An American Tune Read online

  “Excellent,” Pete said. “Party tomorrow night. Sig house. Want to come?”

  “I’d love to,” Bridget said.

  Into the sudden, awkward silence that followed, Tom said, “Jane?”

  “Of course, Jane’s going,” Bridget said.

  “Do you want to?” Tom asked.

  “Sure,” Jane said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Yeah, okay.”

  She was mortified when, entering the dorm lobby the next afternoon, she saw him picking up the telephone – to call another girl, she assumed; one he actually liked – and she took a step backward, hoping to avoid him.

  But he saw her and put down the receiver. “Jane! Hey, I came over to make sure about tonight. Bridget can be so –” Then, surprising her, he blushed. “I just wanted to make sure you really wanted to come to the party.”

  “I do,” Jane said.

  “Good. Well, then. Seven.”

  He grinned, offered his hand; they shook.

  And he was gone.

  Jane stood for a long while, still feeling the warmth of his palm against hers, elated, a little afraid to know that he had come in search of her.

  “That’s just like Tom,” Bridget said when Jane told her. “Honest to God. He called me this morning and said, ‘Do you think Jane really wants to go tonight?’ I said, Yes. But I knew he didn’t believe me.” She laughed. “Man, you guys are perfect for each other. You think he’s being polite and doesn’t really like you, he thinks you’re being polite and don’t really like him. It’s a damn good thing I’m around, that’s all I have to say. Here –” She offered Jane a blue and maroon plaid madras shirt that still had the price tag on it. “This will look great with your hair. It’s cool that we’re exactly the same size, don’t you think?”

  “Bridget,” Jane said. “This is brand new. You haven’t even worn it yet.”

  Bridget rolled her eyes and pressed it upon her. “Jane. Here. Really. My sister Colleen took me shopping and we went totally nuts with my mom’s charge card. She just graduated, Colleen did. So she knew exactly what everyone would be wearing, and she told my mom I had to have it all. So, God. There’s plenty for both of us.”

  She said it blithely, as if the dismal state of Jane’s closet had only to do with the lack of an older sister to help her shop for the right things.

  The shirt was perfect, nicer than anything Jane had ever worn. And it did look good with her hair, which was sun-streaked from the summer. Perfectly straight, it had grown to her shoulders, finally, and she’d had it blunt-cut – like a surfer girl’s. When she leaned forward, it felt like a silky curtain against her face.

  “Okay,” Bridget said, settling on a starched blue oxford, buffing her Weejuns with a damp towel. “I give up. Pete can take me or leave me.” Then she threw herself backward onto the bed and lay, her arms and legs flung out in an X. “Aargh, I’m a wreck,” she said. “A total nervous wreck. Are you?”

  “Yes,” Jane said.

  The party was in the attic of the Sigma Chi house, where no girls were supposed to be. James Brown was blaring on the stereo. People were dancing, the floor slick with spilled beer. Along one wall, there was a row of battered couches where sorority girls perched, laughing, on their dates’ laps. The room was smoky, close. The red tips of cigarettes glittered in the dark corners.

  “Watch out.” That’s what Karen Conklin had said the night before, when they were getting acquainted and Jane told her that she and Bridget had been invited to a fraternity party. “Those boys are wild,” Karen said. “John – that’s my boyfriend – he told me they ask out freshman girls, get them drunk and then – well, you know.”

  But Jane nursed a single beer most of the evening, and Tom didn’t seem to notice. He talked to her. He held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, taking deep drags. He blew the smoke out evenly, careful as a little kid trying to make perfect soap bubbles. He talked about school, about the guys he lived with. About mornings, hunting with his father – how the fog sat in little pockets in the hollows and his feet went numb with cold and time stopped. He talked for so long it seemed he’d been saving these things all his life, waiting for the moment she would walk into it so he could tell them to her.

