The Queen of Hearts(5)
The caption read: FOR A MINUTE THERE, YOU BORED ME TO DEATH. This evidence of coolness, coupled with the tight jeans and the black eyeliner she also sported, rendered me silent with the pressing need not to say anything boring, like “Hello. I’m Emma.” I settled for a firm, speechless nod. My roommate regarded me with interest and said, “Hello. I’m Zadie.”
“Hi,” I managed.
“You have beautiful hair,” she said, eyeing its excessive length and uncut wispy ends. “Do you have a religious thing about not cutting it?”
“What? No. No, I just like it long.”
“Whew!” she said. “I thought maybe you were in one of those fundamentalist groups that makes their women eschew modern conveniences, like pants and education.”
Did she just say “eschew”? A dorky hope flared in me. “No, it’s . . . more of a counterculture thing,” I said, even though I was about as counterculture as Andy Griffith. “I am in favor of pants. And education.”
“Oh good,” she said. “I was worried about having to spend all summer with someone weird and unlikable.”
Okay, I could do this. “Like a . . . kleptomaniac rich girl,” I offered. “Or a bulimic hoarder.”
“Or somebody with abhorrent musical taste.”
“Or a boy-crazy flake.”
Uh-oh. Wrong thing to say.
“Or how about one of those people who hisses ‘Shhhh!’ if you make a phone call while she’s meditating?” she blurted.
“Um,” I said, relieved that she’d overlooked my boy-crazy comment. “That last one sounds a little personal.”
She giggled. “Yeah, that was my roommate at band camp one year. Oops. I think I revealed I went to band camp. Please don’t move out.”
“I’m a band geek too,” I said. I realized I’d twirled a lock of hair around my finger into an irredeemable knot and began to try to extricate my finger without being too obvious. “Do you still play anything?”
“I was encouraged to find another interest. Turns out, I’m sort of tone-deaf.”
“Sorry,” I said. I felt a hard edge in my chest give way. I could tell she liked me.
The more I got to know Zadie, the more we connected: she was the first girlfriend I’d made because of—not despite—my intellect. More often than not, we stayed up all night, talking about books, current events, philosophy. As the summer wound on, I began to relax into a comfortable camaraderie around her, reveling in the opportunity to unleash my thoughts without watching the other person recoil. This sensation was so novel and so enjoyable, I became nostalgic for it before it even ended, hyperaware of the fleeting nature of happiness even as I was happy. I knew it couldn’t last.
But somehow, it did. Zadie and I called each other often throughout the school year, and then we were roommates in college, and later, in med school. I knew her as well as I knew any human being.
And I’m sure she thought the same of me.
—
For a beat, Zadie didn’t react to my statement about Nick. Then her eyes went wide as her hands fluttered up near her face, apparently trying to fan air into her flash-frozen lungs. “What?” she squeaked. “Please tell me that’s a sick joke.”
I regarded her carefully. “Are you going to faint?”
“No!” She yanked her hands down and sat on them. “How do you know he might be moving to Charlotte?” One of her arms escaped, flailing around and landing on her coffee mug. She took a giant slurp and then almost snorted it out her nose as my husband, Wyatt, came skidding around the counter in his underwear.
“Late!” he yelped, waving his coffee cup.
I’m aware of the uncharitable comparisons people make when they first meet me and Wyatt. They think we’re Beauty and the Beast, evocative of those billionaire-supermodel combos you see in the tabloids. Or the racial aspect briefly trips them up: Wyatt’s black. I’m white. One glance at Wyatt, a squatty endomorph, and me—all angular cheekbones and elbows—and people assume that Wyatt’s loaded. He is loaded, but he’s also both brilliant and mesmerizing. He can talk a herd of cats into a hot tub, and he’s relentless when he wants something.
While us being an interracial couple rarely garners a second glance, the difference in our physical attractiveness sometimes does. My interior and exterior are an incongruous mismatch, seemingly designed to confuse. I’ve learned the hard way that people expect dull vapidity when they meet me: the pouty cast of my lips, my heavy-lidded blue eyes, my blond hair and emaciated height invoke a dim vibe no matter how I slouch or how I dress. People assume that Wyatt could not love me for my mind, or that I could not love him for his looks. Marrying each other might have seemed like an odd choice from a distance, but we complement each other well. He balances out my awkwardness, and I keep him reasonably reined in when his zest begins to overflow into the realm of mania. Once they get to know us, no one wonders why I love Wyatt.
“Tarnation!” he bellowed, having just spilled hot coffee on his feet. He began high-stepping around the room, trying to shake off the sizzling liquid from his bare toes, forgetting that he was still holding the sloshing cup. “Aah! Lord almighty. A little help here! Emma! This coffee is attacking me. And someone has stolen all my pants. Hey there, Zadie.”