Artie
I was walking with Naomi, who seemed to want to know me better. She was funny in a weird way—I think maybe she’d had one too many LSD trips. She talked about them, for sure. She’d been turned on to acid this past summer when she was here for the summer term. A friend had some windowpane, and he shared it with her. “Man what an outtasight trip! I saw things I ain’t never seen before for sure!”[1]
She wondered if I wanted to do some acid. I thought about it and said I’d think about it some more. Acid’s too intense, I felt. Maybe something else, like mescaline or psilocybin. “I heard from Bert that there was some good mescaline floating around campus, so maybe I’ll try that out first.” She nodded then told me about her summer semester, the art course she’d taken really turned her on, the kilns were outtasight—her favorite word, I think—and boy wouldn’t it be cool to do an art major. Math for me, I said, and she shot up her eyebrows. “In the groove, my man,” she said.
We saw Temi and Sandy heading our way. He was still holding her hand, gripping it more than holding it, I thought. They were going to a coffee shop, really a diner, the NCD it was called, and wondered if we’d like to come along. We went along. I got to sit with Dylan and Naomi and Temi’s roomie and her squeeze. Naomi got into talking art with Peter, art major, and with Ellen, art history major. That left me and Dylan to rattle on about Plato. Really. Plato. Dylan was taking a classical philosophy course. I’d read some of the dialogues while the stepfather kept me imprisoned in isolation, so I riffed on abstraction and idea while Dylan defended abstraction and idea. I thought a little bit of Sam Johnson—another stepfather prisoner reading—might come in handy. “I refute it thus,” I said, and kicked the table leg. Dylan laughed. That’s what’s different between Dylan and Sandy. Sandy gets pissed while Dylan laughs. I like the laughing.
When we got back to Eliot the girls went off to Hemingway and the boys, except for Peter, back to Tennyson. Peter lived down Pushkin way. I peeled off and stayed in the FUB. I wanted a little distance from companionship. Funny thing. I’d spent all my high school life wanting friends, and now that I had friends I wanted some separation. I needed to think. I couldn’t think when there were people around. School the next day wasn’t on my mind. Temi was. I mean, I’d known her for all of three or four days, but she’d rooted on my brain like a scarlet star on a banyan tree. A bantam one. A bantam banyan. Ha—beautiful, buddy! Nah. She was the beautiful one. But it wasn’t just her beauty. I knew Naomi even less than Temi, so it was unfair to compare, still . . . I compared. Naomi was beautiful too, an OK girl, would be a great friend, I thought. But Temi was something else. Maybe she wouldn’t really launch a thousand ships in the late 20th century, but she definitely launched my longing for female companionship. That was friendship too, right? She was smart, she was witty, she was . . . she was everything I’d ever dreamed I’d fall in love with. Not everything. She wasn’t a thing for chrissake. Next thing I’d be making her a chick for some chick-hunting scheme. Oh shit, what am I getting into here?
What to do, what to do. Sandy wanted her. I had no doubt about that at all. He’d said as much to Dave and me. The way he grabbed her made me want to punch him on the nose, I admit. That wasn’t just because I was into her, though. The guy was just too arrogant for his own good. What gave him the right to lift her right out of her seat at lunch and drag her off with him? And to look at fraternity houses, for god’s sake! I’d overheard the conversation at the NCD and knew that’s what he’d taken her off to do. Lord. I hoped Temi wasn’t into the whole fraternity thing, cause if she was then Sandy was a natural for her. I couldn’t see it, but who knew. So what to do, what to do.
I wasn’t really thirsty but I bought myself a tea and sat in the same spot I’d sat with Temi the night before. And there was Temi again, walking into the union building without Ellen or Naomi—or Sandy, thank the good lord. All alone.
“Hey, Temi,” I yelled out. Not yelling for real, but loud, so she could hear me from across the big open area in the FUB. She waved and came over to sit with me.
“Well here we are once again.” She paused. “You know, Sandy was really . . . I don’t know, angry? upset? weird? because I’d been down here with you last night.” She paused. “What does he think? I need a protector of some sort? a chaperone?”