  Later, in his room, he pulled her toward him. Now, Jane thought. She hadn’t dated much in high school; she’d never had a boyfriend. Mostly, she had obsessed over certain unattainable boys, shocked speechless on the rare occasion one of them ever said word to her. She had no idea what Tom expected of her now, or what she would say or do if it seemed wrong to her. She tried to concentrate on the bookshelves in the built-in desk they leaned against. Fat, leather-bound business textbooks. A Farewell to Arms, The Catcher in the Rye. The books made her feel a little better, but the dark shadow of the bed still frightened her.

  He kissed her – a good kiss. She knew enough to know that. Then in what was almost like a dance step, he pushed her away so that they stood apart, just holding hands. “Don’t be scared, Jane. I’m not in any hurry here.”

  “I’m not scared,” she said.

  “Yeah, you are. Hey, I don’t bring girls up here all the time. This isn’t a game with me.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings that dissolved into the room’s gray corners. “Come on. Smile.”

  And she did, in spite of herself.

  “Good.” He smiled back.

  She laughed a little, drifted over to the window. Outside the street lamps shone, and she could hear the music from the party. She felt him move closer. He stood behind her, not touching her, but so close that she could feel the rhythm of his breathing. There was the faint odor of tobacco mixed with the scent of English Leather. They stood there for a long time. Jane thought that if she raised her arm, his arm would raise, too. If she made a quick feint sideways, he would follow. She let out a deep sigh, and he encircled her.

  “Well?” Bridget said, when they got back to the dorm. “I, personally, am besotted. Pete told me he’d teach me how to ride his motorcycle, can you believe that? My parents would kill me if they found out!” She threw up her arms in glee. “But they won’t! They can’t! I swear to God, I’ve waited forever to get here and tonight I realized I never even came close to imagining how cool it would actually be. Jane! My God, can you believe it? Me and Pete and you and Tom.

  “So, okay,” Bridget went on. “We’ve got the boy front covered. Now tell me what you think about Karen Conklin. The truth of what you think about her.”

  They’d fled to the lounge to talk, and Jane dreaded going back to her room where Karen would surely grill her about the party. The night before, she and Bridget had gotten off the elevator singing “Game of Love” at the top of their lungs and there was Karen emerging from 907, carrying a brand new pink plastic bucket with her toiletries in it. She wore a pink robe with roses on it and matching slippers. Her hair was in pink rollers.

  “Hey!” Jane said. “Hi. I’m your roommate.”

  “I was wondering where you were.” Karen gave her an assessing look. “It’s really nice to meet you,” she said, practically whispering. “But it’s after hours now. Maybe you didn’t realize we’re supposed to be quiet in the evenings?”

  “That would be after classes start,” Bridget said.

  Karen raised an eyebrow, moved past them, and disappeared into the bathroom. Later, she said to Jane, “Listen, I don’t mean to butt in, but that girl is wild – anyone can see it, and you might want to be careful about hanging around with her. If you wreck your reputation the very first week you’re here, well . . .”

  “Jane?” Bridget said.

  “She’s horrible,” Jane said.

  Bridget smiled serenely. “Exactly my thought. And I saw her eating dinner with my roommate, Carla, who’s just as big a drag as she is. So I’m thinking, let’s switch.”

  “You can do that?” Jane asked.

  “Yep. Colleen told me, ‘If you get a dud for a roommate, figure out who you really want to live with and switch.’ But she said you’ve got do
it quick, before things get weird. So let’s go down and talk to the dorm counselor about it right now. Get things fixed exactly the way we want them to be.”

  Bridget was a wonder, Jane thought. She convinced the dorm counselor to let them switch roommates. The next day, she marshaled Jane through registration, making sure they got as many classes together as they could. She shared Colleen’s advice to think of college as a 9–5 job and, that first week, the two of them made a pact to get up no later than 8:00 every weekday morning, eat breakfast, and head for class or to the library. No napping in the afternoons, no lying around listening to music, no soap operas down in the lounge. Evenings and weekends were their own, free for hanging out together or dancing with Pete and Tom.

