Impossible Things (34 page)

“What’s she doing?” Sandy said.

She’s drinking too much, Elizabeth thought, and she let her hair grow out, and she’s too thin. “She’s working for a stockbroker,” she said, and went to get the address Tib had given her. Sandy wrote it down and then flipped to the tabbed section marked “Found” and entered the name and address again.

“Would you like some more coffee, Mrs. Konkel?” Elizabeth said.

“You still don’t remember me, do you?” Sandy said. She stood up and took off her jacket. She was wearing a short-sleeved gray knit shell underneath it. “I was Karen Zamora’s roommate. Sondra Dickeson?”

Sondra Dickeson. She had had pale-blond hair that she wore in a pageboy, and a winter-white cashmere sweater and a matching white skirt with a kick pleat. She had worn it with black heels and a string of real pearls.

Sandy laughed. “You should see the expression on your face. You remember me now, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry. I just didn’t … I should have …”

“Listen, it’s okay,” she said. She took a sip of coffee. “At least you didn’t say, ‘How could you let yourself go like that?’ like Janice Brubaker did.” She bit into a cookie. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me whatever became of Sondra Dickeson? It’s a great story.”

“What happened to her?” Elizabeth said. She felt suddenly colder. She poured herself another cup of coffee and sat back down, wrapping her hands around the cup for warmth.

Sandy finished the cookie and took another one. “Well, if you remember, I was kind of a snot in those days. I was going to this Sigma Chi dinner dance with Chuck Pagano. Do you remember him? Well, anyway, we were going to this dance clear out in the country somewhere, and he stopped the car and got all clutchy-grabby, and I got mad because he was messing up my hair and my makeup so I got out of the car. And he drove off. So there
I was, standing in the middle of nowhere in a formal and high heels. I hadn’t even grabbed my purse or anything, and it’s getting dark, and Sondra Dickeson is such a snot that it never even occurs to her to walk back to town or try to find a phone or something. No, she just stands there like an idiot in her brocade formal and her orchid corsage and her dyed satin pumps and thinks, ‘He can’t do this to me. Who does he think he is?’ ”

She was talking about herself as if she had been another person, which Elizabeth supposed she had been, an ice-blond with a pageboy and a formal like the one Elizabeth had loaned Tib for the Harvest Ball, a rust satin bodice and a bell skirt out of sculptured rust brocade. After the dance Elizabeth had given it to the Salvation Army.

“Did Chuck come back?” she said.

“Yes,” Sandy said, frowning, and then grinned. “But not soon enough. Anyway, it’s almost dark and along comes this truck with no lights on, and this guy leans out and says, ‘Hiya, gorgeous. Wanta ride?’ ” She smiled at her coffee cup as if she could still hear him saying it. “He was awful. His hair was down to his ears and his fingernails were black. He wiped his hand on his shirt and helped me up into the truck. He practically pulled my arm out of its socket, and then he said, ‘I thought there for a minute I was going to have to go around behind and shove. You know, you’re lucky I came along. I’m not usually out after dark on account of my lights being out, but I had a flat tire.’ ”

She’s happy, Elizabeth thought, putting her hand over the top of her cup to try to warm herself with the steam.

“And he took me home and I thanked him and the next week he showed up at the Phi house and asked me out for a date, and I was so surprised that I went, and I married him, and we have four kids.”

The furnace kicked on, and Elizabeth could feel the air coming out of the vent under the table, but it felt cold. “You went out with him?” she said.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it? I mean, at that age all you can think about is your precious self. You’re so worried about getting laughed at or getting hurt, you can’t even see anybody else. When my sorority sister told me he was downstairs, all I could think of was how he must look, his hair all slicked back with water and cleaning those black fingernails with a penknife, and what everybody would say. I almost told her to tell him I wasn’t there.”

“What if you had done that?”

“I guess I’d still be Sondra Dickeson, the snot, a fate worse than death.”

“A fate worse than death,” Elizabeth said, almost to herself, but Sandy didn’t hear her. She was plunging along, telling the story that she got to tell everytime somebody new moved to town, and no wonder she liked being alum rep.

