Hanging Wasp

by Cori Jones

PART ONE: HARVARD UNIVERSITY, SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1998: Vinca

She figures she has an eating disorder, but what the fuck. After all, she spits. It goes like this: she never eats more than half of her regular meals. Divides the stuff on her plate--veggies, meat, pizza, whatever--into The Half that goes into Her Stomach and The Half that Goes into the Garbage. But she’s always on guard against sweets, which she spits. She buys a whole cake, or a dozen donuts, maybe a whole box of gourmet cookies. Shuts herself somewhere secret, chews everything up, spits it all into a wad of napkins. Never swallows anything buttery, sugary; brushes her teeth--twice if it’s chocolate--when she’s finished. Never pukes. Been spitting ever since Harvard, ever since everything with Ann and the note she found under her pillow. Dearest Vinca, I’m leaving Harvard. I feel dishonorable and awful. I’m leaving you some notebooks you might find helpful. Love always, Ann. Does spitting count? She knows it’s not like sticking her finger down her throat five times a day or going on a water diet for three months so she can get down to seventy-two pounds. Still, she wonders if it does count for anything. Lately, she’s started spitting out half her dinner and breakfast too: eggs, meat, all the things that build your body up. But who would she ask about spitting? Mum? Mum would wipe away a tear (Crying, she once told Vinca, was too Irish.) and tell Vinca about all the years she spent wishing she could get off chemo and keep food down and now her daughter tells her this? Then she’d sigh, shake her head. At least I raised you to be polite. Just remember that people like us are always polite. But, Lovey, you’ve got to watch that mouth of yours. You spent too much time before college listening to nasty language in Harvard Square. Language? What language? During those days at Harvard Vinca heard about five new words an hour: metaphysical, punctilious, cryptic, quandary, postmodern. She had no idea what they meant or how a person could pull them out of their brain and use them. No way she’d picked up nasty language at Harvard. Actually, she hadn’t even picked it up in the Square, although she’d hung there with plenty of burnouts when she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. She knew that her nasty language came out of Mum’s cancer. It started when she met Jerome Washington at Dana Farber, the cancer hospital that sits practically on top of Roxbury. Jerome used to hang at the main entrance, wearing cool shades and baggy shorts that hung down past his knees, talking nonstop in a soft rap rhythm. Big C hit and Man that’s spooky. You got pukey. Big C-pukey. Keep that food in your belly in your belly in your belly. Buy from me and your mind’s gonna float. Suck that pukey up in smoke. Smoke. Smoke. Weed. Right here. Vinca started hanging with Jerome when he became Mum’s regular pot-dealer. She used to meet him at the Roxbury Crossing T or on a bench down where Brattle meets Mount Auburn. They hung together for maybe two years, until the day he disappeared and she never saw him again.

Anyway, she figures she caught her eating disorder her one semester at Harvard, because she was given a roommate who was probably contagious. Ann Aspinall: good WASP name, good WASP bones. Good WASP hair, almost as blond as Mum’s before hers started falling out. Ann left Harvard some time around Halloween, Vinca soon after. Vinca’s grades by midterm were all Fs, and the notebooks Ann had left her from her days at Concord Academy –calculus, ancient history, American Lit Honors--wouldn’t help her pass anything. The first day Vinca arrived on campus, the first day she was alone in the sardine-can double room in Hollis Hall or whatever its stupid WASPy name was, she kept hoping no one would show up. Vinca, with all her years of home-schooling, had never had a roommate--or even many friends, except for Jerome--but she knew that there at Harvard she was going to have to put up with someone. That first afternoon she spent two hours combing out her Roxbury wigs--blue, purple, orange, pink, brown, and two greens--and watching the clock. One thirty-five, two-fifteen, three-thirty. Maybe this person who was supposed to be her roommate had decided not to show. Maybe she’d joined a traveling circus, run off with gypsies, whatever. Maybe she, Vinca Hale, would be blessed with no roommate. But at three forty-five (or thereabouts), just after she’d put on her white wig, her life with Ann Aspinall began when Ann dragged her pornographic steamer trunk into the room. Vinca couldn’t take her eyes off it: oxblood leather with figures of men and women doing it in every position you could imagine. Actually her blond brother Chip dragged it in, since Ann looked as if she could barely drag around a powder puff. “Excuse me,” Ann said. She tapped on Vinca’s back with her finger. When Vinca turned away from the dresser, her orange wig fell off its stand. The girl had no flesh, just cheekbones strung tight like. . . .like what? Skeleton bones. “I’m Ann Aspinall,” she said.

“Oh?” said Vinca. “My name’s Vinca. Vinca Hale.” Ann and her brother seemed to be staring at her feet. What was wrong with her feet? What d’you think I am, poor? She wanted to say. She glanced at Chip. “Do you go here, too?”

He made a dismissive shake of his head. “Dartmouth. Are you going to stare at that trunk all day?” When Vinca held out her hand, he didn’t take it. Neither did Ann, who was fingering the green Dutch Boy wig. Vinca put her hand on it and slid it off the dresser. “Mine. Not yours. Okay?”

Ann gasped. “I wasn’t trying to….”

“She has no intention of taking your things,” said Dartmouth.

Vinca glared at him, then at Ann. “He your boyfriend?” she asked.

“My brother, Charles.” She had a great voice, Vinca had to admit: all hoarse and high at the same time. She opened her top drawer and laid the wig on top of a bra.

“Chip,” Charles said.

“So. Chip. Dartmouth, huh? I know where that is. New Hampshire, right?”

Chip gave her a look as if she were totally out of her mind. “Tell me,” he said. “Will your boyfriend be staying over a lot of nights?”

“What . . .I don’t . . .” Vinca stopped herself before she told him she didn’t have a boyfriend. Sure, she used to hang with Jerome, but that was over. And all the burnouts she’d met in Harvard Square were so yesterday’s news that she hardly remembered what each of them looked like, what race they were, where she’d had sex with them, all that stuff. .Had Jerome ever told her he loved her? Was that what boyfriends were supposed to say? She didn’t have the foggiest. She stared at the trunk, then at Chip’s feet. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Prolly not.” Ann grunted as she shoved the steamer trunk into a corner. After she undid the combination lock, she began pawing through it, throwing out underpants, jeans, a pair of chinos, a terry cloth robe, and three Polartec sweaters. When she reached into the bottom of the trunk, she lost her balance and fell forward. Charles, Chip, whatever he called himself, grabbed her and helped her stand up straight. She stood up holding a down vest—periwinkle, Vinca noticed—and threw it at her brother. “Chip,” she screamed. “Where is it?”

“Where’s wot?”

“My scale. My fucking scale. What did Father do with it?”

“Ann. Did you pack a scale?”

“I packed it. I folded my down vest around it. Where’s my fucking scale?”

“Ann. You know the agreement you signed. No scale.”

“Who found it? Who took it out?”

“Why, Father did, of course. Who else would know the combination?”

Ann sat down on the unmade bed. The mattress creaked as she rocked back and forth, snuffling and sobbing. “All of you tricked me and forced me into that program,” she sniffled. Chip pulled out all the drawers of the vacant dresser and started picking Ann’s clothes off the floor. He stuffed them in every which way: down vest mixed with panties, chinos and jeans rolled in balls. “You’ll want to call maintenance tomorrow,” he told his sister. “Have them take the trunk down to the basement.” Ann didn’t answer him. “And,” he looked at them both, “all mirrors in the room have to go. Tonight.”

Ann shook her head.

“Ann,” he said. “You know what Father said about mir . . .”

