I picked up Scaramouche and started reading.
That evening, Cat Morris blew into my room full of excitement. She was pledging Kappa Gamma—the very one I had aimed for. She looked incredulous when I admitted, haltingly, that I was not pledging. She sympathized but couldn’t find much to say. I rarely saw her after that. She was busy attending pledge dinners, meeting her new sorority sisters, dressing for parties, attending dances and exchanges at the frat houses, and generally settling into life at her second home at the Kappa house. Her room, down the hall from mine, was a mile away.
One day I wandered into Cat’s room looking for someone to talk to. She was bent over, straightening the seams in her nylons.
“It’s the big initiation dinner at the house tonight,” she said over her shoulder, turning towards the mirror. Her uplifted face was excited, flushed as she fastened on pearl drop earrings. “I wish you were coming.”
And she was gone. From the seclusion of my dorm room I heard the rush of fraternal activities, the joyful cries of decked out and breathless girls as they skipped down the dorm stairs, and later laughter and footsteps bounding down the halls as the new pledges returned. The girls I had chummed with during rush disappeared into the wave of sorority life, along with Cat Morris.
My position as outcast was assured. During the rash of celebrations that climaxed rush week, I stuck to my room. Plopped in bed I read stories, along with every magazine I could purloin from the dorm lobby. Other than Cat, I told no one.
Finally, I paid a visit to Sue Scott, who was staying in a dorm across campus. I knew her only because our two parents were good friends in Minneapolis. But I’d always admired her straightforward frankness, and when she told me she had pledged one of the top houses and asked me what I had joined, I told her everything. She didn’t know what to say. Obviously she was too busy with the whirl of pledge activities and classes to involve herself in my plight. What could she possibly do? Come and see me any time, she offered sympathetically as she walked me to the door.
One night the following Christmas, while I was home on vacation, Sue’s mother, Mrs. Scott, took me aside, gave me a hug, and whispered that the sororities had greatly misjudged and I shouldn’t mind. I shook my head and gave her a grateful look. Then I shrugged. What could I do?
The hardest part was informing my parents. I imagined that their expectations were fulfilled: I had not made the grade. My letter to Mother explained that I had chosen only one house. That I was being invited places by my two roommates who lived near Boulder and had no interest in the fraternal life. That it was just as well, as I was not cut out for the formality and regimentation of sorority life. I preferred to concentrate on my studies. All of this was a lie. My roommates, saturated with friends, were too preoccupied with their boyfriends to attend to me. I was on my own.
Mother wrote back that she understood, and the subject was not mentioned again. The big question: what she would tell her friends?
On weekends I waited in my dorm room until the excited voices of pledges on their way to their new homes disappeared. Then I went down to the lounge and joined the few girls who sat conversing quietly or reading in an armchair. Even though the year hadn’t started well, I was determined to keep going and hang on to whatever came my way. I joined the dorm Maintenance Committee and tried out for the school aqua dance team—unsuccessfully. Weekends I strolled to Talagi’s for beers with some of the free girls. Once or twice I was invited to a fraternity party. One bash at the Phi Delta house centered on a western theme. Wearing a plaid shirt, neck scarf, and wide-brimmed cow-boy hat, I perched next to a boy at the dimly lit bar, drinking gin and tonics and smoking. I was aware of having no reciprocal sorority parties or anecdotes to offer.
“What did you pledge?”
“I didn’t. I’m not in a sorority.”
“What do you do?”
“Study. Go to bars. Not much.”
* * *
And then I met Sylvia. Three of us stood on the steps of Sewell Hall with our suitcases, wearing parkas and knit scarves to break the gusts that blew in from the mountains and whistled up the front steps and through the stone pillars. John, Dan, Sylvia, and I had met several weeks before at a University Ski Club meeting while scanning Colorado ski brochures that advertised some of the best slopes in the country. We signed up for the trip to Aspen during semester break, and when John offered to drive, the four of us agreed to make the journey through the Rocky Mountains together.
