Plans were afoot for them to sign out for the weekend and travel with their boyfriends to Martha’s Vineyard, to stay in someone’s parents’ house. Lies would be told. Parents were not consulted. This was astonishing to me. The trip involved plane travel, and I was not even sure that was legal—weren’t there officials of some kind to monitor these things? But New York picked up the pay phone in the hall by the back door and read the numbers off her credit card. If I asked who Martha was, my friends laughed and laughed, watching me for the tell. When it didn’t come, they laughed even harder and said, “Oh my God, you’re so cute!” I did not ask the things I really wanted to know: What happened when you spent a weekend with a senior? What did you eat? What happened at bedtime? Did you brush your teeth, your hair? What did you wear?
“We have to get you a boyfriend,” said New York.
D.C. had ideas. None of them were good.
“Let me talk to Russ,” said New York, of her new beau. “He’ll come up with someone.”
He did. A senior on the wrestling team who was game to “hang out” with me. This boy, Shep, was cute—blue-eyed, with a too-thin top lip that gave him a rabbit smile, but it was sweet, and he was growing into it. With a bit of insouciance, it would have made for a nice come-hither curl. Analogies were prominent in our classwork, this is to this as that is to that, of angles or adjectives, and I understood that Shep was to Russ as I was to New York. There was no romance to this but the geometry of high school popularity. I thought it was a fine idea.
Shep had a caveat.
Her name was Shyla, and she was a fourth former too. She looked, to my eyes, like a pinup model: glamour-puss lips, blinky blue eyes so large and bright you thought they might close automatically when you laid her down. She was oddly independent, not falling in with the sort of crowd her looks would suggest. I had yet to work out the catch here, the reason why she wasn’t considered a bombshell. Was she poor? Was she too smart? Was she crazy? She did wear this bulky wool coat, with wooden-toggle closures and a fur-lined hood, when the done thing was a light outdoorsy sweater or (arms crossed, refusing the shiver) nothing but short sleeves. Did someone know her from before, such that she trailed a horrible hometown tale?
I liked Shyla. She smiled and said hello, and lots of people didn’t.
So, my New York friend told me, Shep was going to choose one of us. We were each to write a note explaining why we wanted to be his girlfriend and place these notes by lunchtime in his student mailbox at the post office at the center of campus. He would come to the library that night and tell us who had won his favor.
Odd, that we, the girls, were the suitors, and the older boy the prize. Even I sensed that something was off. But what did I know? My friend was smiling her perfect, delightful, seed-corn smile, and rubbing her hands together as if to warm them before setting them on chilly me. “Let’s do this,” she said. “He will choose you.”
I wrote:
Dear Shep,
I hope to see you tonight at the library.
Lacy
I folded the notebook paper and addressed it to him. He had a famous name, and I thought it might appeal to him that I was an ordinary person, not afraid to use normal words and say simple things. Maybe he’d think I was unimpressed, which would make me impressive. Besides, I didn’t know what else I might have said. I hoped my brevity conveyed sophistication.
After dinner I went to the library and waited. Other students filed in one at a time—the shy or exceptionally studious. The more gregarious among us were involved in activities or clubs, practicing debate and rehearsing shows, or visiting each other’s dorms. According to the practice of “intervisitation,” a girl could visit a boy’s room and vice versa, but three rules applied: door open, lights on, three feet on the floor.
I remember how my mother laughed when she first heard this rule, at orientation that fall. The laugh escaped her throat and floated free, and other mothers turned to look. I didn’t understand their curiosity because I didn’t understand the rule. Nowhere in my imagination was the implied danger—namely, kids on the dorm-room bed. Instead, hearing “three feet on the floor,” I dreamed up a student standing one-legged, like a flamingo. Would it be the boy or the girl? I was gulping down information in those first days, and with particular urgency in the hours before my parents kissed me goodbye and drove back down to Boston for their flight home. Impressions burrowed deep. When I remember “intervis,” my mind still conjures teenagers balancing in the raw-bulbed light of a dormitory single.
At the library, aged fourteen, waiting for Shep, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing, so I wandered the poorly lit reading room. A set of black books on a low shelf were stamped with red swastikas. I reached for one and let it open in my hand. Tiny print described a scene from a Nazi killing field that remains to this day the most horrifying thing I have ever read. I have never again seen a description of that same grotesque act forced upon the condemned. I grew dizzy and the print swam. Could this be real? Could any of this be real? I closed the book on my thumb and looked
