Maud, a city girl to the marrow, had hardly noticed the ridge at first. She knew it was dangerous to jog up there. But Shell, who was a mountain girl—“a mountain grill,” she liked to say — would declare obeisance each time she went out by way of Cross Street.
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help,” she would say. Of course it was a joke, one of Shell’s jokes on herself, on her people and their God. Once during their freshman orientation nature walk, Shell had halted two steps from the sunning spot of an eastern banded timber rattler, which woke and raised itself, slithered sidewise and stood its ground. Its tail disappeared in a blur of speed and reptile rhythms, clackety-rap. Its eyes were all business.
Maud, a few feet behind her new friend, saw the thing, called out, “Oh, shit! Oh, Shell!” Maud thought Shelby Magoffin was like a seashell, pink and fragile. Sometimes Maud teased her with the name. “Seashell, watch it!”
The male upperclassman leading the walk had lifted Shell up by the elbows and swung her out of striking range. “Asshole,” Shell had muttered ungratefully.
“Ever see a big old rattler before, Shell?” the earthy-crunchy youth had asked.
“Only in church,” Shell had told him.
The other freshmen had taken it in. They had also registered Maud’s New Yorky swearing. And Shell’s cool answer — they knew it was a cool answer whether or not they caught the reference to Pentecostal snake handling. And Shell Magoffin was forever Seashell, though the origins of the name and its significance were left unclear. Later, as the other students came to understand that she was an actor in the sorts of movies they went to see, they realized that the goofy name was part of it.
On Cross Street the panhandlers did not usually hit on Maud or her friends. In fact they rarely hit on any of the particularly attractive girls. Where raillery might be expected, there was none; no teasing between the lost boys and the college girls. There was too much privilege and anger — a terrifying atavistic cloud enfolding shame and resentment, even humiliation and murder. Bad things had happened. Everyone knew better.
That morning Maud and Shell found themselves headed the same way. At Stoddard Street they followed the Common past Hale Gate, joined now by kids on their way to the day’s first class.
“You don’t have a class,” Shell said to her friend. “How come you’re up so early?”
“Date for coffee.”
“With him?” Without waiting for an answer, Shell told Maud, “I have rehearsals until after nine. I could sleep away tonight.” Shell looked at her with wry sympathy.
“Thanks, friend. He’s not free tonight.”
“I was gonna say,” Shell said, “but I didn’t.”
Snow began to fall, although it seemed too cold for snow. “Anyway, this is just an appointment,” Maud said.
They kept their heads down, making for Bay’s, the nearest coffee place to campus.
“Bringing him coffee?”
“Yeah, right,” Maud said. “Cold coffee date.”
“Older guys are so much better,” Shell teased. “They, like, know so much more.”
Shell’s celebrated career had already brought her into close contact with putative adults. Some of them were very famous and said to be very powerful, but she was not impressed.
Bay’s coffee shop operated on the ground floor of a four-story converted office building that had become a halfway house for deinstitutionalized mental patients. The halfway-house people had made a headquarters of the place and gathered there from daybreak until seven in the evening. Bay’s kept chairs outside for them, which they occupied in every weather. All day they predominated; their behavior and queer psychic emanations gave the coffee shop an unsettling spin. A stranger sitting down for an espresso would presently notice another customer’s peculiar intensity, an overloud conversation punctuated by excessive laughter or the imminent lunacy of a silence. An inappropriate emotional tone prevailed. Some people liked it — art students and Shell Magoffin. It gave Maud the creeps, but she wanted some coffee. She followed Shell across the brick plaza.
The mentally ill customers were known as Housies or Outmates. At times, terrace chairs would become vacant — say, when the Outmates had made up a posse to go shopping at the nearest Safeway, four scary inner-city blocks away. Shopping alone or in twos, they might be confronted or even physically abused by anyone from the younger of the homeless to the police. In the vertical society of that city, the Outmates’ standing was low. They were unpopular and somewhat defenseless. No one believed the things they said, so their complaints were dismissible. Streets on which the coeds walked confidently held dangers for the halfway-housed. It seemed that only the tough female mounted troopers were nice to them, knowing their names and letting them pet their mounts, like children. The mounted policewomen also treated the halfway-house residents’ leader, Herbert, with a reserved, humorous respect. Herbert had become the residents’ leader by virtue of his very loud voice and broad general knowledge.
As the girls turned into Bay’s, Herbert was at his usual table, actively facing down the coming storm. Herbert was the one male habitué who by his assumed right and custom always talked to the girls. “Hey, Shell!” he said at the top of his voice. “Seashell!”
Shell gave him a smile and a pat on the shoulder. Maud’s polite smile might have concealed her disgust from most people but did not fool Herbert.
At the coffee counter Maud and Shell asked for the specials of the day to go. Maud bought two largos, served by a beautiful young man from Spain, a graduate music student with bleached hair and a row of three earrings. Then the two girls made their way through the shivering halfway-house crowd to the street. Herbert was reading aloud from the local paper, quoting a story on the mayor’s legal troubles. There was no one around to listen; the wind increased.
Shell and Maud went different ways. Herbert looked up from his paper to oversee them.
“Hey, have fun, girls!” Herbert called after them. “Bless this world and all who sail in her.” He put a hand in his lap and watched them disappear into the first heavy flakes of the storm.
At the gate of Peabody Quad, Maud stopped and set the two coffees down on the cold slate sidewalk. It was time for her to fish out her ID card, which would open the electric lock on the college gate. Once through the gate, it required the opening of three more locks to reach the room where she was headed.
Ever since the first Indian hatchet lodged its blade in the college’s single stout oak door during the Seven Years’ War, doors and access within had been significant there. For years the place rested behind no more bolts than the resort of young gentry required in any rough-handed New England mill town. Then the sixties struck, with coeducation and power to the people — all sorts of people — and there had even been a solitary unisex bathroom, which languished amid the embarrassment hardly a year after its building, and there was the Throwing Open of the Gates, the Unbolting of the Great Doors, the Opening to the Community. What ensued, drug-wise, crime-wise and in terms of bitterness between the college and the town, was brief but ugly. The opening forth was followed by a locking up, down and sideways that had locksmiths laboring day and night, and now there were three or four doors for everything — even clerks’ offices were secured, and elderly dons retired because they spent half their working days trying to distinguish in a dour economy of light which of the cards or keys on their chains opened their outermost office door, which the second, which the third and so on. The coffee Maud had brought cooled on the cold stone while she knelt fiddling and jingling at Professor Brookman’s door.