You Think It, I'll Say It(13)



One surprising discovery I made in the first week of my friendship with Rae was that her boyfriend—Noah Bishop, recipient of the Valentine’s Day care package—was younger than she was. He was a junior at Exeter, which meant that she had begun dating him when she was a boarding school senior and he was a freshman. Although Rae revealed this fact without fanfare or embarrassment, I found it so jarring that that night, when Isaac and I left her room at the same time, I said outside her dorm, “Do you think it’s weird that she’s three years older than Noah?”

“Obviously, the norms of high school imply yes,” Isaac said. “But it wouldn’t be weird if their genders were reversed. And it wouldn’t be that weird if they were a married couple, and she was fifty-three and he was fifty.”

I took this in as we walked. Isaac was so much more articulate than I was that I might have found him intimidating, if not for the fact that he was nice; though he’d make damning observations about people, he seemed to be simply stating facts rather than relishing their weaknesses. I said, “Did you go to public or private school?”

“Public.”

“Me, too,” I said. “And I picture boarding schools being very, like—” I couldn’t find the word.

“Conformist?” he asked.

“Yeah. Which would have made them going out even weirder.” We kept walking—it was getting dark, and I felt the particular longing of an Ivy League campus at dusk and wished I were walking with a boyfriend of my own instead of with Isaac—and I added, “Although Noah is really cute.” Indeed, in photographs Rae had shown us, Noah was almost unbearably handsome, in exactly the way I wanted him to be: curly brown hair and full lips and a tiny silver hoop in his left ear. Apparently his family lived in a huge house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, his parents disliked Rae, and he played ice hockey and the guitar. And he had lost his virginity to Rae, though she had lost hers to the son of a friend of her mom’s.

If I was offering Isaac an opportunity to formally reveal his gayness, he declined it. He laughed and said, “I bet Noah himself agrees with you.”



* * *





As the weeks passed, Rae became increasingly concerned that Noah was hooking up with a girl in his class whose name I secretly loved: Clementine Meriwether. In mid-October, Rae decided to pay Noah a visit, which would entail taking the hour-and-a-half bus ride from Hanover to Manchester, then borrowing her mother’s car to make the forty-minute drive to Exeter. She invited both Isaac and me to go with her and stay at her mother’s house for the weekend; Isaac said he couldn’t, but I accepted.

The night before we left, Rae had cramps and asked if I’d pick up dinner for her. As I was leaving the dining hall, carrying a tray with two plates of steaming lasagna and two goblets of vanilla pudding, I pushed open the door to the outside with my back and when I turned around, I was face-to-face with Rae’s freshman roommate, Sally Alexander. Sally, who was accompanied by another girl, glanced at the tray and said, in a voice that was more friendly than snotty, though the sentiment seemed snotty, “You’re hungry!”

“It’s not just for me,” I said. “It’s for Rae, too.”

Sally’s eyes narrowed. “Are you friends with her?”

“Yeah,” I said, and though I felt a swelling of pride, it was short-lived.

“You don’t find her annoying?” Sally said.

Taken aback, I simply said, “No.”

Sally shrugged. “She’s so self-centered, but I think it’s because she’s an only child.”



* * *





Rae’s mother’s boyfriend picked us up at the bus station in Manchester, after Rae had placed three calls to her mother on a pay phone, and he was fifty minutes late and seemed irritated by our arrival. At her mother’s house, which was one story, very small, and brown shingled, he let us off without coming in, then drove on to the office building where he apparently worked nights on the janitorial staff. Rae’s mother was a private-duty nurse and wasn’t yet finished with her shift. When she did come home, a little after six, wearing pale pink scrubs, she hugged Rae, then hugged me, too, and said how beautiful my eyes were (I’m brown-eyed, and this was a compliment I had never received). She added that she could tell I was an old soul, then asked where I was from and how I liked Dartmouth. She had a thick New Hampshire accent, and both she and the house smelled like cigarette smoke, though the house was generally clean and tidy. We were in Rae’s mother’s presence for no more than ten minutes before Rae asked her for the car keys.

With an expression of good-natured disappointment, Rae’s mother said, “She can’t stay away from that boy, can she?” She made me miss my own parents, and it occurred to me to stay there while Rae went to see Noah. I was hungry, and I envisioned eating, say, chicken pot pie with Rae’s mother, then perhaps watching Family Matters or Unsolved Mysteries together before going to bed at ten P.M. But this would be a redux of GFU night, which had set me back God only knew how many months. Thus, reluctantly, I joined Rae in her mother’s Honda Civic.

The car was a standard, and I could feel how my earlier self would have been impressed by Rae’s casual ability to drive it, seeing her possession of a skill I lacked as in keeping with her general aura of coolness. But there was more and more evidence—starting with the discovery that she was dating someone younger, then reinforced by Sally’s comments outside the dining hall—that I’d invented my original idea of Rae, that really, the only person who perceived Rae as cool at all was me. And she hadn’t pretended; I had misconstrued. I also, of course, hadn’t understood until seeing her mother’s house that Rae didn’t come from a rich family. Her boarding school degree and her New Englandishly hippie clothes had confused me, because I was easily confused. I realized that, presumably, by Rae’s standards if not by my own, I came from a rich family; after all, I had taken out no college loans and was receiving no financial assistance. The decor of my parents’ house in Des Moines wasn’t that different from the decor of Rae’s mother’s house—wall-to-wall carpet, faded sofas and chairs, shiny walnut tables—but my parents’ house was much bigger.

Curtis Sittenfeld's Books