  High school had been easy. Jane had grown up in a blue-collar town, and classes were pitched to the majority of students, who were there because they had to be, who expected no more out of life than a job at the steel mill that came with insurance benefits, three weeks of vacation every year, and the promise that you could retire to a little lake cottage someday, kick back, and do nothing at all – or, if you were a girl, to get married to someone with a job like that. Memorize, spit back the facts, and you were National Honor Society material. Here you had to think, which Jane found she liked every bit as much as dancing.

  She loved staying up all hours with Bridget trying to puzzle out what a poem meant, or how the stuff of a story might be connected to an author’s real life. She loved highlighting her copious notes, reducing the Civil War into an outline, then an anagram that held within it everything she knew, so that when she opened her blue book and wrote the letters on the inside cover, thoughts and facts blossomed out and onto the page as she answered the exam questions.

  But she loved most walking through drifts of red and orange leaves on campus, her arms full of books, and glancing up to see Tom coming toward her. She still half-believed he’d walk right past, as if he’d never even met her. Never, ever was she prepared for the way his face lit up at the first sight of her. Walking up the steps to the fraternity house with him on Saturday nights, Jane quickened at the sound of music pouring from the open windows of the dining room, the sight of bodies moving in the haze of cigarette smoke. Inside, the long, scarred tables had been pushed against the walls; the band was set up in one corner: a whole family of colored people from Terre Haute, who came with parents and grandparents, little kids. Teenage sisters in short, spangly dresses and go-go boots, singing backup. They played Motown and the Blues so deafeningly loud that there was nothing to do but dance.

  There was always a keg of beer hidden in the phone room just off the front hall. At first, Jane had hesitated: only the wild girls drank in high school. But a few beers – if she was careful – what could it hurt? The second one gave her a nice little buzz, the third dissolved her last shred of self-consciousness, and she was whirling, shouting the lyrics along with everybody else.

  It was fun. She’d never had such pure fun, she thought. She’d never been so happy as she was dancing with Tom – Bridget and Pete circling like satellites. Wild, silly dancing: the Pony, the Swim, the Funky Chicken. Slow dances, feeling the length of Tom’s body against her own, knowing soon they’d go upstairs to his room and collapse, kissing, the music coming right up through the ceiling so that it was as if they were still dancing, even then. One night, goofing around, they realized that their school pep songs were sung to the same tune, then that their thighs, pressing against each other, were exactly the same length, even though Tom was a full head taller. He’d caught her hand and held it to his, palm to palm, and they discovered that, though his palm was bigger, her fingers were longer, making their hands essentially the same size as well.

  “See,” he’d said. “One more reason you should fall in love with me.”

  The last weekend in October, he took her to see Peter, Paul & Mary in concert at the Auditorium. Just the two of them. Jane loved their music, the way there were ideas in it, the way it made her feel at the same time hopeful and sad. She had sat in the dark auditorium, Tom’s arm around her shoulders, marveling that they were there before her, real. Proof somehow that she belonged in this larger world and that it had been there all along, just waiting for her – with Tom in it. Walking hand-in-hand through campus afterward, her head was still full of music; her heart full, too, for the way he had surprised her with the tickets. His pleasure in surprising her. He stopped and drew her to him in the shadow of a gingko tree.

  “I love you, Jane,” he said.

  She couldn’t make herself speak, just burrowed into his chest, breathed in the scent of him, her eyes burning with tears, and he held her tighter.

  Till then he’d talked to her only in a teasing way about being in love. Love at first sight, he claimed – and she half-believed him, though it seemed incomprehensible to her. But this was different. She was scared, suddenly. Scared to say she loved him back for fear he’d change his mind and what would she do, now that she could no longer imagine her life without him in it? Scared of how loving Tom made her feel.

  “Oh, man.” Bridget smacked her hand against her head when Jane tried to explain her confusion. “Jane. Can’t you see what this is really about? You feel guilty because the truth of what’s making you so deliriously happy is making out like a fiend with him. Every single night. Wherever, whenever you can.”

  She hooted at Jane’s embarrassment. “You’d have made a great Catholic, you know? Listen. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with making out with someone you like. It’s totally natural. It’s . . . biological! And, Jane, Tom’s completely trustworthy. You decide where you want him to stop, and he’ll stop. You know he will.

