Politics, too—she was aggressive in the extreme. True, she had a conscience, and tremendous charisma, but even so I could detect the intimidating shape of things to come. In May, I remember, she led a midnight raid on the ROTC offices in the basement of the humanities building—no damage done, just a statement of intent, but a day or two later she began pushing for even more drastic measures. She had no interest in compromise. She knew where the screws were.
“Either you’re serious about this,” Sarah told me one morning at breakfast, “or you’re a twit. There’s no halfway. Like your poster says, real bombs, you can’t hide your head. Pain leads to pain. Ask the kids in Saigon.”
I nodded.
“Fine,” I said, “but sometimes it seems just a little excessive.”
“You think so?”
“A little.”
Sarah gazed at her coffee cup. Complicated events were occurring along the surfaces of her eyes.
“Well, that’s a pity,” she finally said. “Excessive. Tell it to the White House. Go lay it on the Joint Chiefs, I’d be real interested in some professional feedback.” Then her voice went low. A husky, mocking tone. “You’re something else, pal. You want this nice happy world, all roses, except you get all squeamish when somebody goes out and tries to make it happen. The jellyfish mentality.”
“Forget it. You win.”
“I do,” she said softly, “I win.”
She finished her coffee and stood up.
“And one more thing. So far you haven’t seen diddly. Excessively speaking, I mean.”
An unpleasant tone, I thought.
Culottes to sansculotte—a radical realignment. The question, though, was why. There were many such questions: Why politics? Why so sudden? Why so rabid? And why me? Why stick with a jellyfish?
Except in the most superficial sense, I didn’t really know her. Even the facts seemed unsubstantial.
A cheerleader, of course.
But why?
A history major. Pre-law. Brains, obviously, but not legal brains.
A birthmark below her right breast.
Thick blackish brown hair freshened by modern chemistry.
A small, recurring fever blister at her lower lip. I’d often catch her toying with it, applying ointments. “It’s a fatal flaw,” she’d say, “for the femme fatale.”
Flippant.
Sarcastic to the point of wise-ass. But it was almost certainly a kind of camouflage, like her cosmetics, the gaudy nail polish and lipstick and mascara. At times, I thought, it was as if she were hiding herself, or from herself.
Reticence, maybe.
Maybe fear.
A splay-footed way of walking, like a deer. A certain stiffness in her posture. As a kid, she told me, she’d had polio, a mild case. But no details. When I pressed her about it, Sarah smiled and tapped her chest. “Nothing serious,” she said. “Iron lungs.”
Her mother was dead.
Her father was a mortician.
Does it matter? She wasn’t gloomy, and she rarely talked about it, but I often found myself imagining what it must’ve been like to grow up in that big white funeral home on Main Street. How did it feel? What was the emotional residue? I was curious, of course, but she wouldn’t respond to even the most basic questions.
“Don’t be a ghoul,” she’d say.
Or she’d say, “No big mystery. Luscious me, sugar and spice. Don’t analyze it, William, just adore it.”
A playful, uninhibited girl.
And yet there were also moods of complete withdrawal. It could happen instantly. In bed, she’d peel off her clothes, clowning, then suddenly her whole face would freeze. She’d slide away. She’d pull a pillowcase over her head and crawl up on my desk and squat there like a statue. Tempting, I’d think. Not lewd, not immodest, just the white pillowcase and that awesome nakedness. “Sarah,” I’d say quietly, but she wouldn’t budge. There was something chilling about it, something desperate. Why the mask? Why, sometimes, would she clamp the pillowcase at her throat and whisper, “I want to be wanted. Get reckless, William. Go for broke—love me.”
And in my own way I did.
Granted, it was a judicious sort of love, one step at a time, but over the spring of our junior year I discovered the great pleasures and bondings of a political romance. I was part of something. I belonged. At our Committee meetings, I was perfectly content to let Sarah take charge; I admired her poise and control; I got a kick out of watching how she kept Ollie and Tina under tight rein. I liked the closeness. I liked being seen with her. In the geology lab, late at night, I liked it when she’d come up behind me and turn off my microscope and say, “For Christ sake, man, stop playing with your rocks.” Endearment, I liked that, too. How she held my arm walking to class, how she always stood beside me during our noon vigils at the cafeteria. Many things. The times I’d wake up to find my hands tied to the bedposts. The way she’d sleep with one knee hooked tenderly around my neck.
And the sex.
Congress, she called it.
“All rise!” she’d cry. “Congress is in session!”
In a way, naturally, I was grateful for this, but there were times when I thought she took it too far. It was the rah-rah side of her personality, too flamboyant, and one evening I asked if she’d mind toning it down.
Sarah gave me a hard look.
“Down?” she said. “Discreet, you mean?”
“Well, no, I just wish you’d—”
“Demure? Candy and flowers? A nice little Southern belle—sit around batting my eyes?”
She twisted away.
It was a warm spring evening, very humid, and she was naked except for a chrome bracelet. She got down on the floor and began a furious set of exercises, sit-ups and leg-lifts. I could see goose bumps forming in the flesh at her nipples.
After a moment she laughed.
“Discretion,” she said bitterly, “is for dead people. Am I dead?” Her tone surprised me. The anger was real. “I grew up in a goddamn mortuary, remember? Organ music day and night. Flowers up the bazoo. You wouldn’t believe how discreet a stiff can be. Very modest. They’re dead, get it? Tickle them, they don’t budge—real coy, real dead. You don’t get deader. You know what dead is? It’s dead.”
Then she gave me a brief synopsis of life and death in a funeral home.
The various odors. The comings and goings. How her father’s workshop had been located directly beneath her own bedroom, one floor down, and how at night she used to lie there with a pillow pushed up to her face. Like a gas mask, she said. Wonderful fragrances—just what a kid needs at bedtime.
She paused in mid-sit-up. There was a soft, faraway look in her eyes.
Then she shrugged.
“Anyway, I know what discreet is,” she said. “Plain flat dead. You take demure, I’ll take rigor clitoris any time.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Besides,” she said tightly, staring at me, “you better consider the alternatives. Who else would go near that mincemeat pecker of yours? Like a battle zone.”
“A bike accident, I explained that.”
“Oh, sure, a fine story.” She shook her head. “Scars and stitches. Looks like you tried to poke a blender.”
“Sarah—”
“Discretion!” she said. “Go paste Band-Aids on your weewee, Congress is adjourned.”
A troubled girl, that much was clear.
Part iron, part mush. Neurosis maybe. But how far can you dig into a personality? How much do you finally accept at face value? Do motives matter?
Politics, for example.
Why ask why?