My mother looks up at me, and for an instant, the façade breaks and I see what is underneath. She’s worried about me. So am I. But my reality is not one that I can invite her into because this flare-up of motherly concern will not last more than a moment for her. The split in the clouds of her busy internal life is something I cannot trust and not because she’s abusive. She’s far from cruel; she’s just self-absorbed. Accordingly, I’ve learned the hard way that I’m the only savior I’ve got in this world.
“You’re going to be fine,” she says through an exhale of smoke.
She has to believe this because to entertain the opposing option that I will not be fine and leave me here anyway means she’s a negligent mother. Which she’s not. I have been fed, watered, clothed, and housed since the moment of my birth. The damage she does is never intentional, and besides, her desperate, twitchy, clawing need to distinguish herself from her lot in life tortures her much more than it does me.
I’ve always felt sorry for her.
“I’ll call you every Sunday at two p.m.,” she tells me.
“Okay.”
“You have the money I gave you.”
“Yes.”
There’s a long pause, and as things become uncomfortable, her eyes skip out to the lawn. The sight of the grass she is so taken with must calm her because she nods once, the sharp head bob like a gavel coming down on a court case, the verdict in. Then she waves at me with her cigarette and I step back to watch the Mercury pull away. In the wake of her departure, I link my arms around my middle. I blink in the lightning-bright sunshine of fall. I smell clean air.
The leaves on the trees are still green. This will not last.
I turn and face the dorm, seeing it properly for the first time. The glossy black door has been propped wide with a brass weight, and there are windows open all across the front of the building, the lower sashes pushed high, no screens to buffer the sounds inside. Voices, high and low, form a symphony that could have been written by the members of the roofline’s frieze, and I close my eyes, trying to find the repeating sequence that pulls all of it together. There is none.
My stomach cramps as I walk into the dorm’s cool interior. Straight ahead is the main staircase, and beyond it, through a broad archway, I see a big open area with no furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows. To the left is a room with several mismatched tables, a couple of chairs, and eight phones with long cords that crisscross institutional-grade carpeting.
Okay, so that is where I have to be every Sunday at two p.m.
To the right, on the wall, is a varnished wooden rack of open-air mailboxes, each cubbyhole marked at its top with a name tag slid into a brass holder. There are missives in each of the slots already, a multicolored assortment of notices that have lollygagged in their compartments, forming rows upon rows of the letter c.
I leave my set of papers where they are because no one else has picked up theirs, and in my disinterest in the communiques, I figure I am fitting in with the crowd here for my first, and maybe only, time. The stairs are made of the same dark-colored and varnished wood as the mailboxes, each step protected against wear by a black-treaded pad that will also provide purchase when students come in with rain on their sneakers or snow on their winter boots. The banister is the same kind of wood again, and I wonder what sort it is as I troll my hand up the smooth and spindled support.
When I get to the second floor, I stop on the landing. Ahead, there is a closed door with a brass plate on it that reads Residential Advisor. I look to the long halls on the left and the right. The student rooms are set at equidistant measures down both sides of the pale-brown-carpeted corridors. For a moment, I panic because I can’t remember which way I should go and I can’t think of how to come up with the correct analysis. There are too many excited voices, too many people walking around with suitcases and duffels, and too many perfumes and colognes mingling in the humid, still-summer air, a department store’s fragrance counter come to Christmastime’s agitating life.
Everyone is energized by the fresh start that the new school year brings. New notebooks and packs of pens, new textbooks with bindings that are uncracked. New teachers, new subjects. New friends, new boyfriends. I recognize this phenomenon because a similar buzzy buoyancy infected everyone on the first day of my public high school a year ago. I witnessed it from afar then, too.
Right. I go to the right.
As I make my way down to my room, I realize I’m more like my mother than I’m comfortable with. We’re both outsiders to so much, although at least I am content to stay where I am on the far-flung fringes.
My room is not that far down, located just past the bathroom that services our wing with six shower stalls, six toilet stalls, and six sinks. As I pass by, two men in work uniforms come out with buckets of tools and a coiled snakelike contraption. They don’t look at me. They’re sweaty and they are clearly ready to have whatever job they are doing over with. Perhaps their wish has been granted, I think, because they seem to have packed up.
“Are you boys done?”
At the sound of the male voice, I turn back around. There’s a man standing in the juncture of the hallways, by the stairs. He has his hands on his jean-clad hips as if he’s in charge, but he’s got a Nirvana Bleach tour T-shirt on. His dark hair is a grow-out of a much shorter cut, the ends perking up as if they are making a break for it, the brown color deepened by dampness and lightened by streaks of copper. His cheeks are shaved. His face is breathtakingly handsome. He is wearing a wedding ring.
I am glad my mother left before meeting him. And I am curious how he can call two men in their fifties “boys.” He is at least twenty-five years younger than they are, fully mature, yet nowhere near dad status.
The plumbers walk over and talk to him about pipes. He asks questions. I hear nothing.
The more I look at him, the more I feel strangely excited and a little nauseous. My palms sweat and a giggle trembles up between my lungs even though there is no joke anywhere near me.
He doesn’t notice my presence, and this makes sense. For one thing, there clearly are some issues with the pipes—not the sort of thing you want with twenty rooms full of young women. But I’m also not the kind of girl that people notice for the reason I’d want someone like him to notice me.
As I continue on to my room, a residual of the man follows me, my molecules supercharged and vibrating even as I leave the sight of him behind.
The room I’ve been assigned to is 213, and as I pass through its open doorway, I want to close things up. I have a paranoia about open doors. About people staring at me. About my secret getting out. My roommate hasn’t arrived yet, though, and it seems rude to shut her out before she even gets here.
Our space is generously sized and split down the middle by an invisible line. The walls are whitewashed down to the chair rail that runs around about four feet off the floor, and under that rail there’s beadboard that’s varnished the same color as the floor, as the banister, as the stairs, as the mailbox cubbies. The arrangement of what is mine and what is my roommate’s is a mirror image, the beds wedged into the corners on either side, the bureaus at the foot of the beds, the narrow desks pushed together in front of the tremendous, many-paned window that makes up the whole wall opposite the door.