“Well, Father isn’t here, is he?” She moved toward Chip and shoved her hand into his chest. He flicked her away as if he was hitting a moth. “I’m free of Father for a change. And I’m keeping my mirror.”

Huh? No mirrors? “Hear that?” Vinca said. She jerked her thumb at Ann. “Her mirror stays. My mirror stays. Got it? I need it for my wigs.”

Ann folded her chickenleg arms and glared at her brother. Vinca took off her white wig and put on the blue. Chip seemed not to notice. For some reason, the huge penises on the trunk-men made her mad. “Hey,” she said, “the mirrors stay. Got it, White Boy?” I’m talking Roxbury, she thought to herself. Oh, Mum would love this. All Chip did was walk over to Vinca’s closet and turn on the light. Vinca watched him as he knelt in her doorway, studying every inch of floor space. “That’s my closet,” Vinca told him. “Get outta there.”

He stood up slowly as if changing yoga positions. “Do you haaave a scale?”

Enough. She’d promised Mum she wouldn’t be sassy, but she’d already called him White Boy. This guy was too much. “What’s a scale?” she asked. She crossed her arms and started sucking her thumb. When she stared at his sandals, she noticed that his left big toe had hair on it, black curly hair like pubic hair. Made sense. The guy was a dick.

“I need to know if you own a scale.”

“I don’t know what a scale is, I told you,” said Vinca. Ann had rolled over onto her side and was watching them both. Why was she lying down? Was she sick?

“I’m merely asking if there’s a scale anywhere in this room.”

“Why?”

“ Be . . .cause . . .” How old did he think she was? Five? The phone rang, startling them all. Chip grabbed the receiver. “Yes?” he barked. Without saying Vinca’s name--maybe he didn’t remember it--he held it up and pointed at her, snapping his fingers.

Vinca swallowed. The receiver felt sweaty. “Hello,” she whispered.

“Vinca? Lovey?”

She cleared her throat. “Mum?”

“The surfaces in the dormitories are dirty,” her mother emphasized. “Wear latex gloves. Always.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Vinca. “I don’t live at home any more.”

“I know,” Mum sighed. “I’m so lonely. But I do not like that language, Vinca. You’re at Harvard now.”

“I gotta go,” Vinca slammed down the phone.

“You’ve not answered my question,” Chip said. “Is there a scale in this room?”

“Hey, it’s pretty clear that you think I’m trashy, huh? Trashy and kinda dumb? Now if there was a scale in this room and it happened to be mine, do you think I’d, like, let some nosy dick like you know? ” Underneath his tan, Chip was blushing just slightly. “I think you’d better leave now.” Vinca said. “Go on up to Dartmouth or wherever.”

After Chip had left, Vinca began to realize, glance by glance, that Ann Aspinall was quite beautiful. The tan, the blond streaked hair, the small snub nose, the dark brown eyes . . . It had never occurred to her that blonds could have brown eyes. And, of course, the bony frailty of her. A man would be blessed to have her die in his arms. She wore some sort of perfume--just the tiniest bit--that made her smell vaguely of some garden by a warm sea. The delicacy and scent surrounding Ann like a hazy glow made Vinca feel too tall, too knock-kneed, too big.

The first few weeks, Ann hardly said a word; when she was in the room, she just seemed to, well, be there, floating in her glow. She seemed to spend most of her time hanging around the room in sweatpants, doing a round--or two, or three--of jumping jacks every fifteen minutes or so. Sometimes, when she’d stopped her crazy exercising and was sitting at her desk, Vinca could feel those brown eyes watching her. Sometimes it gave her the creeps. Once, after another phone call from Mum--begging, as usual, for Vinca to come spend the night--she imagined staring right back in them, opening her mouth, telling Ann about herself. My Mum, she’s sick. Now I’ve left the house, there’s just a nurse to take care of her. Do you think she misses me? Or do you think she’s playing some game because she wants me to take care of her? Huh? It wasn’t until one night in October that Ann actually initiated a conversation with Vinca. She looked like she was sweating a lot, and Vinca was beginning to wonder if she had some sort of heroin habit. The sex-trunk was still in the room. Maybe there was heroin hidden in the penises that Ann took out when Vinca was in class. Now, maybe, she’d used up her supply. Did she know how to get more? Vinca never saw her in the dining hall, at the freshman orientation sessions, in any of the lounges in the dorm. Maybe she was in Chinatown, or Roxbury, trying to score. But one night, just as Vinca was drifting off to sleep, she heard Ann’s high hoarse voice from across the narrow room.

“Vinca?”

Should she answer? Ever since she’d come here everyone asked her the same thing: was that a wig she was wearing? Or: was that the same wig she was wearing yesterday, and was this, like, some rave thing? And hey, how many wigs did she have, anyway? “Hmmmh?” she answered. She tried not to sound too sleepy. If Ann had something interesting to say, she wanted to make sure she sounded smart when she replied.

“I was wondering,” Ann whispered. “What prep school did you go to?”

Vinca stretched and sat up. She turned her reading light on. Ann was lying on her side. She’d kicked the sheets off. On each ankle was a thin gold chain. She had the boniest ankles Vinca had ever seen, the tiniest wrists. “I didn’t,” Vinca said finally.

“What d’you mean?”

“I didn’t go to prep school.”

“Well, what high school, then?”

“Didn’t go to high school.”

“Well, . . .what are you doing here?”

“Doing here? At Harvard? I’m going to college, just like you.”

“But how could you . . .”

“I was home-schooled, okay?”

“Really. Why?” Forget it. Vinca wasn’t about to go into the details: Mum’s chemo, Mum’s fried immune system, Mum’s fear that Vinca would bring germs home from school.

“I guess my mother just believed in it. I mean, why not?”

“But then, how did you, you know, get here?”

“You mean how’d I get into Harvard? It’s probably because my mother went here. And my father. Their family’s been giving money for a gadzillion generations. Duh.” If Vinca wanted to do one thing right then, it was to turn out the reading light. And to make herself shut up; she’d already run her mouth and told Ann too much. And if they kept talking, Ann would probably be full of a new set of questions: what courses was she taking? How much reading, how many papers did she have in each? This was what everyone seemed to talk about in the lounge. Course work. Either that, or what anthro field study programs might be available in Kenya this summer or how some sophomore over in Eliot House had just landed an internship in Brussels, at NATO. And Vinca would have to tell her--because she was honest and didn’t like to hide the truth--that right now she had more reading than she’d ever had to do in her life, more than she could keep up with; that she had three six-page papers (Six does not mean five, one TA had warned them.) due in ten days and that she’d never written more than a one-page paper with an introduction, body, and conclusion. She might tell Ann what she really wanted to tell Mum every time Mum called, which was at least twice a day: she was starting to feel very, very stupid. Did Mum really think Vinca was ready for Harvard? All the home schooling in the world couldn’t have prepared her for this; she felt like she was listening to a foreign language every time she sat in a classroom. “It’s kinda hard here.” She hadn’t meant to say it, but it just came out.

But Ann wasn’t interested in academics. “I was wondering, um, how much you weigh.”

