Family Secrets (45 page)

Her mother kept saying, “I let you go to college,” as if going away to college were something really brave and adventurous and grown up. Actually, life in the dorm was very regimented. Freshmen could only stay out until one o’clock in the morning two nights a week. You usually saved those for weekends. Other nights you had to be back in the dorm at ten o’clock. On Sunday night you got to stay out until eleven. You had to sign out and in in a book which was placed near the door. You also had to say where you were going. There was to be no cheating. If you were one minute late you were called up to a kangaroo court and made to tell your excuse, which short of death or an automobile accident resulting in a rush to the hospital was not accepted, and you were put on Social Pro, which meant that you were banished upstairs every night after dinner for a specified time (a week or two or three) with no phone calls allowed.

There was one telephone on each floor, with several push buttons. Each girl had a buzzer in her room and a light above the door. When the buzzer rang and the light flashed you rushed to a house phone on the wall in the hall where the switchboard girl told you what line your phone call was on. Then you ran to the phone on your floor, which was usually occupied, and then you ran from one floor to another until you found a phone which was not occupied, hoping meanwhile that the mysterious caller would not hang up. When you arrived finally at an available phone, out of breath and frantic, it was a great disappointment to find it was only your parents. The phones, except for one on the first floor in a phone booth, were situated in the floor laundry rooms, so while you were trying to have a private conversation with the boy you had a crush on at the moment, several girls were standing there ironing and listening.

The phone system was called “Bells.” One girl had to stay on the switchboard (which was located in the front hall of the dorm near the door) for two hours, and they took turns. If you were a freshman you had to work in the kitchen and wait on table. Only upperclassmen had the privilege of being on Bells. Besides answering the phones and announcing the calls, the girl on Bells also announced Callers. Any pimply eighteen-year-old roaming around looking for a blind date qualified as a Caller. No men were allowed above the first floor. You had to receive Callers in the living room. Of course, you could also go outside with him, provided you came back before your curfew. If someone telephoned or came by to see you the girl on Bells left a note in your mailbox (a wall of cubbyholes on the first floor) that said “Mr. X called.” Unless, of course, Mr. X was kind enough to leave his name. Many girls cried and had hysterical fits when they returned from the coffee shop on the corner to discover that the boy they had been waiting weeks to hear from had finally phoned when they were out. Because, of course, you could not call him back; that was unthinkably aggressive. You had to wait patiently for him to call again when he felt like it. Many girls stayed glued to their rooms because of this social rule, afraid to miss the phone call from the love of their lives. But no matter how much you loved him, you could not call him back. A girl didn’t do that.

If a boy wanted to take you out on Saturday night it was proper to phone on the Monday before. You could usually tell what type he was right away. A jerk called on the Monday before so he could trap you before you made another date, also because he was a stickler for convention. The boys you liked the best, the ungallant, charming, unpredictable ones, usually called near the end of the week (unless they had tickets to a football game) or even called on Friday for Saturday, which was humiliating. Sometimes they just showed up to see if you were there. You went right out with them if you liked them, insulted or not. It was difficult to keep your social life the way you wanted it because the drips and jerks always asked you to the big football games two or three weeks in advance, and you would accept out of fear of having no date at all, and then the boy you liked would call later, when you had to turn him down because a nice girl didn’t break dates, even with a boy she hated. Paris had been forced to turn Spencer down for four big football games because she was already stuck with boys her mother would have approved of but whom she found boring and unsexy.

There was no honesty and no communication between the girls and the boys. Everything was a game. The girls pretended to be interested in what the boys liked, talked about what the boys liked, and never dared ask them why they hadn’t called for such a long time, when they would call again, or if there was any hope for the relationship. You simply kept your fingers crossed. What you were wanting was a love affair with a stranger, so naturally the entire experience was shrouded in mystery. If the boys had been friends or even real people, it would have been easy to understand, predict, and make work. The girls were no more real to them than they were to the girls. A girl was fun or not fun, easy to make out with or not easy, or impossible, but never a human being.

