Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

Mel fixed her eyes on Caroline. “If you look tough, you get treated a certain way and it helps you become what you want to be.”

“You want to be tough?”

“Hard, in fact. Immune to the whims of the body. And what weaknesses I have are my own business.” Mel turned away, and Caroline knew the conversation was over. Mel had such certainty. But she didn’t rant, she didn’t bluster. Caroline admired that. Mel somehow escaped being smug because she didn’t say more than she had to. Rants always make it seem as though the person ranting is desperately trying to convince himself of something. Or maybe the ranter becomes so interested in the rhetoric of what he is saying that convincing is beside the point. It is just about language and pattern and repetition. And the rush of words and adrenaline as it all spills out, exhausting any opposition with an overload of words. Mel was not evangelical in this manner.

Strange Caroline felt this way now. Bobby, after all, made ranting such an art. Whole days could go by and she wouldn’t think of him. Already.

CAROLINE AND Berry ate dinner at Caroline’s small table and watched the president give a speech. Again, Caroline noticed the sweat on his upper lip. It was hard to listen to him. He spoke about himself in the third person and described the “rather rough assaults” the president must suffer. He stood at the lectern with a peculiar, forced smile on his face. It was very specific, this expression of resentment and humiliation. What was it? Caroline shook her head. It was vulnerability. The bastard. He was melting before their eyes, and it was a lousy thing to watch. Berry ignored the TV. Animated bubbles advertised Dow Bathroom Cleaner. “We work hard so you won’t have to.” Caroline turned it off.

Berry sipped wine from a pottery mug. She described, in detail, her last breakup. Her last sexual fling. Caroline listened and drank her wine and watched Berry wind a piece of blond hair around her finger.

“I don’t know why I do it, sometimes.” Berry pulled her finger from her hair, and the little curl sprang back toward her face.

“I feel like when I don’t want to I’m being uptight or something. You know, we are supposed to be open-minded and loving, right? And not make sex into these power games between men and women but make it equal.”

“But you still feel lousy about it in the morning.”

“I have some hang-ups still.”

“Maybe you just don’t want to have sex every time. Isn’t that allowed?” Caroline said.

“But I do want to, I just think it still means different things and we all pretend it doesn’t.”

Caroline poured what remained of the wine into her mug. Berry lit up a joint pinched in a roach clip and took a drag.

“Maybe I should just become a lesbian. Like Mel.” Berry offered the smoke to Caroline. Caroline took a hit and exhaled slowly. She thought it risky, but then it was okay. Time between sentences elongated and expanded. She felt good, all in one place for a moment.

“Is that really how it works, you just decide?”

Berry started to giggle. Caroline found this funny too, and she laughed. It was strange to hear herself laugh.

“Can’t you tell that Mel has the hots for me?” Berry said, still laughing.

“Yeah, I noticed. You’ve got her wrapped around your little finger.” Caroline snorted into her hand, then coughed, laughing. “Everyone wants you, Berry.”

“Of course they do.” And Berry thrust her breasts out a bit and made mock bedroom eyes. Caroline opened another bottle of wine. Berry scrounged in Caroline’s purse for some cigarettes. She pulled out one broken Parliament. “You should lose the purse,” Berry said. “Let go of all the stuff you lug around everywhere. Do you really need it?”

“No, I don’t.” She stared oddly at her purse. It seemed a foreign and ridiculous object. Then she was at a loss, fixated on the leather shoulder bag. Caroline forced her attention back to Berry and tried to think of something to say, something to keep the mood going. But she shouldn’t have worried, Berry would never allow conversation to lag for too long. She just needed to take another hit off the joint. Berry tilted backward in her chair until it hit the wall behind her. She smiled as she looked at Caroline.

“Well? Aren’t you going to tell me about the big heartache you seem so sad about?”

Caroline shrugged.

“C’mon, what’s the big mystery? Was he a married man? Was he a woman?”

Caroline sipped her wine. “He was a Republican.”

Berry giggled and coughed on the wine. “I have always had a thing for David Eisenhower, myself,” Berry said. “Or even Nixon. I’m serious. I watch him on TV, going down, angry, trembling, scotch on his breath, hunched in his awful suit. And I think I’m attracted in some perverse way. His repression—”

“Okay, enough.”

“Do you think I should bring that up at the next CR meeting? Oh, Mel, I’d like to discuss my sexual fantasies about the president.”

“I met him at a demonstration,” Caroline said.

“Where?”

“Berkeley. He was active in, you know, the usual groups. It’s like you always see the same people at the demonstrations. Well, he stood out. He was from L.A., but he became involved in the campus activities around San Francisco. He was very plugged into the scene, you know, everything I wasn’t.”

“I met Sandy at a demonstration. I picked him up the first time I saw him,” Berry said. She munched on a fat, cigar-shaped pretzel stick in between tokes and playing with her hair and sips of wine. Crumbs landed on her breasts, and she brushed them off without really breaking her chewing stride. “Do you want to know what I said to him?”

“Sure,” Caroline said.

“I seriously said this, Caroline. I’m not kidding.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Do you want to come home with me and get high and screw?’”

“That was clever,” Caroline said.

“He didn’t say a word, just followed me right out of there.”

“You don’t say.”

“I was very pleased with myself. I just picked him and that was it. What is his name?” Berry spoke through her now soggy pretzel stick, still perched cigarlike in the corner of her lips.

“Who?”

“Your man. The heartbreaker.”

“Bobby.” Caroline was pretty high, and she also thought she just wanted to say his name, feel it come out of her mouth, hear it hang in the air for a second. But then Berry repeated the name, and when Caroline heard Berry utter it, she wished she could take it back. She felt the hollow in her stomach, then a queasy, drunk feeling. Berry smiled and waited for her to speak again. Fuck it, Caroline thought.

“He had a lot of creative ideas about the world. He was buoyant and possible in a way that most people aren’t. And he fell in love with me, which was probably the thing I found most impressive.” Berry crossed her legs on the chair and leaned forward. She looked pretty in the candlelight. They were listening to the latest Dylan “comeback” album, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid . Berry played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” three times in a row. They both agreed it was the only good song on the album. Caroline thought Berry looked like the women Dylan wrote about, bejeweled and disheveled and bewitching, ornate in body and soul, or at least it looked that way from where Caroline sat, stoned and a little drunk.

“I never had a lot of men interested in me,” Caroline said.

“C’mon,” Berry said. “That’s not true.”

“No, it is true. But I wasn’t interested in a career in men. So it wasn’t a problem. I was interested in, well, society. Improvement. Moral perfection. I could have been a nun. But he was playful and passionate. Always very bright, and unfailingly convincing. And he had incredible confidence in his opinions.”