Lucky

SIX

In my senior year of high school, I had applied to three colleges: Syracuse University, Emerson College in Boston, and the University of Pennsylvania, where I was supposed to have gotten in, a cinch as a faculty child. I did not want to go to Penn, or at least that's how I remember it. I had watched my sister move in and then quickly out of a dorm on Penn's campus, bring her possessions back to my parents' house, and commute her first year. If I had to go to college-which I spent the better part of four years in high school saying I didn't want to do-I wanted it to have the benefit of being far away.

My parents humored me; they were desperate for me to go to college. They saw it as an essential gateway, the thing that had changed their own lives, particularly my father's. Neither of his parents had finished high school and the shame of this was like an ache to him; his academic achievements were fueled by a need to distance himself from his mother's bad grammar and his father's drunken dirty jokes.

In my junior year of high school, my father and I visited Emerson, where long-haired students he called "throwbacks" advised me on how to break what they saw as oppressive rules.

"You aren't supposed to have any electrical appliances," said the resident assistant of the dorm we toured. He had dark brown dirty hair and a scruffy beard. To me, he looked like John the bus driver, who had driven me to school during junior high and had dropped out of high school. Both these boys had the smell of true, authentic rebellion. They reeked of pot.

"I got a toaster oven and a hair dryer," this John boasted, pointing toward a grease-coated toaster oven wedged into a set of handmade shelves. "Never use 'em at the same time, that's the trick."

Though amused, my father was also shocked by this boy, his mangy looks, his position of authority in the dorms. My father may have been divided. Emerson had the reputation of being an arty school in a town of monoliths like Harvard and MIT. Even Boston University, whose campus we also visited and which my father praised, was far above Emerson's place on the food chain. But I liked Emerson. I liked how when we drove up to it and saw the sign, two of the letters were missing from it. This was my kind of place. I felt I could learn not to make toast and dry my hair at the same time.

That night I had fun with my father. This is a rare event. My father does not have hobbies, wouldn't recognize a ball sport if the ball hit him in the head, and there are no cronies, there are only colleagues. The reason for relaxation of any kind is largely beyond him. "Fun is boring," he told me as a child when I attempted to coax him into playing a board game I had set up on the floor. It became one of his favorite phrases. He meant it.

But I'd always had a hint that my father could be different away from us and away from my mother. That he had fun in other countries or with his male graduate students. I liked to get my father alone, and on the trip to Emerson, he and I shared a hotel room to save money.

The night after a long day in Boston, I slipped into the twin bed nearest the bathroom. My father went down to the lobby to read and perhaps make a call to my mother. I was wound up and couldn't sleep. Earlier, I had gotten a bucket of tiny ice cubes from the hallway. I planned my attack. I took the ice cubes and put them in my father's bed, right down near the feet. I saved the remainder and placed them by my bed.

I feigned sleep when my father returned. He changed into his pajamas in the bathroom, brushed his teeth, turned out the light. I could see the outline of him as he pulled the covers back to get inside. I was elated, if a bit frightened. He might just be plain mad. I counted, and then it came. A ferocious yell followed by cursing. "For Christ's sakes, what the…?"

I couldn't hold it. I started laughing uncontrollably.

"Alice?"

"Got ya," I said.

At first, he was angry, but then he threw a cube. That was all it took.

It was war. I threw back. Our beds were our bunkers. He threw great handfuls and, retrieving them, I used them as individuals, firing off rounds timed to get him just as he was coming up to strike. He was laughing and so was I. He had tried momentarily to be the parent, but he couldn't hold to it.

I got what he thought was too hysterical and reached what my mother called my hyperactive state, so we stopped. But before that, oh, to see my father joyful, laughing. At moments like this I pretended my father was the big brother I'd never had. It was up to me to instigate, but when he was that repressed kid released, my whole heart wanted him to stay that way forever.

Like a small-town girl might view Hollywood, I saw Syracuse as my big break. Compared with my sister's proximity to my parents, Syracuse was far away from home. Far enough so that I could redefine myself against what I had once been.