The girls’ dorms were chaperoned by a house mother, with whom no one ever had a conversation. Her whole function was to see that the couples necking on the porch at curfew stopped and separated. Perhaps the college had intended she have another function—guidance, kindness, friendship—but none of the girls was aware of it and she never displayed any indication that she was capable of it. One night in winter Paris, who had a bad cold, began to have an asthma attack. She often had asthma attacks with colds, and knew she needed a vaporizer of some kind, so she went downstairs to the kitchen to find a pot to boil water in to make steam, but the kitchen was always locked after meals so none of the girls would steal food. She then found the house mother, who was dressed in her customary Army surplus camouflage robe and annoyed expression. By this time Paris was wheezing very badly and her lips and fingernails were turning blue.

“May I please have a pot? I need to make steam for my asthma.”

“A pot?” the house mother said. “If you knew you had asthma you should have brought a pot from home.” And she went away, never to return.

So Paris waited for morning when they would let her into the Health Center, fighting for breath, and finally passed out from lack of air.

She never did bring a pot to college for her asthma, because the house mother wouldn’t have let her use the kitchen stove in any case. The function of the house mother was to keep the school rules and protect the girls’ virginity, not keep them alive.

“It’s nice you have a house mother,” Paris’ mother said. “You have someone to go to if you have a problem.”

“Sure,” Paris said. She didn’t tell her mother about the incident; she didn’t want her parents yanking her out of school.

It was cold that winter, freezing cold, and snow was piled up waist high in the streets. No one cleaned the streets in Cambridge; they just cleared a little footpath and left the rest of the snow until spring, when it would melt naturally. It was so cold that even the peeping toms and men who exposed themselves in the Common disappeared. Paris had never seen a man expose himself, even one of her dates. The boys she went out with were all shy. She was afraid of the pushy ones. She knew for a fact that some of the older girls, and even a few in her class, weren’t virgins any more, because they talked about it openly among themselves, but most of the girls pretended they were. Paris’ best friend, Rima Gold, adamantly insisted that every girl in the dorm was a virgin, and there was nothing Paris could say to convince her otherwise.

Rima and Paris had everything in common and also were complete opposites, which was why they got along so well. Both of them were only sixteen. Both of them were Jewish. Rima came from the Bronx, and although Paris had been living in New York for four years she considered that she really came from Brooklyn. Both of them had gone to progressive private schools. Neither of them had had a date before coming to Radcliffe, but both of them were now boy crazy. They both liked the same boys, but luckily not at the same time. At the start of their friendship they made a pact that neither of them would ever steal the other’s boyfriend, and neither of them would go out with a boy the other was dating (no matter how he pestered her) until the one who had him first had declared she was through with him. For some reason both Rima and Paris were sought out by the prep school-Social Register boys, the ones with the profiles like Greek gods and lockjaw accents, who wore old raccoon coats and drove around in funny cars, the boys none of the other Jewish girls would even talk to because they were so strange, so foreign, definitely not husband material; not that they had a chance. Rima spent a lot of time knitting six-foot long scarves for her latest crushes. Perhaps the boys sought them out for the same reason Paris and Rima sought them out; they were exotic and different, safe, not serious, adventurous and immature, laughed easily, liked silly things, and didn’t want to get married right away. Most of the boys, having gone to all-boys schools deep in the country, had hardly been out with any girls before coming to Harvard, so they were virgins and naïve too. They liked to kiss. So did Paris and Rima. Rima had already gotten a rather bad reputation for being wild because she let boys kiss her on the first date. She was very romantic, and fancied herself Madame Bovary or Lady Hamilton, ready to die for love. But despite the fact that Paris and Rima went out almost every night, both of them got straight As.

Rima studied hard. She was an English major too, a good, shy, gentle girl, very high strung, too frail, with dark hair and pale skin and a closet full of expensive clothes. She loved to read poetry, and also wrote poetry, but hid it. She wanted to work in publishing when she graduated.

“Do you know what the dean told me?” she said to Paris. “She asked me what I wanted to major in and I told her English because I wanted to be an editor someday, and she said: ‘We don’t train girls for
jobs
here. This isn’t a
trade school
. Radcliffe girls are expected to marry Harvard men and be better wives and mothers.’”

