It was like cortisol—or something—had been released into Julie’s bloodstream in preparation for a showdown, and though the cortisol had proved unnecessary, she was compelled to deploy it. She said, “Gayle, how are you doing? In terms of, you know, Graham?” Even now, there was a certain illicit thrill in saying his name aloud, as if he were a regular person.
Gayle rolled her eyes. “Have you heard that he’s moved in with Beth? He was staying at a residential hotel for a while, but now he’s at her place. Frankly, I’m not sure what she sees in him. What does a gorgeous thirty-year-old woman want with a man having a midlife crisis?”
Julie’s heartbeat had picked up. “Who’s Beth?”
“Beth Brenner,” Gayle said. “In mergers and acquisitions.”
Julie had a dim idea of who this was—an employee of the firm where both Graham and Keith worked, an up-and-comer who was, if Julie was thinking of the right person, her own physical opposite. Her mental image of Beth Brenner was of a tall, slender blonde wearing a short-skirted business suit and high heels.
“I’m sorry,” Julie said, which of course was true.
Gayle shook her head. “He claims it started after we separated, but come on. You know what, though? She can have him.”
Because the children and adults were entering the museum in a horde, it wasn’t the moment for Julie to burst into tears again, though there was time to discreetly check her phone and confirm that Beth Brenner was who she was picturing. Half the second graders were led to the Butterfly Center proper—basically a tropical greenhouse—and the other half, including Lucas’s group, started in a classroom, where they were each given a sheet of orange paper that read, across the top, THE WORLD HAS MANY BUTTERFLIES. Below that were the words Did you know…and an assortment of facts: Butterflies have four wings, fold them when resting, and live during their pupal stage in a chrysalis.
A docent led a discussion among the children while Julie and the other adults stood against a side wall. She can have him. Would Julie ever in casual conversation say that about her husband and another woman? It felt unlikely. She had wondered, in retrospect, if she had been hoping to leave Keith for Graham, hoping she and Graham would marry. She thought but wasn’t certain that she’d only been trying to have an affair. Though how embarrassing, in light of the news about Beth Brenner, that Julie had imagined Graham might desire her forty-four-year-old self, even boob-lifted and hair-straightened. Sometimes, in the last few weeks, she had thought maybe he’d been denying his attraction to her as an act of chivalry, in order not to destroy her marriage, too. But Beth Brenner offered rather convincing evidence that he’d said he was never romantically interested in her because he was never romantically interested in her.
The children made butterflies out of paper, glitter, and pipe cleaners, and Lucas tried to give her his to hold as they left the classroom. Julie shook her head. “You can hang on to it like everyone else,” she said.
In front of the doors to the “rain forest,” Julie, Gayle, and the ten children in their group were told by another docent that they should not touch the butterflies, even if one landed on them. Before exiting, they’d need to make sure no butterflies were clinging to their clothes. Already, Julie could feel the humid air.
Julie had been to the Butterfly Center several times. Inside its tropical clime, a walkway snaked around massive nectar plants and fruit trees, below a three-story roof of windowpanes. At first, the children shouted out on glimpsing a butterfly—someone identified a zebra butterfly, then a green swallowtail—but they were so plentiful that the children soon settled down.
And yet, Julie thought, the world did not have many butterflies. Or at least for her, it hadn’t. A long time ago, after Julie and Keith had been dating for a month, they’d gone for drinks one night with a bunch of his business school classmates, and the next morning, while the two of them were still in bed at Keith’s apartment, Julie had begun describing her impressions of his friends—that guy James had been a blowhard, and Ross had made a weird comment about affirmative action, and clearly Nick’s girlfriend was anorexic or bulimic or both; in fact, Julie wondered if she’d puked in the bathroom at the bar, because she’d been gone twenty minutes and returned to the table wobbly and minty-smelling.
From his side of the bed, Keith had said, without looking at her, “It’s not that you’re wrong. But when you say stuff like this, it makes life a lot less enjoyable.”