Sylvia was poised on the top step looking out over the campus. She wore a short, red leather jacket and a white wool neck scarf, her uncovered hair blown back by the wind. Her eyes, when she turned them on us, were a deep-set, transparent violet. Don and I stood a few feet away, eyes peeled for John’s dark-blue Oldsmobile.
Finally John drew up and we piled in. It would be a six-hour drive to the White Cap Lodge in Aspen, where we were scheduled to join the rest of the group. The Olds wound through Boulder and struck out along the highway past stretches of white countryside and rising slopes. John was tall and clean-cut with a get-things-done, no-nonsense manner, with even teeth that gleamed when he smiled. Dan was shorter, with straight brown hair and a cover of freckles over his cheeks. His face held a perpetual look of passive expectation. I knew these weren’t frat boys, possibly because they showed up at the planning meeting unattached, without a slew of raucous buddies. These were just plain boys and that was fine with me. John and Dan were from North Dakota and Kentucky, respectively, and Sylvia had lived all her life California.
None of us had experienced mountain skiing. The sport was introduced in Minnesota in 1952. A new ski area in Bloomington had installed a single rope tow that pulled skiers up a three-minute run. I’d tried it a few times, scooting down the hill on my wooden skis, long thin planks that measured from the floor to my wrist raised above my head. Now I was about to taste the real thing.
A relentless snowfall whipped through the Rocky Mountains as we ascended, and soon we were barely able to see the tunnel of headlights in darkness. Thick flakes swirled and sputtered against the windshield as the wipers crunched slowly back and forth. We’d hoped to reach Aspen the same day, but it became too blistery to drive. The last motel we’d passed was miles behind us, and as the night grew late we peered anxiously out the windows for some sort of refuge. At last a blue sign appeared in the headlights and we quickly turned in. The landlady of the inn served up a light supper of hearty vegetable soup, Cornish bread, and roast beef slices. Afterwards we lounged in deep wicker chairs in the fireside room exchanging life histories. The fire warmed us. We smiled into the flames. Life was good.
* * *
By the next afternoon we were plunging down the slopes, invigorated, our muscles tingling. John and Dan raced off to a far chairlift and spent the day on a blue run. Sylvia and I signed up for morning lessons, and each afternoon we practiced pole planting and stem Christies until, tired of controlling every move, we’d give up and experience the thrill of racing down the mountain at full speed. You could start at the top and ski non-stop, getting to know the feel of the slope, falling instinctively into the rhythm of the turns and gaining more speed than you ever imagined you could handle, flying down steep runs no beginner with a rational mind would ever dream of attempting. By the end of the week Sylvia and I could last twenty minutes without stopping, flying under the chairlifts and sinking on our skis at the bottom, snow-bleached, out of breath, and exhilarated.
Evenings, after dinner at the lodge with the other students from the UC ski club, we stretched out on an American Indian rug in front of the two-story fireplace, surrounded by shelves of stuffed squirrels, raccoons, and mounted elk heads. Or we wandered out after dinner to one of the nearby bars lining the crowded streets of downtown Aspen.
One night, after a few beers at the Stilted Breast, John, Dan, Sylvia, and I returned to the lodge and collapsed around the fireplace in a
circle of chairs. Soon a group of fraternity students from our group burst in, dusting off snow, and flung themselves down in front of the fire. They grabbed each other’s arms, joked, and called out across the room. In contrast, our little clan of four was quiet.We were the only independents on the trip, an isolation that drew us together. This was fine with me. I was content. I liked small.
Sylvia immediately caught the attention of the group. The first evening, having changed into a blue velveteen top and mauve slacks, she appeared on the oak staircase. All male eyes turned her way. It struck me for the first time how beautiful she was. She floated down the stairs with the upright stance and grace of a ballet dancer, step by step, looking like a young Gene Tierney heading into Tyrone Power’s arms at the bottom. Passersby gazed at her with admiration and a wary curiosity.
