Acts of Love (28 page)

Ann smiled. “Yes,” she said, and Sandy saw in that smile the shy vanity of the newly loved.

“He's different than I expected,” she remarked.

“What do you mean?”

“I just thought you'd want to be with someone more, I don't know, reflective. Less blustery. He just doesn't seem like your type, that's all.”

“I don't have a type, Sandy. That's your department.” She sighed. “I'm sorry. It's just that I really want you to like him.”

“I do. I like him.”

Ann smiled and suddenly walked over and kissed Sandy goodnight, not something they did.

“I knew you would,” she said happily and got into bed.

Sandy listened as Ann's breathing settled into the steady rhythm that was so familiar, it seemed to live forever in the pumping of her own blood. She bit her lip, turned over. Why Ann?

 

H
ER DREAMS OF MEN
were never of sex itself, attainment, satisfaction, but of the
desire,
the overwhelming ache of mutual desire as yet unmet, the charged current as you and I (the you variable), come closer, closer.

But she always woke before they met and was left with only the bone-ache of longing.

 

T
HREE WEEKS LATER
, Ann called Sandy back at school. It was close to midnight, and the ringing startled her.

“Did I wake you?” Ann asked.

“No. Is everything okay?” Jonathon, Estelle.

“Everything's fine.” There was a long pause. “I just called to tell you I got married.”

“You what?”

“We got married.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why did you get married, Ann? You're so young. How the hell do you know that's what you want? Why didn't you give yourself a chance?”

“A chance to what?”

“To see what's out there.”

“This is what I want. I love him,” she said simply. “Can't you just be happy for me?”

“I'm happy for you.”

“Okay.”

“No, I mean it, Ann. I am. But are you sure?”

Ann laughed, didn't answer. “I'll call you soon. You should go. You probably have classes tomorrow.” She hung up before Sandy could say congratulations.

 

S
ANDY NO LONGER MADE MUCH OF AN
effort to get to her classes, certainly not the morning ones. Even when she intended to go, she rose more often than not swaddled in a hangover, mealy-mouthed, mealy-headed. There was nothing she wanted in the classrooms, anyway, nothing in her prehistoric art classes or psychology or Hawthorne and James that intrigued or even distracted her. Often she slept till one or two in the afternoon, forced herself to do an hour's work, and then went to happy hour at the B & G bar downtown, where she drank whiskey sours the first year, then straight vodka. For a while, she convinced herself that she was in love with a boy who lived on the floor above her, a handsome six-foot-two boy in L. L. Bean turtlenecks and hiking boots whom she followed around campus, learning his schedule and his habits, constructing a life from morsels. She dreamt of his arms, his hands on her. But he started seeing a girl named Susie who wore pink lipstick and sweaters with embroidered daisies. There were others, anyway.

She grew reticent of calling Ann in her new home, as if the fresh and unavoidable presence of the other left no room for what they had been. Ann sent her homemade cookies and brownies, enclosing short, chatty notes that were as curious to Sandy as if they were postcards from another country. She pinned them on the bulletin board above her desk to study.

Once, she had called home and tried to talk to Jonathon. “I can't seem to find what I want to do,” she said. “How do other people know so clearly?”

“Because they're either imbeciles or geniuses. And you, my dear, are neither.” He mumbled something she didn't understand and then added in a strident voice, “Whatever you do, don't take notes. Never take notes. They will just make you rely on someone else's prejudices. Why should you memorize false opinions? Promise me you will never take notes in your classes.”

“No problem,” Sandy said.

 

B
UT AT THE START OF HER JUNIOR YEAR
, Sandy discovered journalism. It was an accident, actually. The class she had initially wanted, “Race Relations During Reconstruction,” was filled.

Each morning, as soon as all the students were seated, the professor would tell them a story. “There's been an accident on Route 91. Two cars, a Chevy with a family of four and a Pontiac station wagon with a seventeen-year-old boy behind the wheel. The Pontiac swerved into the oncoming lane and hit the Chevy. The mother, sitting next to the driver, was killed instantly. The teenaged boy is in intensive care. It was raining. You've got five minutes. Write me the lead paragraph.”

And it was then that Sandy discovered a way to lose time, to lose herself, the external, extraneous, worrisome self, for longer than that one ephemeral moment she only sometimes found with boys. Moving facts around on paper, facts that could be held and measured and weighed. Facts that might, if raised up, refracted, examined, yield explanations, or at least clues. The laws of cause and effect fascinated her, seduced her with the promise that if only you dug deep enough, asked the right questions, a reason could always be found. It was randomness, then, that was the illusion after all, randomness that could be defeated, outsmarted. It was only a matter of perseverance. She began to think of herself as a hunter, clear-eyed, unsentimental, fleet.

She dropped her other courses and crammed in as many journalism classes as she could. She began to do stories for the student paper. The faculty dissatisfaction that had kept Professor Chasen from being offered tenure. Athletes who were being unjustifiably passed so that they would not lose their eligibility to play. The internal politics of the weekly meetings at the Women's Center.

The first time she saw her name in print, in small and even black letters, perfectly centered, impossible to deny, she felt an anchor settle in the core of her belly where there had been only hollowness before.

She bought a tape recorder and a pocket mike and found that she could ask anything, her voice even and calm, when it was turned on. She knew instinctively how to let a silence spread uncomfortably open until a response emerged. She was a very good listener, patient and curious and unmoved by embarrassment.

