Inside Madeleine (3 page)

“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.”

“Well, I guess if I can fantasize what it’s like to see, you can pretend to be blind. What the hell. Keep reading.”

“Alright. I’m going to start reading from a new piece, okay?”

“Whatever. You’re the one who can see.”

That night, Tony and Maggie ordered a pizza and watched a movie in his apartment. His roommate, a guitar player in another band, was out. They had the place to themselves. After the movie, in the near darkness of his room, on his futon, they made love. Maggie tried not to look. She tried to keep her eyes closed, but she couldn’t. She didn’t like it that way. She opened her eyes and saw his pale skin glowing in the dark. His black hair blending into the night, but separate all the same. He entered her and she gasped. His eyes were like a night beast’s, black and shining at her. She didn’t stop looking into them until she came, and then she couldn’t see at all.

Caroline listened at first, but as the weeks wore on, she mostly wanted to talk. Maggie felt rushed—she read quickly. Often, Caroline interrupted her. Maggie worried that she wasn’t doing her job properly—she worried what Anya would think. But Caroline was very aggressive. Very needy. She hated her roommates and wanted to talk about them all the time.

“They think I don’t know because I can’t see. So they fuck in front of me. I can hear it. The rustling of their clothes. The moist sound of their bodies against each other. I can smell it. I hate them.”

“Have you tried talking to them? Telling them it’s not okay to do that?”

Caroline’s unseeing eyes seemed to try and focus on Maggie. Funny, thought Maggie, this girl has been blind her whole life, but her face, her eyes, still appear to try to see. Caroline looked
down from her perch on her bed, and it was her nose that really pointed toward Maggie. Her white oxford shirt was buttoned incorrectly and wasn’t very white at all; it was a grayish yellow. Maggie wondered if she should say something to her. She would say that to a friend, she would tell a friend, your shirt’s buttoned incorrectly. But with Caroline, she hesitated. She felt the rules were different. And besides, she didn’t feel like Caroline was a friend.

“Of course I talk to them about it! I start yelling at them to stop! I’m not one to keep things bottled up inside, surely you’ve figured that out by now. You know what they do? They laugh. They laugh and keep doing it.”

“Maybe you should try and get a new room.”

“I don’t think so. That’s the last thing I need, to try to reorient myself. They are the ones who should go. They should go straight to hell. Fucking cunts, both of them. Michael’s nothing special is he? I mean, I can tell from the way he talks. Once, he let me feel his face, too. I’m right, don’t you think? Nothing special, either of them. And Shelley’s fat! That I know!”

Maggie decided she hated Caroline’s roommates, too. One week, upon arriving to Caroline’s room, the two of them were there. Caroline wasn’t.

“Oh, Caroline’s friend,” said Shelley sarcastically, lounging back on the bed with Michael. It was the middle of the day, but clearly they’d been fucking. Maggie was like that with Tony. She wanted to fuck him no matter what time of day, no matter
where, no matter anything. She was like them, she thought, her face growing warm.

“You know, Caroline’s really upset with your behavior.”

“Caroline’s really upset about everything,” shot back Shelley.

“Stop fucking when she’s in the room. She knows. She doesn’t like it. It’s cruel.”

“We don’t fuck when she’s in the room, not that it’s any of your business.”

“Somehow, I don’t believe you,” Maggie said, although her resolve was faltering. Maybe they didn’t fuck in front of Caroline. After all, Caroline couldn’t see, she couldn’t really know.

“Well, believe it. Caroline’s an angry bitch. I can’t wait until this year’s over. I can’t wait to live with someone who knows how to properly wash their own damn laundry.” Shelley’s face was red. She was standing now. “You try living with her. She’s impossible. She’s dirty, she’s mean. She doesn’t know how to properly wipe her ass and everything smells like shit in here. She’s always fucking angry. You try it. Oh, and she’s not here today. She went home. Her mother came to get her. She won’t be back until next week.”

The semester was coming to an end. Tony broke up with Maggie, this time it seemed for good, although it wasn’t and it wouldn’t be for another year or so, not until many more breakups happened would it be for good. Maggie’s grades dropped. Most of her professors didn’t notice, but Anya did. At the year-end conference, Anya asked Maggie, “What’s going on,
Maggie? You haven’t handed in your last paper. And the last in-class exam of yours was a bit of a disappointment. As you know, I gave you an A because there was nothing wrong with your exam, but it lacked that special brilliance you always deliver. You have such a gift, Maggie, do you know that? I hate to think you would squander it.” She looked at Maggie quizzically, but with some disappointment, some sternness. “A gift like yours is only something if you use it, otherwise you may as well not have it, and sadly, you can’t just give it to someone else, can you? Is reading to Caroline interfering with your work in any way? I wanted to ask how that was going. I think it’s so wonderful that you’re doing it.” Anya sat behind her desk, her elbows jutting out neatly, her slim, beautiful hands laying delicately on top of each other, the frizzy strands of her hair sparkling around her head. Suddenly, the late spring’s sun flowed in through a window behind the desk and flooded the room with warmth. Maggie flushed. Anya was looking straight at her, with concern. With a detached, professional concern, but with genuine concern.

“My boyfriend broke up with me,” Maggie sobbed, much to her shame. She put her head in her hands and cried noisily and wetly. How could it be? How could he not love her like she loved him? He told her, you’ll still be beautiful in your thirties. In your forties. You’ll be my beautiful wife. He had told her, his dick inside of her, still warm, we’ll have children together. Laying on top of her, his thin, small body barely covering her own, his head hanging down next to her ear, we’ll have six
children. And grandchildren. He pulled out of her and it hurt. Not physically, but it hurt, left her empty. She wanted him inside her always. He stood, naked and so white before her, his black, Italian eyes staring straight into her. And she’d believed him. And she’d never, ever felt so loved, not even as a child. He loved her, in that moment. In that moment, he loved her for the rest of her life. And the next day, he wouldn’t return her phone call. Or the next. Or the next.

What more could he want, if she gave him everything? She let him fuck her in the ass. She let him have everything she had. She had ripped open her chest and delivered him her red, bleeding, pumping heart. And now, there was nothing left of her.

“Sorry about last week,” Caroline said the following week, upon Maggie’s arrival. “I should have called you. My mom had some time off and surprised me by coming down.”

“That’s alright.”

“I’m miserable to be back. I have to get rid of Shelley. She’s the goddamn devil. But the year is ending soon. I guess I should just wait it out. Do you have any roommates?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like them?

“No, not really. But we all pay the rent on time. And we have a nice apartment for very little money so I can’t imagine any of us ever giving that up. But no, I don’t like them. They’re very spoiled.”

Caroline smiled, looking off into the center of the room. “I’m spoiled. My mother spoils me. She always did everything she could for me. She gave me everything I needed. She’d go to the end of the earth for me.”