The driver yelled something at me but I waved him off. I was city-smart, street-smart. I was from Orlando, not some Podunk country town. I wasn’t born yesterday.
In the morning, I filled out paperwork and the registrar’s office gave me a room assignment: 006 Jennie Murphree Hall. It was in the basement. I got my keys, but we couldn’t move in until after orientation. I wrote a check for food services. I bought the full plan. I was hungry.
Orientation was in a dorm on the other side of campus. I walked up the street where a line of kids wrapped around the building. I looked for the end of it, my garnet and gold orientation folder sweaty in my arms. I was sweating all over. My feet were sliding around in my sandals. All these kids were dressed so nicely. The girls had smooth, shiny hair and gold jewelry, and the boys wore khakis and loafers, and they were talking away, hundreds of them. People called out to their friends way up and down the line. It was like a party where everyone knew everyone else, or like high school between classes, only richer and more. Sheep! my mother would have said. Let’s get out of here while we can still think! She would never have stayed in a line like this, mingled with people like this.
I wanted to go to my motel, but a good rule of thumb was Do the opposite of what my mother would do. I wanted to run, go back to Orlando, go anywhere else. I stayed.
Guys came out of nowhere.
I said hi, I gave out my phone number whenever asked, but I often couldn’t figure out who I was talking to. Guys came up to me and knew my name and it was heady and distracting, but I also felt popular for the first time. I affected a ditzy, spacey persona, giggling and flipping my hair around. Sara Simko, whom I couldn’t shake even in college, told me I should be more careful, not give out my number, not be so friendly to everyone. I was getting a reputation before classes had even started. Well, I wanted a reputation.
The best of the tribe were the geology graduate students, who were gorgeous and shirtless and stoned and attentive; they didn’t say “babe,” “rad,” or “hated.” We walked around the campus. They showed me all the places Jim Morrison had lived. I pretended I knew who he was. I didn’t know he was dead until years later; he was alive to them.
In a rusty green Ford pickup, we drove out to the sinkhole called Big Dismal. They passed the joint, through me, to each other. I pretended this was my new self, but I knew it was only an afternoon self. I didn’t want to be stoned. I wanted to be the opposite of stoned: that’s why I had come to college. I drank beer. It was cold and sharp and from a green glass bottle, Rolling Rock. It was so much better than my father’s beer, Schlitz, my childhood beer. I had two beers now.
At Big Dismal, they explained karst topography, limestone, aquifers and their insistent fragile habits, and I lay down on the pine needles and the world spun around. Florida floated on lace, on fragile ancient bones, and this was why it caved in on itself. I was falling in love. I traipsed along, holding my skirt up higher than I needed to. At the edge of the sinkhole, I took off all my clothes and folded them at the edge. The ponytailed geology graduate student took my careful pile and set it in the notch of an oak. I swung off the rope swing, my body slung out over the terrifying inky green water ten stories below. There were cars down there, and trees and bodies too: the grad students had known the last two divers who died. They had drunk beer with them the night before at Crazyhorse. Naked in the air, I felt like a piece of silk. I went so far down so fast that my eyes opened. In the cold, black water, I felt less unusual, safe. I knew who I was.
There was a party in Hooverville, an old boardinghouse on College by the cemetery. I took a nap. I got dressed up in a white sundress and high heels. At nine, I left Jennie Murphree. But at the party, I couldn’t find the guys I knew, my Big Dismal friends. I walked down the hall, up the stairs, back down, into the apartments. I looked everywhere. Everyone appeared stoned, slowed down, happily bored. Women were flinging their limbs around like they didn’t really want arms, feet, heads. Men were laughing silently, in slow motion, on a sagging gold sofa. Most people were barefoot. There were beads in the doorways and Indian cloths on the couches. The men all looked more or less alike. But no one acted as though I was familiar. It was too loud and too quiet. I felt like I was seventeen years old, which I was. I was way, way out of my league.
