Maddy Caldera

In Sociology, Maddy smiled at me when she entered the classroom. It was the accidental obligatory smile people had to extend when their eyes accidentally met a stranger’s. I appreciated it nonetheless, in the sense that her palpable intimacy extended to all objects about her. It was windy outside and Maddy’s nose was red. She wore no make up and her brown eyes glistened as if she had had little sleep the night before. They squinted a little and the eyelashes curved toward her well-defined brow bones. She was still the most beautiful girl in the class.

She smiled and took the seat next to me. People were still filing in and the professor was setting up the projector for the presentation. The room was mostly quiet except for strums of turned pages and the clicks of mechanical pencils. I glanced at Maddy from the corner of my eye. She was taking her gloves off. She had small and delicate hands. Her skin was pale and I knew that if I were to touch it, it would be smooth. I was filled with a strange desire to do so. There would be some poetical static, some meaningfulness, if the rough cold-strained ridges of my fingers were to trace themselves along her palm.

I was lost to sensation. My eyes were half closed. I gave no consideration to the implications of my sudden desires. She turned to me as if she read my mind, as if all this time I had been screaming everything I felt without noticing.

“What a Monday,” she said.

It was such a strange thing to say. Was this a particularly bad Monday? All Mondays were rubbish, as far as I was concerned. Maybe she meant it was a good Monday. Maybe something nice had happened to her that day—maybe she found a dollar bill on the ground or a boy she had dreamed of had spoken to her. Or perhaps it was a bizarre Monday; some alternate-dimension Monday where everyone acted contrary to who they were. Or maybe it was just a neutral Monday, a Monday you mentioned when you had nothing else to say. She didn’t need to speak to me, I thought, so perhaps she wanted to. But that seemed more of the bizarre Monday variety. There must have been desperation on my face—she must have registered how much I wanted precisely this. She was accommodating me out of pity. I didn’t want to be pitied, especially not by Maddy. How could I let Maddy believe I’d give up so much just for a simple conversation about Mondays?

“Yeah,” I said to her and turned away.
The class was nearly filled and the professor approached the front. He might have passed off for Einstein’s crazier brother in his navy, checkered, button-down, short-sleeved shirt and khakis. He wore dirty sneakers. His hair was white and spiked in all directions. He had poor posture.

“Any of ya’ll go to Banned Book reading at the HOB last weekend?” he asked. The room was quiet. Maddy raised her hand.

“What’d you think?” Einstein’s brother asked.

“It was pretty eye opening—I mean, it was just a bunch of local writers reading from a selection of banned books but the truly thought provoking thing was—well,” she paused; I exhaled. “Like on the one side you think art shouldn’t be censored and banning books is ridiculous—I mean, when you think banned books you think Catcher in the Rye and Huck Finn, and the idea is so silly because you’re basically silencing these important misunderstood voices and you find those people ignorant. I mean it’s an ideology in itself—the idea that books are not written to be burned. But then you get them reading from like Mein Kampf and you start to wonder if maybe you aren’t really a hypocrite underneath all that like moralizing. I mean—I like that the people who run it obviously recognize the deeper implications of what they’re promoting. It makes their statement that much stronger.”

Einstein said he was very glad she brought it up and it related to the lesson in such-and-such way, and what we would learn that day would be so-and-so. I stopped listening. I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t comprehend any more words. Any more words spoken to me that day would be extraneous—thrown away like when pennies fall out of wallets but their owner is too lazy and indifferent to pick them up. They are only pennies, words, after the right thing is said.

I inhaled. It was being a starving homeless orphan at Christmas, pressing bare, dainty fingers on a toy shop’s frosted glass. It was realizing the world and all the people in it. How could she be so inarticulate and so profound and so extraordinary? I imagined her alone, in that same raincoat she was wearing now, with those gloves on her hands, and some loosely-knit wool scarf around her neck, walking into the dimly lit club, sitting in a corner, savoring all the angles and approaches to messages. I imagined her as a receptacle of information, a sift, a funnel. Her voice was as fresh as her smile. I wanted to be responsible. I wanted to be responsible for all the troubles of the world. I wanted to be an implication, a question mark. I wanted to write Mein Kampf, or to form a cult, or slaughter masses—I wanted to be the reason Maddy thought—I wanted to be the singular cause for the exercise of her mind. It would all be worth it, if Maddy Caldera only knew my name.

I imagined her not doing it alone. I imagined myself coming with her. Dumping my bovine roommate to wallow in my dark, moldy cell of a dorm, and taking the streetcar to the quarter, laughing with Maddy and savoring the streets. She would get the window seat and have her hair pinned back and it would smell of flowery, girly shampoo when she turned her neck away. And I would watch the shape of her head framed by St. Charles. We’d be clever and chatty and swap make-up secrets and she would tell me about her family and her boyfriends and favorite lipstick shades. The smell of lipstick—the doughy plasteline scent. It would be euphoric and superficial and sublime. We’d take a corner table and share calamari and she’d squeeze lemon on the plate and her fingers would drip with the sour citrus.

I imagined forming opinions together. Rolling our eyes and giggling or recognizing the meaning of it all. I imagined profound conversations and debates and exclamation of our supreme fortune—to have found each other. Who needed other people in the world? She could make life malleable like putty, or saltwater taffy stuck to the roof of the mouth. She was all sugar cones and cotton candy and bubble gum lips and flowing blouses. She was the manifestation of what was right and lovely in the world; the corporeal symbol of whatever goodness could be scraped off the burned casserole of life. She was what was left when you blew the dust off a lustrous surface. She was porcelain and crème brûlée and happiness. In my imagination, she was what could have saved me.

“Who’d you go with?” Amanda with frizzy blonde hair and a frumpy sweater whispered to Maddy. She was sitting near us both.

“Brad, Andrew, and Krystal,” Maddy whispered back, “It was awesome. You should have come.”

Not only was frizzy Amanda apparently friends with Maddy but also Maddy had gone to the banned book thing with her friends after all. I felt ridiculous. My fantasies were at best delusional but more likely psychotic. There simply were not people in the world as isolated and lonely as I was. There simply were not people in the world who could not find a single other soul to connect to. And beautiful, charismatic, extraordinary people like Maddy were certainly the last to even approach that designation. In truth, I had been accurate all along. She was a kind person and she pitied me for being something she had never been and could never completely understand.