden torrential downpours Pasadena is famous for at that time of year. You could see the rain sweep down the broad streets as it approached, a heavy gray curtain dropping over one house after the next. The street we were walking down that afternoon was lined with trees, which might have provided refuge, and—better yet—houses whose owners would gladly have let us in. No one locked their doors in those days. We would have been taken in in an instant and given cookies and lemonade, a dry towel. But no sooner had I begun to slow my pace than Alex grabbed my hand and pulled. I was already drenched—my fingers slick, my arms—and her hand kept slipping against my skin. Rain streamed down the street’s slight incline, the bark on the palm trees gone glossly black and reflective, as though lacquered.

We ran for what I would later swear was miles, though of course it was only a few blocks, Alex in front with her hair streaming out behind her like something out of Ovid, some changeling creature. We turned in to her driveway and collapsed on the front stoop of her house just as the rain stopped, as abruptly as it had begun, both of us gasping, sopping wet.

“I’d like to run to the ends of the world and back.” She shook her hair back off her shoulders, though pieces of it clung to her neck like strands of seaweed. “I think I could run forever—I mean it.” She said it with that fierceness she had even at that age, and I pretended to be busy with my socks, pleating the material between my fingers and watching the colored water drip onto the stone. “I bet I could run far if I wanted. Fast, too. I bet I could outrun all of them, even those Browning boys.”

“Sure you could.” My uniform skirt had begun to bleed. Streaks of blue ran down my legs through the mud in a way that worried me, my socks not only filthy but stained as well, the cost of replacing everything, I knew, prohibitive.

“I will, too. And soon.” She shrugged. “Soonish. People here lack depth,” she said seriously. “Zero gravitas.”

“But where would you go?” I asked, careful to keep the rising panic from my voice.

“Anywhere. Everywhere. Travel expands the mind.” This she said carefully—quoting, it seemed clear, something she had recently read. “I’ve been thinking maybe the Amazon. It’s supposed to be marvelous down there. The natives believe the earth is carried around on the back of an animal. Isn’t that the most marvelous thing you’ve ever heard? A lion, I think it is, or a turtle. Actual living flesh, is the point, creeping around with the weight of the world on its shoulders.”

“I think that’s blasphemy,” I said uneasily.

“But the best thing I read about the Amazon is what happens when you get into the jungle,” she went on, ignoring me. “Deep, I mean, at the absolute center. There’s a tribe of women who rule the place. They hunt and kill all their own food. Do everything men do. Men aren’t even allowed. Or maybe,” she frowned, “once a year or something. They must let in a few to mate every now and then. Point being, they otherwise do without. And you want to know the best part?” She raised her hand to the right side of her chest and slowly, seriously, made the shape of an
X
. “They cut it off.”

“It?”

“The right one. It gets in the way of the bow.” She leaned in close. “They slice right through. No medicine or anything. Imagine—they’ve probably never done it on a white woman. All that blood would be shocking as hell against skin like ours.”

I felt a pang in the right side of my chest, where I was still flat as a board. “But it’s only these natives who do it,” I said worriedly. “Isn’t it?”

She sighed. “That’s really not the point, Rebecca.”

Perhaps I felt she’d just shared something with me and I wanted to do the same. Or maybe I felt a shiver of excitement at the danger in what she’d said, or I heard her disappointment at my question and wanted to prove myself to her once and for all. I don’t know. All I know is that I took her hand as she started to turn away—grabbed it, with an urgency I believe surprised us both.

“Look.” I pointed to the pale blue
V
of veins along the underside of her wrist. “Do you have any idea what these do?”

“I’m cold,” she said, frowning.

“This’ll just take a minute.” I traced the veins up to where they disappeared, an inch or two below the rolled cuff of her blouse. “I was reading about it the other day. There are three big veins that run through your arm—the brachial, the basilic, and the cephalic.”

She peered down. “I don’t see anything.”

“You can’t see them, exactly. You have to know how to look.”

“So what—now you’re God?”

“I think it’s interesting, that’s all,” I said, faltering. “It’s like Mr. Percy said, remember? The best parts are all around us. Everywhere you look. For instance, our hearts.” I held up my fists. “Did you know? They’re only that big.”

