Triptych Interviews
Whitney
Saturday, November 26 (After Chapter 18 of Odalisque)
WHITNEY: Hey-ya! Knock-knock. You Dr. Aroslav?
aroslav: Some people call me that. Welcome, Whitney.
WHITNEY: Thanks. You really want to know about this little old Bayou girl?
aroslav: No. I’m not really interested. There seem to be some people who believe you’ll be important to the story sometime. They want to know about you.
WHITNEY: Well, as long as it’s not just you. What do you want me to tell you? Do you mind my Bayou accent? I can change if you prefer. I’m pretty good at Midwestern, like yours. If you want me to be foreign but still understandable, I can do Western Canada. Really, Eastern Canada isn’t that different from the Bayou, at least among my folk. What do you prefer?
aroslav: Do you have a native accent that is really you?
WHITNEY: It’s closest to the Bayou, but when I’m talking to people I tend to adopt the same accent they are using.
aroslav: Well, let’s make that part of our conversation. First, though, let’s deal with the vital statistics so the readers know a little more about you. Name, age, and birthday?
WHITNEY: Okay, boyo. Whitney Acadia Lambert. There’s a t on the end of that. Down in the Bayou it gets left off a lot. I’m eighteen years old, born on April eleventh, Easter Sunday. Mama never forgave me for her missing church that morning, but said she’d pretty much given up everything for Lent anyway.
aroslav: Religious family?
WHITNEY: Catholic’s a religion? I thought it was our nationality.
aroslav: I can see your confusion. Have a passport?
WHITNEY: First time I tried to board an airplane I found out my baptism certificate wasn’t considered identification. I went out and got a driver’s license—even though nobody else in school had one—and a passport. Quite the day when that arrived. I swear we roasted a pig to celebrate and everybody in the neighborhood came by to see that silly little book.
aroslav: Whitney, are you pulling my leg?
WHITNEY: Not yet. Gimme time.
aroslav: So how did a good Catholic girl like you get from the Bayou to Seattle.
WHITNEY: Oh, you got it all wrong, Dr. Aroslav. I’m not a good Catholic girl. I’m a very bad Catholic girl. You should send me to your room. I mean my room. Riiiiight?
aroslav: Begs the point. What got you to Seattle?
WHITNEY: I take it you mean besides Air Atlantis or whatever they call that airline. I swear they’ve made more water landings than they hit the tarmac. Well, first of all, there’s a good, liberal Catholic school called Seattle Cascades University.
aroslav: Wait, wait, wait, wait! I didn’t know SCU was Catholic.
WHITNEY: Well, you wouldn’t know it to look at it. It might be a little school when you compare it to Notre Dame or Villanova, but it’s still Catholic and it has a good education reputation. See, SCU was founded a century ago by Jesuits, but they are a pretty secular lot when it comes to education and even though the grounds are technically owned by the Catholic Diocese, there isn’t really much interplay between the church and the college. Things like the Social Services Committee still have a strong connection, but even they are independently run and funded. It was enough to satisfy ma Mère and Pop that I wasn’t going to a den of heathens. Little did they know they were sending the heathen into the den.
aroslav: Tell me about what you are studying. Linguistics, is it?
WHITNEY: Linguistics it is. And don’t go trying to hide your accent. I know exactly what part of Northern Indiana you grew up in.
aroslav: That was a long time ago.
WHITNEY: Traces still remain. I’m no Henry Higgins, but I’m pretty good at American dialects until you get into that whole New Jersey/New York mishmash. I am not going to try to pinpoint what block of what neighborhood a person is from based on how badly he slurs his vowels.
aroslav: How on earth did you get into linguistics living in the Bayou?
WHITNEY: Shortwave radio. I loved to listen to music, but the radio station near where we lived only played zydeco. Don’t get me wrong. I like my Creole, Cajun, and Louisiana zydeco music. We didn’t have much in the way of instruments out there, so when we got together a fiddle, washboard, and washtub bass were about all folks could make music on. But I once heard an opera recording in school and realized there was other music. I begged and pleaded until Pop finally spent thirty-five dollars for a five-band transistor radio that I listened to every night. AM was pretty worthless, and we were pretty far from most of the FM stations except the local and one that broadcast strong enough from Houston. The weather band only had one station I could find and it didn’t help us avoid Katrina or Rita.
