"One afternoon, we were in bed together at his house- his wife was away-and he goes to the closet and pulls out a suitcase. All that was in it was this pornographic joke magazine-these close-up pictures of genitals-male and female-all fixed up to look like faces. Pubic-hair Afros, penis noses, vagina mouths: pages and pages of this stuff. 'Look at this one,' he kept saying. I mean, this guy publishes in the Yale Law Review, for Christ's sake. So, right there, I just got so tired of the whole thing. Angry, too. He was sitting up in the bed, naked, and I reached over and took hold of his limp little prick. 'And look at this tiny little garden slug,' I said. 'This one's the biggest joke of all.' I withdrew the next morning... I mean, it was more than just that one thing, my leaving, but that's the one that sticks in my mind: him sitting there getting off on pictures of genitals fixed up like Mr. Potato Head."

"All men are pigs," I said.

Her hands stopped the shampooing. "No they're not. Larry's not"

I thought of their flowering the night before.

"Well, anyway, I'm probably not even going to go to college," I said. "It's what my mother wanted, not me."

"Oh, go!" she said. "Try it at least. Think of it as an adventure."

She rinsed my hair with warm water and toweled it dry, then wrapped it in a turban. "What if I don't like adventure?" I said.

Ruth dragged over a kitchen chair and sat down facing me. "Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That's how you grow."

"Look at me," I said.

"I'm looking. What?"

"My size."

"What about your size?"

"Growth isn't exactly something I need."

She didn't laugh or look away. "If I didn't go into VISTA," she said, "I never would have met Larry. Tia wouldn't exist."

Tia had the cabinet onen anH IMC rw..i;-~ j- -=**- Grandma's pots and pans. Larry's singing carried in to us from the stairwell. Ruth's gaze made me shiver.

Then pans clattered to the floor and she was out of her chair and running to stop the damage.

When they were ready to leave, I handed Larry his check. "Here you go," I said. "Have fun at Woodstock. Drive carefully."

"Have fun at school," Ruth said.

The dog was barking. Everyone was hugging and thanking everyone. From the truck window, Ruth held up Tia's hand and made it blow kisses. Larry honked all the way down Pierce Street.

I might have made them up, I thought, only they'd left evidence: the new wallpaper, a flea on my leg, dried orange juice sticking to my sneaker bottoms when I crossed the kitchen floor.

Grandma got home late in the afternoon, hours after I'd gotten back from the bank where I'd cashed in Arthur Music's check for a thick stack of twenty-dollar bills. "The new wallpaper looks pretty," she called out to me. The back-door screen made a veil for her face. "What are you doing out there by the ash can?"

"Nothing," I told her. Bees were in the grass and the afternoon sun warmed my face and arms. I had just found the mint.

V-/N THE SECOND PAGE OF THE MERTON COLLEGE CATALOG.

was a photograph of Hooten Hall, its parking lot full of gaping trunks and smiling freshmen, cars clogging the lawns, fathers hefting footlockers. Here, in person, was the same parking lot, the same crisscrossed white birch trees- only deserted and still. I put down my suitcases and Ma's wrapped-up painting on the front step and tried the doorknob again. A car drove by, so singular that it roared. I walked from window to window, listening to the clack of my own Dr. ScholFs.

It was just as well. Things had gone sharply downhill from the Port Authority bus terminal in New York when a hunchbacked old man had hobbled down the entire aisle, coming to rest with a sigh on the backseat next to me. From New York to Philadelphia, I sat yanking Ma's trench coat around me as he blew and blew his nose and nibbled food from an oil-spotted paper bag. I spent three hours on the same chapter of Valley of the Dolls, worrying that his garlic breath would seep into the fabric of Ma's coat-that Kippy would smell his smell and think it was me.

One of two things was happening. Either Merton College had folded over the summer and been too cheao to snenH stamp to tell me, or the other girls had seen me struggling up the long flight of steps and locked the door. I imagined them huddling on all fours beneath the windowsill, giggling like Munchkins. Either way, I reasoned, I'd given college a fair chance and was now free to trudge back to the station and purchase another streamer of those purple tickets that would land me back in Easterly, my obligation to Ma fulfilled.

