Broom of the System, The.
by David Foster Wallace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
The author thanks the following for their help: Robert Boswell Gerald Howard William Kennick Bonnie Nadell Andrew Parker Dale Peterson The Trustees of Amherst College
PART ONE.
1.
1981.
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. They"re long and thin and splay-toed, with b.u.t.tons of yellow callus on the little toes and a thick stair-step of it on the back of the heel, and a few long black hairs are curling out of the skin at the tops of the feet, and the red nail polish is cracking and peeling in curls and candy-striped with decay. Lenore only notices because Mindy"s bent over in the chair by the fridge picking at some of the polish on her toes; her bathrobe"s opening a little, so there"s some cleavage visible and everything, a lot more than Lenore"s got, and the thick white towel wrapped around Mindy"s wet washed shampooed head is coming undone and a wisp of dark shiny hair has slithered out of a crack in the folds and curled down all demurely past the side of Mindy"s face and under her chin. It smells like Flex shampoo in the room, and also pot, since Clarice and Sue Shaw are smoking a big thick j-bird Lenore got from Ed Creamer back at Shaker School and brought up with some other stuff for Clarice, here at school.
What"s going on is that Lenore Beadsman, who"s fifteen, has just come all the way from home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, right near Cleveland, to visit her big sister, Clarice Beadsman, who"s a freshman at this women"s college, called Mount Holyoke; and Lenore"s staying with her sleeping bag in this room on the second floor of Rumpus Hall that Clarice shares with her roommates, Mindy Metalman and Sue Shaw. Lenore"s also come to sort of check out this college, a little bit. This is because even though she"s just fifteen she"s supposedly quite intelligent and thus accelerated and already a junior at Shaker School and thus thinking about college, application-wise, for next year. So she"s visiting. Right now it"s a Friday night in March.
Sue Shaw, who"s not nearly as pretty as Mindy or Clarice, is bringing the joint over here to Mindy and Lenore, and Mindy takes it and lets her toe alone for a second and sucks the bird really hard, so it glows bright and a seed snaps loudly and bits of paper ash go flying and floating, which Clarice and Sue find super funny and start laughing at really hard, whooping and clutching at each other, and Mindy breathes it in really deep and holds it in and pa.s.ses the bird to Lenore, but Lenore says no thank you.
"No thank you," says Lenore.
"Go ahead, you brought it, why not ... ," croaks Mindy Metalman, talking the way people talk without breathing, holding on to the smoke.
"I know, but it"s track season at school and I"m on the team and I don"t smoke during the season, I can"t, it kills me," Lenore says.
So Mindy shrugs and finally lets out a big breath of pale used-up smoke and coughs a deep little cough and gets up with the bird and takes it over across the room to Clarice and Sue Shaw, who are by a big wooden stereo speaker listening to this song, again, by Cat Stevens, for like the tenth time tonight. Mindy"s robe"s more or less open, now, and Lenore can see some pretty amazing stuff, but Mindy just walks across the room. Lenore can at this point divide all the girls she"s known neatly into girls who think deep down they"re pretty and girls who deep down think they"re really not. Girls who think they"re pretty don"t care much about their bathrobes being undone and are good at makeup and like to walk when people are watching, and they act different when there are boys around; and girls like Lenore, who don"t think they"re too pretty, tend not to wear makeup, and run track, and wear black Converse sneakers, and keep their bathrobes pretty well fastened at all times. Mindy sure is pretty, though, except for her feet.
The Cat Stevens song is over again, and the needle goes up by itself, and obviously none of these three feel like moving all the way to start it again, so they"re just sitting back in their hard wood desk chairs, Mindy in her faded pink terry robe with one shiny smooth leg all bare and sticking out; Clarice in her Desert boots and her dark blue jeans that Lenore calls her shoe-hom jeans, and that white western shirt she"d worn at the state fair the time she"d had her purse stolen, and her blond hair flooding all over the shirt, and her eyes very blue right now; Sue Shaw with her red hair and a green sweater and green tartan skirt and fat white legs with a bright red pimple just over one knee, legs crossed with one foot jiggling one of those boat shoes, with the sick white soles-Lenore dislikes that kind of shoe a lot.
