The Appetites of Girls (14 page)

When I asked Toru about this, he arched his brows and turned out his palms. “Your body won’t change just because you want it to, will it?”

“Maybe it would help if I ate more. What do you think? If I ate big portions like you?”

But Toru only frowned. “Who can tell?”

So at supper I began to pile larger and larger spoonfuls onto my plate. But only now and then did I have the chance to finish them. For after Toru had scraped up the last grains of rice, the remaining shreds of beef from their serving bowls, he claimed his stomach still growled with hunger. And eyeing the food on my plate, he would say, “Setsu, can you really finish
all
that?”

“No. No, I can’t. The rest is yours, Toru.” And I would pass him my plate.

•   •   •

I
n the early spring, Mrs. Dubois announced to Toru and me that she wished us to perform in an upcoming recital. It would take place in a small concert hall not far from the capitol building and was an event that musicians and teachers from the finest music schools often attended. This was a significant opportunity, she explained, her voice grave and low, but she had no doubt we had the ability necessary to participate. All that was needed, over the next eight weeks, was to practice the piece she had selected for us to perform until it was perfected—“Sarabande and Allegretto” by Corelli; she wished it to be played as a duet. “We will devote your lessons to it,” she said. “And, of course, you will work on it daily at home.”

“Sarabande and Allegretto”—I had heard the piece before, its more rapid section reminding me of bird wings fluttering.

“Oh, Toru, what do you think!” I said, turning to him to see if he shared my excitement. But he was busy adjusting the tuning pegs of his instrument.

That evening Toru and I set our music stands side by side in his bedroom and began to practice the Corelli together as we had been instructed. But after only a few measures, Toru stopped suddenly, vigorously shaking his head.

“What is it, Toru?”

“Something doesn’t sound right. One of us is off.”

So we began once more, and I listened as carefully as I could, trying to hear what was bothering Toru. But again he flicked his bow from his strings in irritation, and his fingers tightened around the neck of his violin.

Late into the evening we rehearsed the piece but never completed more than the first page. Again and again Toru would stop, insisting we were making no improvements. Then, studying me through half-squeezed eyelids, he bit his lip as though there were something he wished to say.

“Am I doing something wrong, Toru? Tell me and I will try to fix it.”

After a long pause, he said, “We do not bow with the same staccato—I use more, you use less. And here and here,” he said, pointing to two places in the music, “our tempos are different—yours is slower than mine. How can we play for an audience with such different sounds?”

But the more I tried to blend my sound with Toru’s, the more errors I seemed to make. And each day, Toru stamped his foot with a new complaint—C-sharps that didn’t match, an overuse of vibrato in the final notes, insufficient crescendos. Soon my head began to buzz with these corrections so that I struggled just to hear my own playing.

As the recital drew nearer, Toru complained that we were making no advancements; in fact, he thought, things were only getting worse. To soothe his frustrations, he fed his growing appetite. In the afternoons, before our practice, he polished off entire boxes of seaweed crackers, which my mother kept on a special kitchen shelf just for him. At night, after finishing his own dinner, he eyed what I had not yet eaten on my plate.

So I found that I left more and more meals with a stomach unsettled from hunger. Some nights when Toru and I played together, I felt almost too dizzy to stand, and all that I had been trying to learn grew more muddled in my mind. Even things I had long known seemed to be slipping from my grasp. One evening, as Toru fidgeted and huffed more frequently than usual listening to me play, two thin tears rolled down my cheeks. And setting my violin in its case, I covered my eyes with my hands.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Tell me what to do, Toru!”

For a long time Toru uttered not a single word. Then, scratching beneath his nose with his fingertip, he said, “Maybe what I told you the first time was right. I guess the way I play is not something I can teach.” Then slowly stroking beneath his chin as if a new thought had occurred to him, he said, “The Corelli is not normally played as a duet, you know.”

“But what do you mean? The recital is less than two weeks away. How can we perform anything else?”

