Higher Education

by Lisa Pliscou

“No thanks. I was only joking.”

  After descending the three steps into the dining hall, I pass the enormous portrait of John Quincy Adams, who somehow looks more solemn and dyspeptic than ever, and head for the checker’s desk, nimbly avoiding a collision with the house chemistry tutor and one of his students. Sourly I notice that they both wear trousers that are slightly too short, which leads me to ask myself yet again why it is that chemistry majors always look like chemistry majors.

  Virginia the checker waves me on into the kitchen, making a little red mark next to my name on her list. “I got you, hon.” She is for the most part genial and easygoing but I have seen her on occasion break into a terrifying sprint after unauthorized diners attempting to slip out the back door carrying trays of food. Virginia never buys the sick-roommate story. “If they’s so sick,” she’ll retort, “how come they need two servin’s chicken cacciatore?”

  My cynical interest in tonight’s culinary aberrations notwithstanding, I pass the hot entrées and proceed directly to the chilled metal dairy tins and help myself to a bowl of yogurt. Grinning, Serge tosses me an apple and a whole-wheat roll. Next I jostle my way to the head of the line at the coffee machine. Then, following the obligatory moue of disgust, it’s out of the kitchen and into the dining hall. Not unlike Scylla and Charybdis, now that I think of it, impatiently waiting for a pair of overweight sophomores to finish squeezing through the doorway in tandem.

  Standing by the salad bar with my tray, I peer about in search of friendly fauna. It’s the usual six o’clock scene: a blur of faces and arms and legs and teeth, the cacophony of trays and dishes and silverware clattering, shoes clicking and tapping on the polished wood floor, voices raised in banter and salutation and laughter. The house master’s baby is crying again. He’s propped up in his high chair at the pre-law table, where Master Ackerman holds court, flanked by two long rows of sycophants who snatch bites of food between nods. His wife sits at the foot of the table, her chin receding desperately as she attempts to shush James P. Ackerman, Jr., who waves his tiny fists about and wails with a fortitude that might come in handy during the Yale game when football season rolls around again.

  I wouldn’t want to be sitting at that table either, bulging as it is with articulate, neatly dressed overachievers engaging in thoughtful and well-informed conversations about important issues of the day. Dear god.

  Their first word was probably “LSAT.” It’s not that I object so much to their sedately checkered flannel shirts, or even to their inexplicable interest in world affairs. It’s the effort they display that unnerves me. The trick, I’ve found, is to breeze into exams, serenely whip your way through a bluebook or two, and leave forty-five minutes early; to ostentatiously skip language lab yet be able to recite your French verbs perfectly the next day; when called upon in English lit to explicate a passage from “Il Penseroso,” confess that you haven’t read it in years but would be happy to hazard an interpretation, and then launch into a short but brilliant exposition upon Milton’s unmatched utilization of imagery and meter.

  Smiling maliciously, I loosen the cap on the vinegar cruet. I keep it to myself that I spend a lot of time hunched over my books in the Widener reading room, sequestered among the portly bearded scholars and the haggard Eastern European émigrés who sit reading obscure Czechoslovakian periodicals and chain-smoking till closing time. Or that I’m often in the Widener stacks, borrowing some anonymous graduate student’s carrel for a couple of hours to do some writing or reading. If anybody ever asks me, I claim to have been playing video games. Either that or out doing volunteer work for the Radcliffe Foundation.

  “Yo, Miranda.” It’s Carlos loping past, empty plate in hand.

  “Thank god.” I straighten up. “Where are you sitting?”

  “On the right side of the tracks.” He gives me a wolfish smile, teeth very white against his skin. “For once.”

  Although it’s perhaps not evident to the untrained eye, the Adams House dining hall embodies an intricate and ever-changing social matrix in which different areas and even specific tables manifest varying degrees of prestige and chic. These days all tables north of the salad bar are déclassé, while those in the extreme southeast comer are the most sought-after seats in the house, veritably bristling with a ridiculous number of chairs. These tables are in such demand that it’s risky to vacate your seat for something so trivial as seconds; you may return to find your chair occupied by someone else, your tray mysteriously vanished, your overcoat quite possibly gone.

  “Who’s at your table?” I ask Carlos. “Anyone remotely humanoid?”

