by Lisa Pliscou
“Really? You like it?”
“Everybody. Sing!”
“Sure. I love the little accordions.”
“They’re typewriters.”
“All together now!”
“Oh.” She starts unwrapping. “Have a cheese ball.”
“No thanks.”
“Socks.” She holds them up. “With little accordions on them. Neat.”
“They’re typewriters.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.”
“Do you like them?”
“I love them. They’ll look great with my argyles.” She’s unwrapping another package. “Combs.”
“Cheez-its!” somebody cries. “Mouses! Meeces!”
“No!” screams a voice by the bar. “Where?”
“Jessica, is this a theme party?”
“Huh?” She’s busy with another package. “What’s this? A box of Ivory Snow?”
“Family size,” I say proudly.
“I usually get Tide.”
“I know. But I like Ivory Snow better.”
“Oh, really?”
“I thought I might borrow some.”
“Ah.”
“Jessie, you’ve got a little piece of olive in the comer of your mouth.”
“Oh. Thanks.” She dislodges it with the knuckle of her forefinger. “You sure you don’t want a cheese ball?”
“No thanks.”
“Some champagne? You should see what they’re using for glasses.”
“Maybe later.”
“Okay.”
“Jessie?”
“Yeah?”
“Who’s that over there with the lampshade on her head?”
Jessica looks up from the Coop bag. “Oh, that’s just my thesis adviser.”
“It looks good on her.”
“Yeah?” She squints. “It clashes with her dress.”
“Yes, but she’s tall, so she can carry it off.”
“I guess so.” Jessica tears the paper off a bottle of nail polish remover. “You’ve met her already, haven’t you?”
“No, but I guess it’s kind of hard to meet people when you’ve got a lampshade on your head.”
“Yeah. Oh, Jesus, Herbal Essence.” She unscrews the cap and sniffs. “It smells like air freshener.”
“Oh.” I feel my face fall. “I thought you liked Herbal Essence.”
“I do. I said it smells like hair freshener.”
“You mean that?”
“I mean everything I say.”
“I can take it back if you want. I still have the receipt.”
“No, I love it, really. Listen.”
“Yeah?” I’m eyeing the cheese balls.
“Speaking of mean.”
“Mmm?”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Sure.” I pull my hand away from the table. “Speaking of mean.”
“I may have been a little touchy lately.”
“You?”
“A bit short-tempered.”
“You think so?”
“Those dandruffy cats were driving me crazy.”
“I can imagine.”
“I can hardly wait to go home and shampoo my legs.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to say so. But you can use soap if you want.”
“Did you buy any?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll use shampoo.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, I just wanted to say—”
“Jessica.”
“What?”
“Love means—”
“I’m vomiting.”
“Which reminds me. Since when do you like cream cheese on Melba toast?”
“If you’d been living on granola bars and Spaghetti Os for a week, don’t you think it’d look pretty good to you too?”
“I see your point.”
“Have a cheese ball.”
“No thanks.”
“Anyway, it’s an acquired taste.”
“Ah.”
She holds out a piece of Melba toast. “Bite?”
“I’ll pass.”
“Okay.”
“Well, anyway, I just stopped by to—”
“Miranda?” she says, chewing.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got it figured out.”
“You’ve got what figured out?”
“It came to me in a blinding flash of light.”
“What did?”
She swallows. “The meaning of life.”
“Really?”
“What do you mean, really?”
“It’s just an expression.”
“Oh. Well, don’t you want to know what it is?”
“The meaning of life?”
“Yes,” she says impatiently.
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh, come on. Humor me, okay? It’s my party, after all.”
“Oh, all right. What’s the meaning of life?”
“Guess.”
I roll my eyes. “Ninety-three.”
“Close.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It’s like this.” She wipes a little dab of cream cheese off her chin. “If you have a pimple, be grateful it’s only one.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Wait, there’s more.”
“Oh, good.”
“And if you have two pimples, be grateful it’s only two.”
“Can I try?”
“If you feel up to it.”
“Okay. If you have three pimples, be grateful it’s only three.”
She nods excitedly. “And if you have four—”
“And so on—”
“And so forth—”
“Until it’s time to go to the dermatologist.”
“Eureka,” she exclaims, hugging me.
“You make it sound so easy.” I sniff covertly at her hair.
“Well, it is. Stop smelling my hair.”
“Sorry.”
“Miranda?” Her voice is muffled by my sweatshirt.
“Yeah?”
“Speaking of smelling.”
“Yes?”
“You smell awful.”
“I beg your pardon.” I lean away. “I believe you mean to say that my running clothes smell awful.”
She lets go of me. “Anyway, the whole point is to be grateful for having only one pimple, see? Or two, or three—”
“Whatever. I get your drift.”
“And I’m not even drunk.”
“Imagine that.”
“Just a little champagne. I had mine in a Dixie cup.”
“That’s my girl.”
“Are you sure you don’t want a cheese ball? They’re going fast.”
“That’s the way it is with cheese balls.”
She’s chewing again. “Well, thanks again for the presents. I can’t wait to wear one of those socks with the little accordions on it.”