My roommate was Nancy Pike. She was a roly-poly, overexcited girl from Maine. In the summer, she had found out my name and written me a letter. It was six enthusiastic pages long and regaled me with what she was bringing and their attendant definitions-"I have a hot pot. It is a little pot that looks like a coffee percolator but it's really only for hot water and has a plug that you plug in. It is great for making soups and water for tea though you should never put soup directly in it."

I dreaded meeting her.

As my mother, father, and I arrived on move-in day my head was swimming. This was my new life and here were all the new people in it. A coed dorm held possibilities I dared not outline to my parents. My mother had on her Donna Reed face, which was a particularly sickly smile imbued with positive thinking, dredged up from I never understood where. My father wanted to get the stuff out of the car and get it over with. He was not made, as he pointed out many times that day, "for heavy lifting."

Nancy had gotten there first, chosen her bed, hung up a rainbow wall hanging, and begun to putter with her belongings. Her parents and siblings had stayed to meet me and my family. My mother's Donna Reed was cracking into panic. My father drew himself up to his full academic, Ivy League-professor height, the one from which he looked down on everybody who expressed interest in sports or daily life. "I was born two centuries too late," he is fond of saying, or, "I had no parents, I sprung from the Earth whole and unique." My mother could always manage a zinger: "Your father looks down on everybody because from that height, he's hoping they won't see his bad teeth."

Weird family Sebold meets excited family Pike. The Pikes filtered out and took Nancy to lunch. The word that suited them best, I think, is crestfallen. Their sweet daughter had drawn a superfreak.

Nancy and I didn't talk much in the first week. She would bubble and I would lie in my bunk and stare at the ceiling.

At the bright, happy orientation exercises that the resident assistants led us on-"Okay, we're going to play a game called Living Priorities. Write these down. Studying. Volunteer work. Rushing sororities. Can anyone tell me what they would choose as a priority and why?"-my roommate had hand in air. During one interminable afternoon, when the girls of our floor sat cross-legged on the grass outside the dining hall, listening to a lecture on how to do laundry, I thought I had been dropped off at a camp for morons by my parents.

I stomped into the dorm. It had been a week and I had refused to go to the dining hall with the other girls for dinner. When Nancy asked why, I said I was fasting. Later, when I was hungry, I asked her to bring me food. "It has to be white food," I said. "No colors. Erik Satie ate only white food." My poor roommate brought home mounds of cottage cheese and giant pearl tapioca. I lay in bed, hating Syracuse and listening to Erik Satie, from whose liner notes my new regime came.

One night I heard noise in the room next to mine. Everyone else was at dinner. I went out into the hall. A door was slightly ajar.

"Hello?" I said.

It was the most beautiful girl on the floor. The one my mother had pointed out on move-in day. "Just be glad that gorgeous blonde isn't your roommate. The line of boys would be out the door."

"Hello."

I went in. She had just gotten a whole footlocker of food sent from home. It was open against the wall. After a week of white food, it was an oasis. M &M's and cookies and crackers and Starbursts and fruit leather. Products I had never even heard of or wasn't allowed to have.

But she wasn't eating. She was braiding her hair. A French braid. I expressed my admiration and told her I'd never been able to do more than simple braids.

"I'll do it for you if you want."

I sat on her bed and she stood behind me and began to take the small pinches of hair and work a skull-numbingly tight French braid down the back of my head.

She finished the braid and I thanked her and looked in the mirror. We both sat and then laid down on the two twin beds in the room. We were quiet, staring at the ceiling.

"Can I tell you something?" I asked.

"Sure."

"I hate it here."

"Oh, my God!" she said, sitting up, flushed with permission. "I hate it here too!"

We ate our way through her trunk of food. I have a memory of actually sitting in the trunk with the food but this can't be right, can it?

Mary Alice's roommate was what we called experienced. She was from Brooklyn. Her name was Debbie and her nickname was Double D. She smoked and thought little of us. She had a from-home boyfriend who was older. And I mean older. Early forties, but with the agelessness of Joey Ramone. He was a DJ somewhere and had a deep smoker's voice. When he visited, they went to hotels and Debbie returned to the dorm with her cheeks flushed and clearly, again, disgusted by us. Mary Alice had long toes and would feed me crackers by digging them into the box. We dressed up in stupid outfits and, with coupons from cocoa mix, sent away for a real Swiss Miss cardboard chalet.