“My sorority sister said, ‘He’s really got intestinal fortitude coming here like this, thinking you’d go out with him,’ and I thought about him, sitting down there being laughed at, being hurt, and I told my roommate to go to hell and went downstairs and that was that.” She looked at the kitchen clock. “Good lord, is it that late? I’m going to have to go pick up the kids pretty soon.” She ran her finger down the hopelessly lost list. “How about Dallas Tindall, May Matsumoto, Ralph DeArvill?”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “Is Tupper Hofwalt on that list?”

“Hofwalt.” She flipped several pages over. “Was Tupper his real name?”

“No. Phillip. But everybody called him Tupper because he sold Tupperware.”

She looked up. “I remember him. He had a Tupperware party in our dorm when I was a freshman.” She flipped back to the Found section and started paging through it.

He had talked Elizabeth and Tib into having a Tupperware party in the dorm. “As co-hostesses you’ll be eligible
to earn points toward a popcorn popper,” he had said. “You don’t have to do anything except come up with some refreshments, and your mothers are always sending you cookies, right? And I’ll owe you guys a favor.”

They had had the party in the dorm lounge. Tupper pinned the names of famous people on their backs, and they had to figure out who they were by asking questions about themselves.

Elizabeth was Twiggy. “Am I a girl?” she asked Tib.

“Yes.”

“Am I pretty?”

“Yes,” Tupper had said before Tib could answer.

After she guessed it, she went over and stooped down next to the coffee table where Tupper was setting up his display of plastic bowls. “Do you really think Twiggy’s pretty?” she asked.

“Who said anything about Twiggy?” he said. “Listen, I wanted to tell you …”

“Am I alive?” Sharon Oberhausen demanded.

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “Turn around so I can see who you are.”

The sign on her back said Mick Jagger.

“It’s hard to tell,” Tupper said.

Tib was King Kong. It had taken her forever to figure it out. “Am I tall?” she asked.

“Compared to what?” Elizabeth had said.

She stuck her hands on her hips. “I don’t know. The Empire State Building.”

“Yes,” Tupper said.

He had had a hard time getting them to stop talking so he could show them his butter keeper and cake taker and popsicle makers. While they were filling out their order forms, Sharon Oberhausen said to Tib, “Do you have a date yet for the Harvest Ball?”

“Yes,” Tib said.

“I wish I did,” Sharon said. She leaned across Tib.
“Elizabeth, do you realize everybody in ROTC has to have a date or they put you on weekend duty? Who are you going with, Tib?”

“Listen, you guys,” Tib said, “the more you buy, the better our chances at that popcorn popper, which we are willing to share.”

They had bought a cake and chocolate-chip ice cream. Elizabeth cut the cake in the dorm’s tiny kitchen while Tib dished it up.

“You didn’t tell me you had a date to the Harvest Ball,” Elizabeth said. “Who is it? That guy in your ed-psych class?”

“No.” She dug into the ice cream with a plastic spoon.

“Who?”

Tupper came into the kitchen with a catalog. “You’re only twenty points away from a popcorn popper,” he said. “You know what you girls need?” He folded back a page and pointed to a white plastic box. “An ice-cream keeper. Holds a half gallon of ice cream, and when you want some, all you do is slide this tab out”—he pointed to a flat rectangle of plastic—“and cut off a slice. No more digging around in it and getting your hands all messy.”

Tib licked ice cream off her knuckles. “That’s the best part.”

“Get out of here, Tupper,” Elizabeth said. “Tib’s trying to tell me who’s taking her to the Harvest Ball.”

Tupper closed the catalog. “I am.”

“Oh,” Elizabeth said. Sharon stuck her head around the corner. “Tupper, when do we have to pay for this stuff?” she said. “And when do we get something to eat?”

Tupper said, “You pay before you eat,” and went back out to the lounge.

Elizabeth drew the plastic knife across the top of the cake, making perfectly straight lines in the frosting. When she had the cake divided into squares, she cut the corner
piece and put it on the paper plate next to the melting ice cream. “Do you have anything to wear?” she said. “You can borrow my rust formal.”

Sandy was looking at her, the thick notebook opened almost to the last page. “How well did you know Tupper?” she said.

Elizabeth’s coffee was ice cold, but she put her hand over it, as if to try to catch the steam. “Not very well. He used to date Tib.”

“He’s on my deceased list, Elizabeth. He killed himself five years ago.”

Paul didn’t get home till after ten. Elizabeth was sitting on the couch wrapped in a blanket.

