Beware of Love in Technicolor (2 page)

             
“Oh my God!” she cried in a high-pitched drawl. “You’re here! I was wonderin’ when you’d be arrivin’!”

             
I am a New Englander, born and bred, accustomed to the reserved nature of people descended from Puritans and Pilgrims. I had never encountered someone as open as Molly Maloney. She at once repelled and endeared herself to me.

             
Behind the tiny Texan were two boys, equally as dirty as my new roommate, but far less repellant. One was an ordinary, dark-haired Irish kid, whose name I forget now; I only saw him a handful of times after that first day. The other boy was named Ben, and made me blush just by making eye contact when he said hello.

             
Ben was tall, tanned, and fit, with eyes the color of the Caribbean ocean. His brown hair hung in loose waves to about jaw level, and he smiled wide, easy smiles that could melt butter. Though it took me another year or so to name what made him so intriguing, Ben oozed sex appeal. He had the tanned, toned body of a life of privilege. Summers spent at the beach, ski vacations in the winter.

             
At age eighteen, I had yet to experience boys in any way other than theoretical. I had snubbed high school boys for the non-threatening fantasies of movie stars and musicians, and wrapped myself in a cocoon of aloofness to walk the halls of high school. Now here was a very real boy in front of me, and all I could think to say was, “Hi.”

             
The two were helping Molly carry a couple of large boxes into the room. I stood by, watching silently as the three unpacked Molly’s Macintosh. In those days, a roommate with a computer was a huge score. It meant not having to sweat it out at the computer cluster in the basement of the Student Union Building, affectionately known as The SUB by those on campus. She even had a printer.

             
Molly chatted relentlessly the entire time.

             
“And so, I just closed my eyes, and just prayed those ropes were tight, and then I was hangin’, just hanging out there, with these gigantic mountains all around me. I’ve never been so scared in all my life!”

             
She laughed a loud laugh that sounded like a hiccup, tossed her saddle to the floor from her bed, and flopped down.

             
“And the hike up Mount Washington was just something else,” she sighed, proudly showing me the oozing scab on her left knee. “I am so glad I came up a week early, even though it was hard to leave home. Freshman Camp was definitely worth it,” she continued to me on one breath.

             
I nodded and smiled and wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. First puke, and now camping? Could it get any worse?

             
“And just wait til you meet the rest of the gang! Right guys? Man, they’re all just crazy!”

             
When the computer was unpacked and arranged on her desk, Molly asserted that she could, indeed, hook it up herself. Ben and the other one stood to leave. The dark-haired kid ducked his head and made a beeline for the door. Ben walked to my dresser, looked at the cutout of James Dean, then back to me.

             
“Nice meeting you,” he said with a smile. I felt my face flare red, but I managed a smile in return.

             
“Good luck with everything,” he continued, shooting a glance at my new roommate, who was busy pawing through her giant red leather duffle bag. Her head was hardly visible. I said “Bye,” to the boys, and pretended to busy myself with organizing my desk drawers. They almost made it out the door, free and clear. Almost.

             
“What are y’all doing for dinner?” Molly called after the boys just as Ben stepped out into the hallway. The two of them froze. And that is when I noticed it. They didn’t like her. They felt bad for her, but they didn’t like her. I wonder what my story would be had they kept walking?

***

              As I have already mentioned, I grew up in a small town in the great Granite State. But before anyone goes jumping to fantasies of white steeple churches and jagged mountain notches, I’ll have you know Preston, NH is only about 35 miles north of Boston.

             
At age eighteen, I was far more familiar with the Prudential building than the Old Man of the Mountain. I preferred hiking Harvard Square to the Appalachian Trail. A day spent in the great outdoors involved a paperback around my best friend’s swimming pool.

             
I had the kind of charmed childhood that produces accountants and lawyers. Neighborhood block parties, gymnastics, little league softball, and family vacations to Orlando and Williamsburg, Virginia. Slumber parties, Girl Scout cookies, and church every Sunday. I was the girl who, in the middle of all that Americana bliss, read Bukowski and Kerouac, and dressed in head to toe black.

             
My mother loves movies, especially the old black and whites from the days before the summer blockbuster. She named both my brother and me after movie stars whom kids of our generation had never heard. My brother, Cooper, was named for Gary Cooper. She named me for her favorite actress, Greer Garson.

             
On a cold day in January, at recess in the fourth grade, Danny Keller was feeling like bullying someone.

             
“Here comes Greer the Queer!” he called out, cackling in that way only grade school bullies know how.

             
Luckily, I had a dad who encouraged my inner tomboy. I balled up my little fist and knocked Danny Keller flat on his ass. Gave him a bloody nose, and made him cry. To this day, I’m not sure how my brother kept the kids from calling him “Pooper.”

             
Somewhere in the middle of my sophomore year of high school, I decided to drop the punk rock thing. My best friend, Penny, and I started playing tennis. We shopped at Gap. I even bought a pair of penny loafers. I used dimes in place of pennies. I kept reading Bukowski and Kerouac.

             
I always envisioned college like the brochure claimed. Rolling green lawns, brick academic buildings with clock towers, students playing Frisbee or studying under a tree. I envisioned long, deep conversations about the world, midnight coffee runs, and long stretches at the library with my nose in some classic or another.

