One afternoon in late March of our senior year, just about two months before graduation, I wandered into the apartment I then shared with Arlene and found her standing at the fridge looking upset. She was rummaging around in the vegetable drawer, and her mascara was smudged. Mascara, like the perm, was part of her daily wear.
“What is it?” I said. “Is it Fred?” Fred was her latest jock, a wide-eyed, hurdle-jumping track star whom I found very attractive and who stoked my envy. I always harbored a secret hope that they’d break up.
“No,” she said, into the shelves. “Fred’s fine.”
“And?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The usual.”
She held up several thin plastic bags holding vegetables we’d bought and forgotten to eat: floppy green onions, a browning head of broccoli, limp kale.
“We never ate any of this,” she said.
“So throw it out,” I said.
She dragged a hand across her eyes. “This happens every time,” she said, shutting the fridge door. “Why do we even bother to go shopping?” She pulled on a coat and went outside with a shovel, picking and digging at the ground until she was able to bury the old vegetables under a bedraggled marigold plant. I watched from the window. She was often upset in these days, usually about graduating. Every night, she cried a little about the end of this phase of her life. What the changes would be like. How much she would miss me, and her classes, and our apartment. I would watch her cry sometimes, on the sofa with her tissue, and I’d say comforting things I’d heard other people say about the opening and closing of windows and doors, but mostly I just admired how she did it; she had this way of crying like she didn’t realize she was crying.
When she came back inside, she was gripping a yogurt cup someone had thrown near our side strip of garden.
“Plastic doesn’t cycle.” She shrugged off her coat. “Right? We recycle it, but it can’t do anything on its own, and all it can ever do is be itself again. It is the worst kind of reincarnation. Lame! That is so lame! And it’s everywhere!” she cried, going to the bathroom to splash water on her face.
Arlene didn’t usually get so worked up about things like the veggies or the yogurt cup, but her moods had been heightened in the weeks since our friend Hank had hit the doctor on his drive to the recycling plant. Hank was a nice guy who lived two apartments over with a mutt named Blooper, and the two of them came by often. Hank, like Arlene, was conscientious to a fault. In fact, he was so thorough that he did not trust that the big blue trucks would actually take his recycling to the plant, so once a week he drove it over himself. He crushed his bottles and folded up his boxes, and he said he found it very comforting to see the plant itself, those manmade cycles in action. “It’s called a plant!” he’d say, goofily, delighted. Had he not been gay, I’m sure he and Arlene would have fallen very deeply in love for a long time.
One afternoon, while on his drive to the recycling plant, Hank glanced down at the radio during a song he didn’t like and hit a doctor. The doctor, a young surgeon just finishing his residency, was crossing the road on a sunny afternoon on his lunch break, and he stepped into the street right when Hank was spinning the tuning dial. Hank knocked him to the ground, and the tires rolled over his hands. The doctor who had specialized in surgery for children with cancer.
Arlene did not appreciate my line of thinking.
“You cannot make an equation!” she said, coming out of the bathroom. “The doctor’s hands did not break because Hank was recycling!”
She adjusted the ribbon on her dress that she was wearing as a gesture of support for Hank, who was meeting that day with a lawyer.
“True,” I said, flicking on the light that she always flicked off, even when we were studying. “And yet, if Hank did not feel the need to drive his bags to the plant, then the doctor would be fine. Correct?”
“That’s fudging the data!” Arlene protested.
The doorbell rang. Fred came in. He was looking particularly strong and flushed that evening, having just finished lifting weights at the gym.
“It’s just so sad,” I said. “He saved children.”
“It’s horribly sad,” Arlene said. “But it is not a lesson. Hey, baby.” She turned away from me and leaned in to give Fred a kiss.
“Or how about the Litmans?” I said.
The Litmans were the liberal parents of a mutual friend of ours who had adopted a homeless kid with no family and raised him with love and care and good limits and kind gifts and progressive schools, and the kid had grown up to be a staunch ultra-right neo-con who believed in torture and wiretapping civilians and aggressive, preemptive warfare. The parents did not know what to do.
Arlene began to rub Fred’s shoulders. “Did you go to the gym?” she said. “You look hot.”
“Nice dress,” he said.
“Anyway,” she said to me. “You can’t predict the outcome. You can’t raise a kid and then tell him what to think.”
“No,” I said. “I’m just saying.”
“You’re saying we should all stay at home and do nothing,” she said.
“Claire’s not a shut-in,” Fred said, smiling at me.
“See?” I said, smiling back, although Arlene’s statement did sound a little true.
“What happened with Hank and the lawyer?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “He’s still not back.” She held on to the sides of his T-shirt. Her eyes filled with real tears. Fred kissed the top of her head tenderly, and for the umpteenth time, I wondered how Arlene, of the questionably toxic perms and mascara drips and yogurt cup righteousness, always got the better guys.
“He has to live with that his whole life,” she said.
Fred ran a hand through her hair. They left, to go to dinner.
“I hate you people,” I muttered as I shoved my eggshells into our small kitchen compost pile, which smelled like rotten food, which is just exactly what it was.
The building quieted around me. Saturday night. I had nothing to do. The latest guy I’d liked, a documentary filmmaker, had to work late in the editing room. I loved documentaries, but he said I couldn’t see his for two more months, and, like a sports star, he said it was better that he work solo and think solo until he was done. Due to dating choices such as this, I seemed to have more time than most of my peers, so I had pursued an addiction to crossword puzzles. When not studying, I opened up the newspaper and did the daily one each afternoon. I was not particularly good, and often could not answer the questions. I grabbed a pencil and curled up on the sofa and opened the newspaper to the puzzle I’d started the night before. As I worked away, rereading the same clues, two thoughts commonly accompanied my work. One was my strong desire to finish as quickly as possible so I could do something else, who knew what. But finishing quickly was impossible, so I also found myself thinking that if someday I were taken by a dictatorship and shoved into a holding tank with only this crossword, and my only chance for survival was to finish this crossword, then and only then might I be able to figure out the answer to 12D: Lincoln’s controversial Cabinet member. Maybe it would take years, I considered, skipping that question, but as I continued to work the puzzle, I could feel that holding tank floating in the background, an Orwellian-style setup with a large crossword projected onto the wall as the world warred outside, and for some reason the future of humanity might even depend on whether or not I could plumb the depths of old history tests in my memory, and rustle up the answers.