The Brown Reader, Page 2

  The Brown Reader: New Curriculum? More like No Curriculum. I didn’t take a single history course at Brown. No math. No science. The only thing I know about the Hundred Years’ War is how long it took. But this is the middle-aged me talking. When I came to Brown, what the New Curriculum said to me was, “Hey, you’re an adult now. You’re in charge of your own education. We’re not going to tell you what to do.” That resonated with me. There are downsides, sure. But I knew what I wanted to do when I arrived at Brown. A lot of kids did. That’s what makes Brown Brown. I knew what I wanted to do and I just went for it. And as the poet said, in the end that made all the difference. Excuse me? The Hundred Years’ War took 116 years? You see? That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

  The Yale Reader: Like who didn’t Harold Bloom ask to take a bath? Any woman he taught, sooner or later he’d go, “My dear, wouldn’t it be more relaxing to discuss Miltonic prosody in a nice warm bath?” Yeah, sure. If you could find a tub big enough.

  The Brown Reader: I couldn’t leave Dave. I just couldn’t.

  Earlier that night, around five p.m., we’d met downtown, as arranged, to swallow one tab of blotter acid each. After that, we wandered around, waiting for it to take effect. Nothing seemed to be happening at first—and then something definitely was.

  We went into a doughnut shop. We sat by a hissing radiator, listening to it as though to music. Someone had put a Styrofoam cup over the valve to catch the spray.

  That, too, seemed full of significance.

  Our thoughts circled back on themselves. Dave and I kept trying to articulate our branching, circular revelations. Finally, we came up with a metaphor. “It’s like Escher!”

  We meant the way figures in an Escher drawing seem to be simultaneously ascending and descending the same stairway.

  Things got easier after that. Whenever we turned a corner and had a brainstorm about the nature of time or the industrial grid, we relied on our shorthand. We said, “Escher!”

  Around ten p.m., the drug began to wear off. Tired of exploring, we went back up to College Hill. There was a party that night at French House, where Dave lived. When we got there, we were scared to go in. We stood outside, looking in the windows at all the people who weren’t tripping and who could never understand the state we were in.

  Finally, we went in, anyway.

  Almost immediately, we ran into Marie. Marie was a tall, beautiful, sad-looking girl who, until recently, had gone out with a friend of mine. Now they’d broken up and she was available. I’d been flirting with her for weeks. I had a sense that something might happen between us. When she came up to me at the party and smiled, I knew I was right.

  But I couldn’t leave Dave. I just couldn’t.

  We didn’t tell Marie we were tripping. That was our little secret. What we did, instead, was we both took Marie up to Dave’s room. We sat on either side of her, on the couch. I wasn’t feeling the least bit horny.

  When we were downtown, Dave had put a cookie into his mouth, experimentally, to see if he could eat it, but he couldn’t, and so he’d taken the cookie out again.

  That was how I was feeling sexually.

  Still, we were strangely uninhibited. That was why we began massaging Marie’s feet. We took off her shoes and socks and got really into it. I tried to figure out where Marie’s acupressure points were, concentrating with my eyes closed, as though I could sense them through my fingers. I was perfectly content. I would have done that all night long. But all of a sudden, in a high-pitched yet commanding voice, Dave spoke up.

  “Marie,” he said, as though acknowledging the obvious, “these pants have got to come off.”

  I froze. I stopped massaging Marie’s feet, and waited.

  Calmly, Marie undid the clasp of her jeans and pulled them off.

  Right about now you’re thinking that this isn’t an appropriate contribution to The Brown Reader. But just wait. Dave, that impresario, turned out the lights. He put a Mozart piano concerto on the record player, leaving the stackholder up so the record would repeat. We pulled his mattress onto the floor. For the next hour, while the Mozart played, the three of us rolled around on the mattress, trying not to fall off. The mattress wasn’t very big, though, and we did fall off, usually Dave or me, at which point we clambered back onto it as if it were a life raft.

  In the middle of all this activity, the door opened and Dave’s roommate Karl came in. He didn’t turn on the light, but he could see what we were doing. I expected him to turn and leave. Instead, he said in an angry voice, “I’m going to bed!”

  Karl took off his shirt and pants and got into his own bed across the room. He turned his face to the wall. Dave, Marie, and I waited a minute or two, and then we went at it again.

  Every time the Mozart record ended, the mechanism returned the needle to the beginning, and the music started up again.

  We were surprised, a half hour later, when Karl jumped out of bed and stormed out of the room. We’d forgotten he was there.

  I feel bad about that now (sorry, Karl). But at the time, I didn’t.

