Pemulis shakes his head very seriously at Troeltsch. ‘Not a chance, brother.’
‘I’m telling you man this milk is powdered.’ Troeltsch peering down into the tumbler, probing the milk’s surface with a thick finger. ‘Me I can tell from powdered. I have growing-up domestic confirmed traumas around powdered. The day Mother announced milk was too heavy to keep lugging back from the store and switched to powdered, with Father’s OK. Father knuckling under like Roosevelt at Yalta. My big sister ran away from home, and the rest of us were traumatized around it, this switch to powdered, which is unmistakable if you know what to look for.’
Freer makes a snoring noise.
‘And do I ever know what to look for, to verify.’ Troeltsch is hoarse, and one of these people who speaks to more than one person at once by looking from one person to one person to one person; he’s not a born public speaker. ‘Namely your telltale residues along the sides of the glass, when swished.’ W/ great flourished swishings of the milk.
‘Except Troeltsch you can turn around and see them fucking loading the bags into the dispenser every twenty minutes. Bags of milk. That say MILK on them, the bags. Liquid, sloshy, hard to handle. It’s milk.’
‘You see bags, you see the word MILK. They’re counting on the packaging. Image management. Sensory management.’ Responding to Pemulis but looking at Struck. ‘Part of some larger overall kertwang. Possible punishment for the Eschaton thing.’ Eyes going briefly to Hal. ‘Covert vitamins possibly next. Let’s not even mention saltpeter. Put aside deductions from bags a second. I’m sticking to facts. Fact: this is verifiably powdered milk.’
‘You’re saying they mix powdered milk and then try and pour it into milk-bags, all to allay?’
Schacht clears his mouth and swallows mightily. ‘Tavis can’t even regrout tile in the locker room without calling a Community Meeting or appointing a committee. The Regrouting Committee’s been dragging along since May. Suddenly they’re pulling secret 0300 milk-switches? It doesn’t ring true, Jim.’
‘And Troeltsch has a cold, he said,’ Freer observes, indicating the little bottle of Seldane next to Troeltsch’s squeezing-ball, by his plate. ‘You can’t even taste, Troeltsch, if you got a real cold.’
‘Trevor should have the cold, Axhandle, no?’ Schacht says, tapping carminative capsules onto his palm from his own amber bottle.
With supper they can choose milk or else cranberry juice, that most carb-caloric of juices, which froths redly in its own clear dispenser by the salad bar. The milk dispenser stands alone against the west wall, a big huge 24-liter three-bagger, the milk inserted in ovaloid mammarial bags into its refrigerated cabinet of brushed steel, with three receptacles for tumblers and three levers for controlled dispensing. There’s two levers for skim and one for supposedly high-lecithin chocolate skim, which every new E.T.A. tries exactly once and discovers tastes like skim with a brown crayon melted into it. There’s a sign in a kitchen-staffer’s crude black block caps taped to the dispenser’s façade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The sign used to say MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of a blue dot by a fairly obvious person. 260 The line for seconds on entrees now stretches out past the milk dispenser. The best thing about satiation and slowing down on the eating is leaning back and feeling autolysis start in on what you ate and tending to your teeth while you gaze around the airy room at crowds and clumps of kids, observing behaviors and pathologies with a clear and sated head. The littler kids running in tight circles trying to follow the shadow of the ceiling fan. Girls laughing crumpled against their seatmates’ shoulders. People protecting their plates. The blurred sexuality and indecisive postures of puberty. Two marginal male 16’s have their heads directly in the bowls in the salad bar, and some of the surrounding females are commenting. Different kids are illustrating points with different gestures. John Wayne and Keith Freer stroll purposefully through the serpentine crowd and up to the front of the Seconds line and insert themselves in front of a little boy who’s tearing at a held bagel with great violent movements of head and neck. The 18-A’s get free buttinskis: R.H.I. literal P., at E.T.A. Jim Struck spears one of the cherry tomatoes out of Hal’s salad bowl with a savage fork-gesture; Hal makes no comment.
Troeltsch has run his thick finger around the inside of the tumbler and is holding the digit out at different guys around the table. ‘Note a certain bluish cast to it. Traces and remains. Suspicious foam. Minute grains of not quite altogether dissolved particulate powdered stuff. Powdered always leaves its telltale signs.’
‘Your fucking head is a minute grain, Troeltsch.’
‘Put that finger away.’
‘Tryna eat here.’
‘Paranoia,’ Pemulis says, scooping up stray peas with the flat of his knife.
‘Base tuition of 21,700 scooters, not counting,’ Troeltsch says, moving the finger back and forth in the air — the stuff drying on the finger does not, admittedly, exactly look appetite-whetting — ‘and yet let’s note how the Lung’s not up in spite of rampant weather and Achilles’-complaints, and today’s lunch a total déjà vu of yesterday’s lunch, and the bread and bagels they’ve started getting us Day-Old with the yellow stickers on the bags, and there’s dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and lawn-mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on the wall and Stice’s bed moves around, and there’s a ball machine in the girls’ lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef—’
Stice’s head has jerked up, a trace of mashed potato on his nose. ‘Who says my bed moves? How’s it you know anything about any beds moving?’