Now, I know y’all think Katrina was the worst storm in history because, frankly God hates Nawlins. But he’d always been kind to the southwest Louisiana Bayou until Rita came crashing in a month later.
aroslav: Nawlins?
WHITNEY: [big grimace] New Or Leans to y’all. Anyhoo. We all’da stuck it out if it was just Katrina, but most of the folk who ran north from Katrina hadn’t come back yet when Rita wiped out pretty much everything. They say the surge was twelve feet high. Of course, we were hiding out up in Shreveport with Aunt Adelaide and when we came back, there wasn’t much left. Pop is a stubborn old mule, though and the four of us, Pop, ma Mère, Stevie—my little brother—and me, lived in a tent for two months while Pop built a cabin on the old foundation.
Now where was I?
aroslav: Uh...shortwave radio.
WHITNEY: So the other two bands were shortwave. So I became a shortwave DXer. I crept up and the shortwave band listening for any signal and trying to stay tuned in and understand what they were saying until I got a call sign and location. Then I’d creep up to the next. Course, everybody gets Quito, Ecuador, the BBC, and Grand Old Opry. But I kept studying exactly how folks talked in the different parts of the world and then the different parts of the country. I discovered I could identify regions by different inflections.
When my English teacher figured out what I was doing he got a whole set of English dialect CDs. Don’t ask me where he managed to locate them, but the Feds were giving us money for just about anything and he didn’t have any problem figuring those language CDs into the new school budget. I suppose Lougenia’s little boy who’s, oh, six now probably doesn’t have crayons in first grade because I had those damn CDs.
aroslav: It strikes me that you taught yourself a lot.
WHITNEY: Oh I had teachers, too, but none of them were linguists. They taught me math and science and English grammar. I liked literature and music, too. I was valedictorian of my class.
aroslav: Impressive.
WHITNEY: Woulda been if there’d been anybody else in the class. Only other one my year was Armand and he can barely write his name.
aroslav: Only other one in your year?
WHITNEY: Well, see when Rita shit on us, they got plenty of money to build a new school, but hardly anybody came back to the area. The closest school in the district was over forty miles away, though, so those of us who came back all went to our pretty new school. All sixty-five of us. That’s preschool through twelfth grade.
aroslav: Sounds like it was really tough.
WHITNEY: Are you kidding? No. It was like having private tutors who would teach me anything I wanted to know. I learned French, calculus, comparative literature, sex, and biology.
aroslav: ???
WHITNEY: Everybody wants to know. I wanted to know. Hell, you don’t live in a one-room cabin with horny parents and not learn something was going on. As soon as Clovis Dagobert started teaching me human physiology in health, I wanted to know how everything worked. He was kind enough to teach me, and teach me how to be protected and not end up pregnant on the beach with no place to call home. Once I’d learned everything I could from Clovis, I taught Armand, but he was kinda clingy and had a sweet spot for a little girl two years behind us. I just hope he remembered all I taught him.
aroslav: You were how old?
WHITNEY: I guess fourteen. Clovis made sure there was a good supply of condoms in the Health classroom and he never counted to see if any were missing.
aroslav: Why’d you set your sights on Tony when you got up here?
WHITNEY: I’m smart, pretty, and fast. I’ve never been denied anything or anyone I really wanted. You know, Tony thinks he’s an art geek, but he’s pretty much a hunk with the humility of a social pariah. I figured that out the first night I met him. Of course, I didn’t know about all the eye-candy he lived with at the time. He just had the look of a nice guy who was great in bed. Then that little sexpot Rio came along and acted as if he was tied up to her and that just got my little competitive genes all in a bunch. I knew I could have him if I wanted and if she wanted him, I did. Then I found out neither of us could have him and it just made it a bigger challenge.
aroslav: You seem to get along fine with Rio, though.