It was more than her beauty. Sylvia’s manner of dress was unique, you might say foreign, compared to the matching slacks and sweaters the other girls wore. She dressed in Indian brocades, silk blouses, and flowing cotton skirts, with gold lamé earrings dangling from pierced ears, and thin turquoise bracelets circling each arm, looking more like a gypsy than a co-ed. The other students were not sure how to take her. She held ideas on every subject and introduced esoteric topics such as the superiority of leopard fur coats, the early poems of Ezra Pound, and the underground recordings of Ima Sumac. It appeared she knew about things of the world beyond us. The others, piqued by curiosity, found her irregularity suspicious. But it didn’t bother me. I got used to her as we sat on the twin beds talking, or rode up Snowmass on the chairlift. She was friendly and seemed to like my company.
I wondered how this would work. Sylvia was an artist. Next to this girl with her sophisticated ideas and alluring style, I was plain and conventional. Clearly we had nothing in common, yet I couldn’t help but like her. She was full of ideas. She talked willingly about herself and listened patiently to my abundant thoughts. While the others sat around pitchers of beer, we cruised the shops and thumbed through art books. We fell in love with Cezanne’s Fastnacht paintings of Harlequin and the strutting Pierrot and set about crafting ways to obtain prints.
One night, Sylvia stood up from her chair by the fire and announced she was going outside to look at the stars. I remained sitting with John and Dan, holding a half-full cup of hot cider and staring into the yellow flames. After a while I drew on my down jacket and followed her out onto the deck. She was leaning on the railing, gazing up at the pearl sky where a million tiny stars flashed patterns of light. I leaned next to her.
“The mysteries are there,” she said in low voice. “We just have to divine them.”
I looked upwards without replying.
“Look! Look there’s a falling star!” she gasped.
I squinted.
“Do you know the constellations?” she asked, turning her head towards me for a brief moment.
“No,” I replied. “Not at all.”
For me the stars had never been anything other than sparkling cover lights to snuggle under. Sylvia described how the ancients saw their feats outlined in the sky in star-rimmed clusters.
“Oh, I think I see Auriga!” she cried. “See those little balls of light? Those are the wheels of her chariot racing through the sky!” She stood on her toes, face lifted.
“Well, yes, I see,” I said. I didn’t see anything except a mass of brilliant sparkles exploding in the night sky. It was breathtaking, but I wasn’t going to show my ignorance of celestial pictorials and ancient myths.
“I guess I’ll turn in,” I said, but we stared into the darkness without moving, each in our own thoughts.
“I always wear this,” Sylvia said after a while, fingering a turquoise necklace around her neck. I turned and caught a glimpse of a smooth stone outlined on her throat. “It’s been blessed by an ancient visionary of the Plains tribe, handed down to an old Indian woman from my mother’s grandmother’s tribe.” She was proud of her remote Indian ancestry. I considered my own take on the subject and didn’t seem to have one. I guess it was preferable to be unique—I could buy that.
The air was quiet above the mounds of snow. The distant sounds of night music trailed across the treetops, curving along the horizon where titanic mountain shapes burrowed into the sky. The night was too captivating to question anything.
* * *
Easter week over, the Oldsmobile sped over the curving road towards Boulder, Dan at the wheel. I sat in the front looking out into the white cover of snow engulfing the landscape, stark and blinding. Not a sign of movement or life. The white brilliance was so powerful I became lost in its icy vastness. Leaning my forehead against the pane, I gazed at the solitary mountain in the distance, conscious of its staggering beauty, yet the poetry eluded me. Instead, I felt a vast emptiness. A chill had displaced the warmth under my Norwegian sweater and an ache pulsed under my ribs. I wanted something so badly it hurt, but I didn’t know what it was.
I stared at the unending road ahead of us, which disappeared at every turn into white nothingness.
My attention was drawn by Sylvia’s voice from the back seat. The boys were quiet and Sylvia was in the mood to talk.
“As I said, when I get back to Los Angeles I intend to resume studying with my former art teacher, Ada Gar. She was trained in New York. But my parents insist that I complete a college education before I throw myself full time into art. They want me to pursue art classes on the side. I guess I must appease them.”
