Marshall Ferguson wanted to talk to an academic advisor at UCSB about as much as he’d wanted to have his wisdom teeth pulled. The dentist had knocked him out beforehand. He’d got to eat ice cream and milk shakes for a couple of days afterwards, and the Lorcets the quack prescribed for pain weren’t the least enjoyable drugs he’d ever swallowed.
No anesthetic here. If he wasn’t careful now, he not only wouldn’t get the shift in majors he wanted, but he might end up with a bachelor’s degree at the end of next year. Back in the old days, people said, you could flit from major to major like a butterfly in a botanical garden.
Times had changed. They wanted you out the door, diploma clutched in your sweaty fist, ready to turn into cannon fodder for the big, wide world. Marshall, on the other hand, liked living in Santa Barbara. He liked the weed and the booze and the girls. He liked the very idea of a town where they had a Couch-Burning Day. He even liked some of his classes.
Whatever the big, wide world held in store, it wouldn’t be as much fun as he was having now. He was all too sure of that. And he was also sure his old man wouldn’t keep subsidizing him once he said farewell to the university. He wasn’t allergic to work, but he vastly preferred partying. Sooner or later, it would have to end. He was also too mournfully sure of that. Later was better, though.
Rob was still partying, the lucky so-and-so. He hadn’t let an engineering degree get in his way. But Marshall had seen that playing in a band you wanted to take somewhere was also a hell of a lot of work. Besides, unlike Rob, he was hopelessly unmusical himself.
He’d thought without much hope about landing a Hollywood job with a bachelor’s in film studies. But, like history, it seemed more likely to lead to your working in retail the rest of your life. That looked like hell on earth to him.
Then again, there was no guarantee he’d ever get any kind of job at all with a film-studies degree. The way the economy bit the big one, nobody was hiring anybody these days. One more reason not to pile up enough units to make them throw you out. If you probably couldn’t get a job any which way, staying in school looked great by comparison.
It sure did to Marshall. Convincing Dad wouldn’t be so much fun, but he’d done it before. He’d be able to come through one more time.
A girl walked out of the advisor’s office. She was kind of cute: a brunette with a button nose and perky tits under a tight blouse. Marshall smiled at her. You never could tell. But she didn’t smile back. Whatever the advisor’d told her, it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
“Ms. Rosenblatt will see you now,” the secretary told him. Her nameplate said SANDE ANKENBRANDT. Her hair, by coincidence or design, was sandy, too. “Go on in.”
“Uh, thanks.” Marshall did.
Selma Rosenblatt-her first name was on a plaque on the door-was a little older than his mother. She’d let the gray in her hair show, which made her seem older yet. The way she eyed him warned that he was the eleventy-first student she’d seen today, and that she wasn’t delighted to have him here.
“Take a seat,” she said. “Give me your name and your SIN.” From her name, he’d guessed she would sound like a New Yorker. She didn’t. By the way she talked, she was a Valley girl. Only she wasn’t a girl any more, and hadn’t been for quite a while.
Sit he did, on the vinyl-covered, badly padded chair in front of her desk. Behind it, she was snuggled by a leather armchair. They let you know who was who, all right. “I’m Marshall Ferguson-two l s,” he said, and rattled off his nine-digit Student Identification Number. Some bureaucrat, his ass in a fancy chair like the advisor’s, must have come up with the acronym, never noticing what he was doing. By now, it was too entrenched in UCSB life to be replaced.
Ms. Rosenblatt wrote it down as he gave it to her, and used the number pad on her keyboard to enter it into her computer. He knew what she’d see on the monitor: his academic career, in all its occasional splendor.
One of her sharply penciled eyebrows jumped a quarter of an inch. “Well, well,” she murmured. The admiration might have been reluctant, but it was real. “We don’t see a transcript like yours every day.”
“My interests keep changing,” Marshall said. That was true, and then again it wasn’t. His interest in staying right where he was had been remarkably constant ever since his sophomore year. The proof of that was how far behind him his sophomore year lay now. But here he was, still an undergrad.
Selma Rosenblatt studied the transcript more closely. She clicked her tongue between her teeth. “You know,” she remarked, with the air of a literary critic approaching an interesting novel, “if you’d taken Introduction to Geology two years ago, they would have had to turn you loose.”
She’s on to me! Marshall thought. How many losers sitting in front of his father had felt that same stab of panic? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Marshall did his damnedest not to show it. “I wanted to,” he lied, adding, “but I couldn’t,” which was true. “That was the year the Legislature and the Governor didn’t agree on a budget till November, and everything went to, uh, the dogs.” Sarcasm from his old man-and an occasional whack on the behind-had taught him not to cuss in front of people of the female persuasion.
“Oh, yes. I remember,” Ms. Rosenblatt assured him. “I didn’t say you could have taken the course, then. I just said, if you had. Then you switched majors, of course, and your breadth requirements changed. You timed it well.”
“Huh?” Marshall aimed to play innocent as long as he could.
“You timed it well,” she repeated, with no rancor he could hear. “And what have you got in mind for today?”
Encouraged, he answered, “Well, I was thinking of changing majors again.”
“To what?” Again, only curiosity in the advisor’s voice-Marshall hoped.
“Creative writing,” he answered brightly.
“Well, let’s see how that would work. We’ll stack the requirements up against what you’ve already taken…” Ms. Rosenblatt punched a few keys. Marshall didn’t have her software, but he’d already gone through the same arcane calculations. Now he had to hope he’d done them right. She studied the monitor. A slow smile spread across her face. It didn’t seem to want to take up residence there, but there it was. “Yes, that may keep you enrolled a couple of quarters longer than sticking to film. I gather you’re not paying for your stay here?”
“Uh, no,” Marshall admitted. He was chuffed-he’d worked it out exactly the same way her program had.
“We do try to get people on their way. Some students are more diligent in their efforts to stick around than others, though,” Ms. Rosenblatt said. “And it may be better for the state’s poor, abused balance sheet to have you here paying in rather than out there collecting unemployment or welfare.” She studied Marshall. “Who knows? Maybe you will turn into a writer… and maybe the horse will learn to sing.”
“Herodotus!” Marshall exclaimed. He remembered the story, read in translation. If only he weren’t such a hopeless goof at languages.
“Very good. I was a history major once upon a time, too-and look where I ended up.” Ms. Rosenblatt hit a few more keys. “The change is recorded. Now get out of here so I can take on someone who really needs advice.”
“What do I need, then?” Marshall asked.
“You need your head examined. But then, that’s one of the reasons you come to a university. Or you’re missing something if it’s not.” Selma Rosenblatt pointed to the door. “Scoot. You’ll probably piss off your folks doing this, but then you’re probably doing it to piss them off.”
Marshall left. Another more than reasonably pretty girl was sitting there waiting for the advisor. UCSB could spoil you that way. But she also ignored his experimental smile as she went in to do whatever she was going to do.
Every once in a while, adults made you wonder if maybe they did know what they were up to after all. Marshall’s dad could pull that off sometimes. And Ms. Rosenblatt had the same kind of mojo. She saw right through him. How many college kids had traipsed into her office, to give her the knack of reading at a glance what made them tick?
She was damn good at it. Damn good, but not quite perfect. Mom wouldn’t care that he had a new major. Mom cared about Mom, and about Teo, and, now and again, about Vanessa. Mom and Vanessa were going through the same adventures at the same time, which gave them a bond they hadn’t had before. Sons? Mom remembered she had them and everything, but all they did was remind her of Dad. The way things were there,
