You Think It, I'll Say It(11)
From his side of the bed, Keith had said, without looking at her, “It’s not that you’re wrong. But when you say stuff like this, it makes life a lot less enjoyable.”
Julie had felt chastened, which possibly had been his intent, or possibly that was only a by-product and the intent was simply to get her to stop. That she had stopped, and remorsefully rather than petulantly, she’d interpreted as a sign of her own maturity, the maturity of their relationship. That Keith had wanted her to stop she’d interpreted as a sign of his decency.
She was just a few feet from the exit when the butterfly landed on her forearm, on top of the thin sleeve of her white cotton sweater. The butterfly had wings of mostly iridescent blue, edged in black with tiny yellow flecks. She raised her arm, the way she would if another person were about to hook his through hers. She expected this to make the butterfly depart, but it remained in place. “Mom!” said Lucas. “There’s a butterfly on your arm! You guys, there’s a butterfly on my mom’s arm!”
The second graders were ecstatic. They exclaimed to her and one another as they approached, inspecting the insect, and still it didn’t move. It quivered a little, but it didn’t fly away. Gayle, who was also nearby, said, “That’s good luck, Julie. You should go buy a lottery ticket.”
If there was a kind of person who believed in the magic of butterflies, Julie was not one of them. She had no use for this small moment of ostensible enchantment.
“Or maybe it’s that you get to make a wish,” Gayle said.
It was rude to stare, Julie knew, but for many seconds, she stared at Gayle anyway, wondering just what it was the other woman imagined she would wish for.
Vox Clamantis in Deserto
I’d seen Rae Sullivan around campus, but it wasn’t until early February of our freshman year that I decided I wanted to be like her. This realization happened at Dartmouth’s post office, on a Tuesday morning, when I was in line behind her; I was there to buy stamps and she was sending a package. It was a little after nine A.M., a quiet hour, and as the only person working helped the students in front of us, I had plenty of time to scrutinize the package in Rae’s arms: a cardboard box addressed to a person named Noah Bishop. Though the rest of Noah Bishop’s address was obscured by the angle at which Rae was holding the box, I could see that her handwriting was jagged in a cool way—it was unfeminine—and she’d decorated the borders of the box with patterns reminiscent of an Indian tapestry and the rest of it with erratic hearts drawn in black and maroon Sharpie. The hearts seemed to me unabashedly feminine; also, of course, they implied that Rae, whose name I hadn’t known until reading the return address in the box’s corner, was sending the package to her boyfriend for Valentine’s Day. At that time, the thing I most wished for was a boyfriend. I’d been aiming, unsuccessfully, for a Dartmouth boyfriend, but it seemed even more romantic to have one somewhere else—it implied yearning and passionate reunions. I was nineteen and a virgin, and hadn’t so much as kissed anyone since arriving on campus five months before.
Rae was a little taller than I was, wearing corduroy pants, Birkenstock clogs, and a North Face coat that, when she turned after paying, fell open in such a way that it revealed a gray hooded sweatshirt with the word EXETER across it in maroon. I couldn’t actually see all the letters of EXETER, but I’d been at Dartmouth long enough to recognize the name of a fancy boarding school, even if I was from Des Moines. Over her wavy brown hair, Rae wore a black skullcap.
If you went feature by feature, I don’t think anyone would have said she and I particularly resembled each other, but there was something recognizable about her to me, some similarity. Our builds were about the same, our hair the same length, our clothes comparable in their implication of not exactly making an effort, though this was 1994, when almost everyone was making less of an effort. But Rae’s way of not making an effort fashion-wise was, like her handwriting, far cooler than mine; mine stemmed more from confusion than indifference and resulted in a wardrobe of unironic colorful sweaters and bleached jeans that were loose but tapered.
I didn’t speak to Rae in the post office. But that night, after I took off my sweater—it was a cotton crewneck with alternating squares of turquoise, orange, and black—I never put it back on. I resolved that in the future, I’d wear only solids.
* * *
—
In the fall term of the following year, Rae and I ended up in the same English seminar. I knew from having looked her up in the freshman book—a forest-green paperback booklet filled with black-and-white head shots, with full names and home addresses listed underneath—that she was my year and was from Manchester, New Hampshire. When all of us in the seminar went around the room and introduced ourselves, she said she was an English major. I was pre-med, referred to at Dartmouth as pre-health. Although things still weren’t great for me socially, I liked my classes, both the sciences and the humanities, and my grades were good. Partly because I’d been a diligent student in high school and my work habits were ingrained and partly because I didn’t know what else to do with myself, I studied a lot.
As a freshman, I’d been assigned a single, which was unusual but not unheard of. For me, it had been disastrous. In the new setting of college, I didn’t know how to integrate myself with other people. I had spent a tremendous amount of high school, even while I was studying, thinking about how badly I wanted to go to Dartmouth and about the boyfriends I’d have there. I hadn’t realized how much time I’d devoted to my imaginary, longed-for life at Dartmouth until I arrived at Dartmouth and found that by achieving my goal I had lost my primary means of entertaining myself and feeling optimistic. My father, who was a rheumatologist, had himself graduated from Dartmouth in the early seventies, and my family had driven from Iowa to attend his tenth reunion when I was eight, whereupon I had developed a decade-long fixation with the school that was almost romantic in its intensity.