Applied Learning
Linda was, in four words, born a good girl. Only her faultless good nature kept her from being abused horribly by her peers, though that didn't stop her psych professor, Doctor McCambridge, from using her as a litmus test for social experiments.
The winter before she met Ash, Dr. McCambridge passed her a piece of paper.
"Write down your earliest memory," he said casually, tucking his hands into his pockets, sitting back smugly on his heels.
Linda frowned thoughtfully as she tried to unlock that long-ignored portion of her past. She went back and back, until somehow, something clicked in her mind.
I was three years old, and my family was staying at my grandmom's place in San Diego. She ran a second-hand store, and sometimes she'd let me help her sort the boxes of stuff people would bring in to sell.
I remember holding up an old magazine with an actress on the cover; it was Ann-Margaret. She had the reddest hair I'd ever seen, and the strangest feeling went through me when I looked at her bare shoulders. I traced the curves of her face without thinking.
My mother found me there. She said, "Linda, what are you doing?"
I turned around, and I'll never forget the look on her face; it was as if she'd caught me doing something terrible, something worse than taking a bit of cookie dough or washing my doll's hair in the sink. She made me put down the magazine and took my hand. That's all I remember.
I think was five at the time.
She got an A- on the assignment. Very revealing, he wrote back in red pen, enigmatically.
***
Linda was a good girl, a personality trait of hers that she never for one second doubted. She was friendly, conscientious, studious, religious and hard-working. The sort of young woman everyone wanted as a friend, and the sort of girl every boy wanted to date.
She wanted to dance, had wanted to even when she was a little girl. When she heard about the college's dance troupe she auditioned the second she heard of an opening; after being accepted she threw herself into the rhythm of constant motion, the daily practice sessions. At one of the rehearsals, she found herself sharing lunch with the man they'd hired to play piano during the rehearsals. He listened to her problems, vouched for her when she applied for a job at the S-Mart downtown, then, the day before she debuted as the lead in Carmen, shyly offered to take her to dinner.
It was almost pre-ordained by destiny that she select Ash out of the pack, from all of he college boys at MSU and the men at S-Mart; He, too was conscientious, studious, religious, friendly and hard-working; on top of that he even thought she was the perfect girl.
And she thought he was the perfect guy...
Except...
***
"Half of psychology is what you learn, and the other half is what you intuit," Dr. McCambridge said, leading the class with his authoritative glance. Linda yawned and checked her watch, yearning toward the light.
***
She saw Cheryl for the first time standing across the quad on a blustery spring day. Immediately, Linda was stricken by the woman's odd wardrobe; a peasant blouse of bright green, a broad black skirt, strands of glass beads looped around her neck and a headband of green and black plastic. She had thick red hair and brows, a thick black wool coat looped over her arm and a bead-covered purse dangling from around her wrist, a red bookbag in her free hand. The sight of her appalled and intrigued Linda beyond words. She watched Cheryl cross the campus with a demanding stride, all the way to the athletics building, never once noticing Linda's probing gaze.
Ash took her home that Thanksgiving, and that was when Linda learned that the girl's name was Cheryl and, by some twist of cosmic irony, was her lover's sister.
She was the first woman that Linda couldn't instantly bond with. They sat together in front of the record player, pulling out the Williams' Kingston Trio albums, glasses of wine sitting on the speakers.
Linda stared at Cheryl in the lamplight as she reluctantly spoke of her major. Ash's sister wasn't conventionally pretty. Ash had warned Linda of Cheryl's 'artistic temperament"; Linda only noticed that the girl was quiet, a little introverted when compared to Ash's extreme extroversion.
Cheryl watched the fire crackle.
"Why do you draw?" Linda probed.
Cheryl gave her a stony look. "Why do you dance?"
Linda wasn't used to being questioned; she bit her lip. "Because I have to."
Cheryl gave her an odd half-smile. "That's why I draw."
A moment of understanding passed between them, an easy feeling that wasn't fraught with the tension Linda felt around Ash. She allowed it to pass by, unsure what to do with the feeling.