I looked at people as I passed through the rooms in the apartments, doors open to the hallway. Did the geology guys see me and just pretend not to? Were they blowing me off? Did I secretly not want to find them? Did they secretly have girlfriends? Did they have to pretend we had never met? I wondered if they were just kidding when they invited me, if they were hiding from me because they really didn’t want me here at all. I wondered if I kept walking by them. I had my hair up in a bun. Maybe they didn’t know it was me.
I never saw the geology boys again, but I looked for them every day, everywhere. I said hello to guys I thought were them, but the look-alikes walked right past me. Every day I saw people I thought were Wayne, or Keith. I saw Ruby all the time, too, at the grocery store, the hair salon, driving down Tennessee. Sometimes I thought my mother was following me.
In 006 Zero Alley, Jennie Murphree, my roommate, Tiffany, prayed for me and everyone we knew. She had been praying since day one. She was also praying that at the end of the semester her parents would let her go to Indiana University, where she’d wanted to go, where all her friends from back home went. Florida State, Tiffany told me, was a very inferior school. And no one played euchre. She hadn’t made the cast of Oklahoma!, which made no sense to me: if there was anyone who should have been in Oklahoma! it was Tiffany Crowther. She would not have needed to do any acting at all.
Tiffany prayed and prayed that God would somehow get her back to Indiana. When she prayed, she didn’t get on her knees. She prayed in her chair, at her desk. It looked just like studying. Her parents, she said, had not been saved. They felt she was in a cult. I was shocked. She assured me they were Christians, but they were not committed to Christ. “I just pray,” she said, looking like a forlorn mother.
At ten o’clock we turned the lights out. While the other girls in our dorm stayed up all night with their illegal boyfriends and our RAs smoked pot, Tiffany and I told each other our life stories. It was fun to remember Easter baskets, my mother’s cocktail dresses, the art my father had bought, how shy I was in kindergarten. My mom was strict, with all her rules, but she loved golf and tennis and the theater. My father was wild but so much fun. It wasn’t such a stretch to make us sound like any other family. We didn’t have close relatives or go on family trips, and my parents were divorced, but other than that, my childhood wasn’t all that different from Tiffany’s: four square, the Coke song, crushes on boys, the perils of algebra, cruel classmates. I came across as a hardworking, boy-liking go-getter, sporty and serious. I liked my story.
About four weeks into the semester, on a Saturday afternoon, I was sitting on my bed, brushing my hair, staring out the window. I saw a man I thought was my father, his silver Afro waving in the light. He stomped up the hill. But I was always seeing people who looked like other people. Not until I saw his car, a pale yellow banged-up Ford Fairmont, did I know that this was no mistake. Attached to the Ford was a flat trailer with sides, covered with tarp. Houseplants were poking out the windows of the backseat. My plants.
I would have thrown a tarp over the whole scene if I could.
I ran outside. Fred stood by the dumpster, smoking a cigarette and drinking from a white plastic flask just like the ones sold in the university bookstore. A short, rotund, redheaded woman climbed out of the car, bristling. She was holding a little white box. She handed it to me. She socked Fred in the stomach. “Shit! This is illegal parking! Shit, you bastard, you’re gonna git us another ticket! Goddammit, Fred Sellers!” she shouted. “Can’t you read? Don’t ya read?”
“Heather!” he was yelling. “Girl child!” He turned in a circle amid the U of buildings that enclosed the alley. I opened the box, hoping no one was seeing any of this. In it wa
s a nightgown, a grotesquely wadded thing I feared might have been plucked from my father’s personal collection. My father’s companion introduced herself as Louise, my stepmother. I didn’t have to like her, she said, but she would love me as her own chirren. She had six grandchirren, she said.
“Luigi,” Fred said. “New stepmother.” He laughed and laughed.
“You’re not married,” I said. I didn’t care if she could hear me. I set the box on the hot hood of the car. I wondered what had happened to Ruby.
“Hell, yeah,” he said. “Be nice to her. Start unloading.” He rolled his hand around in the air, finger pointed as though directing a great roundup. His nails sparkled with clear polish.
“You can’t park here,” I said. There was no space in the dorm room for all this stuff. I would need an apartment.
