The Broom of the System (2 page)

“Hunger,” Sue Shaw says after a minute. “Massive, immense, uncontrollable, consuming, uncontrollable, hunger.”

“This is so,” says Mindy.

“We will wait”—Clarice looks at her watch on the underside of her wrist—“one, that is one hour, before eating anything what soentirelyever.”

“No we can’t possibly possibly do that.”

“But do it we shall. As per room discussions of not one week ago, when we explicitly agreed that we shall not gorge when utterly flapped, lest we get fat and repulsive, like Mindy, over there, you poor midge.”

“Fart-blossom,” Mindy says absently, she’s not fat and she knows it, Lenore knows it, they all know it.

“A lady at all times, that Metalman,” Clarice says. Then, after a minute, “Speaking of which, you might just maybe either fix your robe or get dressed or get up off your back in Lenore’s stuff, I’m not really all up for giving you a gynecological exam, which is sort of what you’re making us do, here, O Lesbia of Thebes.”

“Stuff and bother,” says Mindy, or rather, “Stuth and bozzer”; and she gets up swaying and reaching for solid things, goes over to the door that goes into her little single bedroom off the bathroom. She got there first in September and took it, Clarice had said in a letter, this Playboy-Playmatish JAP from Scarsdale, and she’s shedding what’s left of her bathrobe, battered into submission, leaving it all wet in Lenore’s lap in the chair by the door, and going through the door with her long legs, deliberate steps. Shuts the door.

Clarice looks after her when she’s gone and shakes her head a tiny bit and looks over at Lenore and smiles. There are sounds of laughter downstairs, and cattle-herd sounds of lots of people dancing. Lenore just loves to dance.

Sue Shaw takes a big noisy drink of water out of a big plastic Jetsons glass on her desk up by the front door. “Speaking of which, you didn’t by any chance happen to see Splittstoesser this morning?” she says.

“Nuh-uh,” says Clarice.

“She was with Proctor.”

“So?”

“At seven o‘clock? Both in nighties, all sleepy and googly, coming out of her room, together? Holding
hands?”

“Hmmm.”

“Now if anybody ever told me that Spiittstoesser ...”

“I thought she was engaged to some guy.”

“She is.”

They both laugh like hell.

“Awww.”

“Who’s Splittstoesser?” Lenore asks.

“Nancy Splittstoesser, at dinner? The girl in the red V-neck, with the earrings that were really little fists?”

“Oh. But what about her?”

Clarice and Sue look at each other and start to laugh again. Mindy Metalman comes back in, in gym shorts and an inside-out sweatshirt with the arms cut off. Lenore looks at her and smiles at the floor.

“What?” Mindy knows something’s up right away.

“Splittstoesser and Proctor,” Sue gets out.

“I meant to ask you.” Mindy’s eyes get all wide. “They’re in the bathroom this morning? In the same shower?”

“Ahh, no!” Sue’s going to die, Mindy starts to laugh too, that weird sympathetic laugh, looking around at them.

“They‘re, uh, together now? I thought Nancy was engaged.”

“She ... is,” Clarice making Lenore laugh, too.

“Godfrey Jaysus.”

It settles down after a while. Sue does the “Twilight Zone” theme in a low voice. “Who ... will be struck next ... ?”

“Not entirely sure I even understand what you guys are, uh ...” Lenore is asking, looking around.

So Clarice tells Lenore all this business about how Pat Proctor’s a bull and what bulls are and how quite a few of the girls get pretty friendly and all, here at this women’s college.

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“That’s just incredibly gross.” And this sets Mindy and Sue off again. Lenore looks at them. “Well doesn’t that kind of thing sort of give you guys the creeps a little bit? I mean I—”

“Well it’s just part of life and everything, what people want to do is more or less their own ...” Clarice is putting the needle on that song again.

There’s a silence for about half the song. Mindy’s at her toes, again, over at the bunkbeds. “The thing is, I don’t know if we should say,” says Sue Shaw, looking over at Clarice, “but Nancy Splittstoesser sort of got assaulted right before Thanksgiving, on the path out by the Widget House, and I think she—”

“Assaulted?” Lenore says.

“Well, raped, I guess, really.”

“I see.” Lenore looks up behind Sue at a poster over Clarice’s desk, which is of a really muscular guy, without a shirt on, making all his muscles from the back, his back all shiny and bulging every which way. The poster’s old and ripped at the edges from tape; it had been in Clarice’s room at home and their father had not been pleased, the light from the high ceiling makes a bright reflection at the back of the man’s head and hides it in white.