Toru only crossed one arm over the other and shrugged his shoulders. But I knew what he wanted me to do.

When I told Mrs. Dubois I wished to withdraw from the recital, she pursed her lips. “This comes as quite a disappointment, Setsu. Perhaps you will reconsider.”

For an instant my chest pounded with new hope, and I glanced at Toru, who stood several steps away sorting sheets of music. But I could tell by the way he arched his neck, slowly turning through the pages, that he listened to our words. And I shook my head, brushing away the fleeting thought. “No,” I told her, despite her repeated urgings. “No, I am quite sure.”

For some time, I awaited my parents’ attempts to dissuade me from the decision I’d made, for their insistence that I had given up too readily. So I even had my explanation prepared and repeated it silently in bed before dropping off to sleep. But the protest I had braced myself for never came. And I wondered, for just a moment, if a year earlier it might have. A year earlier, before . . . But I did not finish the question because surely, surely this could not be true.

•   •   •

M
y mother told Toru, for the night of the recital, he could choose any dinner he liked. “Whatever your heart desires,” she said, fanning her cookbooks across the kitchen counter.

After some consideration, Toru selected three elaborate dishes: rice balls with salted salmon, egg custard, and vinegar-steamed shrimp. My
mother began early in the morning, dicing assorted vegetables, peeling shrimp, rolling rice in seaweed. She worked until she called us to the table that evening. Toru was the first to sit down. He was dressed in a brand-new suit and an orange silk tie, which my parents had bought especially for the occasion. His hair was brushed neatly off his forehead. Earlier that evening, after he’d finished rehearsing, I had seen him at his bedroom wall mirror carefully combing every strand, slicking it with gel. And I had dabbed at the ends of my own hair, unable to stop myself from imagining things that would not come true.

“You look very handsome tonight, Toru,” I told him as he adjusted the knotted gold cuff links at his wrists, then piled one rice ball after another onto his plate.

“Thank you, Setsu.” His face was beaming. His eyes, his teeth, even his skin seemed to shine.

“If you want, I will show you the rest of my pictures from Japan,” he said between noisy swallows. “I have more than fifty, and you can hold them, too.”

“Oh, yes,” I said softly, surprised by Toru’s sudden generosity.

“But maybe we will wait until tomorrow. Tonight when we return from the recital,
you
may be rested, but
I
will be exhausted.” He smiled at me with his biggest smile. “What do you think, little sister?”

I nodded, unable to speak. Despite Toru’s kindness, my throat swelled with tears.

With a tap of his wooden chopsticks, Toru scooped up the last remaining morsel on his dish. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw that he gazed at my plate, at the mound of egg custard I had not yet touched.

“Such a large portion you have tonight, Setsu. Do you plan to finish it all?”

“No, Toru. It’s yours,” I said. And I took only one last swallow. It was a small sacrifice; it was only fair, I told myself as I watched Toru gobble the last of the custard. For I believed that his hunger was much greater than mine.

(My Story)

•
Freshman Year
•

I
n college you make friends who last a lifetime,” my cousin Gregory had told his brothers, my sisters, and me last winter, having returned home with a full semester under his belt.

“Always showing off,” Sarah had whispered to Valerie and me later. “Now even his friendships are better than ours.”

Yes, so ridiculous. But as my new college suitemates and I formed a circle on the cinnamon-brown carpet of our common room on our first afternoon together, I could not help thinking of Gregory’s claim, wondering if it could possibly be true. His roommate, Eli, had visited him in Westchester for part of the winter break. With straighter hair and a narrower mouth, Eli could almost have been Gregory’s twin. Even their voices sounded the same when they spoke of family or joked about their professors or recent parties they’d attended. But how much would I find I shared with Setsu, Opal, and Francesca, the three girls I was now sitting with?

Earlier in the afternoon, our head counselor, Nora, had stopped by with an assignment: a questionnaire for us to answer in order to learn as much as possible about one another.

