“Really?” Mona looked surprised. “That doesn’t sound like Dan to me.”
But when the time came, she drank down three Bellinis and really seemed to enjoy them. By seven o’clock, we were lingering over dinner and she was telling me about a college friend who had a fetish for postal uniforms. She hadn’t mentioned the citations once. Our citation boxes were still sitting untouched by my front door.
“Didn’t you have a boyfriend in college?” I said, changing the subject.
“Not really. Only very briefly. When did I say I had a boyfriend?”
“I thought I remembered that you did. Maybe I’m mistaken.”
“Oh. Well, I dated this one guy for a couple of months junior year. That’s all. It’s difficult to meet guys when you go to a women’s college, you know? Anyway. Once it started getting more serious, I lost interest.”
“Why? What was wrong with the guy?”
“Nothing. He just didn’t have it.”
“Have what?”
“I don’t know. How do I explain?” Mona pulled her navy cashmere cuffs over her wrists and tilted closer to me. “Those were really delicious, those Bellinis. I think I had one too many.”
“You want another one?” I asked.
“We finished the champagne on the last one.”
“I know. But I thought maybe a Black Label and peach juice cocktail would satisfy you at this stage of the intoxication process.”
Mona yawned and smiled.
“Make it just a Black Label, then,” she said.
“I thought you didn’t like beer.”
“I make exceptions.”
I got her the beer from the fridge, along with one for myself.
“See,” she said, taking the beer from my hands, “I used to have this Greek professor in college. He was my ideal man.”
“You dated a professor?” Somehow it didn’t surprise me.
“No.
No
. I didn’t say
dated
. I had a major crush on him. For a couple of years. He didn’t know it, of course. Although he always gave me A’s on everything.”
“Naturally.”
“He was my advisor too.”
“Was that a coincidence?” I asked.
Mona raised her eyebrows as she swallowed some beer.
“I guess not,” I said.
She leaned forward again and clasped her hands together. “I would think a lot about cooking his breakfast. I would be sitting there in my dorm room, translating Horace, and I would just wonder what it would be like to fix Dr. Grant bacon and eggs. Or to ruffle his ridiculous, moppy hair in the morning. Iron his shirt. The guy was so disheveled, I
don’t think anyone ever ironed a single shirt for him. Hand him his briefcase. Maybe have a couple of his babies.”
“How do you go from handing him his briefcase to having his babies?”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” Mona said. She narrowed her eyes, examining the back of her beer can. “I thought a lot about what it would be like to be his wife. And I mean ‘wife’ in the most traditional sense possible. And there were a lot of days when I was pretty sure nothing would make me happier.”
“Are you yanking my chain, Mona?”
“No
. I’m serious. Maybe it was just his accent.” She glanced up from her beer. “He was from Liverpool.”
“Well then,” I said. “That’s understandable. Everyone would like to marry a Beatle.”
“Or maybe it was just that I was so bored, there at that girls’ school. But I’m pretty sure that on some level I was really in love with the guy.”
“Huh.”
“So sometime around the middle of junior year I decided it was time to wise up and start looking for a distraction. That’s when I dated that other guy for a while. His name was Alan.”
“And you’re still in love with the professor? Dr. Grant?”
“No. Of course not. I got over him. But Alan just didn’t have it. This is what I’m trying to explain. I never thought about making Alan’s breakfast. Not once. In fact, I’m pretty sure I would resent having to make his breakfast, if that was ever necessary. I took that as a sign. Alan wasn’t for me. It was just the same in high school. No one impressed me much, or compelled me to say or do truly stupid things.”
“So you didn’t have a high school boyfriend.”
“No,” Mona answered. “I dated, but I always ended up hating them after two or three dates.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t their fault, really. I always just kind of wanted a
real
man.”
“A
real
man,” I repeated. It was a little unsettling, picturing the teenage Mona scoping for a
real
man. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if I qualified.
“Yeah. A
real
man. That’s what I’m looking for. Still. What about you? Any college girlfriends?”
“I was with this girl for about six months sophomore year. Ella.”
“That’s all?”
“What do you mean, ‘that’s all’?”
“I always imagine people at coed colleges having a pretty steady stream of significant others.”
“No, it wasn’t always like that. Not for me, anyway.”