Vinca wiped her nose, which was starting to drip. The room was always so dusty. She shrugged her shoulders. The truth was, she didn’t know how much she weighed, and she felt frightened suddenly, ashamed of this. Weighing had a smell to it, slightly sour, like bile. She knew there was a scale--a black one, with rust stains around the edges--in the bathroom at home, and that sometimes her mother weighed herself. She remembered stepping on a big stand-up scale when she’d had her college physical. She knew that she was five foot eight, but she didn’t have a clue what she weighed or what the nurse had written down after diddling forever with the weights. One-sixteen? One-oh-four? One forty? There had to be some right answer, but she couldn’t think of it. She said the same words to Ann Aspinall that she’d said to the TA in her English class yesterday, the one who wouldn’t get out of her face. Surely, Ms. Hale, Faulkner must intend something in the lack of end-punctuation here. Will you enlighten us, please, on what precisely that something is? What she really wanted to say--and would have, probably, if Mum hadn’t drummed all the stuff about being a smart-mouth into her head--was Jesus it’s a story about a fucking bear. And the sentences run together. Who cares about the punctuation? But all she did was mumble what she was mumbling now.

I dunno.

Now Ann was sitting up. “You don’t know?”

“Right. That’s what I said.”

Ann’s brown eyes were filling up, as if she were about to cry. “So, you really don’t have a scale? Like you told my brother?”

“Nope.”

Now Ann was really crying. Sobbing, for Christ’s sake. “I really wish I’d been able to get my scale in here with me.”

“Why?”

“I miss it.”

“So it’s kind of . . .like a stuffed animal?”

“I just miss it.” Her eyes were so dark, so big. She wouldn’t stop looking at Vinca.

“Well,” Vinca said, “if you miss it so much, and your father caught you trying so sneak one in here, why don’t you just go buy one?

“That would be dishonorable. I signed an agreement. With my therapist and my family.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Ann sniffled. “So I could get out of the hospital.”

She had to be a junkie. It had to be heroin. If she knew where Jerome was, he’d probably know someone who could help Ann out.

“What hospital?”

“McLean.”

“You mean . . .that mental hospital?” Everybody seemed to know what McLean was. Vinca almost blurted out where rich girls go, but she stopped herself. Her own family’s wealth had dipped after her father died, but still, she wasn’t exactly poor herself. Ann was talking over her, anyway. Vinca. Vinca. Can I come over?

“Over where?”

“In your bed.”

“Um. Why?”

“I need you, Vinca.” Before Vinca had a chance to say anything, a gold anklet brushed her leg. And that garden-of-the-sea perfume…jasmine? Honeysuckle? Like this, Ann whispered. Two delicate hands found Vinca’s chin. Ann’s mouth . . .well, her tongue was smaller than a boy’s, but it still felt good. Vinca felt herself kissing back and Ann rubbing the back of her neck, moving her hands down, cupping Vinca’s breasts. I need you. Then everything stopped. The kiss was over; Ann was lying next to her, one hand flung across Vinca’s stomach. When Vinca tried to kiss her, Ann kept her mouth closed. What did she want Vinca to do? “That scale,” Vinca finally whispered. “You know, you could buy one. Or use the one at the gym.”

Ann sat up. Vinca felt her ankle resting on one of her feet. Ann wound her hair up in a bun, then let it slide down to her shoulders. “No,” she shook her head. “It’s dishonorable.”

Jesus. How could she help? Vinca let her mind wander down the hall. N’Gwambo Something and Vimla Das next door, Rachel Rothschild and Vanessa van Stavern-Millar on the other side of them, Caridad Ramirez and Whatsername with the big red hair across the hall. “Hey, Ann,” Vinca stroked Ann’s hand. “Did you ask Caridad? Maybe she has one. Maybe she’d let you use it.”

“Why would Caridad have a scale? Have you ever noticed her hips? They’re like a hippopotamus.” When Ann shot her that you’re out of your mind look--the same look her brother had given her when he’s asked her about haaaaving a scale--Vinca turned out the light. “I dunno. I was just saying,” she muttered. She kissed Ann’s forehead. Maybe she should go home tomorrow and bring her mother’s scale back to the dorm. Anything to get Ann to kiss her again. But that wouldn’t work. Her mother’s scale was old, and there was all that rust. And Vinca knew, she just knew, that people like Ann Aspinall didn’t live with rust around the edges.

Ann did kiss her several times during the night, and Vinca knew she whispered I love you, Vinca some time when the light turned gray in the room. When Vinca woke around ten, Ann’s bed was neatly made. As usual, she’d gone off somewhere; Vinca had no clue where. Ann had no classes with Vinca; in fact, Vinca didn’t know what courses she was taking. After she’d gotten dressed, she walked over to Ann’s dresser and picked up a black velvet scrunchie. A few blond hairs were twisted in it. She held it under her nostrils. That garden! That sea! She kissed the velvet and slipped it into her pocket. She lay down on her bed and, before she knew it, she was dozing off. Really, she should get up and go to class, but the rain outside was hitting the windows with a vengeance. All Vinca could make herself do was stumble over to Ann’s bed and get under the covers. It was lonely there, and a woman with enormous breasts seemed to be smiling at her from the trunk. Vinca touched her own breasts, ran her fingers over them. Ann had been touching them, then she . . .she’d just stopped. Maybe she’d found something wrong with them. Were they too big? Had she found a lump? Vinca couldn’t feel any lumps; Ann must just not have liked them. The more Vinca touched them, the more loose she felt, until some giant circle opened up and folded her inside it, over and over. Her boobs weren’t too big. She felt faintly sweaty and out of breath.

She didn’t wake up till the door opened; Ann was back. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her alarm clock glowing. Three-thirty. She’d been asleep for five hours, maybe. She breathed very deeply, making soft snoring sounds, as she watched Ann put on her trench coat and leave again. She was so delicate, so quiet; she just seemed to flutter out of the room. Didn’t wake Vinca up, didn’t ask Vinca why she was in her bed; didn’t get in the bed with her. How could she just leave like this? It was a horrible-weather day--the rain was starting to sweep down in sheets--and Vinca couldn’t quite believe that anyone would go anywhere they didn’t have to. The second Ann left the room, Vinca was out of bed. The way she saw it, she had three choices: she could try to start writing the English paper that was due tomorrow; she could try to catch up on the bio chapters she was behind on, or she could follow Ann, who had kissed her last night and told Vinca she loved her and spent most of the night in her bed. She reached in her drawer and grabbed her sbrown pixie-cut wig, which she never wore at all, hurried out of Hollis, and cut over to the gate on Mass. Ave. Not too many people were out, but she was able to make her way to the Square, then up Brattle Street, past Nini’s Corner where the piles of newspaper were soaked, toward Mount Auburn, all the time keeping herself maybe twenty feet behind Ann. Ann led her over to the entrance to the Charles Hotel--she was limping, Vinca thought--up to the second floor to Henrietta’s Table, where Vinca had eaten several Thanksgiving Dinners, when Mum was in one of her remissions and could keep food down. Vinca pulled her rain hat down over her brow and pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her pocket. She let the hostess seat her at a narrow table for two and ordered a cup of tea. She hadn’t eaten lunch, but who cared? Ann never ate lunch, did she? Were her breasts too big? Five tables away, Ann Aspinall was sitting alone at her own table for two, picking at a dish of vanilla ice cream with a long-handled spoon. It was exactly four o’clock. She seemed to slide the spoon into her mouth very slowly, then draw it out even slower, then lick it all over with delicate little flicks of her tongue. Finally she put the spoon down. At five after four, she took another bite the exact same way as the first, another at ten after. By four thirty, Vinca noticed, the bowl looked half-eaten. Every now and then Ann would look around the dining room, turning her head to the left, then to the right. She’d do this exactly three times, then she’d take another bite. It hurt to watch her. Vinca swallowed tears, pushed them down to the back of her throat.

