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So I didn't dodge it. Instead I went right up to her and said, "Bernice! It's me -- Ren!"
She jumped as if I'd kicked her. Then she focused on me. "So I see," she said in a sour voice.
"Let me buy
you a coffee," I said. I must've been really nervous to say that because why would Bernice want a coffee from a place she was picketing?
She must have thought I was making fun of her because she said, "Piss off."
"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean it that way. How about a water, then? We could drink it over there, by the statue." The statue of Martha Graham was a sort of mascot: it showed her being Judith, holding up the head of her enemy Holofernes, and the students had painted the head's neck stump red and stuck steel wool under Martha's armpits. There was a flat base right underneath the Holofernes head where you could sit.
She gave me another scowl. "You are so backslidden," she said. "Bottled water is evil. Don't you know anything?"
I could have called her a bitch and just walked away from everything. But this was my one chance to put things right, at least with myself. "Bernice," I said, "I want to make you an apology. So just tell me what you can drink, and I'll get some of it, and we'll go someplace and drink it."
She was still grumpy -- no one could hold a grudge like her -- but after I'd said we needed to put Light around it, which must've triggered off the better Gardener part of her, she said there was this organic mix in a recyclable carton made of pressed kudzu leaves, you could get it at the campus supermarkette, and she still had some picketing to do, but by the time I came back with the stuff she could take a break.
We sat underneath the head of Holofernes with the two boxes of liquid mulch I'd bought, and the taste brought back my early days at the Gardeners -- how unhappy I'd been at first, and how Bernice had stuck up for me then. "Didn't you go to the West Coast?" I asked her. "After all that ..."
"Yeah," she said. "Well, I'm back here now." She said that Veena had backslidden and joined an entirely different religion called the Known Fruits, who claimed it was a mark of God's favour to be rich because By their fruits ye shall know them, and fruits meant bank accounts. Veena had gone into a HelthWyzer vitamin-supplements franchise, and had quickly expanded to five outlets, and was doing very well. Bernice said the West Coast was perfect for that because although they all did stuff like yoga and said it was Spiritual, they were really just twisted, fish-crunching, materialistic body-worshippers out there, with facelifts and bimplants and genework and totally warped values.
Veena had wanted Bernice to take Business at college, but Bernice had stayed a Gardener by faith, so they'd fought about it; and Martha Graham was a compromise because it had courses in How to Profit from Holistic Healing. Which was what Bernice was taking.
I couldn't picture Bernice healing anything, because I couldn't picture her wanting to heal anything. Grinding dirt into your cut was more her style. But I said that was really interesting.
I told her what I was taking, but I saw she didn't care. So I told her about my roommate, Buddy the Third, and she said the entire Martha Graham Academy was filled with people like that -- Exfernals frittering away their time on Earth without one serious thought in their heads except drinking and getting laid. She'd had a roommate like that at first, plus he'd been an animal-murderer because he'd worn leather sandals. Though they'd been fleather. But they'd looked like leather. So she'd burnt them. And thank God she didn't have to share a bathroom with him any more, because she could hear him doing sexual things with girls practically every night, like some degenerate bonobo/rabbit splice.
"Jimmy!" she said. "What a meat-breath!"
When I heard the name Jimmy I thought, It can't be the same one, but then I thought, Oh yes it can. While this was running through my head, Bernice said why didn't I move into the room adjoining hers since now that Jimmy had moved out it was empty.
I'd wanted to make it up with her but not that much. So I launched into what I needed to say. "I'm very sorry about Burt," I said. "Your dad. About him dying like that. I feel so responsible."
She looked at me as if I was crazy. "What're you talking about?" she said.
"That time I told you he was having sex with Nuala, and you told Veena, and she blew up and called the CorpSeCorps? Well, I don't think he was having sex with Nuala. Me and Amanda -- we kind of made it up because we were being mean. I feel terrible about it, and I'm really sorry. I don't think he ever did anything worse than girls' armpits."
"At least Nuala was a grown-up," said Bernice. "But he didn't stop at the armpits. With the girls. He was a degenerate, just like my mother said. He used to tell me I was his favourite little girl, but not even that was true. So I told Veena. That's why she ratted him out. So you can stop feeling so self-important." I got the old glare, though this time with red watery eyes. "You're just lucky it was never you."
"Oh," I said. "Bernice, I'm really sorry."
"I don't want to talk about this any more," said Bernice. "I prefer to spend my time in more productive ways." She said would I come and stencil Happicuppa protest signs with her, and I said I'd already skipped one class that day, but maybe some other time. She gave me that slitty-eyed look that said she could tell I was wriggling out of something. Then I asked her what her old roommate Jimmy had actually looked like, and she said why was that any of my business?
She was right back into her bossy mode, and I knew that if I hung around with her much longer I'd be nine years old again, and she'd have the same hold on me, only more so because however awful things might be for me in my life they'd always be worse in hers, and she'd have a victim hammerlock on me. I said I really had to run, and she said, "Yeah, right," and then she said I hadn't changed at all, I was still just as much of a simpy lightweight as I'd ever been.
Years later -- when I was already working at Scales and Tails -- I saw onscreen that Bernice had been spraygunned in a raid on a Gardeners safe house. That was after the Gardeners had been outlawed. Though being outlawed wouldn't have stopped Bernice; she was a person with the courage of her convictions. I had to admire her for that -- for the convictions, and also for the courage -- because I never really felt I had either one.
There was a close-up of her dead face, looking more gentle and peaceful than I'd ever seen her look in life. Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought -- kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges -- that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she'd grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she'd been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.
52
Before that conversation with Bernice when she'd talked about her former roommate, I'd been half expecting to see Jimmy -- in a classroom, at the Happicuppa, or just walking somewhere. But now I felt he must be very close by. He was right around the corner, or on the other side of a window; or I'd wake up one morning and there he would be, right beside me, holding my hand and looking at me the way he used to do when we first got together. It was like being haunted.
Maybe I've imprinted on Jimmy, I thought. Like a baby duck hatching out of an egg and the first thing it sees is a weasel, so that's what it follows around for the rest of its life. Which is likely to be short. Why did it have to be Jimmy who was the very first person I'd fallen in love with? Why couldn't it have been someone with a better character? Or at least a less fickle person. A more serious person, not so given to playing the fool.
The worst thing about it was that I couldn't get interested in anyone else. There was a hole in my heart that only Jimmy could fill. I know that's a country-and-western thing to say -- I'd heard enough of that kind of worldly music on my Sea/H/Ear Candy by then -- but it's the only way I can explain it. And it isn't that I wasn't aware of Jimmy's faults, because I was.
I did see Jimmy eventually, of course. The campus wasn't huge, so it was bound to happen sooner or later. I saw him in the distance, and he saw me, but he didn't come rushing over. He stayed in the distance. He didn't even wave, he looked away as if he hadn't seen me. So if I'd been waiting for the answer to the question I was always asking myself -- Does Jimmy still love me? -- I had it now.