I said, “Yeah, you know, from me you need all the protection you can get. I am ferocious monster number one in the college universe.” She chuckled. “Did you enjoy your walk with him this afternoon?”
“Well,” she said. I’d come to know that opening with “well.” It meant doubt, hesitation, hedging her bets. “Uh . . . not really. I’m not, you know, like interested in fraternities. And looking at fraternity houses is just not my thing at all. Although some impressive buildings, no doubt about that. I know Sandy liked that.”
“No doubt,” I said. “No doubt. He seems to be into impressiveness.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.”
“How come he grabbed you by the hand like that at lunch?” I asked.
“Well” (and there it was again—jeez I do the same thing, though, I realized) “I think he thinks he has some . . . I don’t know . . . privilege? rights? He can command me, he thinks, and make me do what he wants to do no matter what I might want. I don’t know where the hell he gets that idea. Not from me for sure.”
“Yeah. You didn’t seem very happy when you went off, but I couldn’t really tell cause your back was to me. But he really was grabbing your hand. Not holding it, grabbing it. It looked like ownership to me. It really did.”
“No ownership! Nobody owns me.”
She sounded hurt, angry—both—and started to get up. “I didn’t mean it that way, Temi. It’s not about you.” She settled back in her seat. “It’s not about you. It’s about him. I didn’t mean anything about you. I’ve known you two days, three days, right? But I can tell you’re a free woman, a free spirit, a . . . . Let me stop myself there. It’s just—he just seems . . . owner-like, you know? I think that’s what he wants to be, with you anyways. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but what the hell—free speech and all. That night after the party at Pushkin? Up in Bruce and Dave’s room, he warned Dave and me to stay away from you because he was going chick hunting.”
She looked shocked. “Chick hunting? What am I some wild fowl or something?” Then she shook herself and came back down to the here and now. “Anyway, what’s up with you? Did you like Naomi?”
“Yeah. She’s real cool. Outtasight. Funny. Knowing her for three hours, I like her a lot. Give me three days and I might like her as much as I like you after three days.” Temi grinned. “Maybe a trip too many, though?”
Temi laughed. “I had exactly the same idea, Artie. Exactly.”
“Very different from you, Temi. I mean, you’re cool too—to me, cooler, cause you’re so . . . I don’t know, so open to ideas, so sharp, funny too. I like you. A lot.”
Temi dipped her head, blushed a little. I continued, “I’m sorry. If you’d known me just two weeks ago, before I came up here, you’d ask yourself ‘what the fuck is up with this guy? Is he the Artie I used to know and dismiss?’ I’ve changed in just the week up here, and I want—no, I need to be as open as I can be. I like you. I like you a lot. That’s about it. Now you can do the ‘what the fuck is up with this guy’ and dismiss me.”
“Well” (I smiled) “I’m not gonna dismiss you. I sorta like you too. But we’ve known each other what, three days? That’s what you keep saying, anyways. And Sandy—bossy, possessive, dominating SOB he might be, but I want to give him a chance. A little bit of a chance. OK?”
“Sure. You’re your own boss, right?” I wondered why she felt obliged to give him anything other than a not so fond farewell. But it wasn’t my business. If what I’d said about the night at Bert and Dave’s didn’t faze her, then . . . OK. Another chance.
She went on to do whatever she’d come down to the FUB to do, and I went back to my room. Sandy was there, working out his routine for the first day of classes, planning where to go and what to do. I’d done that already. No worries, I thought. We talked a little bit, or rather he talked at me about the fraternity houses he’d looked at. He talked at me about Temi being the target of his chick hunting. He didn’t put it quite like that, but that’s what he meant. I didn’t say much, just lay on my bed looking up and counting the tiles of the drop ceiling. Ten across and eighteen along. Not exactly a golden ratio, but close. One hundred eighty square tiles. Even I could do that arithmetic. I wanted to convert square tiles into square feet but couldn’t figure out how big the tiles were. And I fell asleep. Not for long, though. Sandy woke me up for dinner, and down we went to the FUB again.