             
I chose the school for its English department and the assurance of a free ride. Not from a scholarship or anything promising like that, but from my parents. If I chose the state school, I would be student loan-free in four years. They even promised a car after two years in good standing.

Besides, the brochure featured a nice photo of students playing Frisbee in the shade of the clock tower on the rolling green lawn

.

.

***

Maybe I should have
skipped dinner that first night at school. I could have introduced myself to some of the other girls in The Pit, ordered a pizza, and gone over my class schedule. But I just had to see Ben again.

The dining hall in our section of campus was like something out of an Ayn Rand novel: big, utilitarian, and impersonal. It was representative of a rush to accommodate more students in the seventies, built into a hill, with long ramps winding around each side of the building. Inside, you chose from the lesser of two lines, and wound yourself through a maze of ropes. You handed your student ID to a glorified lunch lady, who sat higher than the students in a cube of Plexiglass, for authorization to dine upon such de
licacies as “chickwiches” and “spicy spinach tofu triangles.”

             
On mozzarella stick night the lines would wind their way outside the building onto the street outside, and the dining hall employees were instructed to serve only two sticks at a time. People would be sitting at their tables with six, seven, even eight or more plates towering and clattering on the tray in front of them. Just one of those funny things I remember.

             
On that first night, though, they served up cookout food: hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad. It felt like summer camp. I remember feeling very annoyed by the efforts of the university to make us feel like kids at camp. We were at college, for Christ’s sake. There were posters all over the dining hall announcing a bonfire to be held that night on the football field to welcome us. It was called the “Freshman Jamboree.”

             
That gives an idea how good the football team was.

             
Skipping the questionable meat products, I loaded my plate full of near-wilted salad, and a bowl of Cap’n Crunch to be safe, and found a table where Molly’s Extreme Friends were sitting. They were a loud, rugged looking group of fleece vests and Birkenstocks.

             
Hippies. I was starting off my college social career at the hippie table. Good God.

             
Ben was there. Plus the dark-haired kid, and three girls. Molly squealed something unintelligible and squeezed herself in next to a blonde girl named Alex.

             
Remember Musical Chairs? Remember that feeling of being the kid without the seat, standing there adrift when the music stopped, while the other players squirmed gleefully in their hard-won chairs?

             
Ben looked up from his plate of potato salad, and seeing me standing there, pushed over to his right.

             
“Thanks,” I said, and sat down, knee to knee, with him.

             
Across the table, I noticed the girl in the green sweatshirt with the biggish sort of nose elbow the girl named Alex in the ribs. But before I could introduce myself, the squawking began.

             
“This is my roomie, Greer!” Molly gushed to the girls. They stared at her as if she had just farted.

             
“This here’s Alex,” she said to me without missing a beat. “And Bonnie, and Sarah. They’re all best buds from Connecticut.”

             
Molly talked like one of those voices out of
Seventeen
magazine. She used words like “buds,” and “fave,” and “hunky.” Except that coming out of her, the words acquired the surreal twang of an East Texas accent.

             
I smiled meekly at the three friends and went about silently eating my salad. They were New England girls, like me, and we all understood how to shut one another out. The fact that the weird Molly Maloney brought me to the table was reason enough for them to cast me off.

             
But when Ben turned to me and started a conversation, I could see all three tense up and hone in on what we were saying.

             
“So, Greer,” he began, his blue eyes relaxed and friendly, “that’s an interesting name. Does it mean anything?”

             
“It means vigilant,” I told him, eyeing the Pissy Posse. “My mother named me after the actress, Greer Garson.”

             
“Would I know anything with her in it?”

             
“
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
,” I answered.

             
He stared at me blankly, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to break the moment, though I had no idea what to do with it.

             
Alex knew exactly what to do with our moment.

             
“Nobody watches those lame old movies anymore,” she laughed, throwing her long, albeit stringy, blonde hair over her shoulder. Sort of the female equivalent of peeing on something. “Remember when we saw
Ghost
last week at that little theater up in that backwoods mountain town?”

             
And just like that, the conversation turned and I was back out on the fringes.

             
As I have already mentioned, boys were a foreign land to me at that juncture of my young life. I was also relatively new to the world of being cute, as I had only dropped my baby fat that summer. I wasn’t tall, but I was fit from hours spent on the tennis court. My hair has always been so dark it appears black, with thick waves. My standout feature, though, are definitely my green eyes. Penny used to call me Betty, because she thought I looked like Betty Boop.

             
Being fashionable was always second nature to me. I have loved clothes ever since I can remember. I was the first to wear knickers and argyle socks in fourth grade, the first to pull on a pair of leg warmers over my Jordache jeans in the fifth grade, and tied with the first pair of Candie’s high top sneakers in the sixth.

             
Once Penny and I met up in the sixth grade, on the day we each wore our new Candies, we founded a solid friendship on a shared love for Esprit clothes and British pop music. For seven years we were the pinnacles of fashion in our little corner of the world, even during our Black Period. We were also a bit chubby and weird, so it never really earned us any popularity points. We were generally accepted by everyone in our class, and generally ignored as well.