Debbie began two-timing her boyfriend with a male cheerleader from school. Her new boyfriend's name was Harry Weiner and of course Mary Alice and I had endless fun with that. Once, on a dare, I hid inside the Swiss Miss chalet while Debbie and Harry went at it on the bed. At a certain point, dare or no, I felt too uncomfortable and crawled, on my hands and knees, with the cardboard chalet moving with me like some sort of cartoon spy's camouflage, over to the door to make my escape.

Debbie was incensed. She put in for a room transfer. Mary Alice never stopped thanking me.

Within a few weeks of the start of freshman year, a group of girls gathered in the hall outside our rooms. We sat on the floor, with our backs against the walls, our legs outstretched or Indian-style. The former homecoming queens or future flirts tucked their legs to one side, while the jocks on scholarship, like my friend Linda, didn't think twice about how they sat or looked while surrounded by their peers. Slowly the stories came out-who was and wasn't a virgin.

Some were obvious. Like Sara, who sold hash out of her black-lit room, where she had a stereo system that cost more than most of our fathers' cars, on which she played the classic stoner tracks of Traffic and Led Zep. "Some guy's in there," her assigned roommate would say, and we would throw this girl a sleeping bag and tell her not to snore.

Then there was Chippie. I had never heard the word before. Didn't know it meant whore. Thought it actually was her name, and innocently said, "Hi, Chippie, how are you?" on the way to the showers one morning. She burst into tears and never talked to me again.

There was also a girl who was a sophomore and lived at the end of the hall. She dated a townie and modeled for Joel Belfast, a semi-famous painter in the art department. The townie liked to chain her up to her bunk bed and we would see her leather and ultrasuede bras and panties as she hurried to and from the lavatory in the morning. The townie rode a motorcycle and had an atrophied left leg. Once, on the night the campus security arrived because they were making so much noise, I saw the scar that rose up out of the top of his boot and snaked up past his hip and around the back of his body. She was stoned and screaming on the bed, where she remained chained up. Soon after, she moved into off-campus housing somewhere.

These girls and Debbie were the only four on a hall of fifty that I knew for sure weren't virgins. The rest had to be, I assumed, because I was.

But even Nancy told a story. She had lost it in a Datsun to her high school boyfriend. Tree in a Toyota. Diane in the basement of a boyfriend's house. Her boyfriend's parents had knocked on the window during the act. The other stories I've forgotten, and remember only that the make of the car became a nickname for various girls. Few were the glorious cases-a boyfriend who had bought a ring, chosen a special night, and brought flowers, or had his older brother's downtown apartment for the day. When these girls spoke we didn't believe them anyway. It was better to say Datsun or Toyota or Ford; it was dues for a peer group, a way to belong.

When that evening of revelation was through, Mary Alice and I, among those outside their rooms, were the only two virgins on the hall.

These fumbled sexual exploits in the backs of cars or in the basements of someone's parents' house seem wonderful to me. Nancy was ashamed of having lost "it," as we all called virginity, in a Datsun, but it was, after all, a normal part of growing up.

In letters sent me over the breaks that year Tree and Nancy were spending every night with their high school boyfriends. For Tree there was talk of a ring being bought. These girls began to take over my landscape.

I also got letters from the boys I'd worked with at my summer job after high school, particularly an older guy named Gene. I begged Gene to send me a photo. Of course, I pretended to the other girls he was more than just a friend, and I wanted evidence to show around.

The photo he sent was clearly a few years old. He was thinner and had more hair but there was the handle-bar mustache that shouted out man. When I finally got the photo late in the first semester I showed it around. Mary Alice cut to the core. "Is it the seventies still? I feel a disco ball dropping down." Nancy pretended to be impressed but she and Tree were too busy keeping connected with their real boyfriends-boys they'd gone to high school with, whom they had promised to marry someday.