We joined the group already there. This time we had both Eric and Eric at the table. Both were from Philly and both were musicians. Eric Gruber played the sax, and Eric Doyle played the piano. They were OK guys too. Lonnie, the only Black kid in our neighborhood, was there also. Being the only Black kid was tough on her, but that was what the school was like. Not a whole lot of African Americans. More than in my high school. But she was a great kid, a little schizoid from time to time—and who could blame her, being the sole person of color in the area. I wondered what her home life had been like. I imagined her in my high school with all those WASPS. Yikes! She was interested in music and so the connection with piano Eric and sax Eric made sense.
All my friends were OK. Except my roomie. It wasn’t just that I saw him as a stumbling block for what my fantasy fantasied might possibly develop with Temi. I didn’t really take myself seriously as competitor anyway. I was not up to par. I knew it. I also didn’t think that competition was the thing that was at work with us three, with any relationship, really. It was up to her. I was going to be myself, my new self, and like McCartney said, let it be, times of trouble or not. If she liked what she saw, great. If she didn’t, I’d be sad. Sandy was just too uptight, too arrogant, too demanding, too cock-sure, too . . . . I stopped, looked up. There he was, dominating Temi again. She seemed trapped at the far end of the table, isolated from everyone else by Sandy. The stepfather syndrome, I thought. I decided to try to figure out why Sandy was Sandy. My project for the beginning of the semester.
Artemis
I was so nervous about classes that I couldn’t fall asleep. Ellen was restless too, and she tossed and turned as much as I did. I don’t know when sleep came, but I do know that it didn’t last long enough. When the alarm buzzed at six thirty a. m. I was so groggy that I couldn’t find the stuff I needed for my morning routine. Where was my bath bag? Where’d I leave my toothbrush? And where the hell were my clothes! I did the bathroom thing quick as I could, then stumbled downstairs and over to the FUB for breakfast. Some of the usual kids were there. Lucky that Sandy wasn’t. I didn’t think I could deal with him in my nervous condition. Neither was Artie, though, and I was sorry about that. He said he liked me. I liked him too. But how serious . . . who knows? Sandy was enough to deal with. Why am I obliged to deal with him, anyway? Don’t ask dumb questions, girl. The boy is so hot you could fry eggs on him. Jeez Louise, I didn’t know you were that shallow! Yeah, well . . . I hope I’m not. But you’ve got to admit he is a girl’s wet dream made real. Sure. If you don’t count his personality, arrogant, bossy bastard. And Artie’s not so bad looking himself. Yeah, that’s true. But six foot two with eyes of blue . . . isn’t there a song like that?[2]
The nonsense in my head distracted me enough so I could eat some breakfast without throwing up. The nerves were intense. My first class, starting at nine, was composition, over in Burroughs Hall, home of the English Department. I hoped the teacher . . . I mean, the professor was nice. Writing was not my strong suit. Grammar and that stuff I was OK with. But organization and working up a key idea, a thesis—well, I’d get better. Isn’t that the whole point of a class like that, to get better?
So much for my hopes. Professor? Bullshit. A grad student so full of herself that she treated us all like idiots. And that was just in going through the syllabus. If she took the same approach in the rest of the class, trouble was on my horizon. Maybe it was the first class she’d ever taught. Well good for her. What about me? About us all sitting at those desks? I hoped it’d get better but wasn’t all that sure that composition was going to be my crowning glory this semester.
I had a break after that class and went down to the main union building on campus, Herrick, the HUB just like Faulkner was the FUB. It was swamped with kids, but I managed to work my way to a coffee bar and bought myself a coffee. I hate coffee. But I needed the caffeine for sure if I was going to survive this day. I ran into Ellen at the bar. She’d been in her first class too, French. She figured that any art historian absolutely needed to know French. She’d had Spanish in high school, so it was the barest start of French that she was trekking into. Gotta start somewhere. Her class had been OK. Nothing really exciting, but the professor—a real honest to goodness professor, no less—seemed enthusiastic and eager to get the class fluent in French within one semester. I said I hoped that didn’t mean that she’d be swamped with French homework all semester, but Ellen said she wasn’t worried. Peter knew some French, she said. She was sure he’d help. I rolled my eyes, and she laughed.