  “Sure, I’m sitting with Flopsy, Mopsy, Biopsy, Donner and Blixen. Not to mention the Bobbsey Twins and the Happy Hollisters.” He laughs. “Oh yeah. And Bryan and Mark.”

  “Bryan?” My stomach gives a little twist. “How did he get in? There’s no interhouse tonight.”

  “I snuck him in while Virginia was tackling a couple of guys from Quincy House.” Carlos twirls his plate on an index finger. “Why don’t you join us? The more the merrier, I always say.” He sails off into the kitchen, still twirling his plate, blithely oblivious to the fact that Bryan and I haven’t been on speaking terms since the night I slept with his friend Tim, to whom he himself is attracted.

  “Why did you do it? That’s all I want to know.”

  Bryan and I look at each other, the silence between us hanging heavier by the second. We’re in a practice room at North House; he sits on the piano bench and I’m leaning against the soundproofed wall, hard-pressed to guess which of us is the more stony-faced.

  “Well?” he says.

  “Three strawberry daiquiris.” I shrug. “You know how it is.”

  “That’s not much of an answer.”

  “It wasn’t much of an evening.”

  “I just want to know why you did it.”

  “I keep trying to tell you.” I draw a long breath, absently noting that my lungs feel tight. What am I supposed to do, blurt out that Jessica was interested in Tim, that he was coming over all the time, we all sort of hung out together, and somehow he ends up telling me it’s me he wants? Tell him that Tim reminds me irresistibly of a Malibu Ken doll? “All I did was lie absolutely still on his bed trying not to puke. Before that I giggled a lot. That’s all that happened.”

  Bryan is tapping out a random tune on the piano. “It just seems so goddam unnecessary, that’s all. You knew how I felt about Tim.”

  “Bryan, Tim was the one who asked me out.”

  “Did you have to say yes?”

  “I always think I’m going to have so much fun with strawberry daiquiris. They just sound like fun, don’t they? But it never seems to work out that way.”

  “You could have had Perrier, you know.” He’s pushing down on the same key over and over again. “And not gotten drunk.”

  “He was paying.”

  “Maybe you’d like to talk honestly about this?”

  “Can’t we just blame it on demon rum and get it over with?”

  “It’s not that easy, Miranda.”

  Quelled into silence by his formal use of my name, I’m busy trying to draw a deep breath when Bryan speaks again.

  “Maybe you have something else to say?”

  “How about playing the theme from Love Story,” I suggest. He shoots me a look of such black incredulousness that I raise a hand in self-defense. “Never mind. I was only joking.”

  “Jesus,” he whispers. “Show some goddam emotion, will you?”

  “Do I have to?” I lean my head back and watch him as he bends over the keyboard. When I realize that he’s crying, I go over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. Now he looks up at me, his face distorted and wet.

  “You’re completely cool.” His voice shakes. “Like a goddam ice queen. Don’t you even care?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, rasping a little from the tightness in my chest. “I’m really sorry.”

  “You sure as hell don’t show it.” He swipes a hand across
his cheek. “Just get the hell out of here, okay? Do me a favor and get out of here. Go make some snow angels or something.”

  After a moment I take my hand off his shoulder; strangely, my palm feels hot, as if it’s touched coals. Leaving the practice room, I jog upstairs and go outside to catch the next shuttle bus back down to Harvard Square. Huddled in my coat, I look out the window at the white snowy streets, wondering why it is I don’t seem to feel like crying.

  Jessica, after threatening to move off campus and tell the housing office that I’d been keeping snakes in our room, then lapsed into a silent treatment which had me thumbing through Dante’s Inferno in an effort to see where she derived her methodology. Finally, after two days of her icy glances and stubbornly pursed lips, I cornered her in the bathroom, planted my body as a barricade against the door, and swore to her that I spent the entire night retching into Tim’s baseball helmet, which, as far as I was concerned, was only the merest distortion of the truth. Relenting, she snickered at my woeful face, and then we shook hands in a manly sort of way and I took her out to Steve’s for ice cream.