The tea was bitter, too strong. Vinca picked up two packets of sugar and ripped them open. How long should she sit here, spying on Ann? What was the point? She was going to have to pull an all-nighter to get that English paper written. The moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter / and on her daughter / they wash their feet / in soda water. So what? She’d have to think of something to say. Mrs. Porter was a woman. Maybe this was some sort of gender issue. Every paper topic any TA assigned, just about, had to do with some gender issue, which always got Vinca thinking about Ann’s trunk, which was full of gender issues. But what did gender issues have to do with right now? What connection did they have with Ann Aspinall, who’d told Vinca she loved her and who was now sitting halfway across the room from her, looking scared to death? Vinca had seen that look so many times on Mum’s face, when she heard her oncologist’s voice on the answering machine or when it was time to go in for another treatment. She tried so hard, but she’d never been able to make her Mum less afraid--no way could she do that--but she could do something for Ann Aspinall, who told her last night that she loved her. She dug seven dollars out of her wallet--one of the singles, she noticed, was torn almost in half--and folded them under the teacup. The chair squeaked as she stood up, startling her. “Shhhh!” She said it too loud, because Ann looked up from her ice cream and gasped. She sat there with her mouth open, absolutely frozen. Vinca bumped into a chair, the corner of a table, on her way to Ann’s table and slithered into the empty chair. “Ann,” she said. “You don’t need to do this. Eat like this, I mean.”

Ann bowed her head. “Are you going to tell my brother?”

“Fuck, no. Why would I tell him anything? I don’t even like him.”

Ann looked up. “I thought you liked him.”

“Wrong. But that’s not the point, okay? The point is, we’re gonna get you a scale. Kind of like a present, okay? From me.” She knew she couldn’t just buy one, because then Ann would think she was dishonorable. But if she came up with a plan to get Ann a scale--a plan that showed her total devotion--maybe Ann would love her for the rest of her life. She reached in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out Ann’s scrunchie. “Hold out your hand,” she whispered. She slipped it over Ann’s wrist. Please love me forever.

Ann stared at her with the deepest eyes Vinca had ever seen. “How?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll tell you how then.” Some vague plan was beginning to circle around Vinca’s head, but she couldn’t shape it. She couldn’t put it into words.

The plan started taking shape later that evening, after Vinca had given up trying to write the essay about Mrs. Porter and her daughter. She didn’t know what to say in the paper, despite two ten-dollar Adderalls from Vanessa van Stavern-Millar, who claimed she was prescribed them for ADD. After an hour and a half of staring at a legal pad and making notes on what might be a gender issue, or a postcolonial issue, or a masculinity issue (Masculinity, in a section on a mother and her daughter!), Vinca had twenty-three words on the pad (This must be about a menstrual cycle and Mrs. Porter is probably bathing her daughter’s feet to make themselves feel better about being women.) andknew it was time to admit that there’d be no paper tomorrow. She went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet for maybe five minutes before she realized one of her feet was resting on a bottle. Ipecac? Who would leave a bottle of ipecac in a dorm bathroom? Caridad, maybe, with the hippopotamus hips? She shrugged, stuck it in her pocket. Big I hit and Man that’s flukey, she whispered, tapping her fingers on her hips. You got pukey. The dorm was too hot; she had to get out of there. She walked out to Mass. Ave. and headed toward Central Square. The wind kept picking up; the Nor’easter yesterday had brought in clear, cold air, but the smells of car exhaust and wet fallen leaves seemed to pick her up about a foot off the ground. The amphetamines were kicking in. It was effortless to walk, run, dance this jittery joyful dance up Mass Ave, float through Central, drift onto Main Street and head toward Kendall Square and Longfellow Bridge. Beneath her, the T rattled right through her shoes. She stood very still and held her arms out shoulder-length. “I’m a T!” she shouted. “I’m a Red Line! I am a subway!” She couldn’t stop laughing, not till she was all the way across Longfellow Bridge. And Vinca Rosea Hale is now in Boston, birthplace of all her fucking ancestors who kept the family money coming in, oh boy. She stood at the Charles Street circle, waiting for the light to change. A train came out of the tunnel at Kendall Square and rumbled up on her left. She looked at its lights, the way they seemed to wink at her. “Hey, Train. I found it!” she shouted. And she had. Right smack in the middle of the circle was an all-night drug store.

No bells, no alarm she could see. But that didn’t mean anything. As far as she could tell, there were two security cameras and a sleepy-looking old clerk in the store. The pharmacy at the back was shuttered. Next to the cash register a Halloween witch held a black plastic bucket filled with packets of Snickers Bars and Milky Ways. There were aisles labeled Pain Relievers, Cold and Cough, First Aid. There in First Aid, under what seemed like 20-watt light, she saw a scale on the bottom shelf. It was open, unpackaged. Vinca knelt down and touched it. She had a wicked notion to put it in the middle of the floor and stand on it, even though everyone said you were supposed to weigh yourself in the morning. Somewhere in the front of the store the desk clerk was humming. Vinca laid the scale on the linoleum and slipped off her shoes. Very quietly, holding her breath, she put her right foot on it, then her left. She shut her eyes, counted to ten. Her eyes opened narrowly, in slits. One thirty-four. One thirty-four? Was that what she should weigh? How much did she have to weigh for Ann to like her breasts? Maybe she should just steal the thing now, but no. She laid it gently on the bottom shelf. There was no way she could get this scale out of here tonight. Her shirt was tight and her pants were tighter, and there was no way she was going to haul it up to the cash register and shell out thirty-nine ninety-nine. All she had with her were some subway tokens. But tomorrow night, with Ann by her side, wearing proper clothing, with T tokens and an appropriate distraction, she could make it happen: Ann Aspinall would have her scale. She stood in the aisle, yawning and stretching. “Bye,” she said to the clerk, who didn’t look up from her newspaper. Outside, Vinca stopped suddenly. One thirty-four. It was definitely too much. She glanced at a huge pile of newspapers next to a dumpster. She looked: they were today’s, and they weren’t tied. And if there were papers out here like this, there’d be papers out at Nini’s Corner, two minutes from her dorm. She pulled a token out of her pocket, grasped it between her thumb and forefinger, and waited for the light to change. When it did—finally--she made her way up the steps toward the elevated Charles Street/Mass. General Hospital station. Across the river, the lights of Cambridge--M.I.T., Harvard, The Charles Hotel, her house on Brattle Street--danced and laughed. Her breasts felt heavy, as if her bra was too small.

The station stank--no surprise--of piss and beer. A man in green scrub pants and a lumber jacket was slumped just outside the turnstile. Spare little change, baby? He held his hand up to Vinca. There were gray warts all over his brown fingers. Just a little, c’mon, honey? Vinca noticed one sneaker, one bare foot. Always be polite to the poor, Mum had told her over and over. “Are you a . . .a nurse over at Mass General?” she asked him. Her teeth were starting to chatter. She pointed to his scrubs, which looked cleaner that the rest of him. He grunted. Where that at? Vinca put in the token and moved through the stile. She pointed somewhere to the north. “It’s right around here somewhere. I . . . um . . . I was born there.” The man shook his head hard. Hehhehhehheh. C’mon. I need some change. So I can get mahself something to eat. Above her, a train was rumbling. She held her head down and dashed up the Outbound stairs.

“Okay,” Vinca explained it to Ann. “Remember. You have to look like you’re pregnant.”

Ann wouldn’t stop shaking her head. “No. Someone’ll find out.”

“Who?”

“Father.” Her chin, Vinca noticed, was trembling.