What if you don't even like adventure? Then you cultivate a taste for it. Easy for Ruth to say. She didn't have to be standing here, looking at herself mirrored back in locked glass doors. She didn't have to suffer sore hands from suitcase handles and bruises from those heavy bags banging against her legs. She apparently didn't even have to answer their fucking phone, no matter how many millions of times I'd let it ring that last week. I wouldn't hang up for fifteen or twenty minutes. The sound of the ringing put me in a kind of trance-became a kind of companion, even-so that once I got mixed up and thought I was calling my mother, was scared someone would pick up and it would be Ma.

I took a quarter out of the trenchcoat pocket and tapped it against the glass. "Hey?" I said, barely louder than a speaking voice. "Excuse me?" To my horror, someone appeared. A fat woman, lumbering behind the double doors. She stopped, squinted out, then walked toward me with a jumble of keys. My breath caught. Locks unsnapped. The door yawned open. This would end badly, I knew. "What?" she said. "I'm new," I answered. "A new freshman."

"Yeah?"

Her eyes were pale blue, her hair a black bowl cut. "Dolores Price? This is my dorm. Are you the house mother or something?" She let go a snort of laughter. "I'm the 'or something.'

You're a little early, ain't you?"

"I got this letter that said we should arrive somewhere between ten and four. It's ten after four..."

"Between ten and four next Thursday."

"I'm sure 1 have the right date." I hadn't gotten the dry heaves over September 7 for nothing. I was surer of that date than anything else in my whole life.

"You can come in and put your stuff down for a minute, but you ain't supposed to be here until next week. I got my orders. There's no linens or nothing. Buildings and Grounds ain't even sent over my new mattresses yet."

"Look, I have the right day. I can prove it."

"You do that then," she said. "But hurry up. I got work to do."

Once you left Easterly, you saw the world was full of these people: ticket sellers, snack-bar clerks. They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routines.

She led me into a shabby lounge area that smelled of dead cigarettes and something else-something sickening sweet, like rotting fruit or spilled drinks. She clicked a pole-lamp switch and four ruby-colored megaphones lit us in watery red.

On the long bus trip down, I'd hunched my shoulder to the gawkers and counseled myself on the dignity of remaining a private person. Now here I was, sweat-drenched, heart thumping, displaying the entire contents of my opened suitcases, forced to prove that I was right and they were wrong. I made little hills of underpants on the threadbare sofa. She looked over my shoulder. I imagined her smirking, but when she spoke, her attention was somewhere else.

"Look at this," she said, pointing to a circular brown stain on the top of an end table. "Burning-hot popcorn popper on knotty pine and varnish. This is how smart you college girts are."

"I'm sure I've got that letter here," I insisted. A handful of bras dangled from my fist.

The Merton College literature was in a side pocket, curled around a can of malted-milk balls and held in place with an elastic band. Though the date on the page kept jumping, kept blurring from my tears, I saw that she was right. For a month and a half, I'd mistakenly fixed every fucking stom-achache on the wrong date-on the date the late-turnon charge began. I was supposed to be safe at home in Easterly. "Oh, this is just great!" I said. I stared up hard at the ceiling, tears dripping behind my ears. "I'm such a stupid asshole. Now what am I supposed to do?"

"Go home," she said. "Come back in a week."

"Where do you suppose I live-down the street?" The pole lamp flickered. "You paid too much for this."

She was holding a jar of Tang. "Down at the Big Bunny this week they got the large size on special for seventy-nine."

My eyes met hers. That smug look was gone.

"Ordinarily I'd say call campus security and see what he says, but he's on vacation this week. Gone fishin' in the Smokies, him and his wife. Somebody could break in here at night and take every single stick of furniture. But that's between you and me and the lamppost." She nodded at the pole lamp.

"Oh, terrific," I said. "I've just been on a bus for ten hours. Now I have to turn around and go back. If I'm lucky, //they even have a bus going back to Rhode Island tonight."

"Is that where you're from-Rhode Island? A fatty like you in that little bitty state?"

"Fuck you!" I said. She wouldn't have fit into that bus seat much better than I did.

The Tang clunked back into my suitcase.

"Like I said, I got work. I'm lockin' up at five-thirty." She thumped down the hall, eyes to the floor.