“Good for them,” she said, turning away again, bored. But instead of going inside, she stood there a moment, her hand resting on the doorknob. “I wouldn’t be scared,” she said finally, her back still to me. “In case you were wondering.” She half-turned then and made that slicing gesture across the front of her chest again. “I wouldn’t mind a bit.”

I fiddled with the hem of my skirt, the material sopping. “
I
would.”

“I know, Rebecca,” she said, her voice heavy with something I didn’t recognize, and then she pulled the door open and went inside.

BUT I said I lost her twice: The second time was Bertrand Lowell. It was May of our junior year at the U when he called for Alex, her voice as she told us she’d said yes unusually husky. I remember thinking it sounded as though she’d been crying. We all circled around her where she sat by the hallway phone, tilting her head back to exhale a thin stream of smoke. “Why the hell not,” she said. “I’ve been living like a goddamn nun.” She stubbed her cigarette out in the ceramic dish we kept beside the phone. “I deserve a little fun, don’t you think? It’s been ages since I had a little fun.”

Their date was on a Friday. I remember because it was the weekend before exams and it was unseasonably chilly, the breeze strong enough that I took a scarf when I left for the library that afternoon. I kept a study carrel there in a corner of the fourth floor so the other girls couldn’t accuse me of being a grind. So long as I didn’t try to work in the dorm, no one could accuse me of anything besides being out, though in retrospect I don’t suppose I was fooling anyone. Still, I liked working there enough not to care. It was smaller than the old Pasadena library, but the windows were big, the carpet kept meticulously clean. French literature—that was the section directly behind where I worked, and, when I tired of reading, I often let my gaze drift to the names written in gilt lettering down the spines:
Sartre
,
Gide
,
Baudelaire
.

It was late by the time I left my carrel the night of their date, dinner long over. I remember I was half delirious from studying and glad to be out in the fresh air, the breeze carrying the smell of the jacarandas that lined the far quad. An unnatural quiet had descended across that part of campus, the only sound the low vibrato of the creek frogs. I gazed up at the sky as I walked, in no particular hurry to get home. I liked picking out the constellations, each angle fixed to a star precise as a pinprick. Andromeda, Cassiopiea, Ursa Major and Minor.

But I won’t pretend I was so engrossed in the skies that I forgot about Alex and Bertrand Lowell. I’d been thinking idly about their date all day while I worked: I pictured them walking down Sunset to the theater, the way he might, smiling, remove a fallen leaf from her hair. As I crossed the footpath over to the women’s quad, where yellow lamplight spilled through the windows of Cullers Hall down across the grass, I felt that sudden desire to be home that still strikes me from time to time, a loneliness that makes me want to shut myself up somewhere familiar. The moon slid out from behind Bellweather Hall and I quickened my pace, half-running as I crossed the last pathway to Cullers and pushed the heavy door open, taking the stairs to my bedroom two at a time.

* * *

I’d just pulled my nightgown over my head when Alex burst through the door.

“What in the world—”

She pushed past me and threw herself on the bed. “Disgusting,” she said. Her face was very pale. “I’d like to know who gave them the right to be so disgusting.”

“Who?”

She glared at me as though I was being purposefully obtuse. “Men,” she snapped. “Bertrand Lowell.” She’d had to hit him to get him to stop, she said. She’d asked first, nicely, and he’d stopped for a minute. His kitchen hot, she said.
Hellish
, both of them sweating like pigs. They’d started out just kissing, and because it felt good, she’d let it keep going. His fingers went to the buttons of her blouse next: She let that go too. It wasn’t until they moved up from her knees and up the back of her legs under her skirt that she tried to push him away. He laughed and told her she was gorgeous. Somehow her skirt ended up around her waist. He was strong, she said. Stronger than he looked. They were down on the floor and he was pinning her, she said; he had her by the wrists. It wasn’t until it started to hurt—and it
hurt
, she said fiercely; no one ever said it would hurt like that—that she’d managed to work her hand free and bring the flat of her palm against his jaw, her ring cutting a half-moon just in front of his ear.