I laugh. “They’ll look great with your Elvis Presley bobby socks, don’t you think?”
“Yeah.” She grins at me through a mouthful of Melba toast.
By the time I reach the Weld Boathouse, the tightness in my muscles has finally dissolved into an easy lope. Breathing hard and rhythmically, I spin around and start on the way back, swinging my arms in a loose-wristed cadence. As I dodge a pair of bicyclists barreling along taking up most of the path, I find myself pondering Jessica’s new theory. Maybe there is something to it after all. I try to remember when was the last time I had a pimple.
Ah, I think, this is a sign.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. I’m picturing Michael and me at the master’s tea, whispering and sniggering over our mugs of apple cider. Maybe I’ll even try one of those little cucumber sandwiches.
Yes, and maybe I’ll start taking aerobics classes at the IAB.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. I’m still grinning as I brush my bangs off my face, swiping a hand across my sweaty forehead. My sweatshirt is damp and clings
stickily to my back. Without breaking stride I raise the collar to my nose and sniff.
“Yuck,” I say aloud. Jessica was right.
I need to do the laundry, and soon. Particularly before Jessica discovers that I’ve borrowed another pair of her underwear.
What else?
Shaking out a swift little spasm in my shoulder, I begin drawing up a mental list of things to do.
Laundry
Clean up room
Get watch fixed
Call M & D (collect)
Get cap and gown free
Soc Sci 33 paper
Soap, toilet paper (?)
Haircut (?)
It seems like rather a lot to think about all at once. Loping closer to Weeks Bridge, carefully I inscribe the list on an imaginary blackboard somewhere in the back of my mind, and then, with a quick glance down at my Spiderman ring, I turn my attention back to my stride. Left, right, left, right.
One step at a time, as Gram might say.
Afterword
Back to School: Returning to Higher Education
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”
—William Wordsworth
“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
—Sylvia Plath
If a writer isn’t careful, her first novel could end up embarrassing her for the rest of her life. Like an awkward high school photo, the book will be a freeze-frame of experiences she has tried to leave behind; she would rather drown it than re-read it (let alone re-issue it). Sometimes the opposite is true. An author can never escape the success or notoriety of her first novel, no matter how hard she tries to distance herself or zigzag away from it stylistically. Lisa Pliscou’s Higher Education, her first novel, is neither embarrassing nor has it become an albatross hanging around her neck. Instead, it is a small gem that is thankfully being republished for the first time since its debut in 1989.
A lot has happened in the ensuing decades. There have been economic bubbles, housing crises, financial crashes, war and peace and then war again, not to mention the rising and setting of a dozen literary stars and tastes. And yet what’s amazing is how much things have stayed the same. Everywhere you look, cultural aspects of the ’80s are in ascendance, if not totally in control: music, fashion, even politics (the next presidential campaign will likely feature a Bush against a Clinton; time warp, anyone?). The fact that Top Gun 2 is shortly going into production should be the only proof one needs that we’re still living in the cultural vapor trail of that totally awesome decade. Because of this, the timing of Higher Education’s reappearance couldn’t be more perfect.
And yet, while the book indeed captures a slice of ’80s life, it’s restricted to one specific experience: college (to be even more specific: Harvard). The setting is important; the novel inhabits Harvard, not the other way around. Throughout the book, there are lots of in-jokes that someone who didn’t go to Harvard will likely miss (a reference about Adams House being better than Mathers House sailed right over my head, as it would, I imagine, for most people). But this doesn’t appreciably detract from the novel. There’s enough that’s universal in Higher Education so that the additional details—if you understand them—feel like extra credit. The fact that Miranda’s from Southern California—and isn’t a Boston blueblood, born and bred—gives her a bit of an outsider’s view. Much like The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, Miranda looks at the world with sly distrust and detached bemusement. Her observations become ours; she’s our chaperone.
The novel doesn’t have a plot. Instead, it has atmosphere. The numerous characters carom off each other without much purpose or design, leaving only the slightest trace they were there. They make an entrance, a few quips, and then exit. Sometimes they reappear, other times they don’t. The interchangeability of characters is most perfectly exemplified by numerous people forgetting Miranda’s name, either mistaking her for another person or shortening her name into a myriad of variations. Throughout the book, Miranda is addressed as and answers to the following: Randa, Wanda, Mirinda, Marlene, Miriam, Mirabelle, even Tarantula. It’s a nice way of showing Miranda’s ambivalence about who she is and what she’s turning into, as well as implying that—in those heady college days—one-night stands and brief affairs have a tendency to outnumber lasting relationships. The confusion over Miranda’s name also prefigures the running gag in American Psycho, published two years after Higher Education, where the book’s narrator, Patrick Bateman, is constantly mistaken for any one of the cookie cutter yuppies that inhabit his world. Speaking of, Bret Easton Ellis looms large over Higher Education. The structure—present-tense episodes broken up by remembrances in italics—mimics that of Less Than Zero, and the story itself resembles Ellis’s second novel, his 1987 coked-up chronicle of college life, The Rules of Attraction.