For half an hour I sat in the lounge, trying unsuccessfully to think of ways to kill myself in Wayland, Pennsylvania. You couldn't just ring some stranger's doorbell and ask to borrow their car keys and their garage. I considered capitalizing on my heart murmur-going outside and galloping around the dormitory until my heart burst. But the long bus ride had exhausted me. I couldn't even manage to get off the sofa. When she came back, she was wearing a white nylon windbreaker with "Dahlia" embroidered on the pocket She was carrying a flashlight "I been tbinkin'," she said. "For the time being, just for tonight because it's gettin' late and hoozy-whatsis is up in the Smokies someplace, I guess I could let you stay here. Just don't put any lights on. Use this instead." She handed me the flashlight "I looked you up. Dolores, right? You're in two-fourteen. There's mattresses there, but there ain't any sheets. If the town cops see lights, they'll stop and look. I don't want any trouble."

I wasn't crazy about this idea, but it seemed less complicated than suicide. All I'd have to do was sit in the dark and breathe.

"Is there a TV or anything?"

"No watching TV! They'd be up here in about two seconds."

"Okay," I said. "I guess that's what I'll do. Thanks."

I pictured Ma's row of pink dahlias that had grown briefly out back on Bobolink Drive. The weekend before the men had come to install our pool, Ma had transplanted them to the shady side of the house. They'd drooped and shriveled -hadn't survived the move.

"I'd let you stay at my house," she said, "but my shithead brother's home this weekend. Here." She wrote her telephone number on my Merton letter. "Pay phone's around the corner across from the John. If you have any trouble, you can call me. I ain't goin' out tonight"

"Dahlia?" I said.

She looked puzzled, then held a finger up to the embroidered name. "This was somebody else's," she said. "Someone who used to live here. Left half her stuff here when she graduated. My loss, her gain. I'm Dottie. So, if you want to give me a ring, I'll be there. Just call. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay then. See you tomorrow. I don't have to come in on Saturday, but I will"

She locked the door from inside, walked out, and tested it Then she trudged down the stairs without looking back. I stood there, watching the fat wobble on her big ass.

The maze of corridors grew logical on my tnira wai*. through the building. The rooms were opened, anonymous except for personalized vandalism: a strip of missing ceiling tiles in room 107, a peace sign painted on the door of 202. My room was at the end of the second floor.

At first, Kippy's and my beds looked identical. Graciously, I chose the side with the chipped bureau top and the stained mattress.

"Kippy! Finally!" I said to the mirror. "Kippy, it's me!" My chin rested in a beard of fat. My eyes were small and piggy-looking. "I'm sorry I look like this, Kippy. I've had a bad life and-"

I switched bureaus, picked up my suitcases and slammed them down on the other side of the room. I flopped down on the unstained mattress. Hadn't she ever told a lie to anyone? What made her so infallible?

Just outside my room was a battered filing cabinet with old tests and term papers. "Rebirth Symbolism in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies... Trace the effects of New Deal legislation from its inception through present times... If Tom, who had one blue-eyed blond grandparent and three brown-eyed, brown-haired grandparents, married Barbara, a brown-eyed blond whose grandmothers..."

I slammed the drawer shut; the ringing metal sound shot down the long corridor and I wondered if it had alerted the town police. Back in my room, I peeled the brown paper wrapping off of my mother's flying-leg painting. "Are you happy now?" I shouted. "I'm here, aren't I?"

At dusk I took the flashlight and explored the basement floor. There was a laundry room with washers, dryers, an ironing board, and a soda machine. In the next room, a cabinet-model television sat on top of an enamel kitchen table. Metal folding chairs were grouped around it in a semicircle. It looked like a kind of altar. A heavy chain was wrapped around the legs of the set and fastened to a thick iron staple embedded in the wall. I gave that staple several good yanks, then grabbed it tight and leaned back with all my weight. Kippy could disown me, a flood could happen, they could drop the bomb, and still that thing would hold.

Back in the lounge I ate supper by flashlight. Two Sprites from the machine and a jumbo-sized jar of macadamias. For dessert I had the malted-milk balls and a roll of Oreos. I ate them the way I did back in Easterly: popped off the roof first, then raked two treads through the frosting with my front teeth. Then I filled my mouth with soda and felt the cookie collapse in on itself. The ritual both soothed and disappointed me. You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.

