Soon, Chess was on the street. She was making her way to the Delta Gamma house. She would drop off the cash box, then sneak through the backstreets to the stadium. She would avoid Barrett Lee until the game was over, by which point, she was sure, he would have given up and left.
She marched up the steps of the sorority house. It was a delft blue Victorian with white trim like icing on a cake. They had a house mother, Carla Bye, who kept the girls on-task with cleaning and straightening, and Chess was glad. She had moved from the dorms into the house that year and she appreciated the quiet, feminine order. The dorms had been loud and lawless; there were boys in Chess’s dorm who chewed tobacco and left plastic cups half-filled with brown spit on the windowsills. They played Frisbee in the halls at two in the morning, drunk, blaring Guns N’ Roses. The Delta Gamma house was more like Chess’s mother’s house in its civility, except that it was college and Chess was free to do exactly as she liked.
She just had to drop the cash box-give it to Carla if she was around, or exercise due diligence and lock it up in the house safe. From the front porch, Chess heard a tremendous, distant roar and knew that the Colchester team had stormed the field. Shit. She was going to miss kickoff.
She heard Carla Bye chatting away in the front room. Some of Chess’s sorority sisters found Carla Bye annoying and pathetic; others blatantly disregarded the house rule about overnight guests, claiming that Carla didn’t mind. Carla Bye wants us to get laid! was an oft-repeated battle cry, one with which Chess couldn’t disagree. On mornings when a young man descended the stairs, Carla often volunteered to make him an omelet.
On football weekends, Carla kept hours in the front parlor, where she was available to welcome alumnae Delta Gammas or DGs from other chapters. Carla had the gift of gab; she thrived on this kind of interaction.
She was chatting with someone now, and all Chess thought was, Good, give her the cash box and bolt!
Chess rushed into the parlor. Carla Bye said, “What luck! Here she is!”
Chess was confused. Then she looked at the occupant of the chintz wingback chair: Barrett Lee.
Chess gasped in horror, which was mistaken for surprise by Barrett Lee and Carla Bye. Meanwhile, Chess was thinking, Shit! This is not happening! She felt the walls of her perfectly constructed weekend caving in.
Carla Bye was staring at her. Manners!
“Barrett?” Chess said. “Barrett Lee?”
He stood up. Carla Bye had already plied him with cider and pumpkin muffins. There was a white and blue duffel bag that smelled vaguely of locker room next to his chair.
“Hey, Chess,” he said. “How are you?” He bent in to-what? Kiss her? She bypassed his lips and gave him a chaste, sisterly hug.
“He came all the way from Nantucket this morning!” Carla proclaimed.
“Took the first plane,” Barrett said. “And drove six hours.”
Why? Chess thought. Why are you here?
Carla said, “I invited Barrett to leave his duffel bag in your room,” she said. “He wanted to wait until you arrived. Such a gentleman.”
Chess said, “I’m on my way to the game. I’m sorry, I don’t have a guest ticket…”
He said, “Would you like to go for a walk? Or get some lunch?”
Chess felt hot and panicky. Her heart was still racing from her gallop across town. She said, “Let’s talk out on the porch.”
Carla took her cue. “Yes, let me give you young people some privacy. I’ll just take Barrett’s bag up to your room, Chess.”
Carla Bye wants us to get laid!
No! Chess thought. But she was too polite to shout it out. It didn’t matter. They could get his bag later; Barrett Lee wasn’t staying.
Barrett followed Chess out the front door onto the porch. She leaned against the railing and he sat on the swing. She heard another cheer from the stadium. The game!
Chess said, “What are you doing here, Barrett?”
He shrugged, grinned. “I had island fever. I needed a road trip.”
“So you came here to see me? Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you. We never really got together.”
“That’s right,” Chess said. “We never really got together.”
“So I thought, maybe now…”
“Maybe now what?”
“Maybe now we could get together. So I drove up here.”
“You didn’t call,” Chess said. “You gave me no warning. I have plans this weekend.”
“You do?”
“Yes! For starters, I’m supposed to be at that football game. My friends are waiting for me.”
“I’ll go with you. I’d like to meet your friends.”
“I don’t have a guest ticket,” she said. “Because I had no idea you were coming. And the game is sold out.”
“Is it a big game?” he asked.
“They’re all big games,” Chess said. “There are only six home games, and they’re all big.” She tried to calm down; she was squeaking like a child. “I have tailgating plans after the game and then dinner plans and then a party tonight, which is invitation only.” This wasn’t strictly true, though the SigEps would not be thrilled about a strange guy in their fraternity house; they liked to keep the male-female ratio in their distinct favor. “And tomorrow I have to study. I have a paper due.”
“A paper?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “A paper. A college paper. Fifteen pages on The Birth of Venus.”
He stared at her. She said, “It’s a painting. By Botticelli.”
He stood up. “I’m starving. Do you want to get lunch? I saw a place in town that looked good.”
Chess felt her eyes cross. “Are you not listening to me? I’m supposed to be at the game.”
“Skip it.”
“I don’t want to skip it,” Chess said. She was officially acting like a petulant child. She wondered for a minute what Birdie would have her do. Drop everything to spend the weekend with Barrett Lee? Make a compromise, Birdie would say. Go to lunch with him, then bid him good-bye. But Chess couldn’t even bring herself to do that. “Listen, I appreciate that you got up at dawn and took the first flight and drove all the way here to see me. But I didn’t know you were coming. And I’m sorry, Barrett, but I have plans already. I have plans all weekend and I can’t include you in them.”
“You can’t?” he said.
He was making her feel like a complete ogre, ungenerous, ungracious, inflexible. And she hated him for making her feel that way. It wasn’t fair. His showing up here was not fair; it was manipulative. She checked her watch: it was one thirty. The first quarter would be nearly over.
She said, “I have to go.”
He said, “Should I just wait for you here, then?”
Island fever. I needed a road trip. What he needed, Chess thought, was to be going to college himself. In a flash of empathy she realized that this was the first fall that Barrett had no school. The fishing and the carpentry and the partying weren’t fulfilling him.
“You should go,” Chess said.
“Go?”
“Or stay. Stay here in town if you want. But you can’t stay with me here. If you had called me, I might have been able to make arrangements, but you didn’t call. You just showed up and expected me to drop everything.”
“It’s a weekend,” he said.
“My weekends are busy. I have a life.”
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t get upset. I’ll go.”
“Great,” Chess said. “So now I feel terrible that you drove six hours to get here and I’m turning you away. But why should I feel terrible? I did nothing wrong.”