“No, Ann, you have to. It’s the only way it’ll work.” She took a deep breath and rocked back on her heels a little. There was something delicious about telling Ann Aspinall what to do. It felt like being stoned, sort of.

“But,” Ann kept asking her, “isn’t there some other way?”

“No.” Delicious. “You have to look pregnant. This is how it’s gotta be.”

“Do I have to wear the papers all the way there?”

“What’re you going to do? Stick them under your sweatshirt on the T?”

“Maybe we could walk. I didn’t get enough exercise today. I could stick the papers in at the last minute.”

Great. Vinca was starting to get tired of the pacing Ann had done all evening, of the newsprint-stink of yesterday’s Corriere della Sera that she’d picked up in front of Nini’s. “Okay,” she sighed. “We walk over; we ride back. You have subway tokens, right?”

Ann nodded.

So at ten past midnight they started up toward Central Square, Ann in sweatpants and a very baggy Dartmouth sweatshirt, carrying a stack of Italian dailies; Vinca in jeans and a turtleneck and a wool jacket with very deep pockets that reached down to her knees. She’d filled them with a quart-sized bottle of water and a Jack Daniels miniature that she’d emptied out and refilled with the ipecac she’d found in the toilet stall. Every few minutes, she’d pull out the water and chug it. After they walked through Central Square, she began swigging the ipecac. She had on her brown pixie wig, boringly curly, and a bandana tied on as a kerchief. When they were approaching Memorial Parkway, Vinca pulled Ann into a dark alleyway off Main Street. “Put the newspapers on now,” she hissed. Ann held up the sweatshirt and let Vinca bundle up a fat stack of papers and ram them against her bony stomach. Vinca yanked the sweatshirt down. “Now keep your hands on your stomach. Don’t drop those papers! You go in, let her see you’re pregnant. You say you gotta take a piss or whatever, go out and drop the papers out front. Then I walk in and you come back. Go by her real quick so she doesn’t look at your stomach. I’ll be in there distracting her by then. Remember, the scale’s in Aisle 2A. First Aid. Left hand side, bottom shelf. Grab one, then get the fuck out of there.” She took a large mouthful of ipecac and opened the water bottle again. “Remember, we have to be there in twenty minutes. “Cause we’re on ipecac time, got it? Let’s move.” She pushed Ann forward, across Memorial Parkway onto Longfellow Bridge.

By the time they reached the drugstore, Vinca felt herself getting definitely pukey. She was starting to sweat. She opened the door for Ann, then stood in the shadows, waiting. Her mouth was beginning to salivate when Ann rushed back outside. “She didn’t look at me,” Ann whispered.

Vinca swallowed hard. Wait till I’m in there, she croaked. She leaned into the door and stumbled into the cardboard Halloween witch with her bucket of candy bars.. “Ahhhhh . . . ohhhh,” Vinca began. She felt Ann come in behind her and pass her on her right. Uhhhawwwwhhh. Ann turned the corner to 2A.

The clerk looked up and adjusted her glasses. Huuhhhnn?

“It’s . . . my . . . my stomach…” Vinca bent double. She was starting to drool. “Over at Mass General, I think there’s an epidemic . . . of . . .”

Huuhhhhnn? Girl, you on somethin’?

Ann, with a newly pregnant stomach, shot past her out the door. Finally!

“Of . . . bubonic plague . . . ” That was it. She couldn’t hold it any longer. She mumbled a quick sorry, leaned forward, and vomited ipecac and water onto a package of Milky Ways. And then she was out the door, running toward the yellow traffic light. Horns honked when she sprinted across, but she didn’t hear any alarms going off. She took the stairs at the Charles Street station two at a time. Somewhere she heard someone running; that had to be Ann. Footsteps , the hehhehhehhehheh. Then Ann’s voice: Cut it out! I don’t have any change! Oh God , what was he doing to Ann? Ann loved her; she needed her. She had to protect Ann! But by the time Vinca got to the turnstile, Ann was gone.

There he was. Same scrubs, same jacket, same warts. Spare little change, hon-neh?

“No!” cried Vinca. “What did you do to my friend?”

“She get on the train. Heheheheheh. She big. Spare jus’ little, so I can get mahself somethin to eat?”

“I don’t have any change.” Vinca pushed the token into the slot. The turnstile jammed; it wouldn’t budge. “I’m poor,” she added. Aww Baby c’mon hon-neh! When she felt him grab her ankle she kicked out, blindly, and stubbed her toe against something metal and hard. “HehhehhehHAH!” he shouted at her as she jumped the turnstile. “Girl, you ain’t poor! You just hanging poor!”

Sure, she thinks about that night, even now. She remembers how she got back to Piggly Wiggly, found the door locked, how she dug around in her pockets forever till she found the key. She turned it in the lock, listened to the door creak. Ann was behind that door, and Ann was going to love her forever now. But she wasn’t prepared for Ann’s concentration camp nakedness, her clothes flung around the room, the scale like a plastic sculpture in the middle of the floor, the trunk receding into the shadows. But Ann didn’t love her, not for one minute; all Ann did was run to her and grab her throat and punch her in the face. Get out! Get OUT! Keep Father out of here! I’m weighing myself; can’t you see? Vinca remembers crying herself to sleep in the lounge that night, Vimla Das in a chenille bathrobe, bringing her ice bags and a cup of sweet spicy tea.

Everything will be okay, Vinca, she whispered. She remembers sneaking out at seven to walk through the campus, the Square, down along the Charles River, stinking and brown, stumbling into sleek Lycra joggers who ignored her. When she was somewhere around Watertown she turned around and walked back. No Ann, no trunk. She found the notebooks, the note. She remembers sobbing on the floor, breathing heavily, Ann’s smell evaporated from the dusty dingy room. Fuck the notebooks! Then she left the dorm again, wandered up Mass. Ave., pushing her way through people in Halloween costumes: Monica Lewinsky, the blue fluke from The X-Files, generic sluts. Somewhere on Main Street just past Kendall Square she found a pizza place, ordered a pie all for herself. Gimme one large white. To go. Remembers carrying the box across Longfellow Bridge, holing up on the stairs to the Charles Street T station, spitting every mouthful into napkins that she stuffed into the box and tossed down onto the street. No one else was around: no medical students, no nurses, no homeless people. While she was chewing she kept remembering what the homeless man had said that night about her hanging poor. She remembered wondering briefly about which direction to take the T in. If she took it Inbound, she could transfer to the Orange Line two stops away, take the Orange Line to Roxbury Crossing, walk up Columbus or Tremont and try to find Jerome. She still knew where he used to hang, didn’t she? She spat out a final piece of pizza and stared at the mess in her hands. Did she feel thinner? She didn’t know. But her instincts were flashing, and she knew that if she spat out food a few more times, if she started spitting it out regularly, she’d eventually get thinner. Of course she’d still be too tall, but people might start looking at her with tenderness, with concern. That night no one was looking at her, and she felt dirty, full of stains. That night she hopped on the Outbound train, took it three stops to Harvard, jumped off. She wasn’t hanging poor. She was hanging WASP.

FWD: V_R_Hale8019@GCCC.edu

TO: Batman4u@GCCC.edu

From: Margery Dargan, APPPLAC

Subj.: WELCOME STUDENTS and Kissing the Sceptre

Cc: Les Exoo J_R_Cafferty

Date: August 28, 2005

Ms. Hale:

This is the seventh time I have e-mailed you since May. You have not responded.

