Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [44]
My believing roommate was a four-foot black girl named Mindy. Mindy was unfailingly upbeat, smiley and energetic. I tried to be nice to Mindy even though she was unfailingly upbeat, smiley and energetic, snored disproportionately loudly to her body weight (my guess is eighty pounds) and took to calling me by a nickname that my father and only my father has called me for my entire life, Jean-Joe.
“Hey, Jean-Joe, what’s shakin’?”
“You need anything from the grocery store, Jean-Joe?”
“You feel like praying before we turn out the light, Jean-Joe?”
Someone like this wouldn’t last two minutes in my life now, but at that point I was convinced she’d see herself to the door, probably by failing out of school since she spent every second running around organizing ways to trick students into accidentally stumbling onto the Bible study on Friday nights instead of ever cracking a book. When she wasn’t out “spreadin’ it!” Mindy was on our couch watching a children’s game show that featured a lot of pie-throwing and water-gun fights.
I was dating an actor, the pinnacle of the Purchase caste system, and after a lot of dry humping on couches it was time to put this show on its feet and see what was what. A long weekend was upon us and I planned on going away with Mike. Mindy was headed home to the Bronx. After she caught a ride into the city with another Believer, I packed a bag in the very quiet, now prayer-free room of ours. I noticed an envelope on my bed. I picked it up and it said “Jean-Joe” on the front. I expected some kind of uplifting weekend message. “God’s on your team, kid!” or the classic “God loves you!” but it said none of these chirpy, miniature Mindyisms. It read, in very small print, in dark pencil: “You are about to sleep with the devil.” This was heavy even for Mindy.
Had Mindy slept with Mike? Did this mean Mike was good or bad in the sack? I had to think that in Mindy’s world this meant neither. It meant that Mike was a devil and that sex was evil. Or maybe, more interestingly, sex with actors was evil? If that’s what the cryptic warning meant I should have listened. The sex with Mike turned out to be a major nonevent. In the theater when a show is about to start and there’s hardly anyone in the audience, the rule is: if the cast is larger than the audience, you can cancel the show. There should be some kind of similar rule for women who see a small penis. If my vagina is bigger than your cock, everybody’s going home. Sorry folks. No show tonight. See you next time.
When I realized there would be no real drinking at this school I turned to the only thing I could think of doing with the hand that wasn’t smoking: I wrote papers, read the assigned books, went to classes. I liked my journalism class a lot, which was a shock because I never considered doing the work that my grandmother and grandfather and my father and my cousin did. I retired from journalism quickly, however, and started to write short stories. While college was just a blackout-sex, alcohol-soaked free-for-all for most people I knew from Bronxville, I barely drank at college. Not that I didn’t occasionally explode and drink my face off. I did. I just mean, for me, I hardly drank at all. For someone normal, I drank quite a bit.
AT MY CAMPUS JOB, I met Carmen. We hated each other from the top. I sometimes feel this is a barometer for how much I will care for someone: Do I hate your guts the first time I meet you? If yes, we’re probably destined for a long and meaningful relationship. I was still working in the cage at the gym, handing out towels to horny businessmen from nearby PepsiCo, one of the school’s major sponsors for the arts, when Carmen came in for her shift. She stormed in, her boyfriend, Sal, not far behind her. She was late (there was a “latemotif” to her life) and she was angry. Anger was really