Mrs. Everything Read online

  “Hey, little sister,” the dancing girl said. Bethie turned to answer her and felt her mouth fall open. The walls were expanding and contracting, but gently, like lungs, breathing in time to the music, which pulsed through the room like a wave.

  “The walls,” Bethie tried to say. She lifted her arms, intending to point, but her limbs felt like they’d turned into some kind of very soft, heavy metal. She could imagine them bending and drooping, like petals full of rain. “The walls are breathing.”

  “Cool,” said the other girl, not unkindly. She reached behind the couch and, like a magician pulling a rabbit from an empty top hat, produced a blanket, the kind of knitted afghan that Bethie’s bubbe had once made. Gently, the girl spread it over Bethie’s curled-up legs.

  “You’re tripping. Just stay calm,” said the girl. “Enjoy the ride.”

  In the months that followed, Bethie would learn that Devon’s woodsy smell came from the patchouli incense that he burned in his bedroom, and that Harold’s style of shirt was called a dashiki, and that the cellophane-looking square that Dev laid on her tongue was blotter acid, high-quality stuff that Devon, who once upon a time had studied chemistry, made in the U of M’s own labs. She would learn the lyrics to all of Bob Dylan’s songs, and “Like a Rolling Stone” would become her friends’ anthem when she arrived on campus nine months later. She would learn, too, that it was fortunate that no guy tried to touch her as she lay sprawled on the couch, watching the walls billow and retreat. Other nights, she wouldn’t be as lucky. But that night, Bethie stared at a poster of the beach that was thumbtacked to the wall, imagining that she could taste colors: the sharp acidity of yellow, the soothing cool of blue. The green was tangy and astringent, like an unripe banana, and the yellow was a rich ribbon of butterscotch. She tried to explain it to Harold when he appeared beside her on the couch. Harold listened, then repeated what the dancing girl had said: “You’re tripping.” Harold looked considerably less amused than the girl had been. “Let’s get you home.”

  Tripping, Bethie thought. She had never been on trips, except in the summertime, to a cabin on the shores of Lake Erie, when her father had been alive. She remembered sunshine in her hair as a canoe went gliding through the water; the feeling of piercing a worm’s body with a fishhook, how it would squirm and then be still. “Was it weird to be a preacher’s kid?” It was hard to get the words out correctly. Her tongue felt as heavy and droopy as her arms had.

  “It was different,” Harold said. “People look at you differently. They hold you to a higher standard, I’d say. Oh, and there’s no getting out of church. Ever.” He had his arm around her waist. Leaning against him felt like leaning against a very warm wall.

  “You’re strong,” Bethie told him. Before Harold could respond to that, she asked, “What’s it like, knowing your Messiah’s shown up already?”

  “What’s that, now?”

  “Jesus,” Bethie explained. “Like, your Messiah’s already come, and now you’re waiting for him to come back, right? Is that weird? Does it feel like there was a great movie and you missed it?”

  “Ah, not exactly,” Harold said.

  Bethie said, “See, if you’re Jewish, you wait. Because the Messiah hasn’t come yet. Could be anyone.” She made a show of looking around at the kids walking around campus. “Could be . . .” She paused, then pointed at the least-likely person she saw, a shrimpy pale-faced red-haired boy with a sunken chest and a rabbitty overbite. “Him!”

  Harold chuckled.

  “Could be me!” Bethie said. She stopped in front of a wooden bench, climbed on top, and said, “I could be the Messiah!” A few kids clapped, a few more stared.

  “Come on,” Harold said, and put his hands on her waist, lifting her down the way he had in the show. “Keep moving.”