Clarice after a quiet bit lets out a long sigh and says, in whispers, "Cat ... is ... G.o.d," giggling a little at the end. The other two giggle too.
"G.o.d? How can Cat be G.o.d? Cat exists." exists." Mindy"s eyes are all red. Mindy"s eyes are all red.
"That"s offensive and completely blaphemous," says Sue Shaw, eyes wide and puffed and indignant.
"Blaphemous?" Clarice dies, looks at Lenore. "Blasphemous," she says. Her eyes aren"t all that bad, really, just unusually cheerful, as if she"s got a joke she"s not telling.
"Blissphemous," says Mindy.
"Blossphemous."
"Blousephemous."
"Bluesphemous."
"Boisterous."
"Boisteronahalfsh.e.l.l."
"Bucephalus."
"Barney Rubble."
"Baba Yaga. "
"Bolshevik."
"Blaphemous!"
They"re dying, doubled over, and Lenore"s laughing that weird sympathetic laugh you laugh when everybody else is laughing so hard they make you laugh too. The noise of the big party downstairs is coming through the floor and vibrating in Lenore"s black sneakers and the arms of the chair. Now Mindy slides out of her desk chair all limp and shlomps down on Lenore"s sleeping bag on the floor next to Clarice"s pretend-Persian ruglet from Mooradian"s in Cleveland, and Mindy modestly covers her crotch with a comer of her robe, but Lenore still can"t help but see the way her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swell up into the worn pink towel cloth of the robe, all full and stuff, even lying down on her back, there, on the floor. Lenore uncon siously looks down a little at her own chest, under her flannel shirt.
"Hunger," Sue Shaw says after a minute. "Ma.s.sive, immense, uncontrollable, consuming, uncontrollable, hunger."
"This is so," says Mindy.
"We will wait"-Clarice looks at her watch on the underside of her wrist-"one, that is one hour, before eating anything what soentirelyever."
"No we can"t possibly possibly do that."
"But do it we shall. As per room discussions of not one week ago, when we explicitly agreed that we shall not gorge when utterly flapped, lest we get fat and repulsive, like Mindy, over there, you poor midge."
"Fart-blossom," Mindy says absently, she"s not fat and she knows it, Lenore knows it, they all know it.
"A lady at all times, that Metalman," Clarice says. Then, after a minute, "Speaking of which, you might just maybe either fix your robe or get dressed or get up off your back in Lenore"s stuff, I"m not really all up for giving you a gynecological exam, which is sort of what you"re making us do, here, O Lesbia of Thebes."
"Stuff and bother," says Mindy, or rather, "Stuth and bozzer"; and she gets up swaying and reaching for solid things, goes over to the door that goes into her little single bedroom off the bathroom. She got there first in September and took it, Clarice had said in a letter, this Playboy-Playmatish j.a.p from Scarsdale, and she"s shedding what"s left of her bathrobe, battered into submission, leaving it all wet in Lenore"s lap in the chair by the door, and going through the door with her long legs, deliberate steps. Shuts the door.
Clarice looks after her when she"s gone and shakes her head a tiny bit and looks over at Lenore and smiles. There are sounds of laughter downstairs, and cattle-herd sounds of lots of people dancing. Lenore just loves to dance.
Sue Shaw takes a big noisy drink of water out of a big plastic Jetsons gla.s.s on her desk up by the front door. "Speaking of which, you didn"t by any chance happen to see Splittstoesser this morning?" she says.
"Nuh-uh," says Clarice.
"She was with Proctor."
"So?"
"At seven o"clock? Both in nighties, all sleepy and googly, coming out of her room, together? Holding hands?" hands?"
"Hmmm."
"Now if anybody ever told me that Spiittstoesser ..."
"I thought she was engaged to some guy."
"She is."
They both laugh like h.e.l.l.
"Awww."
"Who"s Splittstoesser?" Lenore asks.
"Nancy Splittstoesser, at dinner? The girl in the red V-neck, with the earrings that were really little fists?"
