Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [77]
Macy was silent for the rest of dinner.
That’s what I get, she thought. You listen and you listen and you copy their ways and who fucking knew that that bat, that blond bat in a Lilly Pulitzer sheath with her fucking family retainers, who knew I’d break her fucking Baccarat. Macy lived in a boardinghouse a mile from campus and cleaned all the rooms in the house on Saturdays for a break on her rent. On weekends she went to parties and had people drop her off at a trolley stop. She didn’t have people over. She didn’t go on vacation with other people’s families. The girls Macy hung around with, girls like Jennifer and her friends, thought Macy lived with rich, strict relatives. They’d never seen a boardinghouse or a carpet sweeper or a shared bathroom. They didn’t make their meals on a hot plate in their room, unless they were doing it for fun, and they didn’t read Emily Post and Miss Manners like the Old and the New Testament.
Macy brought her lunch to campus every day and she ate in the handicapped-access bathroom. Afterward, she sat in the Student Center to socialize, and when the other girls ate two slices of whole-wheat pizza or a big bowl of soba noodles or a roast-beef sandwich, Macy smiled like Pietsie Cortland, who also didn’t eat, for more normal reasons. Pietsie was Macy’s favorite. Macy loved everything about Pietsie, including her name, which was so fancy, Macy wanted to take her aside and say, Good for you. (When they did get into the question of background, Pietsie said, Isn’t it awful—it’s for Van Piet, my middle name. You know, old name, no money, not a pot to piss in, and Macy heard the ping of real crystal.) Macy avoided anyone who seemed remotely interested in her family. Interesting was not good.
“It’s okay,” Neil had said on the way back to his apartment. “My mother has a strong personality. It’ll be okay.”
Macy looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap.
“It’ll be okay,” Neil said, “because I love you. Ha,” he said, when she stared at him. “You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No,” Macy said, and she put her head on his shoulder and cried a little, at the thought of being loved by Neil Watrous, who was apparently without serious fault.
Neil pulled over and they kissed and then they drove to his apartment. They ran up the stairs, and by the time Neil had unlocked the door, Macy had her shoes and her blouse off and she flung herself on top of him, kissing his floppy brown hair and his big ears and the nicks where he’d cut himself shaving. They landed on his sofa. He kissed her stomach and her armpits. He ran his tongue from her ankle to her ear and they bit each other at every round and yielding spot. At one point, they found themselves with their heads hanging off the bed, their bare feet making dark, damp prints all the way up his wall.
“I was made to love you,” Neil said. He sang the whole Stevie Wonder song, naked, with his head touching the floor.
“And I you,” Macy said.
* * *
The summer before she’d met Neil, even though she was pretty sure that what she was looking for was not creative expression but something more like the makeover to end all makeovers, Macy had spent a week on scholarship at a writers’ conference. She looked at the men and women around her and thought, We’re like the people at Lourdes or the ones who go to the mud baths of that disgusting town with the sulfurous pools that everyone dunks themselves in, except we’ve brought our poems and