Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

FOR WEEKS THEREAFTER, Darconville found the small notes left everywhere for him always infested with little one-dimensional sets of peepers, like the two eyes of Horus; thus:

(..)

They were signed, “The Little Thing.”

XXII

The Clitheroe Kids

Like moody beasts they lie along the sands.

—JOHN GRAY, Femmes Damnées

“ ‘Rafe, throbbing, thought: I’ll fix you, sweetheart — and, hitting that dame a good smack, he flung her onto the bed and prepared to throw his hot gooms into her,’ “

read Jessie Lee Deal, licking her upper lip.

“ ‘O brother, he thought, as she jiggled lasciviously in her scanties, this is some brawd! And not exactly overdressed! And then, hornmad, he drilled his lust-hungry tongue deep into Rhoda’s ear and hissed, “O.K., boobsie, show me some of your tricks!” She arched her back and writhed about. O beautiful! thought Rafe, this kiddo is wide-open, no buts about it.’ “

It was a cold winter night, and in one of the rooms on the fourth floor of Clitheroe, a senior dorm, the girls from several adjoining suites had gathered together, as was their habit, for a general bull-session of gab and gossip: sitting around in pajamas, swapping stories, and, on this occasion, listening to random installments being read from a currently popular and exhilarating fuel-burner called I Knew Rhoda Rumpswab by 16 People (Troilism Press, N.Y.) — a paperback, slightly damp and fungoid from overuse, that sprouted open if left on a table to several well-reviewed passages. The room was filled with an eye-watering canopy of cigarette smoke. A couple of girls were yawning. But it was better than studying.

“I declare,” said Cookie Crumpacker, with a wimbling tongue, “I’m about to just plain boil over listening to that thing, honey, and you can believe it if you think you can’t!” She rubbed her hand over her gluteus médius and whistled out in two beats the commonly understood flirtatious iamb: u —!

Anaphora Franck, sitting on the edge of the bed, grabbed the book. “I have fifty reasons I’d like to be Rhoda Rumpswab. Want to know one?”

“Hey, but isn’t that a pseudonysm or something?” asked slew-eyed Celeste Skyler, the bulb of her head voodooed with bobby pins, pink rollers, and metal clips, and she pointed to the book cover (Woman, Leg up on Chair, Unhooking Fishnet Hose). The herb wisdom at Quinsy, let it be said, did not grow in everyone’s garden.

It was a question, however, given small attention. No one was listening. No one ever listened. Added to that, it was just the very worst time of year. Christmas had come and gone, and even the picturesque dusting of light snow on campus gave short relief to the students, now facing exams. The night-to-morning processus during Finals Week rarely varied, obligations were unrelieved, and the faculties of concentration lagged. And then of course the girls all knew each other— usually by chummy diminutives like Muffie, Mopsy, Sissy, Missy, etc. — and any new habits, opinions, or quirks at this late date could only come as a surprise. So they just lazed about doing what girls together have been doing from time immemorial, primping, talking about boys, and raising, as only groups in dorms can, those neo-ethical, quasi-theological questions usually reserved for the wee hours, you know, famous old topoi like: Would You Confess Under Torture? Which of the Five Senses Would You Rather Lose? How Would You Commit Suicide? Would You Ever Eat a Human Being? (And, of course, its ancillary: Which Part?) What Would Be Your One Wish If You Had Only One? What If You Were Alone at Night and a Weirdo Came into Your Room?

Mimsy Borogroves was ironing her hair. Sally Ann Sprouse, smoothing gouts of depilatory cream over her saber-shinned legs, wondered out loud if erections hurt boys. Glenda Barrow, visibly keratoconjunctivine, said she was going to sue the college linen service and asked if anybody wanted to take bets on it. One fat little puella, Thomasina Quod — a girl, reputed to be an ovarian dwarf, who was often disparagingly called “Buns”—lay back eating a poptart and reading a pamphlet of intimate advice with her feet up on the wall in tiny slippers trimmed with moth-eaten squirrel fur. Holly Sunday, a folksinger with a macrobiotic complexion and straight blond hair, was strumming a guitar and singing with exquisite purity to a darkened window. Aone Pitts, wimpled in a towel, sat in a corner tossing a beanbag frog up and down and claimed she once heard of an unmarried girl transvestite who fell in love with a married homosexual man! Well, interposed Donna Wynkoop, there was a guy on her street back home who was famous for stopping the interior opening of his nostrils with his tongue! And what, Robin Winglet wanted to know, did they think she found that morning on a wheat biscuit in the Quinsy dining-hall? No one asked. And so she tried, unsuccessfully, to tell lovely, spoiled, rich Pengwynne Custis who was not listening but who had been for some time confiding to everyone, while blowing her nails dry, that she had lost her virginity in the Zakopane Forest to a Polish officer with sideburns when she was fourteen — and she loved it, she said, she didn’t regret it one bit, she’d do it again, and they could all eat their hearts out for all she cared, OK? But to care was, logically, to have listened. “ I lost it the night of the sophomore prom, in a car,” said Mona Lisa Drake, with a broad smile. “I just kicked my yellow satin pumps out the window, yanked up my organdy, and got tagged. It was called ‘The Spring Bounce.’ “ She winked. “The prom, that is.”

A spate of rape stories followed. Sex, of course, was by far the most popular subject in Clitheroe 403, but it was equally understood, in that particular room at least, that bragging about one’s sexual adventures with any kind of conceit or competition was simply not done, and most of the girls there generally talked about sex as if to avoid it or exorcise it, as Eskimos, say, use refrigerators to keep food from freezing. The reason wasn’t difficult to figure out. It was Hypsipyle Poore’s room.

“A cockroach,” said Robin Winglet, to no one.

A knock, an entry.

The room went silent. Loretta Boyco — tall, ill-complexioned, homely as a winter pear — stood in the doorway with her hair-dryer and, explaining that the hum was bothering her roommate, asked if she could plug it in in their outlet.

“Plug it in — right over there.”

“You can plug it in any where,” pitched in Cookie Crumpacker, smirking and stroking her tummy underneath the football jersey she wore which showed, to her advantage, a rather extreme case of bouncy overendowment. She crossed her legs and winked at Loretta, who glowered back. They weren’t friends. Loretta, not one of the “regulars” there, was of a somewhat different stripe: secretary of the Tidy Lawn Club at Quinsy, proctor at Fitts, and ex-president of the Baptist Student Union at Consolidated High School in Chattanooga, she toed the mark. She used pink sponge-rubber breasts and kept a picture of God in her room. Her hobby was twirling. As she clicked on her dryer, sniffed serenely, and began to read the book she had brought with her — Caroline Lee Hentz’s Linda, or The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole —several girls behind her raised their hands in claws.

Charity was scant. It was of course a critical time of the year and nerves were on edge. Day in, day out, there had been nothing but one long round of work for two weeks: getting up in the morning, walking through the grey dawn to a classroom, waiting with faces like piggy banks for some fanatic to hand them an impossible exam, and then, what? Returning to the dorms for another night of study and sweat? Horrible! It was like prison! They murmured. They made faces. They moped about like the defiled Moabite women of Shittim and all the while suffered from things like bad bowel rotation, eyesquint, omphalocele, swelled hummocks, and pinworm! For a stupid degree? They didn’t need? When they were all going to get married anyway?