I plunged up the stairs toward 308, still clutching the antiseptic green notepaper, and not even crying. I just felt numb all over. Vaguely I wondered what miracle Vicki Baird would accomplish to get Anthony back for me. She was bound to produce one. After all, she was a senior, pinned to a ∆KE, and she had actually invited Joan Baez to her high school commencement exercises. (Joan didn’t go, of course, but Vicki had received a nice letter from her secretary explaining that Joan was on a peace march with Dr. King, and wished her well. Vicki had the letter framed and hanging above her Donovan poster.)
Vicki’s door was the one with the poster of LBJ and Lady Bird dressed as Bonnie and Clyde. When I got there, a sign tacked to Lyndon’s nose said that Vicki had gone to the post office and would be back before dinner. I slumped down beside the door to wait.
How could Anthony do this to me? I was an English major, for God’s sake! Didn’t I stay in on Friday nights and write to him instead of going out? And no matter how many times people said it was uncool to still be tied to your high school honey, I’d always smile and say that we had been lucky to find each other so young. And now this. It was a judgment, I decided. A curse. I’d laughed when Sophy thought she was pregnant. Back in September, I’d gone to Rosh Hashanah services with her (and became-from force of habit-the first person to genuflect in the UNC Hillel), and she met a med student named Bundschaft. I tried to tell her not to go off and spend the weekend with him, but no! Sophy wanted to experience Life. She came back Sunday night with a green lab coat and a blow-by-blow account of the weekend. Told me I ought to try it with Anthony, and I’d sniffed and said that Southern men didn’t expect that kind of thing from their fiancées. I sniffled a little, remembering it. How did I know what Anthony expected? Some Yankee bitch at Duke might be screwing him on the fifty-yard line for all I knew. And then when Sophy thought she was pregnant-well, she had been rather melodramatic about it. Alternately planning to drop out of school and raise it alone or tell no one and brazen out the year. Finally one evening after dinner, when we were all walking back through the parlor where the guys wait on little loveseats for their dates, Sophy announced her latest plan: “We won’t tell anybody. And then in May when the time comes for the delivery, you can all come in and help me. We’ll boil water in the hot pots-”
At that point the absurdity of the whole situation overcame me-her period was only nine days late-and I dropped to my knees in the parlor, crying: “Oh laws a mussy, Miz Scarlett! I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!” It was wicked and I deserved to be punished-but it did put a stop to the planning. And then a few days later, Sophy had timidly taken the matter to Vicki, who glanced up from her chemistry book, studied the supplicant for a few seconds and flatly declared: “You aren’t pregnant. Go study.” At breakfast the next morning, Sophy had announced in hushed tones that Vicki had been proved right. The crisis was over.
I began to relax a little. Anthony ought to be easy after that miracle.
“Hey! McCrory! What are you doing sitting out in the hall?”
I looked up to find Sophy’s roommate P. J. Purdue hovering over me, dressed as usual in a black turtleneck and black slacks. She looked like a drill sergeant’s impersonation of Mia Farrow. I didn’t want to tell her about Anthony. P. J. Purdue was not what you’d call a sympathetic listener. In fact she was a Vietcong of the sexual revolution; her exploits had passed into campus mythology. P. J. Purdue had once humiliated a flasher in the campus arboretum. She’d been walking back from class when the guy jumped out of the bushes and exposed himself. He’d picked the wrong victim. Purdue said: “Are you bragging or complaining? Listen, buddy, I’ve seen Vienna sausages that were more impressive than that! Wait! Before you jerk off, I’ll lend you my tweezers!” The guy slunk off into the shrubbery and never worked that park again. I could imagine Purdue’s reaction to my broken heart. Purdue had lost her virginity in high school in the backseat of a ’63 Corvair, and she claims her reaction was: “That’s it? You mean, that was if?” I sometimes wondered if there was a Trappist monastery in Charlotte filling up with victims of Purdue’s sexual contempt.
Before I could think up an excuse for camping outside Vicki’s door, Purdue said: “Anyway, you’re just who I wanted to see. I want your wastebasket.”
“My wastebasket?”
“Yeah. My parents are coming down for the weekend, and ours is filled with cigarette ashes and God-knows-what. So we want to borrow yours.” She walked away. “Bring it down to our room!” she yelled back.
I was too dazed with personal sorrow to argue. I gave up my vigil outside 308, and went to deliver my chaste and virginal wastebasket to their den of iniquity. Sophy was sprawled out on her bed under the poster of the statue of David-with a fig leaf taped in a strategic area. She waved a languid hand at me as I came in.
“Hi, kid! Still subscribing to Modern Bride?”
“Not for long,” I said. “I just got a kiss-off letter from Anthony.” There’s something about Sophy and Purdue that makes people blasé about anything.
Purdue looked up from The Village Voice. “So that’s why you were camped outside Baird’s door! Trauma case. Tough luck about the boyfriend, though!”
“What should I do?” I quavered.
Purdue shook her head. “Nah. All that emotional counseling crap is strictly Baird’s department. Now if you had a sexual problem, I’d be the one to go to!”
Sophy snickered. “Not Baird!”
Purdue shrugged. “Oh, you mean the phone call? That was a stitch. But we were freshmen then.”
“What phone call?”
“Freshman year for us. Vicki Baird was always a missionary, even back then. Everybody’s aunt. But she was pretty naive herself, having just got here from Middle Earth, North Carolina, or someplace. So one day the hall phone rings and she answers it, and this guy says he’s going to jack off.” Purdue made the appropriate hand motion to illustrate the procedure. “Got it? Yeah, your basic obscene phone call. Well, Baird was such a twit with her shrink complex that she thought he was going to commit suicide. So she stays on the phone with him trying to talk him out of it, for chrissakes! ‘Oh, don’t do that. Life is beautiful. I’m sure there are people who care about you.’ Finally, the guy says he feels much better, and she says she’s glad. Guy says: ‘Can I call you back?’ And the idiot says: ‘Oh, yes! Any time you feel like this, you can call and talk to me!’ So Baird hangs up the phone feeling like a minister of grace. That glow lasted until dinner that night. We’re sitting at the table-”
Sophy stopped laughing long enough to interrupt. “Yeah, Baird says to P. J.: ‘Oh, Purdue, some poor guy called our hall this afternoon and he was so depressed he was going to jack off!’ And Purdue freaked. Coffee went everywhere.”
“Did you tell her-”
“Yeah, she took it pretty well. Baird’s okay. She’s a big help to sensitive types.” She looked meaningfully at Sophy.
“I’ve aged a lot since September!” snapped Sophy.
She had, too. Since the Bundschaft incident, Sophy had taken up the pill, and a succession of rugged primates who may have been football players. She called this her zaftig period, which we took to mean something like hunks. No one was ever exactly sure what Sophy was talking about, because she had arrived at our Waspish Southern school from Queens, New York, speaking something which was decidedly not English. “Listen!” she’d say to us in the laundry room. “Don’t let me nosh, anymore, okay? I hate to kvetch about my weight all the time, but I have such tsuris with my metabolism-” And we’d say: “You wanna run that one around the barn one more time, honey chile?” Mutual comprehension arrived in a few weeks’ time. Now I knew what tsuris was. Boy, did I know!