“Shit, that’s what I’m saying. Did you hear her? Hear her? Fred? Did you?” Luigi barked. She strutted around in her white pants. “This is a pile,” she said, looking at my building. “No AC? It’s like slavery days. You live in slave quarters. They’re treating you like a slave at the fancy-dancy college. Shit. You pay money for this?”
“What is that?” I said, pointing toward the ramshackle trailer.
Fred said, “I built it! That’s a great cart! We look like the Joads!” He hooked his thumbs into his pants. I looked at his ankles. He had on panty hose under his pants. I knew it was silly, but I hoped Louise hadn’t seen these things. “The Joads!” he yelled again, at Louise. She ignored him. They were perfect for each other.
Even though Tiffany wasn’t home, I wouldn’t let them come inside our room. I said there were no men allowed on the floor. I carried in everything myself: my bicycle, my winter clothes, a green metal bookcase, the boxes of books, the two milk crates of records, Midnight the stuffed cat, the potted palm plant I’d rescued from the neighbor’s trash. I made stacks along a kind of border down the middle of the room. “I’ll purge, I’ll purge,” I promised Tiffany when she came back, standing in the doorway with hands on hips and mouth open, looking like a midwestern milkmaid.
The next morning I met Fred and Louise for breakfast at the Waffle House on Tennessee Street. Fred wrote me a check for a thousand dollars. Louise said there was plenty more where that came from. Fred hollered at her, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” People in the Waffle House stared. “You know what Grandpa said! Tell her the truth!” she hollered at him. They squabbled, slapped at each other’s shoulders, and glowered, and she pretended to spit at him.
“You are supposed to get five thousand a year from your grandfather,” Louise said.
“I’m spending your inheritance,” Fred said to me, and he laughed and laughed. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. It would be better for me, I knew, to pretend I hadn’t heard any of it. I didn’t want to get my hopes up or down. I didn’t take Fred’s check. It sat there on the table like a citation.
Fred said he wanted to come to classes with me. I was trying to think what to say when Louise pounded on his shoulder with her little ruddy fist.
“Shit, Fred, you asshole. It’s Sunday!” She punched him over and over, scrunching up her features into a little pig face.
“How’s Ruby?” I said. Louise took a sip of her coffee and scowled. She was resting up for the next explosion. Under the table I kicked Fred. “I sure do miss her.” To Louise I explained that, of all Fred’s girlfriends, Ruby had been my absolute favorite. Louise set her jaw, held out her coffee cup, and yelled. “Honey! Hey! Honey! Goddamn college students don’t know how to work. We worked!”
“Hey, yeah,” Fred said.
The couple at the table opposite turned and stared at us like we were a television show.
“Listen,” Fred said, leaning in. “Listen to your old man, now. You want to major in accounting,” he said, pointing to the check, “then that’s a gift. If you don’t, it’s an interest loan. Got that? With interest!” He took my wrist and twisted it, hard, in his sweaty hands. “Got it?” He said I could spend the year at FSU and then finish my AA at Valencia. He grinned and showed his huge teeth, and Louise wiped syrup off his face using her spit.
“Don’t be like some them women and wait too long to get pregnant,” Louise said. “You’ll find yourself barren. With college, that’s what happens now. These girls are all barren by the time they get theirselves straightened out.” She made a clicking sound with her cheeks, Giddy up!
I kissed Fred on the cheek and fled.
I didn’t see him again for almost a year.
Tiffany said she and her friends had established a special prayer circle for me and my family. She wondered how long all my stuff would stay wedged and piled in the room, if she could help me get rid of it. There were two mission projects that needed donations, she said. There was a lot of need.
I’d been anxious to get our room back to the way it was, but suddenly, when she said this, I wanted to keep all of it, every single piece. This was my stuff. All my stuff in the world. I wasn’t going home for Thanksgiving. I wasn’t ever going home. Now, it was clear to me, I had to keep this stuff. I climbed over the bookcases and boxes, got in my bed, and rolled to face the wall.
All that fall, I kept seeing my mother. Which was impossible. Then I really did see her. I was walking across campus. I saw a white purse. A head with waves of short, thick hair. She popped into a hedgerow. I went right up to the bushes.
