The Drifter(5)

Once, as she fed handfuls of oranges into the gaping maw of the industrial juicer, Betsy tried to explain the local employment hierarchy to Tom.

“Your job is like your shoes,” she said. Tom was about to hire a very tan sophomore from Fort Lauderdale who wore slouchy socks pushed down over white Reebok high-tops. “Like those girls over at Armando’s next door? They have tattoos, like a marine does, hearts with thorns and anchors and stuff. You know, they’re brunettes. They’re Doc Martens. They’re more like us, the Bagelville crowd, not into Rob Base or pastels. But we’re Converse, Chuck Taylors. Low-or high-top, it doesn’t matter.”

There was an unspoken allegiance between the women of Armando’s Pizza and the Bagelville employees. At least once a week, a sixteen-inch veggie and a pitcher of lite beer was bartered for a half-dozen sesames, a pint of lox spread, and a quart of fresh-squeezed liquid gold in the alley that connected the two buildings, and no one was the wiser.

“That girl with the big socks?” she continued. “Maybe she could iron her pleated khakis and work at Blockbuster? Or if she bought a pair of Birks she could try Joffrey’s, that overpriced vegetarian place in the old Victorian house on the corner? Her calves are tan enough. She might need to wrap her hair in a bandana, though, maybe a patchouli-scented bandana? And she could pick up some of those dangly Indian earrings from the kiosk at the natural foods store.”

“This is profound, Betsy, truly. Real senior thesis shit here,” he said. “Thank you for sharing your insights on microeconomics.”

What she didn’t bother theorizing about was the universally accepted notion that anyone who paid for their share of the $700 rent for a two-bedroom in an off-campus complex with a decent pool by working, those who were still stuck with a shoe box full of cassettes in a shiny CD world, were considered poor, and all other things being equal, not as fabulous. Betsy was sure that there were more people like her on campus than she realized, meaning that there were more people who were relatively broke and anonymous, but because she had thrown herself into the specious Greek life during her very first week of college, she didn’t socialize much with many of them. It seemed like everyone in Betsy’s social circle had fathers who were alumni with deep, golfer’s tans, exaggerated drawls, and an oversized parking space reserved for their game day RVs. They’d show up with four-foot-long sport fisherman coolers full of free booze for their daughter’s friends wearing tiny khaki shorts. Just before game time it was a long-standing tradition for students to fill Ziploc baggies with bourbon and smuggle them into the stadium in their shorts with the “zip” part tucked over the waistband of their underwear. Inside, they’d use it to spike their Cokes when security looked the other way. Somehow, parents found this charming. Like most big state schools, the football culture prevailed, and even Betsy would catch herself feeling intoxicating pride about the team’s winning streak, or the latest Heisman contender on the team. Florida was known for its sports team, being a host of the world’s largest tailgate party in Jacksonville, and for the fresh-scrubbed athletic wholesomeness of its well-tanned student body. Most of her classmates there were completely fine with that reputation, riding on the fumes of the Reagan era, delighted by Jell-O shots and Day-Glo parties, where they’d ruin perfectly good J.Crew T-shirts with splatters of fluorescent paint, and dance all night in front of a black light, marveling at the blue-whiteness of their teeth.

Betsy had reservations about all of it. She had a vague notion that they were on the tail end of a cultural moment. She knew that elsewhere in the world, kids her age were literally tearing down the Berlin Wall and risking their lives in Tiananmen Square. Yet Betsy still had to wear a dress to enter her sorority’s dining hall on Monday nights. She was chastised for standing on the bar and screaming her lungs out, for smoking, for drinking too much, for her occasional flirtation with drugs. There was no room in that world for the anger that was stirring inside her. Betsy often wondered when her life would stop resembling a 1980s movie, if the still-warm corpse of that decade would stop haunting her at night.

Until recently, Betsy had made her best effort to fit in. She’d lived at the sorority house among the quilted bulletin boards and photo collages, the afternoon soaps in the TV room, the baby-faced busboys that cleared her dinner plates, and the estrogen-charged pranks. There were some highlights, she’d admit. The brownies baked with a carton of ex-lax and tagged with a Do Not Eat! Post-it in the communal fridge in an attempt to nab a notoriously hungry food stealer were vicious and brilliant. She would miss the late-night-study snack runs that somehow led to J?egermeister shots, and the incredibly loud singing of the Annie soundtrack at all hours of the night. None of those moments were enough to cancel out how terrible she felt during the annual cattle call known as sorority rush.

HER SIX-HOUR WORK shift seemed desperately long today, given the fact that the second summer session had just ended and classes weren’t due to start for almost a week. Bagelville, like the rest of town, was practically empty. At noon, finally, Betsy slid on her red JanSport backpack and rode into campus to sell back her textbooks at the University Bookstore before they had a chance to collect dust. Once the contents of her backpack were unloaded, twenty-eight dollars suddenly burned a hole in her pocket. Betsy decided to splurge on a cheap bike lock and a three-dollar loose meat sandwich at Steamer’s. She’d had a dream about the vinegary ground beef on the soft onion roll the night before, which prompted the book sale, since it was often the first thing she bought when she had extra cash. Then she planned to ignore the heat and venture downtown toward the Duckpond. She loved to ride through that neighborhood under shady oaks past Gainesville’s historic homes with their wide Victorian porches, admiring the houses whose owners were smart enough not to rent to undergrads. She took the stately plaques forged with long-ago dates next to the front doors as a reassuring sign that there might be something about this place and this experience that was worth preserving and protecting. Sometimes, she would find a bench at the Thomas Center, a former hotel that had been converted into a gallery and arts center, and sit down to smoke a rare daylight cigarette. She hated the taste, but she would take her time, ashing into an empty Coke can and imagining that she lived somewhere else important, in a city that took up more space on a map, where interesting daytime smokers might live. It was all so pleasant and placid and downright boring that she couldn’t imagine that anything as grisly as what Tom mentioned earlier could happen there. Her other favorite spot was the new art museum on the opposite side of town, where she started spending time after she decided to minor in art history. It was a relief to lose herself in the gleaming white space after the tedious time she spent in the classroom. It was a long ride across the vast campus sprawl to get there, but whenever she made the trek, she would stand in the cool, spare room in front of her favorite image, a gelatin silver print by Todd Walker, and stare at it until her skin was studded with goose bumps from the turbocharged air-conditioning. The photo was of what looked like a woman, lying on the floor on her side and curled into a ball under a sheet or a blanket, hiding. It had the murky, underwater quality of an ultrasound image, and there was no real evidence that the form was a person, let alone female, but Betsy felt she knew instinctively what it was. The image filled her with a curious despair.