I moved into Haven, said good-bye to my parents, and stayed in my room. The next day, I traversed the road from Haven to Kimmel, my skin on fire. I was taking in everyone, looking for Him.
Because Kimmel was a sophomore dorm and many of the people from Marion had naturally ended up in Kimmel, I knew most of the girls and boys who lived there. They knew me too. It was as if, when they caught sight of me, they had seen a ghost. No one expected I would come back to campus. The fact that I did made me weirder still. Somehow my return licensed them to judge me-after all, by returning, hadn't I asked for this?
In the lobby of Kimmel I ran into two boys who had lived below me the year before. They stopped dead when they saw me but didn't speak. I looked down, stood in front of the elevator, and pressed the button. A few other boys came in the front door and greeted them. I didn't turn around, but when the elevator arrived I stepped in and turned to face the front. As the doors closed, I saw five boys standing there, staring at me. I could hear it without needing to stick around. "That's the girl that got raped the last day of school," one of the boys who knew me would say. What else they said, and what they wondered, I've kept myself from imagining. I was having enough trouble just walking paths and riding elevators.
But the second floor was a girls' hall, so I thought the worst was over. I was wrong. I got off the elevator and someone rushed to me, a girl I had barely known from freshman year.
"Oh, Alice," she said, her voice dripping. She took my hand without asking and held it. "You've come back."
"Yes," I said. I stood there and looked at her. I had a memory of borrowing her toothpaste once in the bathroom.
How can I describe her look? She was oozing, she was sorry for me and thrilled to be talking to me. She was holding the hand of the girl who had been raped on the last day of school freshman year.
"I didn't think you'd return," she said. I wanted my hand back.
The elevator had descended and risen again. A crowd of girls got off.
"Mary Beth," the girl standing with me said. "Mary Beth, over here."
Mary Beth, a plain, homely girl whom I didn't recognize, came over.
"This is Alice; she lived on the hall in Marion with me last year."
Mary Beth blinked.
Why didn't I move? Walk down the hall and get away? I don't know. I think I was too stunned. I was understanding a language I'd never keyed into before. "This is Alice" translated to "the girl I told you about, you know, the raped one." Mary Beth's blink told me that. If it hadn't, her next comment sure did.
"Wow," this homely girl said, "Sue's told me all about you."
Mary Alice interrupted this exchange, coming out of her room nearby and seeing me. Often, because of Mary Alice's beauty, people thought of her as a snob if she didn't go out of her way with them. But for me, in a moment like this, people's reactions to her were a plus. I was still in love with her and now my adulation included everything she was that I no longer was: fearless, faith filled, innocent.
She took me to her room, which she was sharing with Tree. All the girls of freshman year, save Nancy, were there. Tree tried with me, but we would never recover from that moment in the shower after the rape. I was uncomfortable. Then there was Diane. She was patterning herself so heavily after Mary Alice-imitating her language and trying to compete in coming up with dopey schemes-that I didn't trust her. She greeted me kindly if eagerly, and watched our mutual idol for her cues. Linda stayed by the window. I had liked Linda. She was muscular and tan and had close-cropped black curls. I liked to think of her as the jock version of me-an outsider who got along by having something that distinguished her in the group. She was a top-rung athlete; I was a weirdo, just funny enough to fit in.
Perhaps it was a kind of guilt at the memory of passing out that accounted for Linda's inability to meet my gaze for very long. I don't remember who it was that day, or how it got around to this, but someone asked me why I had even come back.
It was aggressive. The tone it was asked in implied that in having come back I had done something wrong-something not normal. Mary Alice caught the tone and didn't like it. She said something short and sweet, like "Because it's her fucking right," and we left the room. I counted my blessing in Mary Alice and didn't stop to count my losses. I was back in school. I had classes to attend.
Some first impressions are indelible, like mine of Tess Gallagher. I was registered for two of her classes: her workshop, and a sophomore-level survey course of literature. The survey course was at 8:30 A.M. two days a week, not a popular time slot.
She walked in and strode to the front of the room. I was sitting in the back. The first-day sizing-up ritual began. She was not a dinosaur. This was good. She had long brown hair held back by combs near her temples. This hinted at an underlying humanity. Most noticeable, though, were her highly arched eyebrows and Cupid's-bow lips.
I took this all in while she stood silent in front of us and waited for the stragglers to settle and for backpacks to be zipped or unzipped. I had pencils ready, a notebook out.
She sang.
She sang an Irish ballad a cappella. Her voice was at once lusty and timorous. She held notes bravely and we stared. She was happy and mournful.
She finished. We were stunned. I don't think anyone said anything, no dumb questions about whether they were in the right class. My heart, for the first time back in Syracuse, filled up. I was sitting in the presence of something special; that ballad confirmed my choice to return.
"Now," she said, looking at us keenly, "if I can sing a ballad a cappella at eight-thirty in the morning, you can come to class on time. If you think that's something you can't manage, then drop."
Yes! I said inside my head. Yes!
She told us about herself. About her own work as a poet, about her early marriage, her love of Ireland, her involvement in Vietnam War protests, her slow path toward becoming a poet. I was rapt.
The class ended with an assignment out of the Norton Anthology for the next class. She left the room as the students packed up.
"Shit," a boy in an L. L. Bean T-shirt said to his female companion in a AOX T-shirt, "I'm out of here, this lady's a fruitcake."
I gathered my books with Gallagher's reading list on top. Besides the required sophomore Norton, she recommended eleven books of poetry that were available at an off-campus bookshop. Elated by this poet, and having hours to pass before my first fiction workshop with Wolff, I bought tea in a place underneath the chapel and then crossed the quad. It was sunny out and I was thinking of Gallagher and imagining Wolff. I liked the name of one of the books she'd listed, In a White Light by Michael Burkard. I was thinking of that, and reading the Norton while I walked, when I ran into Al Tripodi.
I didn't know Al Tripodi. As was becoming more and more common, Al Tripodi knew me.
"You came back," he said. He took two steps forward and hugged me.
"I'm sorry," I said, "I don't know you."
"Oh, yeah," he said, "of course, I'm just so happy to see you."
He had startled me but he was happy, truly so. I could see it in his eyes. He was an older student, balding, and with a vibrant mustache that struggled for attention with his blue eyes. His face may have seemed older than he was. The lines and creases in it reminded me of those I later saw on men that thrilled in riding motorcycles cross-country with no helmets on.