Something not quite right about the houses, the trees, the light. Because you can feel it when you’re walking down the streets beyond the Warren Bubble that this town is a wrong town. Cthulhu is a giant squid monster invented by a horror writer who went insane and died here. Or as Ava and I call it, the Lair of Cthulhu. Smilingly oblivious to the fact that they are in the mouth of hell. Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation. Behold the white people in black discussing grants they earned to translate poets no one reads from the French. Behold the pewter trays of salmon pinwheels, duck‐liver crostini topped with little sugared orchids. Behold the Christmas‐lit white gauze floating everywhere like so many ghosts. Behold the tiger‐lily‐heavy center‐ pieces. The Narrative Arts department’s annual welcome back Demitasse, because this school is too Ivy and New England to call a party a party.
I pour myself and Ava more free champagne in the far corner of the tented green, where I lean against a white Doric pillar bedecked with billowing tulle. Skins aglow with affection and belonging as though they’d just been hydrated by the purest of mountain streams.Ĭompletely immune to the disdain of their fellow graduate student. They always came apart from these embraces intact and unwounded despite the ill will that poured forth from my staring eyes like so much comic‐book‐villain venom. at they would choke on each other’s blandly grassy perfume. That they would get tangled in each other’s Game of Thrones hair, choked by the ornate braids they were forever braiding into each other’s heart‐shaped little heads. That their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes, and A‐line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting.
I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all year last year. All four of their glossy mouths making squealing sounds of monstrous love that hurt my face. All eight of their eyes shut tight as if this collective asphyxiation were a kind of religious bliss. Temples pressed against temples in a way that made me think of the labial rubbing of the bonobo or the telepathy of beautiful, murderous children in horror films. And then the nuzzling of ski‐jump noses, peach fuzzy cheeks. How fiercely they gripped each other’s pink‐and‐white bodies, forming a hot little circle of such rib‐crushing love and understanding it took my breath away. Or just because you’re so amazing, Bunny. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat, stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women-my academic peers-cooingly strangle each other hello. And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are going to implode.
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