My Last Innocent Year(16)
I pulled her into the bedroom while Kelsey walked Jason downstairs.
“I had the meeting with Dean Hansen,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, right,” she said, flopping onto the bed. “I forgot about that. How was it?”
“It absolutely sucked. But he said he would let it go.”
“See? I told you.”
“He gave me Dr. Cushman’s card, in case I ‘need someone to talk to.’” I pulled the card out of my pocket and handed it to Debra.
“Fucking Dr. Cushman.” She studied the card briefly, then tossed it back at me. “I wonder how many girls he’s sent down there. A lot of good she does. Remember Elizabeth McIntosh?”
I nodded. Elizabeth McIntosh was a senior when we were sophomores, one of those tall, thin, prep-school types; Kelsey knew her from summers in Quogue. For more than a year, we’d watched Elizabeth climbing the stairs from Dr. Cushman’s office two or three times a week. It was clear she had a pretty serious eating disorder, but back then I found that sort of thing glamorous. Then one day, a week before she graduated, she was taken away in an ambulance, an outrageously dramatic event on our tiny campus and one people still talked about nearly two years later. According to Kelsey, Elizabeth was doing better, but one could hardly call her a shining endorsement of Dr. Cushman’s clinical prowess.
I lay down next to Debra. “How’s Reinhard?” Debra had spent the last couple of nights with Reinhard, a German grad student who’d delivered pizza to our room before break.
“He’s a pain in my ass. Now I know why my mother warned me about German guys.”
Kelsey popped her head in and asked Debra if she was going to Gamma Nu’s beach party.
“No,” Debra scoffed, and I knew where the conversation was heading. I folded Dr. Cushman’s card into a tiny square as I listened to them argue, first about the Greek system and what Debra called its corrosive influence on campus life, then about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom. At some point, I would intervene, remind Debra that she’d had fun the last time we went to Gamma Nu—we’d convinced the DJ to play Bj?rk all night—and tell Kelsey that Debra was the one who’d cleaned the bathroom last time, even though it was also true she made the biggest mess. But for now, I sat there listening. I found the sound of their bickering comforting.
My eyes rested on a picture of us on the dresser. It was taken in the fall of freshman year, not long after we met. We made an unlikely trio: Kelsey, tall and blond in a Patagonia fleece and round tortoiseshell glasses; Debra, broad and busty, her thick dark hair cut chin-length so her head floated atop her neck like a triangle; and me, the smallest, standing between them, swallowed up by my long skirt and oversized sweater. I was always cold that year, my body adjusting to the northern weather, the way the cold creeped into your skin like a sickness. Debra said when she first met me, she thought I was Orthodox.
My mother used to warn me about threesomes, but I’d never had friends like Debra and Kelsey. My high school friends were harder and meaner, a desperation born out of their hardscrabble lives. Debra and Kelsey had love and security to spare, and they shared it with me freely. They brought me soup when I was sick, held my hair back when I puked. Last year, we’d gone to Jamaica together over spring break and they’d helped pay my way—it wasn’t a big deal to them, they said, and they wouldn’t have dreamed of going without me.
“You guys,” I said, as their bickering reached a crescendo. “Isn’t it chili night?”
“Is it Friday?” Kelsey asked. Debra nodded. “Then it is indeed chili night.”
I stood up and tossed Dr. Cushman’s card in the trash. “Well, let’s go.” And so we did.
6
THE door to Professor Fisher’s office was open when I arrived, but I knocked anyway.
He waved for me to come in. “Isabel. Sit, sit. I’m almost finished with your pages. Want one?” He held out a bag of Starburst.
I took a handful, then sat down on the faded plaid sofa next to a tower of manila folders. There were similar stacks all over Tom Fisher’s office—on the floor, on a broken chair in the corner, on the two overstuffed bookshelves by the door. I’d run here, worried I was late, but saw I needn’t have. Professor Fisher—or Tom, as he insisted I call him—didn’t seem to know what time it was. I unwrapped a Starburst and waited for him to finish reading the pages I’d left him last week.
Tom’s office on the second floor of Stringer Hall was a few doors down from Joanna Maxwell’s. Igraine usually sat somewhere in the hallway between them, coloring or writing in a black composition notebook, but she wasn’t there today. The large window behind Tom’s desk overlooked the campus green; the half dozen plants on the windowsill were lush and overgrown, making it look like he was working in a tiny jungle. There was a poster of Cesar Chavez on the wall next to a sign promoting the now-defunct Wilder Grape Policy Action Committee. The whole room reeked of cigarettes—Tom rolled his own, a ritual he repeated several times during our weekly meetings to discuss my thesis, a literary examination of domestic spaces in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
“Well, hot damn!” Tom said when he finished reading. His voice was loud, foghorn loud. It was one of the many things I liked about him, along with his tattered sweaters, potbelly, and slightly lazy left eye. “This is really shaping up into something! Don’t you think?”