One night I heard noise in the room next to mine. Everyone else was at dinner. I went out into the hall. A door was slightly ajar.
"Hello?" I said.
It was the most beautiful girl on the floor. The one my mother had pointed out on move-in day. "Just be glad that gorgeous blonde isn't your roommate. The line of boys would be out the door."
"Hello."
I went in. She had just gotten a whole footlocker of food sent from home. It was open against the wall. After a week of white food, it was an oasis. M &M's and cookies and crackers and Starbursts and fruit leather. Products I had never even heard of or wasn't allowed to have.
But she wasn't eating. She was braiding her hair. A French braid. I expressed my admiration and told her I'd never been able to do more than simple braids.
"I'll do it for you if you want."
I sat on her bed and she stood behind me and began to take the small pinches of hair and work a skull-numbingly tight French braid down the back of my head.
She finished the braid and I thanked her and looked in the mirror. We both sat and then laid down on the two twin beds in the room. We were quiet, staring at the ceiling.
"Can I tell you something?" I asked.
"Sure."
"I hate it here."
"Oh, my God!" she said, sitting up, flushed with permission. "I hate it here too!"
We ate our way through her trunk of food. I have a memory of actually sitting in the trunk with the food but this can't be right, can it?
Mary Alice's roommate was what we called experienced. She was from Brooklyn. Her name was Debbie and her nickname was Double D. She smoked and thought little of us. She had a from-home boyfriend who was older. And I mean older. Early forties, but with the agelessness of Joey Ramone. He was a DJ somewhere and had a deep smoker's voice. When he visited, they went to hotels and Debbie returned to the dorm with her cheeks flushed and clearly, again, disgusted by us. Mary Alice had long toes and would feed me crackers by digging them into the box. We dressed up in stupid outfits and, with coupons from cocoa mix, sent away for a real Swiss Miss cardboard chalet.
Debbie began two-timing her boyfriend with a male cheerleader from school. Her new boyfriend's name was Harry Weiner and of course Mary Alice and I had endless fun with that. Once, on a dare, I hid inside the Swiss Miss chalet while Debbie and Harry went at it on the bed. At a certain point, dare or no, I felt too uncomfortable and crawled, on my hands and knees, with the cardboard chalet moving with me like some sort of cartoon spy's camouflage, over to the door to make my escape.
Debbie was incensed. She put in for a room transfer. Mary Alice never stopped thanking me.
Within a few weeks of the start of freshman year, a group of girls gathered in the hall outside our rooms. We sat on the floor, with our backs against the walls, our legs outstretched or Indian-style. The former homecoming queens or future flirts tucked their legs to one side, while the jocks on scholarship, like my friend Linda, didn't think twice about how they sat or looked while surrounded by their peers. Slowly the stories came out-who was and wasn't a virgin.
Some were obvious. Like Sara, who sold hash out of her black-lit room, where she had a stereo system that cost more than most of our fathers' cars, on which she played the classic stoner tracks of Traffic and Led Zep. "Some guy's in there," her assigned roommate would say, and we would throw this girl a sleeping bag and tell her not to snore.
Then there was Chippie. I had never heard the word before. Didn't know it meant whore. Thought it actually was her name, and innocently said, "Hi, Chippie, how are you?" on the way to the showers one morning. She burst into tears and never talked to me again.
There was also a girl who was a sophomore and lived at the end of the hall. She dated a townie and modeled for Joel Belfast, a semi-famous painter in the art department. The townie liked to chain her up to her bunk bed and we would see her leather and ultrasuede bras and panties as she hurried to and from the lavatory in the morning. The townie rode a motorcycle and had an atrophied left leg. Once, on the night the campus security arrived because they were making so much noise, I saw the scar that rose up out of the top of his boot and snaked up past his hip and around the back of his body. She was stoned and screaming on the bed, where she remained chained up. Soon after, she moved into off-campus housing somewhere.
These girls and Debbie were the only four on a hall of fifty that I knew for sure weren't virgins. The rest had to be, I assumed, because I was.
But even Nancy told a story. She had lost it in a Datsun to her high school boyfriend. Tree in a Toyota. Diane in the basement of a boyfriend's house. Her boyfriend's parents had knocked on the window during the act. The other stories I've forgotten, and remember only that the make of the car became a nickname for various girls. Few were the glorious cases-a boyfriend who had bought a ring, chosen a special night, and brought flowers, or had his older brother's downtown apartment for the day. When these girls spoke we didn't believe them anyway. It was better to say Datsun or Toyota or Ford; it was dues for a peer group, a way to belong.
When that evening of revelation was through, Mary Alice and I, among those outside their rooms, were the only two virgins on the hall.
These fumbled sexual exploits in the backs of cars or in the basements of someone's parents' house seem wonderful to me. Nancy was ashamed of having lost "it," as we all called virginity, in a Datsun, but it was, after all, a normal part of growing up.
In letters sent me over the breaks that year Tree and Nancy were spending every night with their high school boyfriends. For Tree there was talk of a ring being bought. These girls began to take over my landscape.
I also got letters from the boys I'd worked with at my summer job after high school, particularly an older guy named Gene. I begged Gene to send me a photo. Of course, I pretended to the other girls he was more than just a friend, and I wanted evidence to show around.
The photo he sent was clearly a few years old. He was thinner and had more hair but there was the handle-bar mustache that shouted out man. When I finally got the photo late in the first semester I showed it around. Mary Alice cut to the core. "Is it the seventies still? I feel a disco ball dropping down." Nancy pretended to be impressed but she and Tree were too busy keeping connected with their real boyfriends-boys they'd gone to high school with, whom they had promised to marry someday.
For her part, Mary Alice was obsessed with, in order: Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger. On the subject of Bruce-for he was our familiar-she was apoplectic. For her birthday I got a T-shirt made. MRS. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN it said, in puffy, too-big iron-on letters. She slept in it every night.
Honestly, when I look back, I can say I was in love with Mary Alice for most of my freshman year. I loved watching her get away with things and being a troop member in her carefully planned out escapades. Stealing a sheet cake from the dining hall became an operation worthy of James Bond. It involved discovering the tunnel between two dorms that led to the odd door that was always locked. There were keys that needed to be stolen and people who needed to be distracted and finally, late at night, pink cake that needed to be disguised and hustled up to our rooms.
But my dorm girlfriends were also fond of the bars on nearby Marshall Street and by spring they went regularly to fraternity keg parties. I hated fraternity parties. "We're just meat!" I yelled above the music to Tree, who was ahead of me in the line for the keg. "So what?" she shouted back. "It's fun!" Tree became a little sister. Mary Alice was always popular no matter how she felt. No fraternity house would turn away a natural blonde and her attendant friends.