“Are we being graded on this?” Francesca had laughed.

Nora looked like some of the other older-looking girls I’d seen on campus, with her jeans worn through around her tanned knees and her plaid shirt cut large enough for my uncle Leonid.

“Oh, I’m kidding.
Kidding
.” Francesca had joked with Nora as if she, too, had been attending the school for years rather than mere hours. “We’ll answer every question faithfully, won’t we?” And she had looked around at the rest of us with amusement.

Now Francesca balanced the two sheets of paper on her left knee. At the center of our circle, she had dropped a box of mini–blueberry muffins in paper wrappers, a large silver bag of chive potato chips, and a clear plastic baggy filled with candies. She had remembered she had munchies left over from her drive up—a drive she must have made on her own, I was gathering, having heard her mention to Opal the car she was beginning to regret having brought with her now that she realized the distance from our dorm to the off-campus garage.

“Might as well have something to snack on while we spill our guts, right?” Francesca laughed again, this time a bark of a laugh that seemed, somehow, not to match the prettiness of her face.

It occurred to me that Opal, whom I’d heard make two phone calls to Logan Airport—checking on a bag that had disappeared somewhere along her journey from California—must also have traveled here on her own, a choice I knew Mama and Poppy would have considered out of the question for me. With her wire hoop earrings, her fluttery white skirt, the measured evenness of her voice, Opal could have been one of the girls from my high school who’d hardly noticed me.

After helping me unpack, Mama and Poppy had been reluctant to leave before meeting my new suitemates. But the truth was I couldn’t
help being glad none of my suitemates had appeared until later in the day, glad they had not been around to see the attention Mama had given to the arranging of my room, or to hear her cautioning reminders about walking through the campus alone at night.

I reached for a muffin and a handful of chips, then realizing I was, so far, the only one to have done so, nibbled them slowly, as if I weren’t very interested in them after all.

“So, should we get started?” Francesca scanned the first sheet of the questionnaire. I felt some relief as she helped herself to two mini-muffins. I was relieved, too, she would not try to talk us out of the first responsibility the school had given us.

“Yes, I think they mean for us to complete it today, don’t you?” It seemed that Setsu, like me, was anxious to follow the rules. She was a beautiful Japanese girl with a voice as soft as air and reminded me of a sylph from a fairy tale, with her graceful, tiny figure and curtain of dark hair hanging to her waist.

Fran smiled, obviously still amused. “Well, the first questions are hardly probing ones: ‘What is your middle name? Where were you born?’ Who wants to go first?” None of us said a word. Fran plowed ahead. “No one? Okay, I don’t mind.” She swallowed a mouthful of muffin, large enough for me to see the bulge of it move down her throat. “Lane and New York City.” She had kicked off her leather sandals, tossing them carelessly—though they looked expensive—toward the corner of the room. She wore only a black elastic band in her hair and no jewelry, but I knew the price of her sleeveless peasant blouse, one my friend Jenny had saved several allowances to buy from a tiny boutique in the Village where, she bragged, Madonna sometimes shopped.

“Am I next?” Opal leaned back, supporting her weight with her palms. “Hélène. And I was born in San Diego, but I hope we won’t be asked every place we’ve lived. I’m not sure I’d remember them all.” She laughed just briefly, though it seemed to be at some ironic thought of her
own rather than with us. This would be her first time living in the Northeast though, she admitted, as if it were the only place left on earth where she had not stayed.

I wondered suddenly what my family was now doing in the apartment that had been my only home until today. And then I wondered how different this day, this night would feel if I’d had as many homes as Opal. Maybe this was as casual a change for her as dozens she’d made before. I thought she might go on about her travels, but she said nothing more, and not once, I noticed, did she move forward for a handful of Francesca’s snacks. Nor did Setsu for many minutes, until eventually two tapered fingers dipped cautiously into the open candy bag and, even then, selected nothing more than a single caramel.