Friday night. I imagined Grandma sitting alone in the parlor watching "Ironside," her new scallop-shell wallpaper rising up behind her, the TV screen lighting her face in silver. Even watching TV, Grandma was at attention, scowling her scowl, ready for the worst. From Pennsylvania, Grandma seemed fragile. Mortal. I wondered if she missed me-if she was sitting up in Easterly, worrying. I saw her fretful face like Auntie Em's inside the witch's crystal ball. Poor Grandma. Her daughter was boxed in the ground, not in heaven, no matter how many rosaries she sat and mumbled. I thought of dialing her on the pay phone to tell her I was all right. Except I wasn't all right... Auntie Em would have praised God and accepted the charges. I wasn't so sure about Grandma.

I licked my finger and stuck it into the empty nut jar, poking at the salt on the bottom. So far, college wasn't that bad, if you thought about it. Maybe a fantastic coincidence would occur and each girl at Hooten Hall would independently decide to withdraw, leaving me this entire private dormitory. I wondered where the old smelly hunchback man from the bus ride was now and what his life had been before we traveled together at the back of that burping Greyhound bus. That foreign newspaper he was reading looked Jewish. Maybe he was Anne Frank's father-the family's only survivor-and I'd missed an important op-xutunity because of garlic breath. There was no logic in life vhatsoever, that much I saw. Anne Frank had had a loving, irotective father and died anyway. I had Daddy, who was lead to me. Somewhere after dark, I followed my swooping flashlight ray back up to my room. I thought I heard noises. Rats? Jack Speight? The door locked with a heavy, reassuring thunk.

My mattress felt like an English muffin. The cinder-block walls glowed in the moonlight. "I'll never sleep," I thought Then, without warning, I was in a dream on the beach, talking to a flatfish.

He had washed ashore on purpose and come looking for me, flip-flopping himself past other sunbathers until he got to my blanket. Sand covered him like Shake VBake, but his eyes were clear and purposeful. "Follow me," he said. The water I jumped into became the pool water back on Bobolink Drive. I followed the fish into chilly depths I hadn't known existed in our pool. Drowning seemed irrelevant. Bells were ringing and I knew it was Ma, calling me, somehow, underwater.

I sat up. It was this empty dormitory in Pennsylvania again. Down the corridor, the pay phone was ringing off the wall.

I fumbled with the door lock. The flashlight ray wobbled ahead of me. Too slow, too slow! Maybe Larry and Ruth had gotten my number. Maybe they'd hang up if I didn't- "Hi, it's me," the woman said. Someone I couldn't quite recall.

"Ruth?"

"Who's Ruth? Who'd you let in?"

"Nobody. I was just dozing."

"This is Dottie. I just called to check. And to tell you I'll be in at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. You like cream cake?"

"Cream cake? What time is it?"

"Right now? Quarter of eleven. There's this bakery on Hazel Street that has day-old stuff at one-third off. I'll bring you some breakfast tomorrow morning. At eight. Don't smoke any cigarettes near your mattress, now. I don't want to have any explaining to do. All right?"

"All right."

"You were lucky I didn't have any plans for tonight. Or else I couldn't have called you like this. I'm doing you a big favor. By rights, I should have sent you home."

I hung up the phone and hugged myself to stop from shaking.

Back in my room I located Valley of the Dolls and read. I had an inch and a half of pages left to go. I didn't know what I'd do if I finished.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, I made my way down to the basement and sat. The dull chill of the linoleum floor numbed my ass, but the soda machine's hum soothed me. I read and read by its glow, one hand on the paperback, the other clutching that iron staple. When I looked up from the print, it was morning-the first pink, stingy light.

"You see, everyone thinks they're too good for day-old pastry, like one-third off is charity or something. The world is full of snobs. Snobs and slobs. I ought to write a book."

The room smelled faintly of her sweat. Everything about her repulsed me. I smiled sweetly and finished my second slice of cake.

"If people want to be snobs, let 'em. Their loss, my gain."

We were probably within twenty pounds of each other, but I wouldn't have been caught dead in the shorts she was wearing. "This is really nice of you," I said.

"What is?"

"Bringing me breakfast on your day off. I mean, God."

She waved me away. "Have some more-that's what it's here for."

I reached for the wedge she'd cut me, cupping my other hand beneath to catch the crumbs.

"Look at that! See?"

"See what?"