Higher Education takes place over ten days, each day a new chapter. Despite this deliberate demarcation, the sequence of events blurs over the course of the book. There are parties, meals, drinks, conversations, and sex. Schoolwork and classes are mentioned, but only as abstract concepts (or as things that get in the way of the parties, drinking, and sex). For what’s ostensibly a college novel, there’s not much in it that has to do with schoolwork or classrooms (the same way, I suppose, those things are themselves tangential to the college experience). There’s one scene in a writing class, and a peek at Miranda’s part-time job at the philosophy library, but most of the book takes place in the interstitial moments that, at the end of four years, ultimately make the strongest impression: time with friends, finding and losing love, finding and losing oneself.
Just below the surface of their experience lies the realization by the various characters that it’s all a game—existence is only a game—with some trying harder at it than others. Everyone’s jockeying for their next move. Is it grad school? Is it a job? Is it a record contract? They begin to suspect that the next sixty years will be just like the previous four.
All of this may make the novel sound tortured and dry, but Higher Education is—more than anything else—a lot of fun. Rare for a first novel, it’s more of a screwball comedy than a tortured bildungsroman; Roman Holiday rather than an overly sensitive roman à clef. Yes, it’s a novel about college, and with that comes the necessary dollop of adolescent angst (at one point a character says to Miranda, “You’re always feeling so goddamn sorry for yourself,” to which she responds, “Somebody has to”). But these are college kids who also say things like “none of your beeswax” and fire repartee back and forth like Myrna Loy and William Powell. And while there are the requisite pop culture references (Talking Heads, Blondie, Elvis Costello), which seem to neatly align with the spate of Brat Pack novels of the ’80s, I don’t remember Bright Lights, Big City or Slaves of New York containing numerous references to Helen Reddy. The spirit of the book owes as much to the ’20s as it does the ’80s. Higher Education was somewhat out of step when it was first published (it’s easy to imagine Miranda as a flapper, jazz in the background everywhere she goes, instead of New Wave), which means that it’s been able to seamlessly travel from being contemporary to classic. The book, like its heroine, is unstuck in time. It didn’t fit in with its contemporaries, and one wonders if Pliscou—like Miranda at any one of the parties she attends—was ever comfortable within the ranks of the similarly young and attractive writers she must have been lumped in with when Higher Education was first published.
Even though the book no doubt contains traces of autobiography—it takes place in 1982, when the author herself attended Harvard—some of its best parts are when Miranda is silent and Pliscou’s marvelous and razor-sharp prose fill the page. For example, the scene where Miranda’s classmates discuss the possibility of a friend getting breast implants. Miranda has been dragged along ostensibly for moral support and doesn’t say much, allowing Angela and Philip to bicker back and forth:
“He’s so self-absorbed, Wanda. He doesn’t pay attention to my needs at all.�
�
“Well, if it comes to that, she never—”
“Him and his little hidden agendas—”
“How does she expect me to get my work done?” Philip leans toward me, his round little wire-rimmed glasses glinting in the overhead light. “How am I supposed to study for my finals? My thesis review is on Thursday—”
“I’ve got emotional requirements too, you know.”
“And the final paper for my psych seminar is due in two weeks.”
“Hopes and dreams like everybody else.”
“And I’ve got med school to start thinking about—”
“Is it such a terrible thing to want to be on the cover of Vogue?”
“And right after my finals are over I’ve got to register for my psych classes at summer school—”
“They’re not his breasts.”
“And all she can do is worry about her cleavage—”
It’s a devastatingly funny scene, and it’s emblematic of the whole book.
Some of the writing, however, is a bit clunky; not everything hits its mark. Miranda, an English major, is seen, early in the book, going everywhere with a thesaurus (and the book is narrated by Miranda), which leads to descriptions like “the obligatory moue of disgust” and sentences that begin, “Not unlike Scylla and Charybdis, now that I think of it.” But the handful of awkward phrases are easily outweighed by the novel’s abundant humor (“Why is it that chemistry majors always look like chemistry majors?”) and detailed descriptions that give a keen and accurate feel for college life (“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”).
Most importantly, because the kinds of feelings that it presents never really go away, reading Higher Education in 2015 doesn’t feel like an exercise in nostalgia. The questions it asks are ones that you end up never being able to answer. What am I going to do with my life? What is it going to take to make me happy? Is the real world as frightening as it seems?
The fact that Miranda is a runner, obsessing throughout the book about squeezing in a jog or getting out of her cluttered dorm room for exercise (whenever she does, she bumps into one of her classmates; there’s no escaping them), makes perfect sense. She’s like John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, forever on the run from life and its problems. At one of the parties that Miranda goes to, “Tainted Love” is booming from the speakers. There’s a line in the song that goes, “Sometimes I feel I’ve got to run away.” What Miranda and the other characters of this incredibly smart and funny novel don’t realize is that what they’re running toward are merely older versions of themselves. (One character tells another’s fortune early in the book: “I see a big house in Scarsdale. I see a big green lawn, hibachis. A golden retriever. Canasta parties. I see weekly facials and enormous bills from Bloomingdale’s.”) They hope that they’re hurtling toward fame or wisdom, riches or adventure, and yet—even with a Harvard diploma—none of that is guaranteed.