“I think it kind of messed her up,” says Sue.

“How hard to understand,” Lenore says softly. “Raped. So she just doesn’t like males now, because of that, or—?”

“Well I think it’s hard to say, Lenore,” Clarice with her eyes closed, playing with a button on her shirt pocket. She’s in front of their air vent, with her chair leaning back, and her hair’s all over, a yellow breeze around her cheeks. “Probably just safe to say she’s pretty confused and messed up temporarily, ‘ntcha think?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“You a virgin Lenore?” Mindy’s on the lower bunk, Sue’s bed, with her picked and flakey feet up and toes hooked into the springs on the underside of Clarice’s mattress.

“You bitch,” Clarice says to Mindy.

“I’m just asking,” says Mindy. “I doubt Lenore’s too hung up about what—”

“Yes I’m a virgin, I mean I’ve never had, you know, sexual intercourse with anybody,” Lenore says, smiling at Clarice that it’s OK, really. “Are you a virgin Mindy?”

Mindy laughs. “Oh very much so.”

Sue Shaw snorts into her water. “Mindy’s saving herself for the right marine battalion.” Clarice and Lenore laugh.

“Fuck you in the ear,” Mindy Metalman says mildly, she’s all relaxed, almost asleep. Her legs are all curved and faintly muscular and the skin’s so smooth it almost glows because she’d recently gotten “waxed” at home, she’d told Lenore, whatever that meant.

“This happen a lot?”

“What happen?”

“Rapes and assaults and stuff?”

Clarice and Sue look away, all calm. “Sometimes, probably, who knows, it’s hard to say, because it gets covered up or not reported or something a lot of the time, the College isn’t exactly nuts about—”

“Well how many times that you know of?”

“Idle know. About maybe, I guess I know of about ten women—”

“Ten?” “ ... ”

“How many women do you even know total, here?”

“Lenore, I don’t know,” Clarice says. “It’s just not ... it’s just common sense, is what it is, really. If you’re careful, you know, and stay off the paths at night ...”

“Security’s really good here, really,” says Sue Shaw. “They’ll give you rides just about anywhere on campus at night if it’s far, and there’s a shuttle bus that goes from the library and the labs back here to the rear dorms every hour, with an armed guard, and they’ll take you right up to the—”

“Armed
guard?”

“Some of them are pretty cute, too.” Clarice winks at Lenore.

“You never told me about any of this stuff at Christmas, Clarice. Armed guards and stuff. Doesn’t it bother you? I mean back at home—”

“I don’t think it’s too different anywhere else, Lenore,” says Clarice. “I don’t think it is. You get used to it. It’s really just common sense.”

“Still, though.”

“There is of course the issue of the party,” says Mindy Metalman from the bunk, pretty obviously changing the subject. The noise is still loud from underneath their room.

What’s going on is that the dorm is giving a really big party, here, tonight, downstairs, with a bitching band called Spiro Agnew and the Armpits and dancing and men and beer with ID’s. It’s all really cute and clever, and at dinner downstairs Lenore saw them putting up plastic palm trees and strings of flowers, and some of the girls had plastic grass skirts, because tonight’s was a theme party, with the theme being Hawaiian: the name of the party on a big lipstick banner on a sheet out in front of Rumpus said it was the “Comonawannaleiya” party, which Lenore thought was really funny and clever, and they were going to give out leis, ha, to all the men who came from other schools and could get in with ID’s. They had a whole room full of leis, Lenore had seen after dinner.

“There is that,” says Clarice.

“Thus.”

“So.”

“Not me,” says Sue Shaw. “Nawmeboy, never again, I said it and I meant it. Pas
moi.”

Clarice laughs and reaches over for the Jetsons glass.

“The issue, however,” says Mindy from the bed, her sweatshirt slipped all down at the shoulder and about ready to fall off, it looks like, “the issue is the fact that there is ... food, food down in the dining room, spread under the laughing fingers of the plastic palms, that we all helped buy.”

“This is true,” Clarice sighs, hitting the repeat on the stereo. Her eyes are so blue they look hot, to Lenore.

“And all we’ve got is just those far too scrumptious mashed potatoes in the fridge,” Mindy says, which is true, just a clear Tup perware dish full of salty Play-Doh Rumpus mashed potatoes, which was all they could steal at dinner, seeing as how the kitchen ran out of cookies, then the bread ...