I informed her I was a writer, which wasn’t exactly true. Thoughts of writing had been skimming through my mind for years, and I had filled several legal pads. Partially finished stories languished in my desk, stuffed in a black manila folder. I had nothing to show.
“I’ve been writing since I was eight,” I told her. I determined to prop up my feeble claims of being a writer. I had plans. “I’ve been thinking of writing a script for Inner Sanctum, something macabre, weird and unbelievable.” I hadn’t actually worked out a plot. Now I revived the idea, hoping to meet this exceptional girl’s expectations.
“There’s nothing wrong with horror shows. Money can be made there,” Sylvia noted.
“I also write poetry.” Here too my ambitions suddenly soared.
Sylvia was devoted to poetry. She described long writing sessions, isolated in her bedroom loft at home in Los Angeles. It appeared her talents were endless.
“My goal is to be a novelist,” I added.
During our week at Aspen, Sylvia and I had discovered a strong commonality—we both suffered under parental domination. As an only child, her every move was tracked. She wasn’t allowed to make her own decisions, and her creative dreams were overruled in favor of sense and practicality. As for me, I felt smothered by overprotection. When I kicked and protested enough, my parents let me have my way. The choice of college had been mine. I’d pretty much picked UC out of a hat. What did I know? It was far away in the opposite direction of where I had been pointed. That was enough.
Sylvia laughed. She understood.
The boys remained silent through our conversation.
“They don’t know from anything,” Sylvia said later. She considered John and Dan quite ordinary and boring. For her, boys had to be interesting. I had to agree with that.
* * *
Cat Morris asked me to room with her second semester. She needed a roommate until next year when she would live in the Kappa house. Why not? Secretly, I was thrilled. Her roommate, Mabel, a chubby girl with wide, demanding eyes and a way of repeating what had just been said as if it were something new, spent most weekends with her family in Denver, far from the bustle of sorority row. Her slipshod ways were getting Cat down.
One afternoon after class, Sylvia took me to see her paintings that would be showin in the class art show scheduled to open the following weekend. We entered a large gallery on the third floor of the stude
nt union. Sylvia’s two canvases hung side by side. One depicted a skeleton and pagan Gaelic symbols hovering behind willowy human shapes. In the other, a clown in a tight argyle suit of sunken black, plum, and purple colors raised one arm against a smoky background, a woeful expression on his face. The effect was mystical. Sylvia held a vision that was all her own, different from the daisies and sky blue mountain scenes hanging nearby. I was sure her canvases were the best in the room.
Sylvia was unlike anyone I had ever known. During the winter months, she traipsed from class to class in a long damson neck scarf and a mohair coat. As the weather warmed into spring, she wore full skirts with Navaho trim and clipped braided belts around her seventeen-inch waist. Her hair flowed freely around her face or was pulled back in a bun, emphasizing her violet eyes. Curious, interested, and captivated, I absorbed her artistic creations and ideas. Here was someone who scorned the ordinary, who created her own vision.
And I was a writer, self-proclaimed. My plans gained momentum. Plans that dovetailed with Sylvia’s.
The other students didn’t know what to make of Sylvia. She appeared oblivious of their coolness. Within our self-defined orbit, the conventional, epitomized by the sororities, was not to be taken seriously. We eschewed the cookie-cutter dress styles, the Levittown houses, the plebeian tastes that ran to hamburgers, French fries, and Velveeta cheese and the roughneck sports and slam-blast drinking in bars that were devoid of all taste. Society pressured everyone to fit in, to follow mass standards, to dress, speak, and act alike. We would rise above all that, bring out fresh ideas, strike out for individuality, create our own codes.
Saturdays we walked to the nearby main street of Boulder for coffee, poured over our journals, read poetry, and visited book and art shops. Although I didn’t know a Pollock from a Picasso, this would change. I was the appreciative learner, although I claimed more experience in the realm of literature. Sylvia started reading the classics, and I browsed through bookstores selecting prints and buying books on the French Barbizon School and the Impressionists.
A Penny a Kiss Page 18