You little bitch.
He’d actually called her that. And then he’d sat there on the floor, cradling the side of his face with one hand as she grabbed her purse and ran.

This was 1965, remember. The words we had for what he’d done fell short of adequate. We might have said he’d been
filthy
. We might have called him an
animal
, said he had acted
abominably
. When she’d finished telling me everything, I went right out into the hallway and poured a glass of milk from the refrigerator in the little kitchenette we all shared. I was surprised to see as I put the bottle back that my hands were shaking; they looked like someone else’s hands, my fingers holding the glass so tightly the knuckles shone through the skin.

When I opened the door, Alex was sitting up on my bed and rummaging busily in her purse. “There!” She held up a lipstick, frowning at the tube. “
Scarlet Sunset
. Christ. A little imagination wouldn’t have killed them.” She drew on her red mouth and blotted with a tissue. “Of course, we’ll have to keep the whole thing quiet
,
” she went on. The last thing she wanted was a fuss, she said. Besides which, there wasn’t much to tell. She was tired—
God
, she was positively
dead
. She’d had much too much to drink. It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten sick. She brought out a compact and checked her reflection, touching up her eyes while I stood there like an idiot with my glass of milk. I had thought she might need to have a good cry. That she might rest there on my bed awhile, gathering her strength, until we came up with a plan. “Everyone makes such a thing about sex,” she said now, examining herself in her little mirror. “I’ve got my career to think about, for crying out loud.”

I sat down next to her on the bed and watched as she twisted her hair back into place, driving the pencil through that elaborate knot with what seemed to me to be unnecessary force. “But it’s awful what he did,” I said finally.

She gave me a bland look. “Honestly, I can hardly remember.”

“You just told me—”

She snapped her purse shut and stood. “And now I’m saying I don’t remember.”

She stood there, tapping her foot against the rug. When it was clear I wasn’t about to say anything else, she went to the door, giving me a look; after a moment’s pause, I agreed to silence—nodding, unhappy. I stayed sitting on my bed a long time after she left, drinking the glass of milk down myself, every drop, before turning off the light. I don’t know what the hardest part of the whole thing was—trying to pick out the truth from everything she’d said or trying to explain to myself how and why exactly I felt betrayed.

THAT next week was, as I said, exams. I would have shut myself up in the library till all hours even if Alex hadn’t come into my room that night and said what she did. As it was, I stayed deliberately late and left the dorm before breakfast was set out, my pencils sharpened and tucked into the side pocket of my purse. Still, it was strange to see her standing there in Betsy’s driveway when we all met that next Saturday morning before Robin’s wedding—her hair falling loose around her shoulders, her yellow dress cut low and tight. Looking, I mean, as though nothing had changed. She gave a languid wave when she saw me, her cigarette leaving a
Z
of smoke hanging in the air.

“Hail the conquering,” she called. “How’d you do?”

“Fine, I guess.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be modest, Becky. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Betsy broke in. “You’re just jealous.” She gave me a reassuring smile. “We’re all jealous, aren’t we, girls? Wouldn’t we all like to be as smart as Rebecca?”

Lindsey patted her curls—copper-colored and tucked under in the style my mother had encouraged me to try. “Some of us will have to settle for being dummies.”

“Dummies,” Alex said slowly, “with a little foresight.” She reached into her handbag and pulled out a flask; Lindsey broke into applause.

Both ceremony and reception were being held at Robin’s family’s country house in Indio, a town some hundred-odd miles southeast of Pasadena in an area known as the dusty territory of date farmers and ranchers. I stayed mostly silent in the passenger seat beside Betsy, listening to Lindsey chatter on as she and Alex passed the flask back and forth in the backseat, both of them rolling down the windows to smoke. The landscape dulled as we drove, the trees giving way to great dry swaths of land that stretched out toward the horizon, pale as bone, dotted here and there with scraggly bushes whose branches scraped low to the ground as though bent to the task of finding water. Dust blew up around our wheels in clouds the sickly yellow of pollen—the car coated with it, we discovered when we stopped, thick enough you could write your name with a finger.