intuitive masseuse, with no sexual hanky-pank. Deep under the shroud of musculoskeletal bliss, Arnold felt a mild gnawing.
“I will be what?” he managed.
Poof. The carriage changed back to a pumpkin. Billie Jo whipped off her seat on his buns and threw him a towel.
“You can wipe off the oil.”
“Can’t reach,” he said, easing himself up on stretched arms. “You do me.”
Billie Jo balled up the towel and began to rub.
“Hey, leave me some skin, please.”
“Gotta unstick the stuck blood. Open up the chi. Here, put this on. I bought it for you after my lesson.” She flung him a navy-blue sweatshirt marked “UNIVERSITY OF PARIS.”
“Paris, Texas?” he asked.
“No, silly. Paris, France. It’s from the Sorbonne.”
“And you want me to wear it?”
“If you like it.”
“But I don’t go to the Sorbonne.”
“So? Why do you have to go to the Sorbonne to wear it? Plenty of people wear sweatshirts from places they don’t go to.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. What have I got to do with the Sorbonne?”
“Don’t be so literal.”
“Billie, it makes the words meaningless—empty symbols.”
“You know what the opposite of symbolic is?”
“Unh-uh.”
“Diabolic. Symbol from the Greek sym-ballein, to draw together. Dia-ballein, to tear apart. Mrs. Aron told me that this morning. We were talking about musical symbols.”
“Well, OK. So you want to be diabolic? This sweatshirt is dangerous.”
“Arnold, I got my acceptance from Oberlin today.”
“What?”
“I’m going to Oberlin.”
“You’re going to go to Oberlin?”
“Yup.”
“Not SMU or UT Arlington?”
“Nope.”
“But . . . what will happen to us?”
“Button up your shirt. I can’t stand those marvelous pecs.”
“What . . .”
“Well, I don’t know. We’ll write. We’ll visit. Ever been to Ohio?”
“No. I’ve never been anywhere. You know that.”
“I thought maybe Ohio didn’t qualify as anywhere. It’s a good school, just right for me, I think. Mom and Dad want me to go.”
“I see.”
“Now are you in shock?”
“Kind of.”
“Told you so.”
“What?”
“You would be in shock.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“You know when I first came to Mansfield, the first piece of advice I got was to try to become a cheerleader. Did you know that? You know what Cheryl told me? ‘It’s very revered to be a cheerleader.’ Revered. Just what I always wanted to be. And of course it was crucially important to look a certain way and to have a boyfriend. And the best possible boyfriend was a football player, as in, ‘Wow, you’re going out with a football player!’”
“Is that why you went after me? Why are you telling me this?”
“I went to the first pep rally, and I watched all those girls, so cliquey and obsessed with their appearance, always flicking their hair back. I watched all those arms pumping frantically up and down, and I thought maybe I’d like to be like them. I tried dressing like them, but I wasn’t pretty enough. You know, pretty? And what was worse, I didn’t act silly enough, so they put me in a category—‘stuck-up brain,’ ‘book bitch.’ There was no way I could break into their circle. I tried, I really did. And then the irony was I fell in love with a football player, as in, ‘Wow, you’re going out with a football player.’ I even got outlaw points for robbing the cradle. And you ran interference. You showed me who I really was. And Arnold, I’m not a UT or an SMU co-ed. We both know that, right? I’m going to go to Oberlin. I can study at the Conservatory and still be in a good school, not just a piano player. You can come visit, I promise. I’ll send you money for airfare. And I’ll be home Christmases.”
“When I met you,” Arnold admitted, “I thought it was funny that it was you who gave me those gifts. I mean, I thought it was some cheerleader. A yellow-and-black wastepaper basket filled with popcorn balls? This is the girl who gave me those?”
“Pretty good cover, don’tcha think? I spent forty bucks on all that stuff.”
“You could work for the CIA.”
“They probably recruit at Oberlin.”
“Can we make love?”
“In the next two minutes?”
“No. Before you go away.”
“You mean home plate?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I told you before: I’m saving myself for my husband.”
“I thought that was a joke.”
“You thought wrong.”
“But we’ve done everything else.”
“The outer boundaries of virginity. Are you my husband?”
“No. Not yet. But . . .” Arnold was wise enough to stop. “I’m applying to Harvard—so if I get in, I wouldn’t be here anyway to date a UT gal.”
It was Billie Jo’s turn to be afraid.
“There are lots of beautiful, smart women in Cambridge.”
“Really?”
“Oh, you . . . aren’t we awful?” She jumped him and sank her teeth into his neck.
The door opened and Chris yelled, “OK, you two, come out with your hands up.”
Arnold and Billie Jo tucked in their shirts and made a not-quite-convincing Entrance of the Innocents into the living room.
After her initial shock, and her frenzy of jealousy, Billie Jo became aggressively enthusiastic about his plans for Harvard. She assured him he would get in—he had the grades, he was poor (for balance) and from Texas (for even more balance)—but just to cinch it, she insisted he try for a Merit Scholarship and even gave him some inside dope from her Phi Beta father, “the very one who insisted she go to public, not private, school”—on how to up his chances with an academically respectable community service project, well documented on his application. She knew the perfect thing for him: a curriculum plan for the study of language. Given who he was, his new English teacher, Carl Gimple, allowed him to go off with six students as an “experimental unit” (hurrah for the Mansfield Integrated School District) to try out his curriculum for the last six weeks of the spring semester. The project got Carl another Merit scholar for his cap. Here, the first page of the addendum to Arnold’s application. The talented hand of his muse and éminence grise is apparent in the background:
A STUDENT-CENTERED CURRICULUM FOR
UNSUCKERING OUR GENERATION
Arnold Hitler, Mansfield High School, Mansfield, Texas May 1–June 15, 1966
Generals,