With her notes and her transcriptions and her clippings lined up before her, she spent hours alone in her room, moving the ragged facts of other people's lives around on a sheet of paper, shifting and nudging and adjusting them until a pattern, an image, emerged. Here? Or is it here?

She ignored the boys who called her, and even the ones who didn't—always more intriguing.

She began to dream in paragraphs.

 

S
ANDY PACKED HER BAGS
the morning of her last final exam, took the three-hour test, and caught a Greyhound bus to Hardison that afternoon. She had no interest in the graduation ceremony itself, long-winded speeches about the unlimited future, and beery embraces with people she would sooner forget. No one would have come, anyway. Ann had written her one halfhearted inquiry about the event, but Jonathon and Estelle had never thought to ask. It didn't matter. She wanted only to leave, to begin.

 

A
LL THROUGH
J
ULY
, as the heat condensed in the shuttered, unair-conditioned house, clustering in the boxes and the bundles, Sandy lay in a torpor in the bedroom, keeping meticulously to her side of the room, though Ann, of course, was gone, would never return. Sweat dampened the back of her knees as she lay curled on the unmade bed, her résumé on the floor, just out of reach, a stack of increasingly dated out-of-town papers spread in a semicircle, the names and addresses on their mastheads circled in red. In an initial onslaught of energy her first week home—
I am not staying here
—she had mailed her clippings to four of them and had already been politely rejected by all. There were others, of course; she knew that. She turned to face the wall. Estelle was watching a soap opera in the living room. Sometimes Sandy would go sit with her in the late afternoon, aiming the small circular fan between them, and Estelle would tell her who was dying of what gruesome illness, whose husband was cheating.

When she heard the theme music of the day's last story kick in, Sandy raised herself lazily from the bed, walked to the living room, and sat down in the chair next to Estelle's.

“Hello, sugar bum,” Estelle said. “I didn't know you were home.”

“Where else would I be, drinking mint juleps at the country club?”

Estelle shrugged. “Your father is out at Tommy Bloodworth's. It used to be parents would ease up on lessons during summer vacations, but now it seems they just want to fit extra ones in. Everyone takes lessons for something these days. Do you know, they're giving swimming lessons to infants at the high-school pool this year? Can you imagine, throwing babies into water like witches to see if they sink or swim?” She sighed. “Your sister brought a lovely cake the other day. Why don't you get us some?”

Sandy went into the kitchen and had begun to slice two pieces of the gooey chocolate cake, sagging in the middle from the humidity, when the phone rang.

“Will you get that, sugar bum?” Estelle called out. “It's probably Meg Hollister with an update on her court case, and I don't feel like talking to her. She goes on forever. Tell her I'm not home.”

Sandy froze, knife in hand, chocolate on her fingertips.

She caught her breath, came out from the kitchen, and looked at Estelle, who was serenely flipping through an old magazine.

“Estelle, Meg Hollister is in one of your stories. She's not real. She can't call you.”

Estelle glanced up, her eyes spinning with addlement for a split second. She looked away, said nothing. The phone stopped ringing.

Sandy brought out the cake, and they ate it in silence.

After that, Sandy watched Estelle closely, waiting expectantly, fearfully, for another fissure to occur, different from the hazy tangents they were used to, this sharp and clean snap from reality. The next hour, the next day, and the next—but there was none. She began to think that she had somehow been mistaken, began to doubt all that she remembered or thought she knew.

But a week later, Estelle knocked on Sandy's door early in the morning. “Why didn't you come out last night?” she asked excitedly. “Didn't you hear me?”

“Hear you?”

“I knocked on your window. It was such a beautiful night, I was out in the yard. I wanted you to come out and tell me about the stars, the constellations. I can never remember what's what and you're so smart.”

“I didn't hear anything but the thunderstorm last night. Look out the window, it rained all night.”

Estelle looked away. “Maybe it was another night.”

Sandy lay in bed for most of the morning. She got up around one o'clock, made herself a sandwich, and brought it back to her room.

She was still on the first half of her sandwich when she suddenly put it down, got up, and began to dig through her unpacked bags until she found her tape recorder and mike. She tested the batteries to make sure they were still good, and put in a new cassette. At four o'clock that afternoon, she hid it in the pocket of an oversized cardigan and went out to tape Estelle.

The next morning, she rose early, showered, put on clean clothes for the first time in days, and went to the drugstore, waiting out on the street until it opened. She bought two ten-packs of tapes, more batteries, paper for transcriptions, and a package of new pens.

 

S
ANDY SAT IN
A
NN'S KITCHEN
. The morning sun illuminated the highly polished countertops, the spotless glasses and the silverware. She wrapped her arms around her tanned knees while Ann finished cleaning the coffeepot.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Sandy asked. “You could at least have warned me.”

“Tell you what?”

“About Estelle.”

“What about her?”

“That she's become delusional. I mean, this is new, isn't it, a new stage?”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Sandy.”

“Ann, she thinks people in soap operas are calling her.”

Ann shrugged. “You've always taken her too literally. She's a dreamer, Sandy. Why can't you just let her be?”

“A dreamer?” Sandy reached into the large bag by her feet and pulled out the tape recorder. “I want you to listen to this.” She hit the play button and Estelle's voice began to fill the room with her high and wobbly tones.

Ann reached over and grabbed the machine, fumbling with it as she struggled to turn it off as fast as possible. She glared at Sandy. “You recorded her without her knowing?”