Someone out in the hall, on a Saturday morning. The phones were in the stair towers at the ends of the hallways. They rang, and if someone was near, they got answered. People who called were better off if they knew the room numbers of the students they were trying to reach, because the calling could be a little more direct. There might even be a knock on the door. To bypass this system, my folks and I prearranged the time and phone so I'd be there to answer it when they called me. Most of the time, I called them. It was easier.
"Hello?"
"Stephanie? It's David."
( ?! ) "Oh! Hi!"
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah ... " (???)
"The weird stuff going on. I was worried."
(laughing - a little ) "Oh, no, it's fine."
We talked a little more - about stuff - about nothing in particular. I told him when I'd be home for Christmas break. It was the middle of November. There were only a few weeks left before I could finally be finished with the semester and have five whole weeks of time in Portland. Maybe he'd ask me out at some point, I supposed, but we didn't talk about that. He just wanted to make sure I was okay. I made sure he knew when the semester would be over.
* * * * *
I was not okay - but I did not realize it. Looking back on it now, I wonder at myself. Was the entire experience of being away, and at a school like that, in a culture like that, was it all so surreal that nothing much could happen to worry me? Were so many things already worrying that a new worry didn't make any difference?
By this first semester of my junior year, I had already adjusted to the subtly humiliating slap of a few room check demerits every once in awhile. New floor leaders seemed to feel compelled to find something to criticize, and any perfectionism I can use for creative work never seemed to come to my aid when dusting a room that didn't need to be dusted. Lights out, with a floor leader doing a bed check, had become almost comforting in its regularity and blessedly enforced silence. Wake up bells, with all freshman required to have their feet on the floor when the floor leader came in - no big deal once I was no longer a freshman. Even having a turn at making sure everyone in our row at chapel was in attendance on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays - it had all ceased to seem odd to me.
I had, in fact, become so accustomed to the rules and rhythms that I decided (perhaps for the first time in my life) to ally myself with a miscreant. Defying the rules and the powers that be, I decided to ignore the fact that A. Whitwam (often in the alphabetically arranged seat next to mine throughout the years) kept all kinds of things to do or read or look at, secreted inside his huge Bible during chapel. I had a bit of a soft spot for him. His name was always on the weekly posted list of demerits (for which one would need to appear at Discipline Council if the number exceeded 10 for the week). I could check the list, scan through the W's, find the large number of demerits next to his name (with the ominous "DC" following), and I could easily see if I was on the list.
By the first semester of my junior year, all the shock had worn off. Some of my own experience helped, of course, but I now think that I was much more dependent on my Elf than I knew. I used her like a compact little weather station, upon which I could do the maintenance and from which I could get a forecast. She was a native of the culture. I needed her.
She needed me, too. And not just for rescue from the cascade of things threatening to fall on her head from the top shelves in the closet. She always had a date (I usually didn't), but she loathed dressing up to slog across campus. Not only was formal dressing something she'd rather do without, because it made no sense to her, she also resented ruining her good shoes in the rainwater. But dressing up, I understood. I could help her. I knew how to use a curling iron, and I had a ladylike sense for jewelry and flowers. I could also keep pesky people from bothering her while she was studying. I have older sisters. I knew how to be the (taller) little sister. She wanted everything put "where it lives," including the rolls of postage stamps we bought together and owned in common so that we would not be "borrowing". Borrowing was against the rules. It made me happy to defer to her extreme need for order. One spring, we even took a picture of our ordered arrangement. We took her mattress off the lower bunk and took a picture of the way in which we had arranged all of "our" things under the bed so we could put everything back in the same place when we came back to school the next fall. Elf and I got along just fine. We had a well-run system.
Crazy Faye messed with the system.
Elf lost sleep and started to get near to a break down, never able to establish her equilibrium for wondering when the next scrawled death threat would appear in lipstick on the mirror above the dresser or in the bathroom. She was worried and for this worry, there was nothing in her playbook to use as a counter measure. She was the one who took the situation to the dean of women. She was the one who felt responsible and threatened. I now suspect that her worry and distress gave me a sense of security. By the end of November, I had written that I found Faye's behavior around the older guys "a little disgusting," and I never felt really sorry for her, not even when she received death threats. Perhaps I could sense that she was not as scared as she wanted us to believe, and perhaps I lived all of my school days there in an altered state of near dreamlike detachment, but probably I felt protected by a worried Elf.
Besides, my reality was on the other side of the continent. Over the semester, the letters I got from Wildly Brilliant David had begun to change. Beside them, the letters from others had started to look less interesting. It's true that I was still sure the man was overestimating my ability to keep up with his brain. He had even made copies of pages out of a commentary he was using and asked me to respond! In his last letter of the semester, he wrote one sentence that really did scare me. He said he wanted to go Christmas shopping with me when I got home.
Once, during that semester, I had written to him on notepaper that I had been storing in the same box with some scented stationery. (Who on earth would I have been sending scented letters to?) We had both thought that my letter arriving for him in Seattle, scented like that, was a hilarious and "mystifying" thing to have happened. Our relationship was not like that. We had an intellectual relationship. We discussed things. Ideas. Theology. That the altar calls on Wednesday nights at Campus Church (attendance required, dorms locked, no assigned seating) got longer and longer right before vacations was no accident. That it was theologically goofy to say to weeping students, as the piano played yet another verse of All for Jesus, "You take the first step and God will take the rest." These things, we had discussed. Analyzed. Observed.
People who discuss things don't go shopping together. Shopping is personal.