Currently you have the highest GPA in your class. I am considering you for the position of Ambassador to Excellence, which will offer you the opportunity for leadership and to represent our excellent college by appearing in a video. You must come to my office later today at 3:30 to discuss this. I am forwarding you the e-mail I send welcoming students when they enter the College which gives the College’s history. Please review the facts in this e-mail before coming to the APPPLAC office, which is in Joker Hall 212.

Margery Dargan,Ph.D. (Comparative Literature), Rutgers

APPPLAC

All of you who enter Gotham County Community College this week will already be thinking ahead to Graduation Day. When that day arrives, signifying your own achievement of excellence, you must kiss the bat-winged sceptre at the December ceremony when you are handed your diploma by myself, J.R. Cafferty (The Vice-President of Everything), President Exoo, or the elected faculty speaker. Kissing the sceptre is one of Gotham’s most sacred traditions. In order to understand this act, it is very important that you become acquainted with the College’s history.

Founded in 1969, the college’s physical space was the gift of Mrs. Barbara Cyzygy, who owned packets of undeveloped land in Hunterdon County, Morris County, Somerset County, and the great city of Newark. Mrs. Cygyzy had inherited the land from her husband, Josef Cgyzyy, who revealed his complete collection of Batman comics to his wife a few days before he died, tragically, of old age. Mr. Cyzyyyyy told his wife that he envisioned a “community college on a hill,” founded in honor of his hero. So we have the name “Gotham County Community College,” even though New Jersey contains no county by that name. In Mr. C’s vision, Batman would always look down upon the college community and smile on the land where his literature and legacy would be preserved forever. You will notice this legacy as you go to your classes in one of two classroom (and office) buildings, Robin Hall and Joker Hall. Mr. C’s collection of comic books sits in the college archives. It is very important that you refer to them as graphic novels, NEVER comic books. These graphic novels are not available for library loan, but you must sign into the archives and show that you have viewed the collection at least once before you graduate. Every time you cross the quad between Joker and Robin, you will see the six-foot statue of Batman. We ask that you not litter the statue, wrap it in toilet paper, or use cell phones within ten feet of it.

About me: as you can see by the above title, I am APPPLAC. This stands for the leadership office of Assessor of Postmodern Pedagogical Processes and Learning Acquisition Coordination. I care about you. I want to ensure that the pedagogical processes here have the correct postmodern perspective and are free of biases of race, class, and gender. You must no longer think of yourselves as “male” and “female.” You must learn that gender is a social construct and that we are all on a continuum of male and female.

If your learning acquisition is suboptimal, or if you cannot form your learning modules into rubrics, stop by my office in Joker 212 and discuss the situation with me. I will investigate all complaints.

Remember! YOU are entering a college which inspires EXCELLENCE. You must uphold that excellence. WELCOME!!!! Have a great semester.

Margery Dargan, Ph.D. (Comparative Literature), Rutgers

APPPLAC

------------------------------------------------------------

PART TWO

GOTHAM COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE: SEPTEMBER 2005

“Where’s Excellence?” Vinca shouts for the third time. She’s staring at Dargan’s cheap plywood door, which is locked up tight and has a wood stain like a vulva in the middle. She steps back and takes a Cadbury’s Bar out of her purse. Grabs two napkins from her pocket. And this APPPLAC nut ordered her to come over on August 28th? She figured she’d wait till today, till after Gilman’s class, but then the bitch marches right into the class and disrupts everything and tries to order her around. She bites the bar in half and chews, then holds a napkin against her mouth. Half down--or not down--depending on you look at it; half to go. “Hey,” she bangs on the door. “Excellence, remember? I haven’t got all day!”

No response. She shoves the other half into her mouth and chews it quickly. Another napkin, more spitting, a toss into the convenient trash can next to the vulva.

Vinca starts giggling. She’s had no breakfast and two venti lattés. Her mouth feels full of chocolate, so she leans over and spits repeatedly into the can. A raunchy thought: maybe Dargan’s in there with some guy, maybe President Exoo. Maybe he’s stopped by for a quick fuck and they’ve scattered all her papers and are going at it on top of her desk while she’s out here spitting chocolate. She presses her ear against the plywood door, which is pretty thin. Mumble. You should have investigated the woman last summer, immediately after it happened. Mumble mumble. Well, I can’t help it if that one gave you no information in July! Mumble mumble mumble.

What was that last mumble? What did she say just now? Vinca pounds on the door with both fists. “Come on. Yo! Excellence! Let’s get this over with!”

“I beg your pardon?” Dargan’s heels click and her voice chirps as she opens the door.

“Excellence. I mean, where is it?” Vinca shoves past her and plops down on a plastic chair that faces Dargan’s desk. “When you’re an ambassador to something, it means, like, a country. So I’m wondering: where are you going to send me? India? England? Guinea –Bissau?”

Dargan gives her a dirty look. “You do not have the position. I told you in my e-mail that I am considering you. This could go either way.” Dargan walks behind her desk and sits down primly. She opens her purse and sneaks her cell phone into it, which Vinca hasn’t seen till now. She hasn’t seen such a a weird outfit in a long time. A tight leopard-print skirt with red flames that comes to just above her knees, and a red tee shirt that doesn’t match the red in the skirt. And that hair! Butch-buzz dyed blue. Fugly. Gah.

“Are you listening? If I choose you, you’ll be an ambassador to the excellence that comes from the pedagogical processes being generated by APPPLAC.”

“Huh?”

“And you’ll discuss those processes on a video.” She holds up a manila folder. “I have your file right here.”

“My file?”

“Your transcript, notes from instructors, complaints. Your complete file.”

Vinca raises her voice. “What are you, CIA? Is it legal for you to have that stuff?” So Dargan kept her waiting for this bureaucratic bullshit because she wanted to yak on her cell phone? This conversation is heading down the toilet fast, Vinca can tell. She glances around the room. This is somebody’s office? It’s the most depressing office she’s seen here, not like Professor Snow’s, with his collection of globes going back to 1896 and his huge map of worldwide immigration patterns that covers one wall. And his plush elephant, which stands beside his desk, smiling. It was four feet tall, he told her last spring. Dargan’s place is cement-block dreary. There’s nothing on the walls except two framed photos, black-and-white, on the wall to her right.

“As an administrator. I have the right to look at any documents I want.” Dargan gives her a saccharine smile.“Now, I need to know two things. First, have you received an education free of biases of race, class, and gender here? And second, will you be wearing that Godawful wig?”

Probably no harm in playing along for a bit. “No. And yes.”

“You have been subjected to biases?”

“You mean biases against wigs?”

“No. We’re talking about biases of race, class, and gender.”

“We are?” She thinks on this. “Before I went to Harvard I had a black boyfriend . . .”

“An African-American boyfriend,” Dargan interrupts.

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, I hung out with him when he sold, um, stuff –if you catch my drift---to cancer patients at Dana Farber. That’s in Boston. I didn’t go with him when he sold it to the brothers over in Roxbury. That’s where he lived. That’s in Boston, too. Me, I lived on Brattle Street. In Cambridge. So, see, he came from a different race and class than me. So there you have your race and your class.” If Dargan’s gonna keep speaking bullshit, Vinca will continue to lapse into third-grade logic.

Dargan leans forward, nodding. What does this idiot think Vinca will tell her? About having sex with an African-American? About how one day, and the next day after that, Jerome didn’t show up at Dana Farber and his beeper suddenly was no longer in service? Dargan wants to hear Vinca’s two theories: that he’s in jail, or he’s dead? No way.

“And I’m a girl and he’s a boy. So there’s your gender. In a nutshell.” Logic For Dummies. Oh, yeah.