“So how did you and Ella meet?”
“In a philosophy class.”
“What was the class?”
“Existentialism.”
“Very romantic.”
“Yeah.”
Mona took a tentative sip of beer and wrinkled her nose at the taste. “So … what was the deal with Ella?” she wanted to know. “What happened after the six months?”
“Well … For one, she was stoned most of the time. It got old.”
“Oh.” Mona looked primly startled by this revelation, which was sort of cute. “Old … in what sense?”
“Well, as I said, she was a pothead. It was sort of fun, at first, that she liked to party so much. But it started to become
obvious, after the early excitement wore off, that we didn’t have much in common.”
“Hmm. That’s funny. I don’t know many female potheads. I mean, I knew plenty of women who smoked pot at Middlebrook, but none enough for me to call them potheads.”
“Well, they definitely exist. Maybe not at Middlebrook College, but they’re out there. Trust me. And Ella was definitely one of them.”
It was true about Ella and pot, but I felt unkind summing her up that way. As if the many lazy hours with her—lying on her dorm room bed, watching her goldfish, anticipating the Tater Tots that might or might not be served on our next trip to the dining hall—hadn’t been enjoyable. But it was she, after all, who’d ended it.
You don’t even know how to
pretend,
Billy
, she’d kept saying, when she was breaking up with me.
“Too bad you didn’t stick with her.” Mona held her beer can in front of her face, probably contemplating whether she should continue drinking it. “You guys could have had a nice existentialist wedding ceremony.”
“Oh. Well, Ella wasn’t a philosophy major. She was a psych major.”
“So, why’d
you
pick philosophy?”
“You know, it’s not so different from your classics major. Difficult, old texts. Not much practical application. Just a good intellectual challenge.”
She peered skeptically over her beer can. “Yeah, but … there must have been a reason you picked philosophy specifically.”
“Well, the reason changed over time. At first, like most freshmen who study it, I thought I was gonna learn all about life’s deep questions. But after a few classes, I actually found
that I was pretty good at it. I liked writing the papers. The papers were easy. I liked picking arguments apart. Once you realize that no argument is perfect, that every argument can be torn down somehow … you’re golden on philosophy papers.”
“But what about building arguments up?”
“Well. True, that’s important too. But that’s not quite as fun.” My advisor was always pointing this out—that I was much better at one than the other.
“So when you were studying philosophy, what did you think you might … you know, do with it later?”
“Well, I know philosophy is like the cliché of impractical majors, but it’s not really that much more impractical than English or history or classics. And philosophy majors actually tend to do well in law school, they say.”
Mona put down her beer can. “Are you planning to go to law school?”
“No.” I laughed a little. “I actually did think about that idea for, like, a minute. Last year.”
“And?”
“And I think law school’s not really for people like me. It’s a lot of money, a lot of work. It takes a certain … confidence.”
“But you’ve got confidence, Billy. At least, it seems like you do.”
“I don’t mean personal confidence. Not confidence in
yourself so
much. I mean confidence that …” I groped for the right words. I didn’t know exactly how to put this.
Confidence that life owes you something
was probably the best way to put it. But it seemed too snide a thing to say out loud.
“Confidence that it’ll pay off. I mean, it’s not only expensive, and lots of work. When you get out, you’ve got your loan to pay off. You’ve got to take the best-paying entry-level job you can find, and hope to pay it back. So it’s more
like a five- or six-year commitment than a three-year one. Who has that kind of confidence? Who’s crazy enough to take all of that on and just assume that, five or six years later, you’re gonna be in a situation that makes it feel worth it?”
“It takes a certain amount of faith, is that what you’re saying?” Mona offered.
Faith
. Of course, that had been the right word all along. But I tended to shy away from this word in casual conversation. There was something soft and mushy about it. It always felt like marshmallow in my mouth.
“Faith. Sure,” I said. “I guess.”
“Hmm.” Mona studied me with her champagne smile. I couldn’t tell if she found my answers interesting or just amusing. Either way, it probably wasn’t smart to go down this road with a girl on a Bellini buzz.
“Should we have some dessert?” I asked.
“I’m kind of stuffed,” she said, stretching. “How about after some citations?”