But it’s true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario’s near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning. Starting with the mysterious and continuing fall of acoustic ceiling-tiles from their places in the subdorms’ drop ceilings, inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-crew lawnmower sitting clean and silent and somehow menacing in the middle of the dawn kitchen gave Mrs. Clarke the fantods and resulted in Eggplant Parmesan for two suppers in a row, which sent shock waves. Yesterday A.M. there’d been a cannonesque ball machine — no small feat to move around anywhere or get through doors — in the Females’ Sauna, which machine some of the upperclass girls had found and screamed at when they went in for the dawn saunas that help alleviate some vague female-type problem that none of the guys quite fathom. And two black girls on the breakfast crew reportedly found a set of squeegees on the dining hall’s north wall, several meters up and hung crossed in a kind of saltire, placed there by parties unknown. F. D. V. Harde’s A.M. groundsmen reportedly took the things down, and now they’re leaning by the fireplace. The inappropriate found objects have had a tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they’re not funny. To varying degrees they’ve given everyone the fantods. Mrs. Clarke had taken the morning off again, was why the repeat-lunch. Stice’s eyes are back on his plate, which is nearly clean. Unmentioned is the fact that Schacht and Tall Paul Shaw at lunch went over the whole part of the north wall the black girls said they found the squeegees on and could find neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visible means of attachment. The whole thing’s been studiously not talked about, adding to everybody’s discomfort at Troeltsch’s hoarse complaints about tuition, which vary in specifics but are otherwise routine.
‘And then now the ultimate dietary cluster-fuck: attempted powdered milk.’
‘Trying to foist it you’re saying.’
‘I’m saying and look at us and what do we do?’
‘Fake a cold and stay in bed playing sportscaster with the TP, in protest?’ says Pemulis.
Troeltsch uses the bottle of Seldane to point for emphasis. ‘We don’t wa
nt to hear about it. We look the other way with our heads in the sand.’
‘Sounds fucking painful.’
‘Go find some fucking synonyms for beat.’
Stice swallows hugely: ‘Never open your eyes underground: my old man’s dictum.’
‘And so we distract ourselves,’ Troeltsch says; ‘we yuck it up.’
Pemulis makes a k-sound. ‘Here’s the real question: how dumb is Troeltsch?’
‘Troeltsch’s so dumb he thinks a manila folder’s a Filipino contortionist.’
‘Troeltsch, who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’
Kyle Coyle says surely they’ve all heard the one about what do Canadian girls put behind their ears to attract boys. John Wayne gives him not a look. Wayne’s peering inside his own tumbler, where there does seem to be some sort of residue. There are fragments of lettuce in his eyelashes. Ortho Stice’s cheeks are ballooned with food, his eyes on his own salad’s remains, expression abstract and furrowed. A terrible kind of community energy in the whole dining hall, a kind of anxious sound-carpet under the surf of voices and the tinkle of flatware, and The Darkness is at some vague center of this energy, somehow, you can feel. Neither Wayne nor Hal’s been approachable all fall, on-court. Kids at other tables say low-toned things to their seatmates, and then the seatmate looks covertly over at Stice’s table. Forehead purply crumpled, Stice stares hard at his salad and tries to block input from his phenomenal peripheral vision. Two 14’s are contending over toast. Petropolis Kahn is preparing to catapult a chickpea at somebody. Jim Struck points out Bridgette Boone and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent returning for what Struck counts as Fourths, and Stice blocks the sight out. The sad pretty sunset out over the hilltops of Newton cannot be seen because the room’s big windows face east, out over the hillside and the Enfield Marine complex that the Academy has bathed in shadow, so E.M.’s porch lights are already on, and tall cubist bits of the old metropolis beyond that, east, with shadows encroaching. The afternoon just past was a glory, scrubbed and cool and windless, cloud-free, the sun a disk, the sky a dome, soaked in light, even the northern horizons bell-clear against a faint green-yellow cast. Schacht has about eight amber bottles of various medicines for his Crohn’s Disease, and a whole ritual of administration. A couple of the black girls who work kitchen and custodial day-shifts can be seen against the shadowy tree-line, making their way down the steep hillside’s unauthorized path back down to the halfway-house thing for wretched people who come up here to work short-time. The girls’ bright cheap jackets are vivid in the shadow and trees’ tangle. The girls are having to hold hands against the grade, walking sideways and digging heavily in at each step. The black girl Clenette Hal had read fear in as she left C.T.’s office with his litter now has a bulging backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage, 261 her arms strung way out between the other black girl Didi and the trees she grabs and digging in sideways with each step, the hesitancy of steep dark slopes, rooty and shot through with briers.
A girl with bangs rises and tings her tumbler with a spoon to make an announcement; nobody pays any attention.
Now Kahn’s by custom allowed to come over and sit with them at the best table, post-prandially.
Wayne and Stice both shiver at the same time as the overhead lighting suddenly becomes the big room’s primary light.