WHITNEY: Hell, yes. You see us on campus and you’d think we were Mutt and Jeff, but she’s got just as big a competitive streak in her as I have. And she’s a smart cookie. I just figured out a better way to get to him than she has.
aroslav: Speaking of physical appearance, you are pretty tall.
WHITNEY: Six-one and weigh one-twenty. Rio’s like five foot even and weighs one-forty. You get what I mean. So, being tall and skinny, there aren’t that many guys who will look me right in the eye from any height. I tend to be intimidating. So I take special care of my looks. My hair is dark brown—I mean really dark brown. My eyes are as dark brown as my hair. My skin is darker than these northerners. I keep my hair short so it isn’t in the way while I’m running, but not so short that I get confused for a boy. When you’ve got itty-bitty titties like me, that’s always a danger. So I wear makeup, usually wear some blouse or tight pants that let people know I’m a girl, and always have my nails done.
Now that was a surprise, let me tell you. Little Rio spent a year doing cosmetology before she came to SCU to earn money for school. She offered to do my nails for me—well, and everybody else in the dorm! And she’s good. Look at these little swirls she did. Aren’t they cute?
aroslav: Yes. Very nice.
WHITNEY: I can’t wear fuck-me boots because I’d just be too tall. So I wear fuck-me nails. Most guys get the message.
aroslav: Something that really says you’re a fast girl.
WHITNEY: I’m fast. I know you’re thinking in the old fashioned sense that I go from handshake to bed in an instant. That’s not necessarily true. But I’m fast on the ground. That’s the real reason I came to SCU.
aroslav: Wait. What? I thought you came here for the linguistics program.
WHITNEY: That’s important, but I needed two things in a school and linguistics was only one. I needed someplace that would prep me and support me for Olympic trials. I don’t have that much time.
aroslav: What are you going to try for in the Olympics?
WHITNEY: I am the Louisiana State high school champion in the one hundred and two hundred meter hurdles and hold the state record in Louisiana in the long jump. Hundred-meter is my main event, but I needed a school that was serious about training athletes that are individual competitors.
aroslav: And you found that here at SCU?
WHITNEY: This school has a great athletic program for individuals. They’ve got a dynamite track coach and a reputation for putting together custom athletic programs. They are a Division III NCAA school which puts them in a position of shuttling athletes to a lot of amateur non-collegiate sport events. Look at Tony’s program. They figured out a way to fund him to play racquetball. That’s a club sport.
aroslav: And do you have a track scholarship.
WHITNEY: Partly. I got a full-ride academic scholarship. A private grant for running track covers my living expenses.
aroslav: So what’s in the future for Whitney?
WHITNEY: I’m going to learn to play racquetball. Speed and agility. Great off-season training. Come January, I’ll be spending more time on the track. I’ve got a deal to work at the field house over at the UW campus with my coach. We’ll work on hurdle form and speed there. All the rest of the training we can do in our own facilities. I still don’t know if I can pump my legs up for long jump at world competition levels, but I know I can get the hundred down. We’re dealing with hundredths of a second in hurdles. I’ve got to gain a meter in long jump in order to compete.
aroslav: Whitney, you mentioned that you found a better way to get to Tony. Care to elaborate?
WHITNEY: You know one of his girlfriends is almost six feet tall? And stacked. And hard-core athletic? Looking at Lissa gets my juices flowing. I had plenty of experience with girls back in Louisiana. With so few of us, we fell back on whatever we could find. You heard about the nuns who were building a convent? They couldn’t find studs but they had lots of tongue-in-groove. I figure if I can have fun with Lissa, Tony will join in and I’ll get both. I have a feeling she isn’t as single-minded as he is.
aroslav: What can I do for Whitney?
WHITNEY: I’m pretty quick on the trigger in any sexual circumstance. I’ll come before Tony gets to my pussy. But I’ll tell you what; you hang an Olympic gold medal around my neck and the next county’ll hear me come.
aroslav: Well, that’s inspiring. Thanks for stopping by to chat, Whitney.
WHITNEY: Hey, Dr. A. Talk is cheap.
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