  “And just in case you’re thinking we shouldn’t be going up to their rooms like we do because it’s against the rules,” she added. “Forget that, too. It’s not like it’s immoral – and besides, what are they going to do if they find us? Send us to make-out jail?”

  Jane laughed then. And Bridget was right; as far as Jane could tell, she was right about pretty much everything. Bridget could always tell which of the sorority girls were really nice and which ones were fake. She knew which boys to trust, which ones to avoid. She knew why Pete got too drunk sometimes, knew the meaning behind things he said and did that sometimes upset Jane or made her worry that Bridget might be in over her head with him.

  “He’s afraid,” Bridget would say. “His parents give him all this money, all this stuff. They’re competing for him, but they don’t really care about him. Until he met me he was completely alone in the world, really – except for Tom, who’s his friend. But, you know. Guys. I’m the one who understands him. And he’s scared of that, you know? He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, but he tests me sometimes –

  “Like the other night, when he did the Alligator at the party. He wasn’t that drunk. I know exactly how much he drank, and it wasn’t that much. Plus, we’d had that huge pizza. He did the Alligator to see if I’d do it with him. Big deal. You throw yourself on the floor and writhe around to the music and that’s supposed to be the be-all and end-all of depravity? I can do that. It’s stupid. But funny. Who gives a shit what those sorority girls think?” She grinned at Jane. “You should have tried it.”

  “And wreck your Villager outfit?” Jane said wryly.

  Bridget laughed. “Honestly, Jane, the best thing we ever decided was not to go through rush,” she said. “I look at all those girls in church clothes lined up outside the houses just waiting for a chance to go in and grovel for a bid so they can join up and get bossed around by a bunch of prudes. Uh-uh. Not me.”

  “Me either,” Jane had said, relieved not to have to admit she couldn’t have afforded it.

  Happy, utterly present in this new life, Jane began to dread her regular call home on Sunday evenings: the forced cheerfulness in her mother’s voice, the eagerness with which she asked about friends and classes. Still, she couldn’t have explained why she didn’t tell her mother about Bridget or Tom right from the
start, or why she let her believe that she and Karen Conklin were not only still roommates, but had become friends and spent all their free time together. Jane liked to think it was because she believed her mother felt connected to Karen, having read her thoughtful note that first day, and wouldn’t worry about Jane being lonely. In darker moments, though, she knew it was pure selfishness that made her keep this happiness to herself.

  The day before Thanksgiving she climbed on the Greyhound bus, fearful that, once home, the growing confidence she’d felt in the past months, the sense of belonging would completely dissolve. She tried to read, study, sleep, but ended up staring out of the window at what seemed like an endless number of small towns and stubbled cornfields as the bus wound its way north, through Indiana. The sky was gray; even so, Jane saw the cloud of smog hanging over her hometown well before she saw the first sprawl of houses or the tall, spewing smokestacks of the steel mills.

  Her father was waiting at the station, smoking a cigarette, shy and awkward as a teenage boy. She smelled whiskey on his breath when he embraced her, his fortification for anxious moments like this one – or maybe just to get him through the day. Walking through the front door of their little tract house, it seemed to Jane as if she was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything looked so small, so close. The worn carpet, the flickering TV screen, the Formica dinette table set for dinner. There were Amy and Susan, wearing the red Indiana sweatshirts she’d saved up to buy for them. And Bobby, stretched out on the sofa, taller, skinnier, and more sullen than she’d remembered him to be.

  “I fixed scalloped potatoes and ham for dinner!” Mrs. Barth said. “Your favorite. It’s ready any time. You’re hungry, aren’t you? After that long bus trip –” She stepped back and looked at her daughter. “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re home. It’s so good to see you.”

  Jane wasn’t glad to be home, she wasn’t the least bit hungry. What she wanted to do was collapse right where she stood and sleep until it was time to go back to Bloomington on Sunday morning. But she attempted a smile. Be nice, she told herself; pretend you’re thrilled to be here. For three days, be the Jane they need you to be. But when she took her place at the dinner table, it seemed to her as if she’d never even been away.