  The night air was cool, and it felt good against her flushed cheeks. Bethie wanted to ask him about being a Negro, if he felt different all the time, or if it was more like being Jewish, where you could go for long stretches mostly fitting in, feeling the same as everyone else, until something—a store clerk wishing you “Merry Christmas,” or a casual exclamation of “Jesus Christ,” or someone saying, “I jewed him down” when he’d gotten a good price on a used car—would remind you that you were different. She wanted to ask if he was the kind of Christian who thought that Jews were all going to hell, or if he believed in hell, or God at all, but before she could decide how to ask it, Harold had walked her through the door of Stockwell Hall, up the stairs, down the corridor, past a half-dozen open dorm-room doors from which a half-dozen different kinds of music could be heard, and into Jo’s cell-like chamber. Bethie lay back on Jo’s bed, feeling Harold fumble with the straps of her shoes. He spread a blanket over her and turned off the light, and Bethie shut her eyes, thinking that there was more to the world than she’d ever imagined. She pictured the dancing girl, arms spread wide, hair flaring out as she spun and spun, at ease with her own size, her own power, forcing people to make room for her, and how she still felt like she’d somehow left her body, like she was pure feeling now. I want to be brave like that, thought Bethie, as sleep washed over her and carried her away.

  Jo

  Even at a school as big as the University of Michigan, it was statistically probable that most students’ paths would cross at least a few times before graduation. The same face would appear in lecture halls, on the Diag, at the Student Union, or in the stadium for the football games. So it was that Jo Kaufman had seen Shelley Finkelbein three times, and knew exactly who she was, before they ever spoke.

  The first time was in Introduction to Philosophy, her freshman year. Jo had taken a seat in the middle of the hall, and Professor Glass had started his lecture when the door banged open and a slender, dark-haired girl with luminously pale skin and light eyes fringed with thick, dark lashes came hurrying down the aisle, leaving the fresh scent of something floral trailing in her wake. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she murmured, taking a seat, easing an expensive-looking trench coat off her shoulders and tossing it negligently on the chair beside her. Her hair was stylishly arranged, teased up high around her head, hanging long and loose in the back. Professor Glass raised his bushy eyebrows. “And you are?” he inquired. A few kids laughed.

  “Shelley Finkelbein,” said Shelley. Her voice was low, but confident, and if the professor had expected her to squirm or apologize, he was disappointed. After a brief pause he launched back into his discussion of the Ancients. Shelley’s dark head bent over her notebook as she wrote. Jo made herself look away, keeping her attention on her own notes. Two days later, when the class met again, Shelley was a no-show, and when she didn’t reappear the following week, or the week after that, Jo figured she must have dropped the course.

  The second time she saw Shelley, Shelley was onstage, standing atop a plywood tower, playing Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet put on by MUSKET, the campus theater troupe (MUSKET, Jo had learned, stood for “Michigan Union Shows, Ko-Eds Too,” which was what the formerly all-male theater troupe had renamed itself in 1956). Shelley was almost unrecognizable at first in a long blond wig, until Jo recalled the curve of her cheek and the contrast between her pale skin and dark brows. “Deny thy father and refuse thy name, and I’ll no longer be a Capulet,” she said, in the low, thrillingly assured voice with which she’d addressed the philosophy professor. Jo wasn’t sure if Shelley was a good actress, or if it was her own predilections that made it impossible for her to take her eyes off the other girl.

  “She’s rich,” said Rachel, an SDS friend with whom Jo had gone to see the play. When Jo described Shelley’s single visit to philosophy class, Rachel nodded and said, “Sounds like Shelley. I’ve heard she’s changed majors four times.” Rachel knew more stories: how Shelley had shown up in Ann Arbor with a red Karmann Ghia, with a monogrammed gold plate by the driver’s-side door, and how she’d ruined the engine because she hadn’t known enough to change the oil. Jo, who’d grown up watching her father care for his cars,
had winced, and Rachel had nodded. “I hear her folks just bought her a new one.” Jo learned that Shelley was the only female participant in Sigma Alpha Mu’s weekly poker game and that she won, more often than not, and that Shelley had dated the fraternity’s president and dumped him for the local television weatherman, a man of thirty-two.