For her part, Mary Alice was obsessed with, in order: Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger. On the subject of Bruce-for he was our familiar-she was apoplectic. For her birthday I got a T-shirt made. MRS. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN it said, in puffy, too-big iron-on letters. She slept in it every night.

Honestly, when I look back, I can say I was in love with Mary Alice for most of my freshman year. I loved watching her get away with things and being a troop member in her carefully planned out escapades. Stealing a sheet cake from the dining hall became an operation worthy of James Bond. It involved discovering the tunnel between two dorms that led to the odd door that was always locked. There were keys that needed to be stolen and people who needed to be distracted and finally, late at night, pink cake that needed to be disguised and hustled up to our rooms.

But my dorm girlfriends were also fond of the bars on nearby Marshall Street and by spring they went regularly to fraternity keg parties. I hated fraternity parties. "We're just meat!" I yelled above the music to Tree, who was ahead of me in the line for the keg. "So what?" she shouted back. "It's fun!" Tree became a little sister. Mary Alice was always popular no matter how she felt. No fraternity house would turn away a natural blonde and her attendant friends.

I was taking a poetry class and in it, there were two boys, Casey Hartman and Ken Childs, who were unlike any in my dorm. They were sophomores, so I thought of them as mature. They were art students, taking the poetry class as an elective. They showed me the art building, a beautiful old thing that was yet to be restored. It had studios in it with carpeted platforms for the models in the life studies classes and old couches and chairs that the students crashed in. It smelled like paint and turpentine and was open all night so that students could work because, unlike most majors, you couldn't do your homework for things like metal welding in your room.

They pointed out a decent Chinese restaurant and Ken took me to the Emerson museum in downtown Syracuse. I began to wait for them outside their classes and go to the art openings they and their friends had. They were both from Troy, New York. Casey was on a creative fellowship and never had money. I would run into him and he would be having tea three times from the same bag for dinner. I only knew pieces of Casey's story. His father was in jail. His mother was dead.

It was Casey whom I had a crush on. But he didn't trust all the liberal arts girls who found him romantic, his scars from a birthmark and beatings things they wanted to cure. He talked fast, like an erupting coffeepot, and sometimes didn't make sense. I didn't care. He was a freak and so much more human, I believed, than the boys in fraternities or in my dining hall.

But Ken was the one who liked me and who, like me, liked to talk. The three of us formed a frustrated triangle. I complained about how many of the girls at Marion were so experienced and how I felt lame. Ken and Casey were quiet at first but then it came out. They felt lame too.

When there was a party at the dorm-and kegs were allowed in your room back then-I would leave and go walk on the quad. I would end up in the art building, making instant coffee in the basement, and then sit for hours reading Emily Dickinson or Louise Bogan in the spring-shot sofas and chairs spotted throughout the building. I began to think of this place as my home.

Sometimes I would walk back to Marion in hopes the party would be over, and find it had seemingly barely begun. I didn't even go inside, I just turned around. I slept in the art classrooms, on the carpeted platforms meant to warm models' feet. They weren't big enough to stretch out on, so I would curl up into a ball.

One night, I was lying in a classroom in the dark. I had closed the door and made a bed in the back. The lights in the hallways were always on and the lightbulbs were covered in mesh cages so they wouldn't break or be stolen. Just as I was nodding off, the door to the hallway opened and a man stood outlined by the light coming from behind him. He was tall and wearing a top hat. I couldn't see who it was.

He turned on the light. It was Casey. "Sebold," he said, "what are you doing here?"

"I'm sleeping."

"Welcome, comrade!" he said, and tipped his hat. "I will be your Cerberus for the night."

He sat in the dark and watched me sleep. I remember, before I nodded off, wondering if Casey could ever find me pretty enough to kiss. It was the first night I'd ever spent with a boy I liked.

I look back and I see Casey as a guard dog. I want to say that under his guard I felt safe, but the person writing this is not the person who curled up on the carpeted platforms inside dark classrooms. The world was not divided for me then as it is now. Ten days later, on the last night of school, I would enter what I've thought of since as my real neighborhood, a land of subdivision where tracts are marked off and named. There are two styles available: the safe and the not safe.