Free The Removers: A Memoir by Andrew Meredith Page B

like the compactor on a trash truck, the men’s slightly pursed lips, the slow tightening of the straps against the underside of this giant white marshmallow. And then she was in flight. For maybe thirty seconds as she was lifted off her stretcher and lowered onto the embalming table Susan arced through the air of the morgue with the four of us standing around her like moons.
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    My first year at La Salle I lived on campus. I didn’t drink, I was terrible at talking to girls, and the more I saw my hallmates enjoying themselves the more I felt alone. I hated being there, but of course I hated everything. I was depressed, without knowing it or even knowing what depression was. I just thought this was how I was turning out, that this hollow gloom I walked around in was meant to be my life.
    One day at lunch in the cafeteria in the first month of school, an older girl, a junior named Valerie, came and sat next to me. I had never seen her before. She was nineteen. I was seventeen. She was tiny, with long black curly hair and too much black eyeliner. Immediately I could feel that we walked under the same gray skies. She told me she had a boyfriend, so I thought her talking to a strange male like myself was unusual. He went to La Salle, too, she said, but he commuted. The next day I sawher walking with him on campus—she saw me but ignored me—so I knew who he was.
    It sounds like the move of someone equipped with boldness to start seeing an older girl with a boyfriend. It wasn’t. She said she’d been noticing me. She invited me to her room. I had no idea what would happen, but I had enough sense to show up. As soon as I got there she started kissing me and let me take her shirt off. I left mine on because I hated my body. If you had asked me at seventeen to draw a picture of my self-image, I would have traced a photograph of the teenage Jerry Mathers, somehow gangly and pudgy at the same time, like a skeleton smuggling kielbasa under his sweater.
    After that first day with her it became a regular thing. I would go to her room and we’d make out. Her boyfriend would call and I’d lie there rigid and silent as she told him, “No, there’s no one here.” After a few sessions it became the norm that she would let me put my fingers inside her. When it was done she would cry. This went on for a few weeks. One day in the courtyard between our dorms I saw her talking to a guy I had a class with. A few days later I saw her talking to another guy. The invitations to her room dwindled.
    The Phillies blew the World Series on a Saturday night, and the next morning in despair I asked a kid in my hallway to shave my head. I had no room for the luxury of hair. When she saw me later that day she said, “Any attraction I had to you is gone.”
    One night after Christmas break she came to my room and said she wanted to talk. We sat side by side on the bed. Sherubbed my thigh, tried to kiss me. I said I wasn’t interested. At the door she said, “I want you to know I only used you. I never liked you.”
    “That’s fine,” I said.
    “Do you understand? I never liked you. I used you.”
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    I moved home after freshman year, returned to what I knew. One of my first days back in Frankford I was walking on Orthodox Street past the park in the late afternoon and in my peripheral vision I saw a man sitting under a weeping willow, his back against the trunk, and noted someone else huddled next to him. I turned my head to them. I saw, under the willow’s shady canopy, a woman taking the man’s penis in her mouth, an act I had never before in any form witnessed. I turned to look straight ahead down Orthodox Street. I snapped my head back to them and saw again a woman giving a man a blow job under a weeping willow, her hand gripping his penis while she disengaged to tuck back her hair; his eyes closing and staying shut; she resuming.
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    Until I was ten, our next-door neighbor was a woman named Eleanor Hippel. In 1906, Miss Hippel was