"Oh. But what about her?"
Clarice and Sue look at each other and start to laugh again. Mindy Metalman comes back in, in gym shorts and an inside-out sweatshirt with the arms cut off. Lenore looks at her and smiles at the floor.
"What?" Mindy knows something"s up right away.
"Splittstoesser and Proctor," Sue gets out.
"I meant to ask you." Mindy"s eyes get all wide. "They"re in the bathroom this morning? In the same shower?"
"Ahh, no!" Sue"s going to die, Mindy starts to laugh too, that weird sympathetic laugh, looking around at them.
"They"re, uh, together now? I thought Nancy was engaged."
"She ... is," Clarice making Lenore laugh, too.
"G.o.dfrey Jaysus."
It settles down after a while. Sue does the "Twilight Zone" theme in a low voice. "Who ... will be struck next ... ?"
"Not entirely sure I even understand what you guys are, uh ..." Lenore is asking, looking around.
So Clarice tells Lenore all this business about how Pat Proctor"s a bull and what bulls are and how quite a few of the girls get pretty friendly and all, here at this women"s college.
"You"re kidding."
"No."
"That"s just incredibly gross." And this sets Mindy and Sue off again. Lenore looks at them. "Well doesn"t that kind of thing sort of give you guys the creeps a little bit? I mean I-"
"Well it"s just part of life and everything, what people want to do is more or less their own ..." Clarice is putting the needle on that song again.
There"s a silence for about half the song. Mindy"s at her toes, again, over at the bunkbeds. "The thing is, I don"t know if we should say," says Sue Shaw, looking over at Clarice, "but Nancy Splittstoesser sort of got a.s.saulted right before Thanksgiving, on the path out by the Widget House, and I think she-"
"a.s.saulted?" Lenore says.
"Well, raped, I guess, really."
"I see." Lenore looks up behind Sue at a poster over Clarice"s desk, which is of a really muscular guy, without a shirt on, making all his muscles from the back, his back all shiny and bulging every which way. The poster"s old and ripped at the edges from tape; it had been in Clarice"s room at home and their father had not been pleased, the light from the high ceiling makes a bright reflection at the back of the man"s head and hides it in white.
"I think it kind of messed her up," says Sue.
"How hard to understand," Lenore says softly. "Raped. So she just doesn"t like males now, because of that, or-?"
"Well I think it"s hard to say, Lenore," Clarice with her eyes closed, playing with a b.u.t.ton on her shirt pocket. She"s in front of their air vent, with her chair leaning back, and her hair"s all over, a yellow breeze around her cheeks. "Probably just safe to say she"s pretty confused and messed up temporarily, "ntcha think?"
"Sure, I guess."
"You a virgin Lenore?" Mindy"s on the lower bunk, Sue"s bed, with her picked and flakey feet up and toes hooked into the springs on the underside of Clarice"s mattress.
"You b.i.t.c.h," Clarice says to Mindy.
"I"m just asking," says Mindy. "I doubt Lenore"s too hung up about what-"
"Yes I"m a virgin, I mean I"ve never had, you know, s.e.xual intercourse with anybody," Lenore says, smiling at Clarice that it"s OK, really. "Are you a virgin Mindy?"
Mindy laughs. "Oh very much so."
Sue Shaw snorts into her water. "Mindy"s saving herself for the right marine battalion." Clarice and Lenore laugh.
"f.u.c.k you in the ear," Mindy Metalman says mildly, she"s all relaxed, almost asleep. Her legs are all curved and faintly muscular and the skin"s so smooth it almost glows because she"d recently gotten "waxed" at home, she"d told Lenore, whatever that meant.
"This happen a lot?"
"What happen?"
"Rapes and a.s.saults and stuff?"
Clarice and Sue look away, all calm. "Sometimes, probably, who knows, it"s hard to say, because it gets covered up or not reported or something a lot of the time, the College isn"t exactly nuts about-"
"Well how many times that you know of?"
"Idle know. About maybe, I guess I know of about ten women-"
"Ten?" " ... "
"How many women do you even know total, here?"