“Mother,” I said. “Mother.” I was mad, embarrassed. I stepped into the hedgerow so people walking past on their way to class wouldn’t see me or her.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed.
She was terribly, terribly worried. My father had told her I was running wild. Going barefoot. And clearly I was not wearing a foundation garment of any kind. Where was my bra? Where was the support hose she had mailed me? What did I think this was? Who did I think I was? If I thought for a second she would fund this kind of display, well, I had another think coming.
“I have to go to class,” I told her.
We walked back to the dorm. She and Tiffany adored each other. She understood completely Tiffany wanting to be in Indiana—the Midwest was really the only place where you could trust people, not be ripped off, make true friends, friends for life. Farmers, people who worked. And real food! Not all this stuff from Mexico. My mother professed a love for church. “The values our country was founded on!” she said urgently, and Tiffany nodded and they had a quick little hug. During this exchange I lay on my bed with my legs open, staring at my Willie Nelson poster. I kept my mouth shut. I watched my mother carrying on in this manic friendliness. It was as though she were impersonating someone she could only ever pretend to be.
My mother agreed to take some of the stuff that wouldn’t fit in my dorm room. She gave me a nonstick pan, gardening gloves, and two more packets of support hose. She gave me a flashlight that didn’t work and a watch that needed a battery. Then she drove back to Orlando.
“Your mother is such a super sweetie,” Tiffany said.
I rolled my eyes. I liked how normal this made me.
On Saturday mornings, I woke up at six and rode my bike across campus to my job at the science center. I felt like the only person awake, the one good true person. At seven a.m. I was all ready to go, with my stopwatch, my bin of #2 pencils, my test books and score sheets. I loved monitoring the well-dressed look-alike students as they took the test that would determine whether they got into law school, medical school, business school, nursing. I roved, glared, hovered, and imagined their flawed, superficial lives. I called the time every fifteen minutes and wrote it on the board. In between, I made up stories about each person. I married them off, I had them betray each other, I had them break down.
Over the holidays, I stayed on campus. I didn’t know a soul; I went for days without seeing a single other person. It was only me and the students from foreign countries. A tiny little dining hall was open, but only for dinner, and no one seemed to go there but me. I truly mis
sed my parents. I wanted to miss them. It was the only way I could love them, a crazy cocktail of longing and pretending and absence and hope.
Miss Molly’s Day Care was just a mile to the east of campus; I rode my bike there. At first I volunteered as part of a requirement for an elementary education class I was taking, and then I was hired. I never felt like I worked at Miss Molly’s. I felt like a child in someone’s large, sunny, busy home. Every morning I dropped myself off to play. I sat on the little orange plastic chairs, passed juice in translucent wax cups from a tray, wiped up juice, swept the linoleum. I loved the counselors; they liked to talk about the kids after they left, and how each child was likely to turn out. That semester I was reading a lot of radical psychology and education texts: R. D. Laing, A. S. Neill. I loved the idea of a subversive world where mental illness was defined as just another version of normal, and education was how you made your way in the world, not something that began or ended. I wanted to move to England and work in a day care where we constructed skateboard ramps for geometry and made books and bread and murals. “But you won’t know a soul in England: you’ll be all by your lonesome!” Miss Jill said after I told her my plan. She said I was brave and adventurous; she wished she were more like me, all independent and bold. But I could tell she really didn’t wish that at all. She thought I was weird and pretentious, a misfit, a troubled girl.
At eleven, the morning moms came to pick up the morning kids. The moms came up the stairs and waited on the deck. Some kids saw their moms and made a beeline. Others were playing out back and had to be retrieved by hand.
“Can you get Maisie for me?” a mom said to me from her position on the deck. I had been at Miss Molly’s for months and months; I did not know the mom-children pairings. I didn’t know if I had seen this mom before. I didn’t know exactly which girl Maisie was. I had suggested the kids wear name tags, but I wasn’t sure Miss Molly ever opened the suggestion box. It seemed more like decoration.
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