Cheryl shifted her knees. "I need more wine."
***
"What's the difference between liking a person and loving them? What IS like?"
Doctor McCambridge wrote on her test. "C-. Retake in the spring."
***
Cheryl came upon them one afternoon, while Ash and Linda were hanging out listening to the new Lionel Ritchie record. Cheryl instantly declared it 'crap' and hunkered down in the corner, taking out her pad and sketching.
"What do you consider good music?"
Cheryl exhaled, shifting her dark red hair. "Velvet Underground, The Smiths..."
"Pussy rock," Ash scoffed.
"Rock that makes you mellow," Cheryl responded, glaring up at Ash. She was in a state of animation that was new to Linda's experience; the Cheryl she knew spent a lot of time glaring at people through her bangs, leaning over an ever-present pad and scribbling in charcoal.
Ash smirked, getting up off of the floor. "D'you want a beer, mooch?"
"Is it cold?"
"As a witch's tit." Ash had invested wisely in a mini-fridge, which had cost him a good third of the money he'd made in over time.
Cheryl glanced over at Linda. "Is Sandra Dee gonna have one?"
Linda frowned. Sandra Dee? "Yes," she said, hearing her own prissy tone. "Yes, please."
Ash gave a fond roll of his eyes, handing cans of Pabst to Cheryl and then Linda. "Don't mind her, she's always like that," Ash said. "Artist," he added.
Linda frowned up at Ash. "I'm an artist, too." She didn't need to say that Ash was a quasi-artist himself, a musician with an analytical mind who could snap together a solution in two seconds, though long-term planning failed him. "Don't mind HIM," Linda said flatly.
Linda did her best to cheer the girl into speaking, offered her a shoulder and a smile. But she turned her down with a shrug and a scowl. She drank deeply that night, and the booze made her giddy. Cheryl drank more, got giddy, grew friendly. They talked and talked, about everything and nothing, while Ash watched them in mild dismay. When he was out of the room calling Scott on a pay phone, Linda's hand lingered for minutes on Cheryl's shoulder, laughing and swaying against her soft, beguiling form. They sang songs like old friends while Ash stood back, watching, confused.
In a few hours they were holding each other's hair back while they got sick in the bathroom. Sylvia Plath once said that there was nothing like a puke to bond two strangers. Cheryl retreated after that, saying she needed to hitch a ride back to her own dorm, refusing to take Ash's help. The meeting broke up in gloom; he worried by the phone for an hour while Linda lay sprawled on his bed, listening to the Smiths singing 'How Soon is Now'?
"She's a little eccentric," Ash said, having received his sister's call and leading Linda to his car. He was somehow more sober than she.
"I think she's fascinating," Linda said, an extra sway betraying her drunken state.
***
"Have you ever loved two people at once?" Doctor McCambridge asked the cavernous lecture hall, striding lazily back and forth across the stage. "A pull that goes beyond the physical desire for release, but a mutual sense of desire, shared values and camaraderie?"
The pen rolled out of Linda's fingers as he scrawled his theory across the whiteboard. "I call it the 'Betty V Veronica Syndrome'..."
***
She had trouble with her voice. That's why she was a dancer; rhythm flowed through her hands and feet, not on her vocal chords. Ash teased her about it, as his deep slightly off-key voice rang throughout the house.
Cheryl sang like an angel as she did the breakfast dishes, her voice filling the tiny apartment she now shared with her brother. When she heard Linda sing for the first time she gently corrected her.
"From the diaphragm, not the vocal chords." She pressed her hand just above Linda's breastbone.
An electric tingle shot through Linda's body - it wasn't like anything Ash had ever done for her, or anything she had ever experienced before.
It scared her thoroughly.
***
She got a C plus on her first abnormal psych exam. "There's nothing more fruitless than denial," Doctor McCambridge noted, double-underlining a straggling clause.
***
She closed her eyes and envisioned the men she'd found attractive. Ash, without his shirt on, playing pick-up basketball with Scott. Sean Penn. Tom Cruise.
But her mind came back to Cheryl and her smile, the lilt in her voice, the way she teased Scott and how good she was to Ash.