Julie had felt chastened, which possibly had been his intent, or possibly that was only a by-product and the intent was simply to get her to stop. That she had stopped, and remorsefully rather than petulantly, she’d interpreted as a sign of her own maturity, the maturity of their relationship. That Keith had wanted her to stop she’d interpreted as a sign of his decency.
She was just a few feet from the exit when the butterfly landed on her forearm, on top of the thin sleeve of her white cotton sweater. The butterfly had wings of mostly iridescent blue, edged in black with tiny yellow flecks. She raised her arm, the way she would if another person were about to hook his through hers. She expected this to make the butterfly depart, but it remained in place. “Mom!” said Lucas. “There’s a butterfly on your arm! You guys, there’s a butterfly on my mom’s arm!”
The second graders were ecstatic. They exclaimed to her and one another as they approached, inspecting the insect, and still it didn’t move. It quivered a little, but it didn’t fly away. Gayle, who was also nearby, said, “That’s good luck, Julie. You should go buy a lottery ticket.”
If there was a kind of person who believed in the magic of butterflies, Julie was not one of them. She had no use for this small moment of ostensible enchantment.
“Or maybe it’s that you get to make a wish,” Gayle said.
It was rude to stare, Julie knew, but for many seconds, she stared at Gayle anyway, wondering just what it was the other woman imagined she would wish for.
Vox Clamantis in Deserto
I’d seen Rae Sullivan around campus, but it wasn’t until early February of our freshman year that I decided I wanted to be like her. This realization happened at Dartmouth’s post office, on a Tuesday morning, when I was in line behind her; I was there to buy stamps and she was sending a package. It was a little after nine A.M., a quiet hour, and as the only person working helped the students in front of us, I had plenty of time to scrutinize the package in Rae’s arms: a cardboard box addressed to a person named Noah Bishop. Though the rest of Noah Bishop’s address was obscured by the angle at which Rae was holding the box, I could see that her handwriting was jagged in a cool way—it was unfeminine—and she’d decorated the borders of the box with patterns reminiscent of an Indian tapestry and the rest of it with erratic hearts drawn in black and maroon Sharpie. The hearts seemed to me unabashedly feminine; also, of course, they implied that Rae, whose name I hadn’t known until reading the return address in the box’s corner, was sending the package to her boyfriend for Valentine’s Day. At that time, the thing I most wished for was a boyfriend. I’d been aiming, unsuccessfully, for a Dartmouth boyfriend, but it seemed even more romantic to have one somewhere else—it implied yearning and passionate reunions. I was nineteen and a virgin, and hadn’t so much as kissed anyone since arriving on campus five months before.
Rae was a little taller than I was, wearing corduroy pants, Birkenstock clogs, and a North Face coat that, when she turned after paying, fell open in such a way that it revealed a gray hooded sweatshirt with the word EXETER across it in maroon. I couldn’t actually see all the letters of EXETER, but I’d been at Dartmouth long enough to recognize the name of a fancy boarding school, even if I was from Des Moines. Over her wavy brown hair, Rae wore a black skullcap.
If you went feature by feature, I don’t think anyone would have said she and I particularly resembled each other, but there was something recognizable about her to me, some similarity. Our builds were about the same, our
hair the same length, our clothes comparable in their implication of not exactly making an effort, though this was 1994, when almost everyone was making less of an effort. But Rae’s way of not making an effort fashion-wise was, like her handwriting, far cooler than mine; mine stemmed more from confusion than indifference and resulted in a wardrobe of unironic colorful sweaters and bleached jeans that were loose but tapered.
I didn’t speak to Rae in the post office. But that night, after I took off my sweater—it was a cotton crewneck with alternating squares of turquoise, orange, and black—I never put it back on. I resolved that in the future, I’d wear only solids.