“But you guys said no way you’d go down,” says Lenore. “ ‘Member you guys kept telling me how gross it was, these parties, mixers, and like a meat market, and how you could get sucked in, ’as it were,‘ you said, and how you just had to avoid going down at all costs, and how I shouldn’t, you know ...” She looks around, she wants to go down, she loves to dance, she has a killer new dress she got at Tempo in East Corinth for just such a—

“She wants to go, Clarice,” Mindy says, throwing her legs over the side of the bunk and sitting up with a bounce, “and she is our guest, and there is the Dorito factor, and if we stayed for like six quick minutes ...”

“So I see.” Clarice looks all droopy-lidded at Lenore and sees her eagerness and has to smile. Sue Shaw is at her desk with her back turned, her butt is really pretty fat and wide in the chair, pooching over the sides, Lenore sees.

Clarice sighs. “The thing is Lenore you just don’t know. These things are so unbelievably tiresome, unpleasant, we went all first semester and you just really literally get nauseated, physically ill after a while, ninety-nine point nine percent of the men who come are just
lizards,
reptiles, and it’s clear awfully fast that the whole thing is really just nothing more than a depressing ritual, a rite that we’re expected by God knows who to act out, over and over. You can’t even have conversations. It’s really repulsive.” And she drinks water out of the Jetsons glass. Sue Shaw is nodding her head at her desk.

“I say what we do,” Mindy Metalman hits the floor and claps her hands, “is Lenore goes and puts on that fabulous violet dress I saw you hang up, and we three stay and attend to the rest of this joint, for a second, and then we all just scamper down really quick, and Lenore gets a condensed liberal arts education and one or two dances while we steal about seven
tons
of food, then we come right back up, David Letterman’s on in less than an hour.”

“No,” says Sue Shaw.

“Well then you can stay here, nipplehead, we’ll get over it, if one semi-bad experience is going to make you hide away like a—”

“Fine, look, let’s just do that.” Clarice looks less than thrilled. They all look at each other. Lenore gets a nod from Clarice and jumps up and goes to Mindy’s little annex bedroom to put on her dress as Clarice starts glaring in earnest at Mindy and Mindy gives little stuff-it signals to Sue Shaw, over in the comer.

Lenore brushes her teeth in a tiny bathroom redolent of Metalman and Shaw, washes her face, dries it with a towel off the floor, puts Visine in, finds some of that bright wet-looking lipstick Mindy owns in an old Tampax box on the toilet, gets the lipstick out, knocks the Tampax box over, a compact falls in the toilet and she has to fish it out, her shirt’s wet, the arm’s soaked, she takes the shirt off and goes into Mindy’s bedroom. She has to get her bra, since the dress fabric is really thin, violet cotton, pretty as hell with her brown hair, which is luckily clean, and a bit of lipstick, she looks eighteen, very nearly, and her bra’s in the bottom of her bag on Mindy’s bed. Lenore rummages in her bag. Mindy’s room is really a sty, clothes all over, an Exercycle, big James Dean poster on the inside of the door, Richard Gere too oh of course, pictures of some nonfamous guy on a sailboat, Rolling Stone magazine covers, joumey concert poster, super-high ceiling like the other rooms, here with a bright blanket tacked one side on the ceiling and one on the wall and sagging, a becalmed candy sail. There’s a plastic thing on the dresser, and Lenore knows it’s a Pill-holder, for the Pill, because Clarice has got one and so does Karen Daughenbaugh, who’s more or less Lenore’s best friend at Shaker School. There’s the bra, Lenore puts it on. The dress. Combs her hair with a long red comb that has black hair in it and smells like Flex.

 

 

 

A scritch. The Cat Stevens goes off all of a sudden, in the main room. There’s loud knocking on the front door, Lenore can hear. She comes back in with the others with her white dress pumps in her hand as Sue Shaw opens the door and Mindy tries to disperse smoke with an album cover. There’s two guys outside, filling the doorway, grinning, in matching blue blazers and tartan ties and chinos and those shoes. There’s nobody with them.

“Hey and howdy, ma‘am,” says one of them, a big, tall, tan-in-the-spring-type guy with thick blond hair and a sculptured part and a cleft chin and bright green eyes. “Does Melinda Sue Metalman live here, by any chance at all?”