Ellen didn’t have a class right away, so she was going to stay in the HUB for a while. I got up to go to my next class, bio, and saw Sandy and Artie come into the coffee bar. I said hi, and Sandy strode over, grabbed my hand, and asked how things had gone. I told him about my comp instructor, and he felt sorry for me. Artie overheard, and nodded agreement. “If you think you’ve got it bad, just think—my comp class meets at eight in the dire dawn of day every Tuesday, Thursday, and . . . get this . . . Saturday. O frabjous day!”[3]
I gave him my condolences, then had to leave to get to class. Sandy and Artie were getting some coffee to go cause they both had class too. Sandy was going to his psych class, and he was psyched about that. Artie was going to Russian. “Cyrillic comes from the Greek alphabet, Temi. You’ll be studying the original, me the degenerate offspring.” I laughed. We went our separate ways.
Bio was brilliant. The professor—a real live professor!—told us about the focus of the class. It was going to work from evolutionary theory. We’d do a lot of reading, not just from textbooks but from original materials by Darwin and others onwards to the present. To embody the theory—the guy’s word, not mine; he liked a pun like babies like milk—we would dissect three different critters during the semester, not just for the hell of it but to see the way that very different animals reproduced the same bodily parts in different but analogous bodily architectures. We’d done a frog back in high school. The point then was just to see what the body parts were and where to find them. We were going to revisit the frog first of all, but the task here was to pay attention to the relation of body part to body part, the arrangement of the skeletal system, and the function of the organs in the life cycle of the frog. Then we’d dissect a bird. “Make believe it’s your Thanksgiving turkey, guys!” Ha ha we all went. Here again the point was to note the relation of body part to body part, the arrangement of the skeleton, and the role the organs played in the life of the bird, parallel to the frog’s or not, he said. Like four legs vs. two plus wings. And we would be working up a comparative chart to see what remained the same from frog to bird, and what changed. The questions we’d ask would be about the functional effect of the differences, which we would navigate via evolutionary theory. The final critter would be a cat. I was not looking forward to that task. I liked cats. But the procedure and the goal remained the same. I might not like to cut up a cat, but I was excited about seeing the way that evolution maintained and changed things.
We’d also be paying attention to the biochemical systems that made living possible. There’d be a lot of chemistry, the prof said, but all of it would go back to the way that cells produced the energy to do what they did. The miracle, he said, was that from fern to frog to fowl to feline (he loved alliteration too) the chemicals were identical. Still, all that chemistry didn’t seem so exciting to me. Obviously I got the evolutionary point. A tough tough semester of work, I thought, but exactly what I’d been looking forward to. I was ready for the work.
My Greek class was up right away, and I almost had to run to get to it on time. It was pure joy. The professor was a tiny little woman, smaller than me, who smiled her way throughout the intro to the course. I was definitely looking forward to keeping up my end of the bargain with my dead grandparents.
A break for lunch—a late lunch. I was going to have to do some eating during the break between comp and bio. And then math. I did not like math at all. The professor seemed patient and helpful, though, so I hoped it would work out all right. It was only algebra, college-level algebra to be sure, but I’d done some algebra in high school and thought it wouldn’t be so bad.
That was it for the school day. My phys ed class met on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was going to be doing ballroom dancing as a class. Groovy, I thought. Exhausted by lack of sleep and four classes worth of work, I trudged back to Hemingway and collapsed on my bed. Ellen was still out. I closed my eyes for a minute. Three hours later I woke up and had to hurry to get down to the FUB before the dining hall closed.
[1] That’s Randy Newman’s “Momma Told Me Not to Come,” covered by Three Dog Night.
[2] There is and there isn’t. Originally, it was “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,” a song written by Ray Henderson, Sam Lewis, and Joseph Young back in flapper days about a girl about Temi’s size. It’s been covered by lots of folks. Changing the word to “six” happened soon enough and it became about men, not women.
[3] That’s what we hear in Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky.”
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