* * *
—
In the fall term of the following year, Rae and I ended up in the same English seminar. I knew from having looked her up in the freshman book—a forest-green paperback booklet filled with black-and-white head shots, with full names and home addresses listed underneath—that she was my year and was from Manchester, New Hampshire. When all of us in the seminar went around the room and introduced ourselves, she said she was an English major. I was pre-med, referred to at Dartmouth as pre-health. Although things still weren’t great for me socially, I liked my classes, both the sciences and the humanities, and my grades were good. Partly because I’d been a diligent student in high school and my work habits were ingrained and partly because I didn’t know what else to do with myself, I studied a lot.
As a freshman, I’d been assigned a single, which was unusual but not unheard of. For me, it had been disastrous. In the new setting of college, I didn’t know how to integrate myself with other people. I had spent a tremendous amount of high school, even while I was studying, thinking about how badly I wanted to go to Dartmouth and about the boyfriends I’d have there. I hadn’t realized how much time I’d devoted to my imaginary, longed-for life at Dartmouth until I arrived at Dartmouth and found that by achieving my goal I had lost my primary means of entertaining myself and feeling optimistic. My father, who was a rheumatologist, had himself graduated from Dartmouth in the early seventies, and my family had driven from Iowa to attend his tenth reunion when I was eight, whereupon I had developed a decade-long fixation with the school that was almost romantic in its intensity.
When I started college, my father had been the one to accompany me to campus—this time we flew, changing planes in Chicago—and prior to classes, I’d attended a freshman orientation camping trip in the White Mountains. The night after the trip ended, several girls on my hall assembled by the stairwell to walk to a fraternity party; it was a minor triumph that I’d managed to attach myself to this group. As we descended the steps, the girl in front, a very pretty blond tennis player from Washington, D.C., named Annabel, called over her shoulder, “I heard they call this the GFU party.” She paused, then added merrily, “Short for Get Fucked Up.”
There were eight or nine girls in the group, and I was bringing up the rear. When I froze, I’m sure no one noticed. I stood there while they descended another flight, and then I returned to my room and lay on my bed and listened to a Garth Brooks CD (my father and I had attended two of his concerts together) and eventually pulled out the MCAT study guide I sometimes looked at before bed; it was a five-hundred-page eight-by-eleven paperback, and something about it was very comforting to me. The girls did, apparently, notice my absence eventually, because the next day one of them said, “Where did you go last night? We all were wondering!” I said I’d felt sick, which in a way I had. For my entire freshman year, I didn’t set foot in a fraternity house or, for that matter, a sorority house.
Over the summer, in Des Moines, I spent mornings babysitting for a family with two little boys and afternoons volunteering at the hospital where my father worked. On my bedside table I kept a list of concrete things I could do to improve my life at Dartmouth, which included:
-Once a week if someone seems nice and approachable ask if they want to go out for pizza at EBA’s
-At least say hi to but try to also smile at people I pass
-Join the debate team?
Back on campus, I lived in a single again, and as I pulled sheets over the twin mattress for the first time, I wondered, but not optimistically, if this was the bed where I’d lose my virginity.
As it happened, I didn’t join the debate team, and I didn’t execute my EBA’s pizza initiative because, after the very first English seminar, I was leaving the classroom in Sanborn House when a female voice behind me said, “What a douchebag.” There was a boy walking not with but parallel to me, about five feet away, and we made confused eye contact, unsure if the comment was addressed to either or both of us.
When I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the speaker was Rae Sullivan. In a disgruntled but chummy tone, as if we’d previously had many similar conversations, she added, “I heard he was full of himself, but his arrogance exceeded my wildest expectations.” She was referring, I assumed, to the seminar instructor. Although it was a literature class, he had started by telling us he was a poet and spent fifteen minutes describing his work. He’d called it language poetry, a term I had never heard. But I hadn’t been bothered by the personal digression; I’d found it impressive.
“I read one of his poems, and it’s literally about having anal sex with his wife,” Rae was saying. “And I’ve seen her, and she’s a total cow.”
I said, “I’m taking the class to fulfill the English requirement.” This was as close as I could get to disparaging a professor.
The boy, who had introduced himself in class as Isaac, said, “I found the poems in his first book derivative of Ashbery.”