  But with Bryan it seems that it’s more than a simple case of pique. Our freshman-year friendship began in a shared fondness for tiny dark cafés, crashing Fogg Museum art openings, the Talking Heads, and picking the raisins out of the granola tin, and was nourished over the semesters by long telephone conversations at all hours and by our study sessions holed up in his room at North House, him tinkering with a score for composition class, me at my notebook muttering over my Roget’s. All this easy camaraderie has somehow been displaced by a tense void between us, looming wider every day; and it’s all the more trying since Tim keeps phoning me, and I haven’t got much to say to him, except perhaps to inquire if he’s ever heard the old expression about loose lips sinking ships.

  And so I stand here by the salad bar with my yogurt getting warm, Carlos offering no refuge, and out of the corner of my eye I can see Beatrice and Alicia in their matching leather trousers rustling my way. Grimly I consider handing over my tray to the dishwasher and bagging dinner entirely. Homemade baklava, chérie. I try to recall what I had for lunch today. Did I have lunch today?

  Then I spot Michael and Walt at a small round table not fifteen feet from the salad bar. Quashing a sigh of relief, I drift toward them as if my destination had been ordained before birth, taking care to avoid all unnecessary and potentially fatal eye contact en route.

  After setting down my tray, I pluck a chair from a nearby table and slide into the seat. “Thank god.”

  “Howdy, you long tall drink of water,” Michael says, half-rising and tipping an imaginary ten-gallon to me. He’s from Texas and can get away with things like wearing pointy Tony Lamas and opening doors for women. Not many people would guess that he’s attended East Coast prep schools since he was ten. “How are you, gal?”

  “Oh, I can’t complain.”

  “Miranda,” Walt says, shaking his head at my tray, “don’t you know what nutrition spelled backwards is?”

  “Noitirtun.”

  “R-e-l-i-e-f.” Michael winks at me.

  “M-o-n-e-y.” Walt is waving his fork for emphasis. Little brown blobs of gravy dot the tabletop.

  “Oh, Walt. You’re beautiful when you’re angry.” Smiling, I wipe a little globule of gravy off my arm. After untold hours of computation, Walt has determined exactly how much food he must consume at each sitting in order to get full value for his board plan, which, as for most Harvard students, boils down to three all-you-can-eat meals a day. He does fairly well with lunch and dinner, but breakfast proves to be another kettle of fish, as it were. How much oatmeal, after all, can one person eat? Walt compensates for his physiological limitations by smuggling out several single-serving boxes of cereal a day, thus, he insists, getting his money’s worth from his meal plan. This satisfaction is never plainer than when he is showing off an entire wall of his room lined with row upon row of carefully stacked Rice Krispies, Cocoa Puffs, Sugar Smacks, Bran Buds, and Special K boxes.

  “I’m not angry, Miranda. But I’ll be honest with you, I am somewhat concerned.”

  “Is it because I have food between my teeth?” I smirk radiantly at him, in deference to his avowed intention of becoming a dentist. “Something huge and disgusting?”

  “Just a small tree in the very front, darlin’.” Michael taps my chin. “It’s kinda cute, though.”

  “I’m not joking, Miranda,” Walt persists. “That’s barely one, one point five dollars you’ve got on your tray there.”

  “I’ll steal some silverware, okay?”

  “Y’all take some dishes, too.”

  “No respect.” Walt shakes his head again and turns his attention to a large half-eaten piece of meat, the animal source of which I don’t care to guess at, that rests on his plate gleaming with an obscenely brown sauce. “Pass the salt, please.”

  Michael complies, then pushes back his imaginary ten-gallon, smiling at me. “How goes it, kitten?”

  “The usual.” I shrug, listening to a girl behind me saying, “Every time I’m in France I get sick. Isn’t it funny?” Sipping my coffee, I keep my eyes fixed on Michael’s face. “What’s new with you?”

  “Well now, funny y’all should ask. My latest Cobol program just about blew up the Science Center, an’ my professor’s gonna string me up the next time I show my red ol’ face in class. ’Course I got three hundred pages of tutorial readin’ due tomorrow, an’ I’ve gotta run over to the phone company first thing in the mornin’ an’ beg ’em not to disconnect my phone just because my roommate used the phone money to buy marijuana. But other than that, not much to report.” An eyebrow arches, sleek and orderly. “Oh, an’ my folks are threatenin’ divorce again.”

  “Oh.”

  “All very well and good,” Walt chimes in. “But what are you planning to wear to the Spee’s pajama party?”

