You Think It, I'll Say It(16)
Isaac claims that he always had a crush on me and that was the reason he hung out in Rae’s room, even though he never much liked her. When I told Isaac that I’d believed he was gay, he was amused and asked why, and when I tried to pinpoint it, the best I could come up with was that he’d used gel in his hair, he’d buttoned the top button of his shirts, and I hadn’t been uncomfortable around him. He was amused by all of this, too.
It would be easy for me to be horrified by who I was more than twenty years ago, how ignorant, but I don’t see what purpose it would serve. I’m relieved to have aged out of that visceral sense that my primary obligation is to be pretty, relieved to work at a job that allows me to feel useful. Did I used to think being pretty was my primary obligation because I was in some way delusional? Or was it that I’d absorbed the messages I was meant to absorb with the same diligence with which I studied? As the mother of a daughter, I hope she won’t judge herself as harshly as I judged myself, but her personality is so unlike mine—she is boisterous and outspoken—that I’m not inordinately concerned.
Isaac, as I didn’t know back in college, was also a virgin when I met him. It was in sophomore spring that he got together with his first girlfriend, which is to say he had sex after I did but, I trust, more thoroughly. Presumably, the campus of Dartmouth in the early nineties—like college campuses in every decade, like towns and cities everywhere—was home to many other virgins, average-looking girls and boys and also grown-ups afraid that they were too ugly to be loved, convinced that this private shame was theirs alone.
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I had thought that extracting myself from my friendship with Rae would be tricky, that she’d resist, but it wasn’t and she didn’t. That night at Exeter, I waited in the parking lot for more than an hour—because I was amazed by the implications of my nonvirgin status and because I had Twizzlers to eat, I wasn’t bored—and finally the Honda Civic reappeared. When I climbed in, Rae expressed no contrition about abandoning me, and we listened many more times to the song “Joking.” I wondered if Noah would ever tell her what had happened, and if she’d confront, or even physically accost, me, but of course he had no more incentive to reveal anything than I did. I suspect that they weren’t in touch much longer.
All sophomores at Dartmouth stayed on campus and took classes for the summer, and it was at some point in July or August that I realized it had been a long while since I’d laid eyes on Rae, even from a distance. The only conversation I remember having with Isaac at Dartmouth after my trip to Manchester was when I ran into him that summer outside Baker-Berry Library and he confirmed that Rae had dropped out.
These days, Isaac and I almost never talk about Rae, though she crosses my mind with regularity; I’m far more troubled that she probably didn’t earn a degree from Dartmouth than that I had sex with her boyfriend. I’ve found no trace of her online, and in this void, I’ve created a biography: She works in public relations for a large and mildly nefarious corporation. She’s tough and powerful and makes a lot of money. She never wanted children and lives in a swanky apartment in a big city with her good-looking and (I can’t resist) slightly younger boyfriend. If you were to mention Isaac or me, she wouldn’t know who we were, but, upon consideration, she’d acknowledge that our names sounded vaguely familiar.
Bad Latch
Of the ten of us enrolled in the prenatal yoga class that summer at the Y, I was the second most pregnant, and the woman who was the most pregnant was named Gretchen. All of us sat on oversized rubber balls, and Gretchen always staked out the center of the front row, closest to the instructor. The first class, when we were supposed to go around and say our name, due date, whether we knew if it was a boy or girl, and where we were planning to deliver, she said August 18—my due date was August 29—and added, “Carl and I want to be surprised about the gender, because in our information-saturated world, it’s nice to still allow for some mystery and magic, right?” She’d turned around on her ball so she was facing those of us in the second and third rows, and she smiled self-congratulatorily.
She had a high brown ponytail and wore a mint-green tank top that stretched over her belly and cost sixty-two dollars, which I knew because I’d seen it at a maternity boutique full of clothes I couldn’t afford. “We’re delivering at home with a midwife,” Gretchen continued. “Drug-free and all that. And then I’ll be a stay-at-home mom because it’s like, if you’re going to outsource your childcare, why even bother to become a parent in the first place?”
Lest it seem like this class occurred in a place where you could get away with saying such things—Brooklyn, maybe, or Berkeley?—it didn’t. It occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, and I heard Gretchen repeat her comments verbatim—Carl, information-saturated, mystery, magic, home birth, drug-free, outsource—every Saturday morning for the next five weeks because the instructor liked us to reintroduce ourselves each time. The sixth class, Gretchen wasn’t there. Her absence meant that when we discussed which parts of our bodies were newly sore or swollen, a discussion Gretchen had consistently dominated, my concerns took precedence over everyone else’s.
At the end of class, as we lay under nubbly Mexican blankets while the instructor guided us on a visualization of our peaceful, joyous deliveries, I wondered how Gretchen’s home birth had gone. Or perhaps she was in labor at that very moment, simultaneously snacking on organic trail mix and breathing mindfully as stalwart Carl massaged her hips.