My Last Innocent Year(15)

There was a poster I passed every day on my way in and out of my dorm, tacked to a bulletin board, a message of hope for those considering taking their own lives: “Don’t make permanent decisions to cope with temporary feelings.” The words floated above a picture of a tree that reminded me of a series my mother had painted then sold to my dentist in exchange for some bill or other. She often painted that tree, the only one we could see from our living room window. It was a sad little thing, scraggly and wan, surrounded by empty beer cans and piles of dog shit. But in my mother’s paintings, she always placed it somewhere else, in a field surrounded by wildflowers or next to a mountain stream. She seemed to be searching for something in her work, a life beyond Rosen’s Appetizing and the Lower East Side. Escape. She wouldn’t have been the first artist looking for that.



* * *



KELSEY AND JASON were in our room when I got back on Friday afternoon. Kelsey was at her desk, her fingers flying across the keyboard of her turquoise iMac. Jason was stretched out across the couch reading Rabbit, Run. Sarah McLachlan played quietly on the boom box.

Jason sat up to make room for me. “Where have you been?” Kelsey asked, still facing her computer. She had one foot tucked underneath her and, from where I was sitting, it looked like it was growing out of the crack in her ass.

“At the information desk.”

“Really?” she said, turning around. “I didn’t know you were working today.”

“They needed me to take an extra shift. Ramona had cramps.” Kelsey turned back to her computer, and I took out my cigarettes. Jason handed me the peanut butter lid I used as an ashtray. He hated when I smoked, something about a grandmother who had lung cancer, but he didn’t say anything because that was Jason, sweet and rosy. Perennially agreeable. My mother would have called him a marzipan man.

“I never asked you how Maxwell’s seminar was,” he asked. Kelsey stopped typing.

“It was okay,” I said. “Do you know she isn’t teaching?”

“I think everyone knows.”

“Knows what?” Kelsey asked, turning around again.

“Professor Maxwell isn’t teaching this semester,” Jason said. “She and Professor Fisher are getting a divorce.”

“Is that the couple with the cute little girl and the house on June Bridge Road?” Kelsey asked. Jason nodded. “Aww, that’s so sad!” She turned back to her typing.

“Do you know the guy who’s subbing for her?” I asked Jason.

“R. H. Connelly? Yeah. I’ve read some of his stuff. The poems are amazing, and he wrote this one crazy novel everyone hated but I kind of liked. I always wondered what happened to him. Actually, I thought he killed himself.” I thought about the scar on Professor Connelly’s hand. “How’s Andy doing?”

Kelsey groaned.

“What?” asked Jason.

“She hates Andy,” I said.

“Babe, you don’t hate anyone.”

Kelsey turned around again. “Well, I don’t like Andy. He’s pretentious, and he treats you like shit.”

“He does not,” Jason said. “Not all the time.” Jason and Andy were coeditors of the Lamplighter, Wilder’s literary magazine. Theirs was a cordial rivalry, although lately Andy had been giving Jason a hard time about applying to law school. Jason’s parents tolerated his English major—a gentleman should be well read—but the expectation was that he would become a lawyer like his father, and Jason was too nice to object.

“He has great hair though,” I said. “You gotta give him that.”

“Yeah,” Kelsey said sadly, twirling a strand of her thin blond hair. “He does. Hey, are you coming to Gamma Nu tonight?”

I looked at her blankly.

“Their winter beach party. Remember? They have it every year.”

“Right,” I said. Every January, Jason’s fraternity Gamma Nu Alpha filled the first floor of their house with sand and blasted space heaters until everyone was sweating and girls were forced to strip down to their bras. A lot of straw hats and Jimmy Buffett. Last year, the floor had nearly collapsed under the weight of the sand but, I’d been told, it had since been reinforced. I wasn’t a fan of fraternities and found Jason’s devotion to Gamma Nu off-putting and out of character, but they threw good parties and in tiny Wilder, New Hampshire, a town with only one bar, that was no small thing.

“Bo Benson will be there,” Kelsey said.

“Kelsey.”

“What?”

“Stop trying to make Bo Benson happen.”

“Why? He likes you—doesn’t he, J? Plus he’s cute. And really nice.”

“That is all true,” I said. “But let me ask you something: Does that sound like someone I would go out with?”

Jason looked at his watch. “Babe, I gotta go.” He stood up and put his hands on Kelsey’s shoulders. She turned and gave him a quick kiss. I looked away, not wanting to get caught admiring their easy, unstudied intimacy. Kelsey and Jason had been together forever—or what felt like forever, since the first week of freshman year—so I was used to sharing her. I’d always known she didn’t need me as much as I needed her.

Debra walked in as Jason was leaving. “Don’t everybody leave on my account. Ugh, do we have to listen to this sad-girl music all the time?”