In December, he wrote that he and some friends had gone out for coffee and chocolate after they had been to a choir concert at a catholic church up in chilly, wet Seattle. As far as I knew, I had never been inside a catholic church in my life, and it would not have occurred to me to go to a concert held in one. Don't they have statues of Mary and things like that in a catholic church? And yet, I wished I had been there. I wished I had been in his group of friends, all of whom I imagined were just as brainy as he was. There is a universe of difference between monthly Artist Series and metal folding chairs in a gym, and a Christmas choir concert inside a church. People who discuss things could go to concerts together, I thought. They could discuss it afterward. They just might even go for coffee and chocolate together. People can discuss things over coffee and chocolate.
I wondered how long he'd wait to call me after I got home.
By this first semester of my junior year, I had already adjusted to the subtly humiliating slap of a few room check demerits every once in awhile. New floor leaders seemed to feel compelled to find something to criticize, and any perfectionism I can use for creative work never seemed to come to my aid when dusting a room that didn't need to be dusted. Lights out, with a floor leader doing a bed check, had become almost comforting in its regularity and blessedly enforced silence. Wake up bells, with all freshman required to have their feet on the floor when the floor leader came in - no big deal once I was no longer a freshman. Even having a turn at making sure everyone in our row at chapel was in attendance on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays - it had all ceased to seem odd to me.
I had, in fact, become so accustomed to the rules and rhythms that I decided (perhaps for the first time in my life) to ally myself with a miscreant. Defying the rules and the powers that be, I decided to ignore the fact that A. Whitwam (often in the alphabetically arranged seat next to mine throughout the years) kept all kinds of things to do or read or look at, secreted inside his huge Bible during chapel. I had a bit of a soft spot for him. His name was always on the weekly posted list of demerits (for which one would need to appear at Discipline Council if the number exceeded 10 for the week). I could check the list, scan through the W's, find the large number of demerits next to his name (with the ominous "DC" following), and I could easily see if I was on the list.
By the first semester of my junior year, all the shock had worn off. Some of my own experience helped, of course, but I now think that I was much more dependent on my Elf than I knew. I used her like a compact little weather station, upon which I could do the maintenance and from which I could get a forecast. She was a native of the culture. I needed her.
She needed me, too. And not just for rescue from the cascade of things threatening to fall on her head from the top shelves in the closet. She always had a date (I usually didn't), but she loathed dressing up to slog across campus. Not only was formal dressing something she'd rather do without, because it made no sense to her, she also resented ruining her good shoes in the rainwater. But dressing up, I understood. I could help her. I knew how to use a curling iron, and I had a ladylike sense for jewelry and flowers. I could also keep pesky people from bothering her while she was studying. I have older sisters. I knew how to be the (taller) little sister. She wanted everything put "where it lives," including the rolls of postage stamps we bought together and owned in common so that we would not be "borrowing". Borrowing was against the rules. It made me happy to defer to her extreme need for order. One spring, we even took a picture of our ordered arrangement. We took her mattress off the lower bunk and took a picture of the way in which we had arranged all of "our" things under the bed so we could put everything back in the same place when we came back to school the next fall. Elf and I got along just fine. We had a well-run system.
Crazy Faye messed with the system.
Elf lost sleep and started to get near to a break down, never able to establish her equilibrium for wondering when the next scrawled death threat would appear in lipstick on the mirror above the dresser or in the bathroom. She was worried and for this worry, there was nothing in her playbook to use as a counter measure. She was the one who took the situation to the dean of women. She was the one who felt responsible and threatened. I now suspect that her worry and distress gave me a sense of security. By the end of November, I had written that I found Faye's behavior around the older guys "a little disgusting," and I never felt really sorry for her, not even when she received death threats. Perhaps I could sense that she was not as scared as she wanted us to believe, and perhaps I lived all of my school days there in an altered state of near dreamlike detachment, but probably I felt protected by a worried Elf.
Besides, my reality was on the other side of the continent. Over the semester, the letters I got from Wildly Brilliant David had begun to change. Beside them, the letters from others had started to look less interesting. It's true that I was still sure the man was overestimating my ability to keep up with his brain. He had even made copies of pages out of a commentary he was using and asked me to respond! In his last letter of the semester, he wrote one sentence that really did scare me. He said he wanted to go Christmas shopping with me when I got home.
Once, during that semester, I had written to him on notepaper that I had been storing in the same box with some scented stationery. (Who on earth would I have been sending scented letters to?) We had both thought that my letter arriving for him in Seattle, scented like that, was a hilarious and "mystifying" thing to have happened. Our relationship was not like that. We had an intellectual relationship. We discussed things. Ideas. Theology. That the altar calls on Wednesday nights at Campus Church (attendance required, dorms locked, no assigned seating) got longer and longer right before vacations was no accident. That it was theologically goofy to say to weeping students, as the piano played yet another verse of All for Jesus, "You take the first step and God will take the rest." These things, we had discussed. Analyzed. Observed.
People who discuss things don't go shopping together. Shopping is personal.
In December, he wrote that he and some friends had gone out for coffee and chocolate after they had been to a choir concert at a catholic church up in chilly, wet Seattle. As far as I knew, I had never been inside a catholic church in my life, and it would not have occurred to me to go to a concert held in one. Don't they have statues of Mary and things like that in a catholic church? And yet, I wished I had been there. I wished I had been in his group of friends, all of whom I imagined were just as brainy as he was. There is a universe of difference between monthly Artist Series and metal folding chairs in a gym, and a Christmas choir concert inside a church. People who discuss things could go to concerts together, I thought. They could discuss it afterward. They just might even go for coffee and chocolate together. People can discuss things over coffee and chocolate.
I wondered how long he'd wait to call me after I got home.
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