Dargan draws back and sits up straight in her chair. It’s a wooden chair, Vinca notices. No Staples Office Specials in this office. Pure straight–backed wood, like something out of a museum on the Freedom Trail.

“That’s not how we look at gender here, Ms. Hale. It’s not merely a matter of male and female. I’m surprised that you haven’t noticed that in your classrooms.” “I did notice. How could I miss it? Gender on a continuum, gender as a social construct, blah blah blah. That’s practically all anybody talks about, at least in the English Department.”

“Well, there’s no better place to get your learning acquisition than the English Department,” Dargan beams. “I myself am a member of that department.”

Vinca frowns. “I thought you were AFLAC or APPPLAC or whatever.”

“I used to teach in the English Department. Now I’m proud to say I am a postmodern administrator who favors leadership.”

“Oh, huh?” Be honest, Mum has taught her. “I don’t think it’s such a great department, ma’am.”

“You called me ma’am. Don’t lower yourself to a subaltern status.” Her voice is stern.

Vinca stretches her legs. “My mother’s people were Virginians. So I have sir and ma’am stuck in half my genes. And that subaltern stuff? See, that right there is the whole problem in the English department, far as I can see. Party line: racism, classism, heterosexism bad. Anyone would have to be from another planet to think racism and classism are good. But those professors act like everybody but them either thinks all these things are okay or they don’t know they even exist.” She yawns, putting her hand over her mouth just in time. “And in either case, the professors are all too smug for my taste. And they try to ram their point of view or ideology or whatever down your throat to make sure you learn they’re bad.”

Dargan points her finger at her. What is she, a schoolmarm? “Tell me one class you

noticed this pedagogy in.”

“Schenk’s.”

Dargan nods. “But you must know that Harmony Schenk is one of our finest instructors.”

“I disagree.” Vinca snorts. “I took American Lit Two with her. It’s a survey course, right? Post-Civil War and such? Well, she spends the entire course on one book. Some junky book from the Seventies. The Exorcist. Every paper we wrote was on that stupid book.”

“There are opportunities for learning acquisition in that novel.” Her face is almost purple; Vinca knows she’s made her mad. This is getting to be fun, sort of. She hasn’t made enough people mad lately, except for that bloody-nosed creep in Gilman’s class this morning.

“Yeah, well,” Vinca speaks slowly. “She turned this survey course into a feminism festival. Tells us the first day that she’s not going to be afraid to share her personal history with the class and then she goes on a rant about her Glory Days in the 1960s before The Exorcist was published and she burned her bra or something.”

“That was an act of defiant feminist courage, don’t you see?” Now she’s leaning forward again, a faint strychnine smile forming at the corners of her mouth.

“No, and I told her so. I said it was about as feminist as throwing your panties to the Boss.”

Dargan shakes her head. “You are not demonstrating good learning acquisition.”

“Well, tough. You know I was expecting to get some good acquisitive learning or whatever you call it in Professor Gilman’s class today, but you come in and order me into your APPPLAC or AFLAC goose-pen and then waste my time by telling me that gender is not a matter of male and female.” Vinca glares at Dargan.

Dargan clasps her hands and slowly leans forward. She has big hazel eyes, kind of pretty. And the way she’s staring at Vinca right now, Vinca doesn’t know if she’s a schoolmarm or a vamp. But that hair! “I have the right,” Dargan begins. “To come after a student, someone who has the highest GPA in the class, who has a chance to be in a video. A student who did not answer one e-mail I sent all summer.”

“C’mon. Who answers e-mail in the summer?”

“Anyone who is asked to respond to a very important matter.”

“Yeah. Well, sorry.”

“I would think that anyone who’s been exposed to Harvard University would have the good manners to respond. It was an honor.”

“I don’t have manners.” That’s for sure. At least that’s what Mum’s always saying. “Anyway, what was an honor? My going to Harvard?”

“The invitation I extended you to be considered as a student ambassador.”

“Ambassador, huh? Well, it’s clear that I can’t be an ambassador if I can’t go to a place.”

“No. You won’t be going anywhere.”

“Oh. I can’t even go to the East Village?”

“What?”

“Like, Alphabet City. In Manhattan, you know? That’s where a lot of Jersey kiddoes go clubbing.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.”

“That’s for sure.” Actually, Vinca thinks, it isn’t for sure. Dargan may be acting like a bossy prissy bitch, but there’s something in those eyes. Maybe it’s the blue eyeliner that she’s put above the lashes of her lower lid. There’s something wild there. But that blue hair, forget it. It’s more artificial-looking than Vinca’s sapphire wig, which has long dreds that fall to her boobs.

“You will represent GCCC. Did you read the copy of the e-mail I forwarded you about the College’s history and kissing the Sceptre? And the graphic novels in the archives?”

“I glanced at it last year,” Vinca frowns. “You sent it to all the freshmen, right?”

“Correct. And I send it to every student every month.”

“Well, that’s overkill. When students get welcomed twelve times a year and get all that PC gender crap thrown at them, they feel like they’re not welcome. Especially the boys. It feels like you’re scolding them.”

“If you want to be an ambassador, you must read it. You need to review the history of this College and Josef Csygzy’s great vision if you want to show true leadership.”

“Josef Csygzy? As in Barbara Csygzy?”

“Barbara was his wife, yes.”

Vinca chews her pen. “I heard she looked just like Anna Nicole Smith.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Blond. Real booby. Big. Did you know you spelled Csygzy about fourteen different ways in that e-mail?”

“It’s a Polish name,” she says finally.

A Polish name? No biases here. Yeah, right, Vinca thinks. “I heard,” she continues, “that you guys have a budget crisis here. I’m thinking that if I make a video, I could make it real juicy. Take it to the East Village. Really sell it to the Club crowd. My goal or objective or whatever would be to get New Yorkers to go to school here. Charge ‘em out-of-state tuition. Lot of money in out-of-state tuition.”

“Go on.”

“I mean, there’s juicier stuff to play up than old man Csygzy had a farm, ee-yi-ee-yi-oh. Did you know he made Barb dress up in diapers and do a lap-dance while he was reading Batman comics?” She clears her throat. “Excuse me. Graphic novels.”

Margery stares at her dead-on. If she lost forty pounds and changed her stupid hair color, she’d be such a fox.

“Yeah. And on certain nights he’d wear his Batman cape to bed and make her wear a mask.”

“Where did you get this?”

“I heard it.”

“From?”

“Fifi Skrebel.”

Margery makes a face. “Her name is Fidelity.”

She shrugs. “Well, I call her Fifi, and she happens to be my friend. Anyway, a video’s a waste of time unless you get actors to pay Joey and Barb. Great S&M possibilities. I could narrate.”

“No. Tell me more about your learning acquisition.”

“Hey. What’s that mean, anyway?”

“What?”

“Learning acquisition.”

“I am the Dean of APPPLAC. It’s part of my title.”

“Yeah, but it’s so . . .jargony. What does learning acquisition mean, exactly? Like, what professors I’ve had and so forth?”

Dargan smirks. “Let’s start with why you left Harvard. I take it they had nothing to offer you.”

Vinca leans forward. “They had the world to offer me. I left because I spit.”

“What?”

Yeah. And I still spit. Right outside your office, honey. “Never mind. Anyway, most of the professors here are okay.”

“But you implied that Harmony Schenk is not. You questioned the action of bra burning in Professor Schenk’s class. You just admitted that yourself.”

“Well, I disagreed with her point. But you must’ve figured that out at your age.”