"I'm not one of those girls," Linda said to herself, prostrate on her bed, spine straight and stiff, her nails digging into her palms. "I'm not, I'm not, I'm not..."
***
"What would you do," asked Doctor McCambridge, "if I told you Santa Claus was a woman?"
***
Cheryl made her a hat of shellacked paper for Christmas, hand-adorned with beads. Linda held it in her lap as she unwrapped Ash's gift - tickets to the Springsteen concert.
The differences between the siblings became clearer every time she dared to compare them. She wouldn't let herself do that again.
***
"Careful with your words," Doctor McCambridge scribbled across the bottom of her thesis.
****
Cheryl was a linguistics minor. She could speak Spanish, a little French, some Chinese. She considered it her duty to teach Linda how to say 'I love you' in every language, because it would befuddle Ash and make him laugh (he loved to be surprised back then).
"Say 'te amo, Ashley'." She said.
"'te amo,'" repeated Linda. "How do you say 'I love you' to a woman in Spanish?"
"Te quiero,'" said Cheryl.
"Te quiero," Linda repeated.
"'Te quiero, Cheryl'," she tried out in private. "'Te amo, Ash'."
It was easy to say around Ash, but the words always got in the way with Cheryl.
***
"You have a hard time applying what you've learned," he wrote. "Keep trying."
***
Two of Cheryl's paintings were selected for display in a big art show down at the Quadrangle. Linda and Ash went as a couple, and while she had no problem mingling with the art students he hung back, intimidated.
Cheryl swept up to Linda in a silk shawl and a slouchy pink hat, a pale purple dress and thick blue clogs. "What do you think of the show?"
"I..." Linda's mouth went dry. "It's beautiful."
"Thank you." She smiled. A wave of awkward emotion swept over Linda, painful and unwieldy, at Cheryl's look. She was just as confused as Linda was. "Have a beer on me. They have a keg tapped in the lobby."
Linda had too much that night, so much that she ended up mumbling Cheryl's name in bed with Ash while he franticly tried to please her. But he was so far gone he didn't even hear her voice.
***
"Linda is a fine student," Doctor McCambridge's reference said. "Any madhouse would be lucky to have her."
***
She told Ash she needed to be alone for awhile, knowing he hated to be alone, knowing he'd ask questions. That was why he'd proposed the cabin trip.
The night before they left, the three of them curled up together on Ash's couch, watching The Hotel New Hampshire on HBO.
It was, as far as Linda was concerned, a ridiculous film, a mélange of women in bear suits, dead parents and incest. Ash saw it as a grand comedy, but Cheryl kept sending her furtive glances whenever Susie and Franny were together.
When it was over, Ash called it a waste of time, and Linda rested against the back of the chair. Cheryl picked up her sketchpad and began to draw, her hair falling forward to obscure her eyes.
Suddenly - when Ash was out of the room getting them another bottle of wine - she looked up and said, "isn't it funny how, after all of that, Susie and Franny were sisters in the end?"
Linda felt a stroke of inspiration pass through her. Maybe that's what I've been feeling for Cheryl, she thought to herself. Sisterhood.
No, that was a lie - she knew it. Walking back to her dorm room, she reconsidered her stance, deciding to end the torture within herself for once and for all.
"Well, so what if it is?" She asked herself. "What are you afraid of?" Her parent's disapproval? They'd disowned her when they discovered a cache of birth control pills in her purse. They wouldn't be satisfied until she settled down with a white picket fence and 2.4 kids. Even if Ash was ready for that she wasn't ready to release her own sense of freedom.
A wave of strength wrapped around her, coddling and bolstering her. This weekend she and Ash and Shelly and Scott and Cheryl were going to head out to an old cabin Scott had rented for Spring break. There, she would make her decision; figure out where her love lay.
And if it lay with Cheryl, then she wouldn't throw stones at herself.
"Maybe that's just who I am," Linda decided. "Maybe I'm just capable of loving more than one person. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm just a little different."
Satisfied, she closed the door. She'd figure it out after they came home.