On the tv screen, Gloria was reporting from Albania, her handsome, slightly weathered face bearing down intensely into the camera, as if she had to finish her report and get away before someone shot her. Madeline's heart did that old flutter. She had just finished putting little Hannah to bed. About once every 3 or 4 months Madeline saw Gloria reporting from somewhere. In the past 6 years they had managed two meetings. Two lunches. After one of them, they had held hands briefly on a park bench, Gloria's larger, unpainted fingers closing warmly over Madeline's smaller, manicured hand. Madeline had been wearing silver nail polish that day. Gloria had looked at it and laughed. In Gloria's universe, glimmering silver nail polish was a myth, belonging to a legendary world of unicorns and princes.
Madeline's nails: they were strung over the memory of that year like Christmas lights. They had met in September of 1994 at Melville, the women's college west of Boston. That dangerous year. Madeline was returning for her junior year, back to the familiar school, but to an unfamiliar room-mate. The new room-mate was Gloria, who had transferred from a small college in upstate New York. Gloria was a senior.
Madeline had arrived at Melville a week late that September, because of the death of her grandmother. The evidence of Gloria was everywhere in the room: a clutter of books, clothes, shoes and magazines, a camera bag with cords snaking out of it, a couple of field hockey sticks. They were lucky to have this room. All the young women - and here at Melville they were always referred to as "women", not as "girls" or "ladies"; serious young "women" were supposed to have outgrown those confining archetypes - all the young women coveted the corner rooms of this, the oldest residence at Melville. They were circular, and formed a turret that rose up into the sky, the highest point on campus. They were larger, and they had the best views, especially of the long sloping grass that led to the small lake.
Madeline unpacked her suitcases. She was studying music performance, a soprano. All she knew about Gloria was that she was a senior. Later she learned Gloria was studying economics; it wasn't until the next year, at graduate school, that Gloria decided on journalism. But even in her senior year, she was writing articles for the student newspaper, always carrying that video camera around.
Madeline needed a shower. She had to replace the sticky film of her flight from Pittsburgh. She threw her robe on and got out her small soft-sided cosmetic bag, unzipping the lid and laying out about 15 shades of nail polish on her dresser. She didn't deliberate long before choosing dark blue - not quite midnight blue but darker than navy. Revlon called it "Twilight Ink".
This was the image she presented when Gloria burst into the room: knees together, leaning forward in her faded red terry robe, her foot contorted at an angle as she applied the last dab of paint to her baby toe. The door swung open, and in strode Gloria, dragging her field hockey stick for a few steps before simply dropping it loudly on the time-stained hardwood floor. You would have expected someone new at Melville to be just a little tentative, but not Gloria; she rolled in like a weather system. Like a hurricane, if you wanted to know the truth.
"Oh hi," said Gloria and walked directly over to shake Madeline's hand. "You must be Madeline. I'm Gloria. So we're room-mates. Just let me get out of this stuff and shower off."
Madeline felt her hand squeezed in the larger young woman's sweaty, muddy hand, her new friend's face flushed red with the exertion of her field hockey, some streaks of mud down the sides of her legs. Gloria wiped the back of her forearm across her brow, then her nose, then took the elastic out of her pony tail and let her long wavy dark brown hair fall messily down her back and shoulders. She sat on the edge of the bed. First, she unlaced her boots and kicked them off, half-way across the room. Then the small shin-guards, similarly discarded. Next she peeled off her t-shirt, blue, with the discreet Melville crest over her heart outlined in white, which she just dropped on the floor between her shoes. She stood up and dropped her pleated skirt in a pool around her feet, not bothering to step out of it but unpeeling her mud-scarred knee socks and leaving them in the centre of the skirt opening, the socks standing up like cloth slinkys. Finally, she reached back and stretched out of her functional sports bra, and tore off the spandex short-tights that she wore under the pleated skirt. All the time, she was breathing pretty hard. Without another word, she strode naked to the bathroom, leaving behind her this scattered pile of athletic clothes like it had been blown there by the wind.
Madeline smiled. Gloria was tall, at least 5'10, with a hard, athletic body, muscles like a guy's. Madeline noticed girls' bodies; she was part artist, and partly attracted. Gloria appeared a few minutes later, rubbing her head with a towel, her dark hair sticking to her neck and her forehead and her cheek and her shoulders. Gloria's lack of timidity was inspiring. Madeline studied Gloria's legs - not so much graceful as impressive because of the sharply defined muscularity. She looked at what must have been the hardest stomach she had seen on a girl. Nowadays, they would have called it a six-pack. Her breasts were neither large nor small: a b-cup for sure, with dark brown aureoles, hard nipples right in the bullseye. Her pubic hair was trimmed, but not a great deal. Tidied would have been a better word.
Gloria stopped rubbing her hair suddenly and looked at Madeline studying her. "You don't mind, do you? Running around without clothes? I just can't be bothered, but if it makes you feel weird..."
Madeline smiled the slow, self-contained half-smile that would come to bemuse Gloria so much. "Oh no. I like it, actually. If you don't mind, I don't mind."
"Good," Gloria said, and went on rubbing her hair, while her tight breasts bounced. After a minute or so, Gloria looked down at Madeline, studying her new room-mate in return, still in the same pose, the small bottle of blue nail polish in her fingers.
She walked over to the foot of Madeline's bed, bent to stare at her toenails, reached out a hand to turn the big toe just slightly, the dark blue nail polish contrasting the white skin of Madeline's feet. "Nice," she said. "Fucking cool." Then she noticed the array of bottles on Madeline's dresser. "Holy shit." She laughed briefly. "Popsicle toes."
"Popsicle toes?" The cuteness was so incongruous in the mouth of this hockey player.
"That's what my Oma used to call them."
"Oma?" queried Madeline.
"Yeah. My grandmother. She always used to paint our toes when we were kids, and she would call them popsicle toes. Used to drive my mother fucking nuts."
She went back to her side of the room, pulled out a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, which she slipped on with no underwear. "Let's go down and eat."
Madeline smiled and stood, undoing her robe and throwing it on the bed, walking naked to her dresser. Her body was smaller and softer than Gloria's, no angles and bulges of calf and thigh muscles, just curves. She felt good, her nipples hardening as she pullied on a pair of jeans and a top. No underwear for her either. Inside there was just the slightest, darkest hum of possibilities.
Gloria was the captain of the Varsity field hockey, it turned out. She had been recruited. A week later, the afternoon of their first game, against Radcliffe, Madeline decided to go down and watch. She got there just after half time. She was stunned. She had never seen anything like it, the intensity the girls played with. The "women", rather. And in the middle of it, clearly the best player on the field, was Gloria. She knew field hockey was supposed to be non-contact, but Gloria played it like it was football, or ice hockey. She would drive toward a knot of players who were scrambling for the ball. It was like every encounter was a game of chicken. The other players would sense her, it seemed, without seeing her, and there would open up in front of Gloria a sudden wedge of space, like a sudden window in time when everyone else stopped but her, and she would slip through it, and emerge on the other side, with the ball, her glistening, mud-streaked legs crunching the ground, her ponytail trailing behind like the tail of a comet. With her mouthguard in, she always looked like she had a fat lip, like someone had punched her. It didn't look out of place.
Madeline watched and absorbed it all, disengaged, unable to summon the enthusiasm and fire she saw in the other girls who were watching and yelling and screaming. Go Melville Go. Kill 'em! Madeline felt more like she was observing paintings in a gallery, from an aesthetic distance. It was weird that people could get so wrapped up in a game. Spectators that is. Players she could understand. Madeline was intense herself. Just because she was quiet didn't mean she was docile.