After we’d gone around our circle, Fran glanced down at the questionnaire again: “‘Share your favorite passage from literature.’”

Setsu recited a poem by Emily Dickinson. Then Francesca read a page from a book she had recently bought, written by the older sister of one of her friends. “
Beneath the Waves
. It’s totally obscure, but it has this great main character, a female deep-sea diver. Anyway, maybe not my
all-time
favorite passage, but it’s my favorite today.”

Opal was next and selected a section of Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
, which I had never read, though both Fran and Setsu seemed to know the book well. As Opal recited from memory an impressively long passage, I racked my brain for something as interesting as what my suitemates had shared. But what choice did I have but the lines from
Jane Eyre
I still remembered from having studied the novel my eighth-grade year, the only literary passage I knew by heart?

It seemed ages after I recited the lines until anyone spoke, and then, “That was lovely,” Setsu said, though she seemed sweet enough to give a compliment regardless of what I’d selected.

Fran continued: “‘What is your favorite pastime?’”

“Maybe going to the opera,” Setsu offered.

Fran’s was a tie between skiing and seeing U2 in concert, Opal’s a walk on the beach before sunset.

“Going to the movies, I guess—” This wasn’t true, but it was the first thought that came to my mind and seemed an answer others might give.

Francesca flicked the questionnaire in her lap, making a dent at the center of the paper. What could she have found so objectionable about my reply? But she was not listening, rather reading from the sheet. “‘Who has most inspired you and why? What is your best quality?’ Boring! Boring! Right?” She grinned conspiratorially, revealing beautifully even, white teeth.

“I don’t think we’re meant to skip any, do you?” Setsu asked, but Fran ignored her, continuing to scan the paper.

“Here we go. This is better: ‘Describe something you did as a result of peer pressure.’ It’s a start anyway. Your turn, Setsu.”

Setsu’s cheeks blossomed pink, and her eyes blinked like small, flickering bulbs. “Okay, give me just a minute—”

“Good Lord, Setsu. We’re not going to bite.” Francesca popped another mini-muffin into her mouth.

“We don’t have to go in order, do we?” Opal said.

Setsu smiled gratefully.

Opal pulled at her hoop earrings, stretching the lobes of her ears. “I never stayed in one place long enough to have many friends. Except maybe Delilah—Delinquent Delilah, I always thought of her. I think she played hooky at least once a week! She was the daughter of my mother’s boyfriend at the time. We met when I was thirteen. She was a year older. She didn’t pressure me into much. But she
introduced
me to certain things.” Opal tucked her hands under her thighs.

“You mean—?” I was thinking the question but had not meant to ask it aloud. To my embarrassment, Francesca rolled her eyes at me and laughed.

“Sometimes Delilah would take out her secret stash—cola bottles half-filled with vodka, rum, gin, sambuca, which she had siphoned off, a
bit at a time, from her father’s liquor cabinet and kept hidden in a dresser drawer beneath her bathing suits and training bras. She would turn off the lights and we would stare up at her mobile of glow-in-the-dark planets and sip from the soda bottles until we were too dizzy and nauseous to move.” Opal squeezed closed her eyes for a moment. “That I didn’t mind, but she had a bunch of pervy magazines she’d stolen from her cousin. She knew I couldn’t stand to look through them. Still, somehow it seemed I ended up at Delilah’s house almost every day.”

“Maybe you liked the magazines more than you thought!” Francesca looked around at the rest of us to see if we were as amused as she.

I giggled, but Opal only sniffed, her upper lip tensing momentarily, as if she were about to make some retort then decided against it. Setsu smiled and rolled a thin link bracelet with a heart charm up and down her wrist. I stared down at my khaki shorts. For some moments, no one spoke.