There’s a brief and sort of ignorant discussion on why girls who hit backhands one-handed seem prone to having different-sized breasts. Hal recalls his brother’s late-in-college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet and have covert sex with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl. This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured. Orin kept a record of Subjects that was sort of a cross between a chart and a journal. He used to come home and leave it out just pleading to be read. This was back when his brother Orin needed only to have sexual intercourse with them instead of getting them to fall so terribly in love with him they’d never be able to want anyone else. He’d taken obscure massage and psych courses and read tantric books whose illustrations seemed about as sexy to Hal as Twister.
Coyle says ‘Their ankles’; everybody ignores him. Wayne’s already left the table.
Little 14-C Bernard Makulic, two tables over from the milk dispenser and constitutionally delicate and not long for E.T.A., throws up in a silky tan cataract onto the floor by his chair, and there is the shriek of the feet of other chairs being scooted in a star pattern away from the table, and the protracted vowels of repulsed children.
Struck, Pemulis, Schacht and Freer have all had sexual intercourse. Coyle’s a probable, but reticent. Axford has trouble even publicly showering, much less submitting nude to a female’s inspection. Hal is maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime virginity is a conscious goal. He sort of feels like O.’s having enough acrobatic coitus for all three of them. Freer even has a like souvenir-colposcope bolted to the inside of his locker door where a pin-up’d have been in days of yore, and Pemulis and Struck have allegedly patronized the Combat Zone after the fiscally pressed city’d buckled and rehung the Combat Zone’s red lights, east of the Common. But Jim Troeltsch and sex: no way. And with Wayne and Stice the question seems somehow beside the point. Hal’s mouth feels like it’s overflowing with spit. He should by all rights have lost to Stice today, and he knows it. Stice was in physical control of the third set. Stice choked it away only because he didn’t believe he could beat Hal yet, deep down, since Hal’s competitive explosion. But the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can tell. It’s now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head. No one except Pemulis and Axford know it’s a whole new and chemical-free Hal who should by all rights have lost to a 16-year-old out there in public on what ended up a gorgeous NNE autumn day.
Wayne had gotten up and bussed his tray in the middle of the jejune breast thing. Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice is still staring into his salad. If you could open Stice’s head you’d see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place. Stice has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with the people at the table. A lot of the guys interpret his intense distraction as Stice’s still being in the magic can’t-miss Zone from this P.M.’s match.
‘The idea being that Nuck girls can only attract guys by being really easy to X, is the joke,’ Coyle says into the noise.
Then there’s a brief rippling lull in the whole dining hall as little Evan Ingersoll emerges from the Entree Line’s end on crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, prorector Tony Nwangi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the kid’s tray for him. The hall’s unease is almost visible, a corona around Ingersoll and the ruptured patellar tendon that’ll cost him at least six months of competitive development. Penn, whose femoral fracture’ll cost him a year, isn’t even back yet from St. E.’s orthopedic. But at least Ingersoll’s back. Hal gets up to go over, Troeltsch rising to accompany him after a long look at Trevor Axford, Ingersoll’s B.B. of record, who’s sitting in his chair with his eyes shut tight, unable to make any sort of conciliatory gesture. A match-sore Hal not limping but stiff-legged and shoulders slightly rolling as he and Troeltsch move serpentine around tables, steering way clear of the custodian and dull-steel bucket on rollers and the mop spreading and diluting Makulic’s chyme out in a thinning circle that clears three tables, which Hal and Troeltsch avoid with practiced curves around tables whose layout they all know well, Hal to say Hey and How’s the Limb, Troeltsch to say Hey and be basically relieved he’s away from a discussion of females as sexual objects. Troeltsch’s never come close to even dating anybody. Some guys here never do. It’s the same at all the academies, this asexual contingent. Some junior players don?
??t have the emotional juice left over after tennis to face what dating requires. Bold nerveless guys on the court who go slack and pale at the thought of approaching a female in any social context. Certain things not only can’t be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught. The whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting; some find the whole girl-issue thing brings them face to face with something in themselves they need to believe they’ve left far behind in order to hang in and develop. Troeltsch, Shaw, Axford: any sort of sexual tension makes them feel like they need more oxygen than is available right then. A couple of the girls at E.T.A. are kind of slutty, and some of the more aggressive Freer-type guys can break some of the girls down and get them to have sex — there’s nothing if not time and proximity here. But E.T.A. is mostly a comparatively unsexual place, maybe almost surprisingly so, considering the constant roar and gurgle here of adolescent glands, the emphasis on physicality, the fears of mediocrity, the back-and-forth struggles with ego, the loneliness and close proximity. There’s scattered homosexuality, much of it emotional and unconsummated. Keith Freer’s pet theory is that the bulk of E.T.A. females are nascent lesbians who don’t know it yet. That like any serious female athletes they’re basically vigorously male inside, and so Sapphic-tending. The ones that get to the W.T.A. 262 Show’ll probably be the only ones who find out that they are, he believes — dykes that is. The rest will marry and spend a lifetime by the club pool wondering why the hair on their husbands’ backs makes them shudder. E.g. the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with breasts like artillery and a butt like two bulldogs in a bag (Stice’s term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, Freer likes to observe. And no one likes the fact that Carol Spodek’s carried and prized the same single large-grip Donnay stick for going on five straight years.