He went straight to the thermostat and turned it down. “How high do you have this thing turned up?” He squinted at it. “Eighty-five. Well, at least I don’t have to worry about you freezing to death. Have you been sitting there like that all day?”

“The worm died,” she said. “I didn’t save it after all. I should have put it over on the grass.”

“Ron Brubaker says there’s an opening for a secretary in the dean’s office. I told him you’d put in an application. You have, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. After Sandy left, she had taken the application out of her purse and sat down at the kitchen table to fill it out. She had had it nearly filled out before she realized it was a retirement fund withholding form.

“Sandy Konkel was here today,” she said. “She met her husband on a dirt road. They were both there by chance. By chance. It wasn’t even his route. Like the worm. Tib just walked by, she didn’t even know she did it, but the worm was too near the edge, and it went over into the water and drowned.” She started to cry. The tears felt cold running down her cheeks. “It drowned.”

“What did you and Sandy Konkel do? Get out the cooking sherry and reminisce about old times?”

“Yes,” she said. “Old times.”

In the morning Elizabeth took back the retirement fund withholding form. It had rained off and on all night, and it had turned colder. There were patches of ice on the central walk.

“I had it almost all filled out before I realized what it was,” she told the girl. A boy in a button-down shirt and khaki pants had been leaning on the counter when Elizabeth came in. The girl was turned away from the counter, filing papers.

“I don’t know what you’re so mad about,” the boy had said, and then stopped and looked at Elizabeth. “You’ve got a customer,” he said, and stepped away from the counter.

“All these dumb forms look alike,” the girl said, handing the application to Elizabeth. She picked up a stack of books. “I’ve got a class. Did you need anything else?”

Elizabeth shook her head and stepped back so the boy could finish talking to her, but the girl didn’t even look at him. She shoved the books into a backpack, slung it over her shoulder, and went out the door.

“Hey, wait a minute,” the boy said, and started after her. By the time Elizabeth got outside, they were halfway up the walk. Elizabeth heard the boy say, “So I took her out once or twice. Is that a crime?”

The girl jerked the backpack out of his grip and started off down the walk toward Elizabeth’s old dorm. In front of the dorm a girl in a yellow slicker was talking to another girl with short upswept blond hair. The girl in the slicker turned suddenly and started down the walk.

A boy went past Elizabeth on a bike, hitting her elbow and knocking the application out of her hand. She grabbed for it and got it before it landed on the walk.

“Sorry,” he said without glancing back. He was wearing a jean jacket. Its sleeves were too short, and his bony wrists stuck out. He was steering the bike with one hand and holding a big plastic sack full of pink and green bowls in the other. That was what he had hit her with.

“Tupper,” she said, and started to run after him.

She was down on the ice before she even knew she was going to fall, her hands splayed out against the sidewalk and one foot twisted under her. “Are you all right, ma’am?” the boy in the button-down shirt said. He knelt down in front of her so she couldn’t see up the walk.

Tupper would call me “ma’am,” too, she thought. He wouldn’t even recognize me.

“You shouldn’t try to run on this sidewalk. It’s slicker than shit.”

“I thought I saw somebody I knew.”

He turned, balancing himself on the flat of one hand, and looked down the long walk. There was nobody there now. “What did they look like? Maybe I can still catch them.”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “He’s long gone.”

The girl came over. “Should I go call 911 or something?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said to her, and then turned back to Elizabeth. “Can you stand up?” he said, and put his hand under her arm to help her. She tried to bring her foot out from its twisted position, but it wouldn’t come. He tried again, from behind, both hands under her arms and hoisting her up, then holding her there by brute force till he could come around to her bad side. She leaned shamelessly against him, shivering.

“If you can get my books and this lady’s purse, I think I can get her up to the infirmary,” he said. “Do you think you can walk that far?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, and put her arm around his neck. The girl picked up Elizabeth’s purse and her job fund application.

“I used to go to school here. The central walk was heated back then.” She couldn’t put any weight on her foot at all. “Everything looks the same. Even the college kids. The girls wear skirts and sweaters just like we wore and those little flat shoes that never will stay on your feet, and the boys wear button-down shirts and jean jackets, and they look just like the boys I knew when I went here to school, and it isn’t fair. I keep thinking I see people I used to know.”