The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [127]
Once it was clear that Leonard was going far away, Rita tried to make up for lost time. She took a week off work to go on a road trip with Leonard. They drove to Walla Walla to see Janet, who’d stayed at Whitman for the summer, working in the college library. Rita surprised Leonard by tearing up at the wheel, telling him how proud she was of him. As though he was already a mature adult, Leonard suddenly understood the dynamic between himself and Rita. He understood that she had been naturally fonder of Janet, felt guilty about this, and found fault with him to justify her prejudice. He understood that, as a male, Leonard reminded Rita of Frank, and that she either consciously or unconsciously held him at a slight distance as a result. He understood that he had unwittingly assumed Frank’s attitudes, belittling Rita in his private thoughts the way Frank had done out loud. In short, Leonard understood that his entire relationship with his mother had been determined by a person who was no longer around.
On the day he left for Providence, Rita drove him to the airport. They waited in the lounge together before his flight. Rita, in sunglasses, big and round in the latest style, and with a chiffon scarf tied over her hair, sat with sphinx-like immobility.
“That college you picked sure is a long way away,” she said. “Should I take it personally?”
“It’s a good school,” Leonard said.
“It’s not Harvard,” Rita said. “Nobody’s heard of it.”
“It’s Ivy League!” Leonard protested.
“Your father cares about things like that. Not me.”
Leonard wanted to get mad at her. But he understood, with that new grown-up brain of his, that Rita was denigrating his new college only because it was something that he wanted that wasn’t her. For a moment, he saw things from her perspective. First Frank had left her, then Janet, and now him. Rita was all alone.
He stopped thinking about this because it was making him sad. As soon as he could, he got up, hugged his mother, and headed down the concourse.
Leonard didn’t shed a tear until he’d taken his seat on the airplane. He turned to the window, hiding his face. The takeoff thrilled him—the sheer force of it. He stared out at the jet engine, marveling at the thrust required to rip him from the earth at such great speed. Sitting back, closing his eyes, he urged the engines on, as though they were doing a necessary violence. He didn’t look out the window again until Portland was long gone.
At first, everyone Leonard met at college seemed to be from the East Coast. His roommate, Luke Miller, was from D.C. The girls across the hall, Jennifer Talbot and Stephanie Friedman, were from New York City and Philly, respectively. The rest of the people on his hall were from Teaneck, Stamford, Amherst, Portland (Maine), and Cold Spring. His third week on campus, Leonard met Lola Lopez, a Bambi-faced girl with a caramel complexion and a tidy afro, who was from Spanish Harlem. She was sitting in the quad, reading Zora Neale Hurston, when Leonard pretended to need directions to the Ratty. He asked her where she was from and what her name was, and when she told him, he asked her what the difference was between Spanish Harlem and regular Harlem. “I have to finish this for class,” Lola said, and went back to her book.
The only West Coasters Leonard met were from California, which was another planet. “Keep California Dis-Oregonized,” read many a bumper sticker on cars with Golden State plates, to which their neighbors replied with a motto of their own: “Welcome to Oregon. Enjoy Your Visit. Now Go Home.” But at least the Californians Leonard met at school knew where he was from. Everyone else, from the South, Northeast, or Midwest, just asked about the rain. “Doesn’t it rain a lot there?” “I hear it rains all the time.” “How do you like the rain out there?”
“It’s not as bad as Seattle,” Leonard told them.
It didn’t bother him much. He’d turned eighteen in August and the Disease, as though waiting for him to reach legal drinking age, began to flood him with intoxicants. Two things mania did were