Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“I’m sure the Sentries of Perception stand at the gateway to a wonderful world of peace and happiness and freedom from the shackles of consumerism. I’m happy that you have a belief system and you have dinners, but I just don’t feel like being brainwashed today.”

Students on the steps turned toward our commotion or deliberately looked the other way, embarrassed for me.

“I just thought you looked friendly, and yeah, to be honest, a little sad. That’s all. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Whisking my book into my bag, I walked quickly away, hoping to God I wouldn’t trip, and when I’d made it around the corner, out of sight, a sob escaped. Just one sob, then I caught my breath and thought about the complexity of breathing.

After that, nothing much happened for the duration of my freshman year, except for the diminishment of my expectations. I busied myself with schoolwork. Somewhere in that time, I had applied for and received a research assistantship with a comparative literature professor writing a book on sentimentalism from Clarissa to E.T. Landing the position and the small stipend attached to it was the type of goal I knew how to achieve through hard work and conscientiousness — fine abilities to have, except they didn’t help me do the thing I most longed to do, which was fall in love. My unimaginative plan to stay in the dorms over the summer started to seem like a bad haircut, an unnecessary handicap. When I saw the flyer— Roommate needed to share apt. with one M and one F (not a couple). Own large room, close to campus. $250/month. Call Andy/Lee— I made myself call. It was tacked to the wall in the coffee shop that I would hesitate to go into if I wasn’t dressed right. There was another coffee shop nearby, fine for coffee, where nobody cared how you were dressed, but there was no point in sitting in that one. Nothing interesting was going to happen to you there.

In the three hours between phoning, speaking to Andy, and showing up, some fantasy had already taken shape in my mind. The slight halting in his voice conveyed an intensity that made it hard for him to speak smoothly, and though he might initially think of me as a little sister, the sexual tension between us would be too strong to deny, possibly leading to some complications with Lee, but we would cross that bridge when we got there. When he came to the door of the drooping Victorian, I silently scolded myself for being disappointed.

My first impression: Andy had a friendly face and a soft body. He wore clothes meant for a more effete, leaner man and they fit him snugly. In a vintage bowling shirt with the name Tom embroidered on it, he looked a bit like Tom, the suburban recreationalist who self-medicated with muffins, whose butt cheeks had grooved the vinyl driver’s seat of his ’86 Cutlass Ciera into a cradle. I detected no sexual tension between us as he led me up the narrowing stairs to the third floor. My disappointment set me at ease. I didn’t have to be afraid of saying something stupid, I only had to judge whether he said the wrong thing or decide to be generous and suspend judgment altogether. Only he wasn’t saying the wrong things; he was saying straightforward and sociable things (“I’m Andy”; “Nice to meet you”; “How’s it going?”) that betrayed no subtext whatsoever. My self-assurance withered into humility ( He doesn’t find me attractive enough for subtext? ), which then briefly descended into desperation ( Why doesn’t he find me attractive? ), which then picked itself up, dusted itself off, and morphed into resentment ( Who is he not to find me attractive? ) and a renewed superiority ( If I wanted to, I could make this happen… if I wanted to ). Did I say there was no sexual tension?

“Sometimes I wish we had a stair lift,” he said.

“Sometimes I want a motorized scooter,” I said.

He looked back and smiled. For a moment, on the landing, I forgot there was a third person in this equation. Then Andy opened the door onto a few feet of hallway and a living room where a girl in a red shirt sat on a white sofa. Light slanted on her from a bay window, and it made me think of when you face the sun and close your eyes.

I thought, at first glance, that this girl had no use for enthusiasm. But that was how she was so disarming. She simply smiled, getting up and putting out her hand, saying “Hi.” She seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place her.

There was no incense in their apartment, not a tapestry in sight and no dorm-room door dry-erase boards. Instead there were drawings tacked to the wall, piles of books, Salvation Army furniture covered in bed sheets. A vase of flowers on the mantle of a disused fireplace. I never thought to bother with flowers. To buy them would have been an extravagance, but I wouldn’t have even considered picking flowers like these purple and yellow ones that grew in untended curb grass; probably because my mother never bothered with flowers. She preferred hearty plants: ficus trees, decorative yet practical arrangements of branches or an earthy bowl of pinecones. My mother would have said that flowers were lovely but ultimately frivolous. She wouldn’t have considered them lovely because they were frivolous.

Aligned in their attitudes, my parents had instructed me to be noncommittal when looking for an apartment, even a summer sublet. Weigh your options, do your homework, don’t fall in love with anything, as though you could choose not to fall in love. But I had been doing my homework my whole life. How bad a mistake could I make here, on these wide floorboards in the room they led me to, under this sloping ceiling with the maple tree outside the dormer window?

In the kitchen — wood-paneled walls, linoleum — drinking beer that Andy bought legally, I learned a few more particulars. Andy had a job at the computer science center. Lee was taking summer classes. Andy would be a senior come September and Lee would have been except she’d taken time off. She didn’t go into detail, which made it so mysterious.

It hit me, then, where I recognized Lee from. Not because she looked the same as she had that day on the library steps — her hair, now a dull blue-black, fell in a jagged bob — but because I had the same feeling I did the first time I’d encountered her: standing in the ocean, close enough to shore to resist a riptide, but wanting, deep down, to see where the pull would take me.

“I DON’T KNOWif you remember this,” I said, “but I think you once tried to talk to me about something having to do with the Sentries of Perception.”

Her laugh was throaty and layered. It reminded me of a science museum exhibit that charted sound as waves of light along a dark wall.

“Oh! Holy shit.” She began to chew one of her nails then drew her hand away from her mouth. “You were my first and last Reach Out. That’s what Bruce called them.”

“Who’s Bruce?”

“Who isn’t Bruce?” Andy interrupted, his voice increasingly booming. “He’s a seeker and a prophet. A desert bloom! A brave soul caught between the astral plane and the check-out lane.”

“Bruce was an adjunct anthropology professor,” Lee said, a little irritated. “But now he works at the Stop and Shop and heads up a local chapter of Mind Faith. This spiritual community? They have these intensive workshops and their own vocabulary. It’s a lot of reconstituted Castaneda and Huxley.”

I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about.

“They also have potlucks,” Andy added.

“I met Bruce about a year ago. I was troubled. He was really good-looking. It was a low point in my life. Blah, blah, blah. I put you on the spot, didn’t I?”

“I just felt like I had a sign on me or something that said ‘loser.’ I’m sorry I ran off.”