The Nix(135)
Faye stepped into the warm water and let it soak her. One hole in the shower nozzle was clogged and sprayed out thinner and harder than the rest—she felt it like a razor on her chest.
In these first days of college, Faye mostly kept to herself. Each night she sat alone and did her homework, underlining key passages, writing notes in the margins, and next door she heard these girls laughing. The college brochures had said nothing about this—Circle was supposed to be known for its expectation of excellence, its academic rigor, its modern campus. None of this turned out to be exactly true. The campus especially was just an inhuman concrete horror: concrete buildings and concrete walkways and concrete walls that made the place about as comfortable and inviting as a parking lot. No grass anywhere. Concrete edifices scarred and ribbed to evoke the look of corduroy, perhaps, or the inside of a whale. Concrete bitten off in places to expose raw and rusted rebar. The same basic architectural patterns endlessly repeating in a faceless grid. No windows wider than a few inches. Bulky buildings that seemed to hang over the students carnivorously.
It was the kind of place that would be the only place to survive an atom bomb.
The campus was impossible to navigate, as every building looked like every other building and so directions were confused and meaningless. The elevated second-story pedestrian walkway that covered the entire campus and sounded so cool in the brochures—a pedestrian expressway in the sky—was in reality maybe the most horrible thing about Circle. It was advertised as a place for students to come together for community and friendship, but what usually happened is you were up on the walkway and saw a friend down below and you yelled and waved but had no easy way to actually talk. Faye noticed this daily, friends waving and then sadly abandoning each other. Plus the walkway was never the shortest path from anywhere to anywhere, and the places to get on and off were spaced such that the length of your walk doubled if you wanted to use it, and the midday August sun had a tendency to cook the concrete expanse to the heat of a pancake griddle. So most of the students used the sidewalks below, the whole student body trying to shoulder their way through narrow corridors made crowded and claustrophobic by the big concrete posts needed to hold up the walkway, all of it dark and shadowy because the walkway blocked the sun.
A rumor that the Circle campus had been designed by the Pentagon to instill terror and despair among students could not be entirely dismissed.
Faye had been promised a campus fit for the space age, but what she got was a place where every building’s surface evoked the gravel roads from back home. She’d been promised a hardworking and studious student body, and what she got instead were these neighbors next door, these girls less interested in academics, more interested in how to score dope, how to sneak into bars, get free drinks, how to screw, and they talked about this endlessly, one of their two favorite topics, the other being the protest. The upcoming protest of the Democratic National Convention, now only a few weeks away. A great battle would happen in Chicago, it was becoming clear, the year’s apotheosis. The girls talked excitedly about their plans: an all-female march right down Lake Shore Drive, a protest in the form of music and love, four days of revolution, orgies in the park, the perfect silvery human voice in song, we’ll touch the honky young, bring down the amphitheater show, shove a great spike in America’s eye, we’ll take back the streets, and all those people watching on TV? We’re gonna anti-America them, man. With all that energy, we’ll stop the war.
Faye felt far away from such concerns. She soaped herself, her chest and arms and legs, thickly. The lather made her feel like a ghost or mummy or some other generally white and scary thing. The water in Chicago was different from the water at home, and no matter how much she rinsed, the soap never came entirely off. A thin varnish lingered on her skin. How easily and smoothly her hands glided over her hips and legs and thighs. She closed her eyes. Thought of Henry.
His hands on her body as they lay on the riverbank her last night in Iowa. They were cold and hard, those hands, and when he reached under her shirt and pressed them to her belly it was like they were stones from the bottom of the riverbed. She gasped. He stopped. She didn’t want him to stop, but she couldn’t tell him without sounding unladylike. And he hated when she was unladylike. He gave her an envelope that night with instructions not to open it until she got to college. Inside was a letter. She had been fearing another poem, but what she found was a little couplet that knocked her over: come home / marry me. Meanwhile, he’d joined the army, just as he said he would. He had promised to go to Vietnam but had gotten only as far as Nebraska. He did riot-control exercises in preparation for whatever civil disorder was inevitably next. He practiced sticking his bayonet into dummies filled with sand and dressed like hippies. He practiced using tear gas. He practiced phalanxing. They would be seeing each other again at Thanksgiving, and Faye dreaded it. Because she had no answer to his proposal. She had read his letter once and hidden it like contraband. But she did look forward to meeting again on the riverbank, when they were alone, and he could try touching her again. She had found herself thinking about it these desolate mornings in the shower. Pretending her hands were someone else’s. Maybe Henry’s. Maybe more accurately the hands of some abstract man—in her imagination she could not see him but instead felt his presence, a solid masculine warmth pressing into her. She thought about this as she felt the soap on her body, the slippery water, the smell of the shampoo as she rubbed it into her hair. She turned around to wash it out and opened her eyes and saw, across the room, standing at the sink, watching her right now, a girl.