Allison
walked across campus with her student guide, whose name was Penny. Penny
was a blonde woman with shoulder-length hair and bangs, a pink headband,
and pink knee socks. There was something a little off about her, but Allison
couldn't exactly figure out what. There were dark circles under Penny's
eyes.
They had already passed the Hopkins Observatory,
which Penny had a lot to say about. She was an astro major. Maybe that
was why the woman looked so tired; she had been up all night, squinting
into a telescope.
"What are you interested in, Allison?" Penny
said, as they walked across the green quadrangle.
"Music, mostly," she said. "Maybe English."
"Good departments," Allison said. "But they're
all god, really. You can't go wrong here."
"I heard Romance languages wasn't so hot,"
Allison said. "Is that true?"
"No, Romance languages are great," Penny
said. "You mean like French, Spanish, Latin?"
"Yes. Italian. Portuguese. I think Portuguese
is a Romance language, too, isn't it?"
A large group of guys walked by, laughing,
shouting, pushing each other. Penny stopped and watched them go.
Allison watched them, too. The two women
stood for a moment, as if lost, watching the men.
"I guess so," Penny said.
"Why are they called Romance languages?"
Allison said.
Penny shrugged. "I wouldn't know," she said.
She pointed toward the spire of the chapel.
"You see that? They drop a watch off the chapel every year at commencement.
If the watch breaks, the class is lucky."
"What do you mean, lucky?" Allison said.
"That's the tradition. They're lucky if
the watch breaks."
Penny didn't say anything else for a while.
Three minutes later they passed the Student Union. "In there's the Dog
House," she said sadly.
"Dog House?"
"Yeah. Hot dogs for lunch." Penny shook
her head.
"What if the watch doesn't break?"
Penny looked back at Allison. Maybe this
was what had been worrying her. "I don't know," she said.
Another group of guys loped toward them,
carrying towels. Penny looked at them with her dark eyes.
"The guys here," she said, almost to herself.
"What?" said Allison. "What about the guys
here?"
Penny looked ashamed. "I don't know. They're
weird sometimes."
"Weird?" Allison said. "Weird how?"
Penny blinked, embarrassed to have spoken
out loud. "I don't know what I'm talking about. Forget it."
"No, tell me. This is something I'm interested
in."
"Guys?"
"Guys being weird."
"Well, I don't know what to tell you. I'm
stumped."
"What do you mean, stumped?"
Penny lowered her voice, embarrassed. "Like,
you'll hook up with somebody, okay?, hang out, and then the next day it's
like, hello?, they don't even know you."
Allison thought about this.
"Do you think you know anything more about
guys now than when you first came here?"
Penny laughed. She sounded bitter.
"They ought to teach a course," Allison
said. "Explaining them."
"Yeah," Penny said. "It would have to be
a science course, though. Maybe chemistry." She thought better of this.
"No, geology." She turned to Allison. "You have a boyfriend, Allison?"
"Yes. Do you, Penny?"
"I don't know. I don't know if you'd call
him a boyfriend exactly. It's more like, I don't know, like having a horse
or something. Like some animal that lives someplace you have to keep changing
its hay."
They were approaching Mather House, the
admissions office.
"There are women's groups you can get involved
with here," Penny said. "There's WOW and EAT Me."
"Eat me?" Allison said.
"Bulimia and anorexia awareness."
Allison was still thinking about Penny's
boyfriend, nattering in his hay bale.
"And WOW -- that's Women of Williams."
"Hey, Penny, are you glad you came here?
Can I ask you that?"
"Of course," Penny said. "Williams is the
best college in the country. Probably the world. Everybody here is incredibly
tight."
"Okay," Allison said. "You didn't sound
sure, I thought."
"Of course I;m sure. It's awesome here."
She looked around. "I'm a little out of it today, I guess. I had a fight
with my boyfriend. Or whatever he is."
"I had a fight with mine, too," said Allison.
"When we were at Middlebury." She thought. "Well, it started at Dartmouth,
but it really got worse at Middlebury."
"I don't know what it is with them," Penny
said. "It's like all they want it -- oh, never mind."
"What?" Allison said, desperately. "What
do they want?"
"Well, what do you think?"
"Yeah, well, I guess. But that doesn't satisfy
them either. They're like these big things lurching around without any
purposes."
Penny thought to herself. "I meet a lot
of nice women through EAT Me."
"Yeah, well, I wouldn't mind understanding
them better either," Allison said.
"Who?"
"Women."
Penny mulled this over, then nodded. "Yeah,
they're strange, too." She thought some more. "Pretty much everybody is
kind of whacked out, if you think about it."
"They are," Allison said.
"It's a miracle we don't all just murder
each other, go nuts, strangle people we don't even know, stab them or
punch them in the nose. Put glass in their food." Penny blinked, smiled.
"Well here we are at admissions!"
"Thanks for showing me around."
"It was fun! I hope you come here," Penny
said. "I don't know, Allison. Look me up next fall if you get in. Maybe
you and me, we could be friends."
Excerpt written
by Jennifer Finney Boylan and reprinted with her permission
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