Paula Bomer - Inside Madeleine

When the class ended, Maggie numbly walked up to Anya Lander. Close up, Anya had acne scars, and her head seemed large for her body, but she was still a supremely magnetic person. Standing so close to Anya made Maggie dizzy. And now, here she was. She could practically smell her. One other person remained in the classroom and that was Caroline, the blind girl. She remained seated in the front row, a mousy girl — short, pale skin, unseeing blue eyes, dishwater brown hair unattractively shaped around her face. Her shirt was ill-fitting; in fact, it may have been put on wrongly.

“Thanks so much for volunteering to read to Caroline. What’s your name?”

“Maggie. Maggie Drescher.”

“Maggie, this is Caroline.”

Caroline stuck a hand eagerly in the direction of Maggie. Her other hand gripped a cane. “Nice to meet you. When can we start? I’d like to set up a once a week meeting. Let’s find out how our schedules work out and set something up. I’m very anxious to stay with the class. I don’t like getting behind in my schoolwork. Can you walk me back to my dorm room? We could figure out everything on the way there.” Caroline’s fingers closed on Maggie’s arm like talons. Anya Lander beamed at Maggie as she guided her new acquaintance out the door.

Caroline was very bossy during the walk, ordering her in a clipped, nervous way. “Turn here. Now go straight.”

Caroline’s grip was too hard. Later there’d be small, purple bruises on Maggie’s arm. Maggie said, “Why don’t you just tell me where you live and I’ll just walk us there?”

“No. No, that won’t do at all in this case, but for other things, that would be great. But for now, I need to always go the same route. I need to learn my way to every class because I can’t rely on people taking me around. I’m often by myself.”

“Alright,” Maggie said.

“Just getting to class is a big ordeal for me,” said Caroline, breathing an acrid, nervous breath at Maggie. “I’ll get the hang of it by the end of the semester. And then, of course, everything will change again,” Caroline snorted, and then barked sharply, “Now take a right!”

When they arrived at Caroline’s dorm room, a couple disentangled themselves from each other and sat up from the bed where they’d been clearly fooling around. “You could knock you know,” said the young woman, a chubby, dark-haired girl. The room smelled sweaty.

“You could go to his room for a change,” snapped Caroline. “This is Maggie. Maggie, this is my roommate, Shelley, and I assume her boyfriend, Michael.”

The couple said meek, watery hellos. Maggie couldn’t help but notice Michael’s erection pushing against his khakis. After she looked at it, she looked up at him and then at Shelley. They held her gaze.

“Maggie’s going to be reading to me for anthropology class, since none of the material is in Braille,” Caroline said. “I’ll need time alone here with her. We’re working out a schedule now. And once I give it to you, you’ll have to hump each other somewhere else during our meeting times. Got that?”

They ended up meeting once a week, at one in the afternoon, the day before the anthropology class met. Maggie’d knock on Caroline’s door, and Caroline would open the door for her — it took her longer to get to it than it would a seeing person. To her dismay, this bothered Maggie. She felt impatience rise in her as she listened for Caroline’s noisy approach. “Hi, come in, come in.” Maggie watched her walk toward the bed with its cheap, blue comforter and flowered pillowcases.

Maggie always sat on the floor below Caroline’s bed, on a thin, dusty white rug. She stayed an hour or sometimes more. As the semester progressed, it was often more. The small dorm room, crowded with two twin beds and two desks and two dressers, smelled bad. Often, Maggie would ask if she could open the window to air out the place a bit. Why did it smell? Was it just the smell of other people, a foreign body smell? Maggie’s boyfriend Tony smelled. He smelled like sweat and Speedstick deodorant and leather and like cigarettes, even though he didn’t smoke, because he spent so much time in bars. Maggie loved his smell. To her, it was life.

Maggie read to her from the carefully chosen Xeroxes: “In many narratives of human evolution there is a similar sense that man may be doomed, that although civilization evolved as a means of protecting man from nature, it is now his greatest threat.”

“Huh,” snorted Caroline. “I would’ve been dead meat back then. Left behind for the hyenas to eat. Thank God for civilization and its constructs.”

“I don’t know if I believe that,” said Maggie.

“You better believe it. The blind and the crippled, the retarded and the children and the old people — we’re not the fittest. The survival of the fittest, Maggie. Don’t forget.”

“I bet early man took care of his loved ones.”

“Pass that one by Anya. I bet she’d disagree.”

“Anya never disagrees with anyone. She lets everyone speak their mind. And then she just looks at you thoughtfully. Sometimes I don’t think she believes any of the evolutionary theories.”

“I know what you mean,” said Caroline. “So why does she teach this stuff?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe she’s such a great teacher because she doesn’t believe any of it.”

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Anya? Yeah, I guess so. Although she has acne scars. It makes her somewhat vulnerable. It makes her more human.”

“Are you beautiful, Maggie?”

There was something nasal in the tone of Caroline’s question; a mocking hostility.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“What do you look like?” Caroline asked. “Tell me,” she said, in her demanding, aggressive way.

“Well, I’m tall. I’m five eight. And I’m blonde and I have green eyes.”

“You’re not fat, that I know from touching you,” Caroline said, smugly. “I bet you’re beautiful. Yeah.”

Maggie felt ashamed. She felt her cheeks get hot.

“I’ve been told I’m not ugly. That I’m attractive.” Caroline put her hands to her face. Maggie looked up at her, this tiny unseeing person scrunched up against the flowered pillows of her bed. She couldn’t be more than five feet tall. She was pasty, as if she never was in direct sunlight. Her hair looked dirty. But she had a button nose and her eyes were a striking clear blue. She had large breasts pushing against her oxford button down shirt. She was not ugly, no. “I had a boyfriend at my old school, at my high school. I went to a high school for the blind. He told me I was beautiful. But he was blind. My mother always told me I was beautiful. But that’s what mothers tell their kids, no matter what. Not that I know what beautiful is, really, to people like you.”

“Where’s your boyfriend now?”

“We broke up. He started fucking someone else. A seeing girl. Can you believe it? He was very ambitious.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Screw him anyway. She was a snarky bitch. I knew her. She taught at our school. He gets what he deserves. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“I do,” said Maggie. “But we fight a lot. We break up a lot. But, yes, I do.”

“What does he look like? Is he handsome?”

“I don’t know if I would call him handsome. He’s not very tall and his hair is thinning. But I think he’s the most beautiful person in the world. I can’t stop looking at him. I see him in my mind all the time. I guess that’s what love does. It makes the way people look unimportant. It blinds you, sort of.”

“Nothing blinds you but being blind, Maggie. You’ll never know what it means to be blind.”

“Of course not! I didn’t mean that.”