  “Is she still with him?” Jo asked, disappointed but unsurprised.

  “I’ve heard things,” Rachel said, but wouldn’t say what.

  The third time Jo saw Shelley Finkelbein had been in a picture on the front page of the Michigan Daily. “Dean of Women Confronted Over Policies,” read the typically bland headline, but there was nothing typical or bland about the photograph. The dean, with her cat’s-eye glasses and Mamie Eisenhower bangs, had been sitting behind a table, her expression grim. In front of her, arm extended, finger pointing and mouth opened, stood Shelley Finkelbein. “Miss Finkelbein, a junior, lives off-campus in a league house,” the name for non-dorm residences where women could live. “When her landlady refused to allow Miss Finkelbein’s date, a Negro, up to her room, Miss Finkelbein took her case to the dean.” The dean had told Shelley that landlords were permitted to make their own rules. Shelley had argued that they should be forced to abide by the same regulations as the dorms. Jo had read the article all the way to the end, before going back to stare at the black-and-white picture. Even with her face contorted, like she’d been photographed mid-yell, Shelley Finkelbein was lovely. Lovely and politically aware. She wouldn’t be like Lynnette, another pretty, dim, head-in-the-sand girl who didn’t care about the world around her.

  On a Friday afternoon in late November, Jo was in her World Anthropology lecture, half paying attention to the lesson, half thinking about her plans for the weekend. Professor Fleiss was standing at the front of the class, asking, “What are the three principles of natural selection?” when a boy ran into the lecture hall, shouting, “The president’s been shot!”

  The students looked at each other. Jo assumed that the boy was talking about Harlan Hatcher, the president of the U of M, but the boy, whose name Jo never learned, was quick to clear that up. “Kennedy!” he said. “He was in Dallas, in a motorcade. A sniper shot him. He’s dead.”

  No, thought Jo. It can’t be. The previous June, back home for the weekend, she had watched when Kennedy had given his civil rights address, sitting next to her sister on the plastic-covered couch as the president, in his broad Bostonian accent, proclaimed, “we preach freedom around the world, and we mean it . . . but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes?”

  “Seems to me that the Negroes are doing just fine,” Sarah observed from the kitchen, where she was ironing sheets.

  “The Negroes are not doing fine,” Jo said, and her sister had muttered, “Oh, boy, here we go.”

  “All I’m saying is that nobody made any special laws to help the Jews,” said Sarah.

  “I think that things were a little easier for the Jews. Insofar as nobody brought us to this country as property,” said Jo.

  “Maybe we weren’t slaves, but I certainly don’t remember anyone throwing us welcome parties. Remember the M.S. St. Louis?”

  Jo nodded. It felt like every week of Hebrew school they’d gotten lessons on the Holocaust, including the story of the ship of nine hundred Jewish refugees that had been turned away from the United States in 1939 because the government believed the passengers were spies.

  “I’ve told you what it was like for me as a girl. Kids calling me names. Throwing things at me. And nobody made any laws to make it easier for Jews to find jobs or houses,” Sarah said, pointing her spray bottle of starch at Jo for emphasis.

  “Right,” said Jo. “You know what it’s like to feel discrimination. So why would you want anyone else to suffer?”

  “I don’t want anyone to suffer. I want everyone to have the same chances.”

  “That’s all these laws will do. Give Negroes the same chances.”

  “No,” Sarah said, setting her iron down with a thump. “It’s giving them more.” She raised her chin. “Negroes could work hard and have all of that, too. If they wanted.”

  “That’s like saying you could win a marathon if you had to start five miles behind everyone else. And then told if you didn’t win, you just weren’t trying hard enough. Don’t you see the way everything’s set up to keep Negroes from getting ahead?”