“I’m lucky I told her I wanted to be a writer. Everybody thinks you can be a writer while you’re home taking care of your twelve kids.”

“I’ll never forget what she said,” Rima said angrily. “Never.”

“What do you care? You’ll never even see her again.”

Paris also wrote poetry, but she sent it to the literary magazine, where it was promptly rejected. She also drew caricatures of all the girls in the dorm. She had decided not to send any stories to national magazines because they would probably be rejected and that would depress her. Part of her life plan was to enjoy college as much as possible and worry about her profession when she was prepared for it. One day, in desperation at having her stories as well as her poems rejected by the college magazine, she wrote the worst story she could, purposely obscure because it had no meaning, and it was promptly accepted. When it ran in the college literary magazine many girls came up to her to congratulate her and tell her how meaningful the symbolism had been to them.

“I have now learned that the last thing I ever want is to be judged by a jury of my peers,” Paris told Rima. “They’re all idiots.”

Although things affected her deeply, Paris passed them off as a joke. The last thing she wanted was for anyone to know she was hurt. Rima, on the other hand, shook with emotions, wept hysterically over a missed phone call from a current love, and was secretly strong as steel. Both of them knew they were intelligent, but only Rima dared admit, even insist, that they were superior.

“It’s not that those boys are dumb,” she would say to Paris, “it’s just that they’re not as smart as we are, so they seem dumb to us.”

“Don’t ever say that to anybody,” Paris said. She knew girls were supposed to act dumb if they weren’t. It was death to be intelligent or intellectual. No one attractive would ever like her if she showed her mind. She would be stuck with a greasy grind, spending their Saturday nights studying together instead of in Cronins drinking beer and seeing everyone and being seen.

Rima never went out with a boy she didn’t like, after one disastrous date where the boy tried to run her over with his car after she refused to kiss him. Paris, on the other hand, went out with every boy who asked her, although not more than once if he was terrible. Her mother had told her over and over to “give them a chance,” so she did, although it made her feel used, like a thing instead of a person. A boy never seemed to care if you didn’t like him, if you found him physically repulsive; all he cared about was whether or not he found you attractive to him. But she “gave them a chance.” She even accepted a blind date from Dottie, who took her to the famous necking palace in the Boston suburbs. It was a huge room, like a coliseum, with a tiny dance floor in the center and rows and rows of loveseats set on tiers rising up toward the ceiling. The lights were very dim and blue, to further romance and anonymity. The couples sat there, about five hundred people in all, and necked and petted in the dim light, all together, pretending to be alone, mauling and slurping and knowing they were safe because no one would go all the way in public. Drinks were served, and a few people even danced, which is to say rubbed up against each other and swayed in a romantic death grip. Paris did not like her date, and as soon as she had clocked enough time to be polite, while pushing him away and chattering, she made him take her home. It was so hard to get away from that “giving them a chance” indoctrination that she almost had to give herself psychosomatic cramps in order to lie and say she felt too sick to stay any longer.

Dottie couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t liked the boy; after all, he had a car, and he had taken her to an expensive place. But she had a few more in reserve, if Paris was interested. Rejects …

Perhaps, Paris sometimes thought, she was too young to go to college, too inexperienced, too unsophisticated, but there had been no alternative. She’d had to get away from home. It wasn’t her fault she’d started school young and then had been skipped. She wouldn’t have become more sophisticated at home, that was for sure. There were other sixteen-year-olds in the freshman class, and they seemed more grown up than she was. Their lives had been different. And there were girls who were older who were babies compared to her. Their lives had been different too. There shouldn’t be rules for what you should want in life at a particular moment—it was different for everybody. But everyone seemed scared to death not to conform to a particular ideal. College was supposed to open up the world and make it more accessible, not present you with a form you had to squeeze yourself into. It wasn’t the school’s fault, it was the girls’ fault, their own fault. They could have taken their destiny in their own hands, but of course it never occurred to any of them to do so.