When I got back to the suite, Margaret was working on a problem sheet for Chem 105, and her boyfriend—a young man with such an earnest, childlike gaze that we’d nicknamed him Christopher Robin—was seated cross-legged on her bed, using a metal mesh contraption to sift seeds and stems out of an ounce of grass he’d just bought. (One of Margaret’s complaints about him was his methodical attitude toward sex and drugs.) “Oo-la-la—very thirties,” said Christopher Robin, giving my outfit the old once-over, and then Margaret dragged me into the bathroom.
“Well, what happened?” she demanded, locking the door, turning on both faucets, and settling herself on the sink counter under the enormous bosom of one of the Playmates we’d pinned up. “He must have kissed you—or did you fall into bed together? You’re absolutely beaming.”
“Knacker was actually kind of a fizzle,” I said. “But it was fun anyway.”
“Idiot child,” said Margaret. “Take off that coat—you’ve wasted it. I knew you should have worn red stockings.”
When I tried to explain myself, she leaned back against the bathroom mirror, closed her eyes, and giggled so that the frame of the mirror shook. “My artistic roommate,” she said. “The woman of epiphanies. You’re going to kill me with your fine points.”
A few weeks later Margaret was dancing to a Stones tape at a party in a converted airplane factory up near MIT when she ran into her adviser, Dr. Bellemere, whom she at last succeeded in calling Don. Bellemere, who was a post-doc a bit older than Geoffrey Knacker, and who fluttered hearts all through the chem labs with his leather vest and Buffalo Bill mustache, had had a lot of the punch, which was a Techie grape-juice concoction laced with acid. He led Margaret out of the strobe lights into a dark corner of the loft, kissed her passionately, and told her he spent every lab session thinking about her legs. A triumph for Margaret—except that she inexplicably discovered a preference for Christopher Robin, and so the thing with Bellemere went no further, except for a bit of embarrassment in lab.
“But there was something really solid there—a kiss, not just daydreams,” Margaret told me pointedly when we discussed it later. For a change, we were sitting among the scattered books and papers of my room, while I packed my book bag to go down and visit Hopalong at Adams House.
“I don’t think the two situations were so different,” I said. “I’m afraid, sweetheart, that whatever we try to do, in our two different ways, we end up being just a couple of nice girls.”
“Oh, I hope not!” said Margaret, flopping backward on the bed. “But anyway,” she went on stubbornly after a minute, “a real kiss is better than an imaginary one.”
And she thumped her booted feet on my bedspread for emphasis.
I wanted to contradict her, but then I remembered how bullheaded and tenacious Margaret could be in an argument, how tiresomely withholding of her oolong tea and the little English butter biscuits that her mother sent her, and that I loved. In the end I just raised my eyebrows with the air of one to whom has been granted higher knowledge, and kept my mouth shut.
A Funeral at New African
1
When my mother called me at school to tell me that my father had had a stroke, it was hard to understand what she said, because the phone was only half working; it had been ripped out of the wall three weeks earlier by an ex-boyfriend of mine named Kiri, a Norwegian graduate student in physics who occasionally got drunk on aquavit and went into berserker rages of jealousy. With the help of my suitemate, the ever-ingenious Margaret, I had managed to piece the phone wires together so that a sort of communication was possible. Mama’s voice came through in a series of gasps embroidered with static, and what she said first sent a dissolving feeling through my bones and then became a part of me that seemed as if it had always been there. The facts were simple: my father had been sitting in his office at the New African Baptist Church, dictating a sermon to his secretary, when he had suddenly fallen back in his chair—a fall that in my imagination took on the controlled backward curve of the thousands of bodies he had baptized. He had been taken to the hospital, and I was to come home immediately.
After I had gingerly hung up the phone, I sat down on the bed and looked around my wreck of a room, which I hadn’t put back together after Kiri had pulled it to pieces and I had told him finally, inexorably, to get lost. Besides yanking out the phone, he had torn down my tidy blue regulation dormitory curtains and my favorite poster—a Degas sketch of a black dancer in a Paris café—and he had put his foot through the stout wooden seat of a Windsor rocker that had belonged to my great-aunt Sarah Crenshaw. It was only a few months until commencement, and it had seemed ridiculous to try to rebuild a cheery student nest with new posters and a shiny Harvard rocker from the Coop. I had, in fact, begun to take a macabre delight in the mangled curtain that swayed spastically in the drafts of March air; in the splintered chair, where the broken wood looked new against the old black finish; and in the dancer, hanging upside down by a shred of tape, a nasty smile on his face as he pointed a toe before a group of Belle Époque bloods. On my desk, scattered among five coffee cups and an