Minutes later I found myself watching Mona pore carefully over a stack of citations in her lap. She sat on my futon Indian-style, in a peculiarly symmetrical fashion—knees and elbows pointy, arranged in equivalent angles.
Ffft ffft ffft
, went her cits. She suddenly didn’t seem tipsy anymore. She apparently had a remarkably quick metabolism for alcohol. I couldn’t quite reconcile this Mona with the one who’d just been telling me about wanting to have her professor’s babies. As I’d prepared our dinner earlier that evening, I’d daydreamed we’d somehow end up fooling around on my futon. Now the prospect seemed pretty remote. It would take some serious conversational gymnastics to bring her around to a tender mood, and I wasn’t sure I had the aptitude for it.
I joined Mona on the futon, and started in on my “D” cits.
Death row
was my first.
“‘Death row’ has only been around since 1950?” I said.
Mona shrugged without looking up.
“Go figure,” she said.
“Nothing useful in ‘deep-fryer,’” I announced a few minutes later. “Disappointing.”
Demythologize
. I flipped a few cits, and there was the old
Teaglass
again:
A wounded, resentful version of my face—but blue-white and open-eyed and dead—started glancing back at me in mirrors and watching me when I was failing to sleep. In time, the image began to resemble a dead-prom-queen costume, sometimes dripping black blood from a heavily lipsticked mouth, or wearing a ripped ruffled dress. Eventually, it became more cinematic, bearing little resemblance to me, easier to shut off, like a bad movie on TV. Almost comical on occasion. Almost. Dead prom queen on intimate terms. Dead prom queen
demythologized
. Not frightening so much as unsettling, constant, and familiar. An unwanted pet you feed out of obligation. Weeks later, the dead prom queen lingered only out of habit.
Dolores Beekmim
The Broken Teaglass
Robinson Press
14 October 1985
36
“We have a winner,” I said, and handed it to Mona. A curtain of her brown hair fell between us as she bent over it eagerly.
“Now, what exactly do you think we have here?” she asked, pulling her hair back.
“A bad dream?” I said. “‘Dead prom queen on intimate terms’?” Mona grimaced as she tried unsuccessfully to knot her hair on top of her head. “Am I supposed to laugh or throw myself out a window?”
I read it again, and then said, “I think it’s somebody struggling.”
“Struggling with what?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe with their, uh, personal demons?”
“Whatever
that
ever means,” said Mona darkly.
“You know something I’ve noticed? All the citations have low page numbers. Like, this one is supposedly from page 36 of the book
The Broken Teaglass
. W
e’ve
found seven citations and I don’t think there’s been any page number over 100.”
“Must be a short book,” Mona remarked.
She bent over her citations again. I turned on the TV so we wouldn’t have to work in silence.
“It’ll make the cits fly by,” I said, ignoring Mona’s disapproving look.
She scoffed and snorted through a cop show and accused me of letting it distract me. But when a news magazine show came on next, she set her citations down and gazed at the screen. They were doing a story on abusive prison wardens.
“Awesome,” she said. “Finally something I can sink my teeth into.”
“You serious?” I asked.
Mona shrugged and nodded at the same time.
In the middle of the show, when they were talking about
some superfluously performed strip searches in a Midwestern women’s penitentiary, I heard her gasp.
“That actually shocks you, Mona? You need to get out more.”
She shook her head. She reached for the remote and shut off the TV.
“Hey,” I said. “They’re just about to show some sweet hidden camera footage. You don’t want to watch?”
“I found another one,” she said, her voice tight. “Number 49.”
“Let me see.”
Mona pulled away from me, hogging the slip in her hand, reading it twice, three times.
“Well, shit,” she said, handing it to me.
Whatever I’ll carry, this is what I leave—the explanation, the story I would tell. You told me once that your own stories have no moral, no
subtext
. There is no obligatory response of awe, admiration, gratitude, or pity. That your presence at a certain place and moment was coincidental, and that you’re no better or worse than anyone for it. Does telling the story, then, make it not so much yours? Not so much your private and singular possession, but a shared object of all who hear it? Something others can hear—or even tell—as suits their particular ear? You’ve said you wish to share history, not possess it. But can it really ever be that way, Red? When the blood is on our hands alone?