Opal’s story made me think of the afternoon in Mr. Gupta’s variety store just off the route I took home from school. And I almost told it. How I had needed pipe cleaners for my U.S. history project. How Mr. Gupta had been seated on a stool behind the counter and waved when I entered, then bent over his newspaper, humming with the lively Indian music playing on a small radio behind him. As I searched for the wire cleaners, I came upon every kind of oddity jammed on the shelves, and in the quiet of the back aisles, a host of things I’d never seen up close: a box of contraceptive sponges, a book called
A Woman’s Guide to Good Sex
with directions inside, and magazines perhaps like those Opal had mentioned—some of women thrusting their breasts, others of men gripping the bulges between their legs. But what would my new suitemates say if I told them how I had ripped some of the photos from the magazines? Pictures of things I’d known little about but others must have. How I had stuffed them inside my pocket and run, bumping into a rack of greeting cards, bruising my forehead!

“So, that’s it? Setsu? Ruth? Nothing? You must all be a bunch of
saints
,” Francesca said. “God, I think I smoked, drank, and slept my way
through high school!” She was kidding, mostly, she said, but she turned to me as if she knew the New York I’d grown up in might as well have been a thousand miles from her Manhattan.

“It’s what colleges do, isn’t it? Match us to roommates with experiences different from our own?” Francesca pulled a box of Parliament cigarettes from the pocket of her white denim jeans, removed one, dangling it between two fingers, and snorted as if this amused her, how dissimilar our lives must have been. As she blew a ring of smoke, I wondered if she was right. Maybe my cousin Gregory had been lucky or exaggerating about his new close friends.

Francesca, with friends from the coed school her parents had transferred her to her sophomore year to “broaden her horizons,” had spent every Friday and Saturday night at bars that never checked IDs. By seventeen, she knew twenty different vodka drinks and had begun dating a twenty-three-year-old, a Wall Street trader, whose downtown apartment she sometimes stayed in until close to dawn, slipping home into her own bed just a couple of hours before her family woke.

I imagined her with her grown-up boyfriend. I wondered what they’d done in private, wondered if it was like what I had caught unexpectedly at night from my bedroom window—the young couple in the apartment across the way who occasionally neglected to draw their shades.

I no longer remember the other questions from our assignment, but there was still plenty of early-evening light by the time we finished, and someone—maybe Setsu—suggested we head outside and have a photo taken of the four of us to commemorate our first day together as roommates. We agreed on a spot just in front of the university’s entry gates as the most appropriate place, a symbol of all that awaited us. Francesca stopped a boy in a faded NASA T-shirt, with narrow shoulders and arms half the width of mine, and asked him to do the honors. In the picture, Francesca is standing between Opal and me, one wrist draped coolly over each of our shoulders. Opal’s face is turned slightly toward Francesca’s, a flattering angle as someone accustomed to being photographed might
instinctively ease into. Setsu is on my left, her fingers folded together, her hands cupped like a neat basket, one delicate ankle crossed in front of the other. I recall, at the time, feeling I was the only one who had not found a comfortable stance. Later, Fran made copies of the snapshot for each of us, and when I look at it now, I still see my awkwardness: the way my right shoulder bends slightly under Francesca’s hand, the way my arm crosses in front of me in an attempt to block my midsection from the camera’s lens but draws attention to it instead.

Returning to our dorm, we talked of other things that night. Of why we’d chosen Brown, of Setsu’s older brother—a musician, of Francesca’s younger brother, and of my sisters. We talked of two Caribbean islands where Opal and Fran had both spent time and of the trip Francesca’s family had taken to South America over the summer, one she declared a total disaster but which made my family’s occasional vacations to the Catskills seem too mundane to mention.

And I learned that Francesca was not the only one who’d had boyfriends. Opal had dated a boy for a summer in Mexico. He was sweet and never pressured her and drove her everywhere on the back of his Vespa. And Setsu told of her senior-year boyfriend from her calculus class whom, she admitted, she’d never found terribly attractive. Still, she had stayed with him to quiet the friends who had started to call her Snow White, never telling them she and the calculus student did little more than hold hands and share dry kisses in the park near her home.