“What?”

“About what’s important in feminism.”

Margery sniffs and stares out the window. “And why are you taking Professor Gilman’s course?”

“I felt like it. I like to write.”

“Professor Gilman isn’t a scholar.”

“So?”

“And she’s not a postmodernist.”

“Good.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Geez. No. She’s a writer, and she teaches writing. So she must know something that Schenk doesn’t.”

“What?”

“Well, writing ought to count for something.”

“But it isn’t academic writing.”

“Big fucking deal. There’s too much of that around here.”

“Too much academic writing?”

“Too much phony scholarship. Schenk was always announcing that someone’s giving a paper in the Grand Conference Room. Telling us it would help our grade if we went.”

“It was important for you to go. Did you?”

“Hell, no. I mean, who wants to go hear a paper with a title like ‘My Lesbian: My Self: Rita Mae Brown and the Mirrored Imaginary.’ Or something like that. Anyway, all those gender articles have about fifteen colons in them; that should tell you something. I mean, a colon is a place where a body stores shit.”

“Did you learn that from Robert Cafferty?”

“You mean Joe-Bob? No. I obviously learned it from being in Schenk’s class.”

“I am talking about this impossibly intolerant stance toward the dignity of women that you show.”

Now it’s her turn to lean forward. “Sometimes feminism doesn’t have a lot to do with bra-burning or some feminist professor’s definition of the dignity of women. And by the way, Joe-Bob seems like a nice guy.”

Dargan sighs. “Very well. I’m not going to bother to ask you about your wig.”

“Fine. It’s none of your business anyway.”

“What is my business is why you left Harvard.”

“I told you. I left,” she says slowly, “because I spit.”

“Ms. Hale, is this some game you’re trying to play with me? I’ve asked you why you left Harvard and all you can say is you spit?”

“Chapter and verse.”

Dargan takes off her glasses and leans back in her chair. No makeup, except the eyeliner. Give Vinca ten minutes with some foundation and blush and she could turn Margery Dargan into a juicy belly dancer. If she felt like it.

. “But . . . forget it,” says Dargan. “I want to know how you got from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Gotham.”

“There was this person at Harvard who lived in . . .” Whoa. She’s not about to spill any beans here: not about Ann, not about anything. “Oh, never mind. I got bored.”

“Excuse me?”

“See, I took all these extension courses all over Boston: Harvard, BU, Northeastern, Emerson, all those schools. Then I figured I’d better go back to college for real.”

“Did you have a job at the time? Most of our students have to work as well as go to school. Which makes learning acquisition difficult sometimes.”

Vinca shrugs her shoulders. “Most of the world has to work. I understand that. Like I said, I know that different social classes exist in this country. I’ll be honest here. See, I live with my cousin. I could have just lied and said I was a Jersey resident and paid in-state tuition. I didn’t, because paying extra money is no problem.” She inches her chair a little closer to Dargan. “But if someone was poor and in the same situation as me, I would have lied. Truth is, I’ve never had to work much.”

“What did you do when you did work?” Dargan’s jaw is twitching a little.

“Pole dancing. Over near Chinatown. In Boston.”

Dargan makes a noise through her nose. “And what did you think of that line of work?”

“I quit after a month. These guys kept shoving dollar bills up my crotch.”

“I see.” Dargan picks up a pair of glasses from her desk and wipes them on that hideous skirt. When she puts them on, she looks like Schoolmarm of the Year. “You’re aware, of course, that you have the highest average in your class?”

“Yeah. Cool.”

Dargan’s mouth twitches. “A woman with your GPA doesn’t look like the type of person who would wear a wig or do a job like that.”

Vinca folds her hands and looks down into her lap. When she looks up at Dargan, she knows Dargan can see little bits of tears that she hasn’t had time to blink away. “My wigs’re nobody’s business. Get it?”

“Or condemn bra-burning and feminism in general,” she continues.

“I never condemned no bra-burning.”

“Any bra.” Oh, Mum would love this one. Mum loves anyone who corrects her grammar. Except Dargan looks a little too Irish for Mum’s taste.

“All I said was it was like throwing panties to the Boss.”

“The who?”

Vinca bursts out laughing. “Girl, wake up. What state are we living in? Is this Jersey or what?”

Clearly Dargan doesn’t know The Boss from George Bush. Keeps staring at her like she’s done . . . what, exactly? Shoplifted from Filene’s? Skipped confession? Dargan is beginning to remind her of Mrs. Reilly. But there’s this under-the-surface wildness. Schoolmarm or vamp?

“This has nothing to do with New Jersey,” she answers.

Vinca leans forward. “It has everything to do with New Jersey. Were you born in the USA or what?” She can’t resist that one.

“I am an American citizen,” Dargan announces.

This is going nowhere. Vinca thinks. First she sits out in the hall, collecting gobs of chocolate, and eavesdrops on Dargan’s weird phone conversation, then she comes in to

talk about some video that Dargan supposedly wants her to do, and she’s just ended up in a big fat loop of a conversation that’s starting to turn into a bitch-fight. Can they get to the video? Please, now? She has to move things along. “Look, she says. “I just think there were more important things to do in the Sixties than set fire to some garment you wear on your boobs. I mean, don’t you think all it did was get people to think about boobs? And feminists are always talking about women’s bodies being exploited. You burn a bra, what does it make people think of? Boobs. So it isn’t any different from throwing your panties to The Boss.”

“Why?” Dargan’s practically shouting. Geez.

“Because. You wear panties to cover up an exploited part of the body too. Right? I mean, don’t you?” Her voice trails off.

“I don’t see this discussion as being appropriate for a Women in Literature class.”

“Well,” says Vinca, “it was American Lit., remember? Anyways, the course had a subtext. A hundred reasons why you should hate men or whatever. And me, I like men.”

“We mustn’t forget our role in fighting the binary,” says Dargan.

“The HUH?” One of the photos on the wall shows a country road, slick and liquid and black, winding down a hill covered in snow. The branches of an evergreen are bent down. Heavy snow, Vinca thinks. The kind that leaves a road wet. The other photo shows an empty swimming pool. Maybe someone had just dived into it, because circles of waves reach out from a point just off-center. It must have been taken at dusk; faint moonlight glitters on the waves. Where is the diver? There’s nobody, nothing. The absence of people and the off-center waves make the place look bleak, unbearably lonely.

Kind of like this office, she thinks. But these are quality photos, Vinca can tell. “Nice photos,” she says.

Dargan looks down. “They’re old,” she whispers.

“Great shadow and light. Did you take them?”

Dargan jerks her head in a curt nod.

“Neat. I took a photo class, and I never could get that shadow and light balance. And the darkroom drove me nuts.” Nothing wrong with chatting this one up a bit. “You’re good.”

Dargan’s face looks frozen. “The man you refer to as Joe-Bob said the same thing once. I used to have my own darkroom. . . .” Dargan takes a deep breath.

Whatever. Who cares what Joe-Bob? “Now, what about this position? Ambassador or such? Am I gonna get it?”

Dargan sits up straight. “Oh, no. You certainly are not.”

“Wha. . “

“There are too many black marks on your record.”

Too many shadows? Vinca stands up. “Well, that’s just great. I come over here for nothing.” She turns before she walks through the door. “Don’t forget. I spit.”

When she walks down the hall, she remembers the weird stuff Dargan was saying on her cell phone. What was that last thing she mumbled? Somebody’s husband died of

nerve gas? And the woman should be looked at more carefully because this is not bullshit; this is a serious threat? She has to have heard it wrong.