The Bride of Catastrophe by Heidi Jon Schmidt

stars glittering in the sky, and swore that someday I’d be like them.
    â€œYou ought to connect with someone else, Beatrice,” Sid said. “You ought to go to bed with Palomino—it would really be good for him.” Palomino was the other boyfriend of the sensuous type. He had named himself for his hair, which was waist length and bleached an odd shade of buff. The next night he let himself into my room …
    â€œSid said this would be good for you,” he said, applying a patchouli massage oil to my thighs. I was glad of this, as Palomino didn’t bathe—in a museum of smells, his hair would nicely represent the seventies, full as it was of incense and hashish and Red Zinger tea, and, I first thought, falafel with tahini, until I realized that was just his own natural odor. I was lost and sad and all I wanted was to curl into myself and sleep, so I came as quickly as I could, after which he finished with a few thrusts, and went, finally, away.
    When he called in the morning my heart jumped, though; maybe he really liked me.
    â€œAre you on the pill?” he asked.
    â€œI am,” I said, proud schoolgirl.
    â€œIs your roommate? I thought I might try her next.”
    To think I’d imagined a man’s love would resolve all my troubles, to think I had been so naive. I deserved the likes of Palomino, for that stupidity. How I wished to go home, where there was no reality—I wanted my mother’s fried puffball, I wanted my own bed. It was March and the fields of narcissus across the brook would be blooming in their brilliant defiance of the spring cold. I remembered going out one morning and finding them frozen—I’d flicked one with my finger and it shattered like glass. I warmed the shards back into petals in my open palm and knelt there grieving; I hadn’t meant to wreck everything, really, no.
    My schoolwork was suffering; I read whole chapters without taking them in. What was the point of reading, when the minute you shut the book, the world the author had stretched so beautifully open snapped back to its harsh, banal self? Imagine, that I’d been fool enough to believe these novels reflected something real. A guy like Henry James, who spent all day writing and all night making clever conversation, who had never married or had children or a job, was never caught in any of the webs of life … of course he saw everything in all its thousand delicate shades of meaning. He had nothing to do all day but turn one scrap of experience under the light. And I, who knew nothing , had been so stupid, I’d thought real people lived this way. I tore The Golden Bowl in half and threw it across the room.
    Clearly, my midterm essay, “Fanny Assingham and Her Ilk,” would not be in on time. So I had to slouch over to Philippa’s office, where, having knocked, I stood at the door shivering, hearing her chair push back and seeing her silhouette come toward the frosted window.
    â€œBeatrice Wolfe! A rare visitor indeed! To what do we owe such an honor?”
    She stepped back to look me up and down, and didn’t like what she saw. I’d started wearing a wretched black raincoat from the Salvation Army, to hide my fifties dresses with their cabbage roses, their air of postwar fertility. I looked like a blackened tree stump in the midst of a poisoned rice paddy—finally, in step with my age.
    â€œBeatrice, what did I suggest, about getting some more—form-fitting—clothes? And didn’t you promise me you were going to look into some kind of pomade or something? Because the hair is—” She paused to search for a suitable adjective, but it was too late.
    â€œPhilippa…” I said, sitting down hard and covering my face with my hands, which did not prevent a tear from running down my chin and plopping onto her notes. She’d been working on her book, figuring out how all the little pieces of life fit into her