The Broom of the System Read Free

telling me how gross it was, these parties, mixers, and like a meat market, and how you could get sucked in, ’as it were,‘ you said, and how you just had to avoid going down at all costs, and how I shouldn’t, you know ...” She looks around, she wants to go down, she loves to dance, she has a killer new dress she got at Tempo in East Corinth for just such a—
    “She wants to go, Clarice,” Mindy says, throwing her legs over the side of the bunk and sitting up with a bounce, “and she is our guest, and there is the Dorito factor, and if we stayed for like six quick minutes ...”
    “So I see.” Clarice looks all droopy-lidded at Lenore and sees her eagerness and has to smile. Sue Shaw is at her desk with her back turned, her butt is really pretty fat and wide in the chair, pooching over the sides, Lenore sees.
    Clarice sighs. “The thing is Lenore you just don’t know. These things are so unbelievably tiresome, unpleasant, we went all first semester and you just really literally get nauseated, physically ill after a while, ninety-nine point nine percent of the men who come are just lizards, reptiles, and it’s clear awfully fast that the whole thing is really just nothing more than a depressing ritual, a rite that we’re expected by God knows who to act out, over and over. You can’t even have conversations. It’s really repulsive.” And she drinks water out of the Jetsons glass. Sue Shaw is nodding her head at her desk.
    “I say what we do,” Mindy Metalman hits the floor and claps her hands, “is Lenore goes and puts on that fabulous violet dress I saw you hang up, and we three stay and attend to the rest of this joint, for a second, and then we all just scamper down really quick, and Lenore gets a condensed liberal arts education and one or two dances while we steal about seven tons of food, then we come right back up, David Letterman’s on in less than an hour.”
    “No,” says Sue Shaw.
    “Well then you can stay here, nipplehead, we’ll get over it, if one semi-bad experience is going to make you hide away like a—”
    “Fine, look, let’s just do that.” Clarice looks less than thrilled. They all look at each other. Lenore gets a nod from Clarice and jumps up and goes to Mindy’s little annex bedroom to put on her dress as Clarice starts glaring in earnest at Mindy and Mindy gives little stuff-it signals to Sue Shaw, over in the comer.
    Lenore brushes her teeth in a tiny bathroom redolent of Metalman and Shaw, washes her face, dries it with a towel off the floor, puts Visine in, finds some of that bright wet-looking lipstick Mindy owns in an old Tampax box on the toilet, gets the lipstick out, knocks the Tampax box over, a compact falls in the toilet and she has to fish it out, her shirt’s wet, the arm’s soaked, she takes the shirt off and goes into Mindy’s bedroom. She has to get her bra, since the dress fabric is really thin, violet cotton, pretty as hell with her brown hair, which is luckily clean, and a bit of lipstick, she looks eighteen, very nearly, and her bra’s in the bottom of her bag on Mindy’s bed. Lenore rummages in her bag. Mindy’s room is really a sty, clothes all over, an Exercycle, big James Dean poster on the inside of the door, Richard Gere too oh of course, pictures of some nonfamous guy on a sailboat, Rolling Stone magazine covers, joumey concert poster, super-high ceiling like the other rooms, here with a bright blanket tacked one side on the ceiling and one on the wall and sagging, a becalmed candy sail. There’s a plastic thing on the dresser, and Lenore knows it’s a Pill-holder, for the Pill, because Clarice has got one and so does Karen Daughenbaugh, who’s more or less Lenore’s best friend at Shaker School. There’s the bra, Lenore puts it on. The dress. Combs her hair with a long red comb that has black hair in it and smells like Flex.
     
     
     
    A scritch. The Cat Stevens goes off all of a sudden, in the main room. There’s loud knocking