  Sarah sent the final sheet billowing into the air and began to fold it in precise squares. “I see that the Steins sold their house to the Johnsons. And now our house is worth ten thousand dollars less than what it used to be. That’s what I see.” With that, Sarah had gone to her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

  “Dead?” Jo said. At the desk beside hers, a girl named Norma Tester was crying, and Professor Fleiss’s normally robust bass voice was almost too quiet to hear when he said, “Class is dismissed.”

  Jo went out to the Diag, which was funereally silent, cutting through the crowds of weeping classmates, looking for a television. Kids were clustered six deep around the sets in the Union, so thickly that it was impossible to see. “It is true?” Jo asked, and the curly-haired boy in front of her nodded grimly, saying, “Cronkite just confirmed it.”

  “His poor wife,” said someone, and someone else chimed in, “She just lost that baby, you know.”

  “It doesn’t seem real,” Jo said, half to herself. She felt a creeping numbness, the constriction in her chest that she remembered from her worst fights with her mother. All around her, girls were sobbing, boys were shaking their hands and saying, “I can’t believe it,” all of them looking at one another, asking, “What happens now?” Jo felt a wave of longing, the loneliness that she’d trained herself to ignore. I don’t want to be alone, she thought. She wondered if Lynnie had heard the news. That was when the girl in front of her turned around. She’d looked up at Jo and said, in a low, familiar voice, “Will you walk with me? I need to walk. I think if I don’t start moving, I’m going to explode.”

  Jo nodded. She felt exactly the same way. Together, the two of them turned and made their way back outside.

  “I’m Shelley Finkelbein,” said the girl, and Jo, who hadn’t recognized her yet, said, “Oh.”

  “Have we met?” Shelley asked, glancing up at Jo.

  Jo shook her head. “You were in my Intro to Philosophy class for about a minute.”

  Shelley waved her hand, dismissing philosophy.

  “And I saw you in Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Oh,” said Shelley, her cheeks turning pink. “Well. At least it wasn’t Carousel. A disaster for the ages.”

  “Is that the one where everyone was naked?” Jo asked, remembering what she’d heard about that performance, which ran for three nights in a church basement and had been the talk of the campus.

  “Lightly clad,” said Shelley, with a slight smile. “It was not a dramatic triumph.” She fell into step next to Jo, the top of her glossy head barely reaching Jo’s shoulder. Jo wanted to stare but contented herself with a peek.

  Shelley Finkelbein was of average height, but delicately built, with light eyes and dark brows and small, uptilted breasts the size and shape of teacups underneath a soft sweater, its color somewhere between lavender and gray. She wore a pair of fitted pedal-pushers that zipped on the side and clung to the swell of her hips, and were cropped to display her dainty ankles, and a pair of pristine white sneakers. Up close, Jo could see that her brows rose in peaks at their center, giving her a quizzical look, and that her eyes were a pale, luminous gray. She had a narrow nose, slightly upturned at the tip, and lush pink lips, the lower one much fuller than the upper one, and skin that looked dewy. Even with her lipstick chewed away and her stunned, sorrowful expression, she was lovely.

  “Hey, can you slow down a little?” Shelley asked. Jo stopped, looked down, and saw that, in spite of everything, Shelley was smiling. “Not all of us have legs a mile long.”


  “Sorry,” said Jo. Even in her distress she felt her face flushing at the thought of Shelley noticing her legs. She slowed down. Shelley pulled a pack of Parliaments and a heavy gold St. Dupont lighter from her brown leather purse. She shook one cigarette free, tapped it on the pack, lit it, raised it to her lips, tilted her head back, and blew a pair of perfect smoke rings, one inside of the other, into the cloudy sky. “What do you think we’re supposed to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” Jo said. “Something. We have to do something.”

  “You go to those demonstrations, right? SNCC, SDS?” Shelley pronounced the acronym for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as Snick, the way students in the know did. Jo nodded. Just like in high school, she’d protested most Saturdays, carrying an EQUALITY NOW sign outside of Woolworth in Ann Arbor, marching in a circle with maybe fifty other kids.