Rae looked between Isaac and me, intensely, for a few seconds, as if making a decision, then said, “Do you guys want to go smoke a joint?”
* * *
—
After Rae and Isaac and I became best friends, it occurred to me only occasionally to wonder whom we were replacing. Who had been Rae’s previous best friends? I somehow knew that her freshman roommate had been a girl named Sally Alexander, but she and Sally didn’t seem to hang out anymore. Much like my freshman-year neighbor Annabel, she of the GFU party, Sally was blond and very pretty; on the Dartmouth campus, there was a disproportionate number of blond and very pretty girls, socially adept girls, sometimes gracefully anorexic or anorexic-ish girls. I’d observed several who ate no fat, ever; for breakfast, they had a bagel, for lunch a bagel and salad without dressing, and for dinner a bagel, salad without dressing, and frozen yogurt. Not that I witnessed it, but they apparently drank a lot of beer; as a freshman, I had found the term boot and rally so anthropologically interesting that I’d shared it with my parents, thereby disturbing my mother. I had a strong sense that, among these poised, preppy, winsomely eating-disordered girls, I couldn’t compete for male attention; faced with the enticements of such creatures, what boy would want my dowdy Iowan virginity?
Like me, Rae avoided fraternity parties, which at Dartmouth in 1994 meant avoiding parties. Unexpectedly, she too had a single—hers was in Allen House—and in the evening, after dinner, she liked to sit on her bed, roll and smoke a joint, and watch a VHS tape of Edward Scissorhands on her TV. I’d usually leave just before the part of the movie when the housewife tried to seduce Edward, because it stressed me out on behalf of both Edward and the housewife. We were often joined by Isaac, who had grown up in Atlanta and whom I intuitively understood to be gay and closeted. He was short, slim, black haired, and excellent at participating in long, analytical discussions of Rae’s two favorite topics, which were her relationship with her boyfriend and people on the Dartmouth campus she hated. In retrospect, I realize that I learned a lot from Isaac about the art of conversation—asking specific follow-up questions, offering non-sycophantic compliments (sycophantic never seemed sincere), and showing patience in the face of repetitive subject matter. Unlike me, Isaac did share Rae’s joints; I’d tried a few times, felt like possibly I was smoking wrong and definitely
I was reaping no clear benefit, worried about the short- and long-term impacts on my memory, and declined from that point on, which neither of them seemed to mind.
One surprising discovery I made in the first week of my friendship with Rae was that her boyfriend—Noah Bishop, recipient of the Valentine’s Day care package—was younger than she was. He was a junior at Exeter, which meant that she had begun dating him when she was a boarding school senior and he was a freshman. Although Rae revealed this fact without fanfare or embarrassment, I found it so jarring that that night, when Isaac and I left her room at the same time, I said outside her dorm, “Do you think it’s weird that she’s three years older than Noah?”
“Obviously, the norms of high school imply yes,” Isaac said. “But it wouldn’t be weird if their genders were reversed. And it wouldn’t be that weird if they were a married couple, and she was fifty-three and he was fifty.”
I took this in as we walked. Isaac was so much more articulate than I was that I might have found him intimidating, if not for the fact that he was nice; though he’d make damning observations about people, he seemed to be simply stating facts rather than relishing their weaknesses. I said, “Did you go to public or private school?”
“Public.”
“Me, too,” I said. “And I picture boarding schools being very, like—” I couldn’t find the word.
“Conformist?” he asked.
“Yeah. Which would have made them going out even weirder.” We kept walking—it was getting dark, and I felt the particular longing of an Ivy League campus at dusk and wished I were walking with a boyfriend of my own instead of with Isaac—and I added, “Although Noah is really cute.” Indeed, in photographs Rae had shown us, Noah was almost unbearably handsome, in exactly the way I wanted him to be: curly brown hair and full lips and a tiny silver hoop in his left ear. Apparently his family lived in a huge house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, his parents disliked Rae, and he played ice hockey and the guitar. And he had lost his virginity to Rae, though she had lost hers to the son of a friend of her mom’s.