  There is a tremendous sound of phlegm-rattling wheezing and then Andrew descends upon us, his cheeks blazing with an alarming red flush. “Hi, guys.” Breathlessly he leans his palms on the table. “Anybody got a cigarette?”

  “No, asshole.” Walt glares at him. “Bug off.”

  “Shit.” He whirls and clatters off, leaving a pungent scent of Gitanes in his wake.

  Walt stabs his fork into his meat. “Dirty son-of-a-bitch bastard.”

  “Well, gal, I thought I’d wear pajamas.” Michael winks at me again.

  “What a concept.”

  “No-good rotten stinking moron,” Walt goes on, bitterly. “Decaying scum-of-the-earth douchebag.”

  “Now Walt.” I repress a smile. “It’s not nice to talk about your roommate like that.”

  “He’s a putrefying baboon and I hope he drops dead from lung cancer. The sooner the better.”

  “Then you really should keep a supply of cigs around for him, don’t you think?”

  A voice rings out from the end of the dining hall: “Panty raid!” Somebody cheers, and the master’s baby starts crying again. Sighing, Walt inserts a large chunk of meat into his mouth.

  A brilliant flash of crimson catches my eye, and I twist around in my chair to watch Robbie and Adolfo gliding out of the kitchen wearing handsome red frocks—new Kamalis, if I’m not mistaken. Their earrings, necklaces, stockings, and pumps are all charmingly coordinated in varying shades of red.

  Robbie and Adolfo are certainly among the most prominent Adams House residents, although it’s hard to say whether it’s because of their tireless activism for gay rights or because of their exquisite taste in clothing. Nobody bats an eye at them, from Master Ackerman on down; after a few days of confusion, the incoming sophomores catch on too. Even Virginia remains unfazed, sometimes cooing over a particularly dazzling outfit. I eye them speculatively, wondering if it’s true, as rumor will have it, that the boys are just good friends. Really.

  “There.” Walt drops his fork onto his plate and leans back with another sigh. “Six dollars and forty-two cents.”

&nbs
p; I tear my envious gaze away from Robbie’s superb Italian shoes. “As opposed to six and a half.”

  “Every penny counts, Miranda.”

  “And a hundred or so makes a dollar.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe I should have been a math major.”

  “Why?”

  I blink at him. “Hey, you want my apple for dessert? I’m not going to eat it.”

  “No thanks, Eve.” He grins. “Get it? Eve?”

  Michael touches my shoulder. “Eat something, gal.”

  I look at him. “Don’t you know this is Oxfam night?”

  “Yep.” He is unmoved.

  “Don’t you see? I feel too guilty to eat.”

  A fourth tray is planted on the tabletop, nearly pushing Michael’s tray off the edge into his lap. He steadies the tray with a quick hand. “Hey now.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Anne Devereaux sits down, and I smell L’Air du Temps. “It’s such a crowded little table.”

  “Isn’t it though?” I stand up. “Luckily, I was just leaving.”

  “Really?” Walt says in surprise.

  “Oh well.” Anne sidles her chair an inch or two toward Michael. “I just love your belt buckle. Is that a cow’s head? I didn’t know cows had horns.”

  “Bye guys.” I pick up my tray.

  “It’s a steer.” Michael grits his teeth at me and scoots his chair closer to my vacated spot. “Ain’t y’all ever been to a feedlot?”

  On my way to the garbage bins I manage to avoid speaking with another former roommate of mine, Melissa, who used to and for all I know continues to dissolve into baby talk when under stress, an irritating habit that contributed little to the general morale of an already volatile rooming situation. Feigning sudden interest in my sneakers, I am able to sidestep yet another tortuous encounter with Nevill Barth, the house English tutor, who keeps asking me out for coffee so we can talk about Hemingway and poststructuralist criticism over baba au rhum, undeterred by my chilly assurances that I have an antipathy for sweets. Next, executing a subtle pirouette around a little yapping cluster of Eurofags in their handsome black overcoats, I relinquish my tray, and finally stalk toward the exit. Bryan and Carlos are standing by the salad bar, laughing. As I pass by them Carlos calls out: “Hey, surfer girl!” I catch a glimpse of Bryan’s suddenly frigid face and I say “Qué pasa, guys?” and keep moving.