I craned my neck in the other direction, peering up and down the aisle. No one else had any idea. I heard Rufina sniffle, and before I had made a conscious decision to do so, I’d set my fingertips on her forearm. “Do you want me to get Ms. Barrett?”
She shook her head.
“Do you want a tissue?” It was a napkin, actually, which I pulled from the backpack at my feet; I’d used it while eating a turkey sandwich on the ride to the game, and it was spotted by some mashed crumbs and a splotch of mustard.
She removed her fist from in front of her mouth, swallowed, turned to me, and extended her hand, palm up. When our eyes met, her expression was so plaintive that I wished the napkin were clean. She bent her head, blew her nose, then looked out the window again. We were passing a cluster of evergreens, shadowy in the approaching dusk, when she said, “I just want to know if it’ll always be like this.”
This was not what I’d expected. First, I had not expected that her voice would be as controlled as it was, and I also had expected her to be more specific about what was bothering her: I miss my boyfriend (I’d heard that Rufina went out with someone from back home in San Diego, an older guy who was in the Army) or I can’t believe Ms. Barrett didn’t let us play. What could I say to what she’d said? Either I had no idea what she was talking about or else I understood exactly, and given these two options, I wanted the latter to be true, but if I asked another question, then it wouldn’t be; if I made her explain even a little, it would mean I didn’t understand at all.
I took a breath. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
I waited to see if either of us would say anything else. She was still looking out the window, and I looked, too, and saw that it had started to snow.
And now two years had passed, Rufina wore hardly any makeup, she wore her hair not slicked back in a long ponytail as she once had but loose, she talked often and unself-consciously, even in front of guys like Nick. I wondered if I also had changed since our freshman year. Certainly not as successfully-I was less naÏve, a little less anxious, but I was fatter, too, I’d gained ten pounds in the last two years, and also my identity felt sealed. Early on, I had imagined I might seem strange and dreamy, as if I spent time alone by choice, but now I was just another ordinary-looking girl who hung out most of the time with her roommate (similarly ordinary looking), who did not date boys, did not excel in either sports or academics, did not participate in forbidden activities like smoking or sneaking out of the dorm at night. Now I was average and Rufina was happy. And she was sexy, too-either she had not always been this curvy and golden-skinned or else I hadn’t noticed. I wondered if she felt like she was wasting her time at Ault, being trapped in Massachusetts during the years she was beautiful.
“You should come listen,” Nick was saying to Rufina, and then he said to Sin-Jun and me, “You guys should, too.”
“You know we have nothing better to do,” Maria said to Rufina.
“I got work,” Rufina said, which was truly remarkable-that Nick seemed to be pursuing Rufina and that she was rebuffing him. Not that he was really pursuing her, I knew.
“I do, too,” I said and stood. Nick was being surprisingly nice, but I couldn’t imagine he truly wanted me to come to the activities center. “Have fun,” I said in what I hoped was a warm way.
Of course, now I wonder where I had gotten the idea that for you to participate in a gathering, the other people had to really, really want you to be there and that anything short of rabid enthusiasm on their part meant you’d be a nuisance. Where had I gotten the idea that being a nuisance was that big a deal? Sometimes now I think of all the opportunities I didn’t take-to get a manicure in town, to watch television in another dorm, to go outside for a snowball fight-and of how refusal became a habit for me, and then I felt it would be conspicuous if I ever did join in. Once when I was a sophomore, I was at a lunch table when Dede was organizing a group of people to go to a restaurant before the spring formal. She went around the table, pointing at each of us and counting, and when she got to me, she said, “Okay, not you because you never go to the dances.” And that was true, but I’d have gone to a restaurant, I’d have put on a dress and ridden the charter bus and sat with my classmates at a big round table in a big room with an oversized red cloth napkin on my lap, I’d have drunk Sprite through a straw, have eaten warm rolls and roast beef and dessert; all of that would have been manageable. But in the moment of Dede bypassing me, how could I have explained this?
And there was something else, another reason I didn’t want to go to the activities center with Nick. I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction. Say it was Wednesday and there was an after-dinner lecture and you and your roommate struck up some unexpectedly fun conversation with the boys sitting next to you. Say the lecture turned out to be boring and so throughout it you whispered and made faces at one another, and then it ended and you all left the schoolhouse. And then forty minutes later, you, alone now, without the buffer of a roommate, were by the card catalog in the library and passed one of these boys, also without his friend-then what were you to do? To simply acknowledge each other by nodding would be, probably, unfriendly, it would be confirmation of the anomaly of your having shared something during the lecture, and already you’d be receding into your usual roles. But it would probably be worse to stop and talk. You’d be compelled to try prolonging the earlier jollity, yet now there would be no lecturer to make fun of, it would just be the two of you, overly smiley, both wanting to provide the quip on which the conversation could satisfactorily conclude. And then what if, in the stacks, you ran into each other again? It would be awful!