  Here’s the point I want to make. I’ve been trying to fix on a single moment, among all the moments of my time on College Hill, that most clearly symbolizes what it meant to be at Brown. I had wonderful professors and met wonderful people and took wonderful classes, but as I sit here right now, thinking, that night is what comes back to me. To be on the long slow descent of a hallucinogenic drug, to be confused about your sexuality, not sure if you’re A/C or D/C, to be starfished on the floor in a novel and rather shocking physical constellation, to be engaged in naughtiness sure to prove memorable, to be so unknown to yourself that self-discovery seems impossible and yet, conversely, right around the corner, to be with your best friend and your new girlfriend at the same time and to not be able to know who was who, to be doing all this in a place called French House, with the window open, and dawn coming up, a bird beginning to sing, and, most of all, to know that all this funny business has to end soon because you have some serious studying to do tomorrow, Proust to read in the original (Dave), Horatian epodes to translate (me), a ten-page paper on competitive interactions among coral reef fish (Marie)—to be up all night in the darkness of your youth but to be ready for the day to come, to be like the sun on our collegiate seal, under cloud cover but breaking through, just wait, breaking through to shine on and on—that was what going to Brown felt like to me.

  The U. Penn Reader: We always get the short end of the stick. I’m sick of it. Like how many times have I had to explain, yes, the University of Pennsylvania is not a state school. It’s private, one of the oldest colleges in the nation, and it’s part of the Ivy League, douchebag.

  Like, if you were doing one of these remembrance things for, say, Brown, you could write whatever you wanted. You could just sit down and play with yourself and write about whatever came to mind. You could just be creative.

  Ooh, look at me! I went to Brow-wwwn!

  You can’t do that here. Not at Penn. Penn doesn’t have an identity like that, so we have to work a little harder. But Brown? You could just talk about any stupid, nasty thing you did at college and act proud about it.

  Brown? Please. Don’t get me started.

  Train Rides

  LOIS LOWRY

  I can still remember the comfortable upholstered chair, molded to the shape of countless teenagers, in the library of the private school for girls I attended in Brooklyn Heights. To its left were the shelves containing college catalogs. In 1954, I was a sixteen-year-old high school senior and I settled myself into that chair every chance I got. I pored over those catalogs, examining the photographs of campus landmarks (picturing myself in a Jonathan Logan dress and Capezio slippers, standing in front of the Sir Christopher Wren Building at William and Mary, or the Thompson Library at Vassar). Reading the small print, I was able to inform my classmate Stephanie, who owned a palomino horse, that there was a college in Virginia that would allow her to house Chico there. I carefully assess
ed the liberal arts requirements at various colleges (I had managed to avoid both chemistry and physics during my high school years and was eager to find a school that would let me continue that avoidance).

  College counseling, to the best of my recollection, consisted of my telling my English teacher that I wanted to go to Brown—actually, to Pembroke, as the women’s college within Brown University was then called. She was enthusiastic about my writing and had told me that I stood a pretty good chance of actually becoming a writer. She leafed through the Pembroke catalog, glanced at the writing courses offered, and agreed that it looked like a good choice.

  I filled out the application papers and sent them in. Perhaps I should have consulted my parents. Instead I presented it to them as a fait accompli. My mother looked startled and nervous at my announcement. My father? He said something like “Over my dead body.”

  My father was a military man, an army colonel accustomed to underlings (including his wife and children) obeying his commands. But when he ordered me to attend Penn State the following fall, I could not bring myself to reply with the expected “Yessir.” My older sister, a home economics major, was a junior at Penn State. I had visited her there, had glimpsed her sorority-centered life, and wanted no part of it.

  Although we lived at that time in New York, our military life had taken us around the world, and my parents had selected Pennsylvania as their permanent legal residence. At sixteen, I had no knowledge of the finances of a college education. Looking back, I realize now that our Pennsylvania residency would have made tuition at Penn State considerably less costly than “some highfalutin college” (my father’s words) in Rhode Island.

  So we embarked on a protracted battle, my father and I. He was terse, adamant, logical. I was surly, arrogant, and adolescent.

  But amazingly, I won. I won because two letters arrived from Brown. The first accepted me into the class of 1958. And the second offered me a scholarship. I remember my father’s puzzled look as he read the second letter and realized that some credentialed committee had found his sullen younger daughter worthy in some way he didn’t entirely understand. During the summer he was transferred to Washington, DC, and we left our New York home. In the fall of 1954 he drove me and a set of Samsonite luggage filled with my belongings to Union Station and put me on a train for the long ride to a city he had never seen and would never visit. I settled into my seat and flipped through the pages of Mademoiselle, glancing up occasionally to watch the landscape of my own past slide by. The train made a stop in Philadelphia, where I had once attended an aunt’s wedding and seen a movie, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, when I was eight. Next stop, New York, where with a friend during the presidential campaign in the fall of 1952 I skipped school in order to follow Eisenhower’s motorcade from the Battery to Times Square. Then Hartford: not far from where I had, the previous year, attended a spring dance at Choate, wearing a blue taffeta strapless dress that I had borrowed from my sister’s closet without her knowledge. Finally New London, where a classmate was perhaps at that very moment unpacking her own Samsonite at Connecticut College. The bits and pieces of my past all slipped away, and only Providence lay ahead.

  Actually, Providence in 1954 was something of a wasteland; that fall, downtown buildings were still stained by Hurricane Carol, which had flooded the city at the beginning of September. I noticed the remnants of the hurricane damage when I arrived but didn’t pay much attention. My thoughts were already up that hill, a hill I had seen only once before, on the bitter cold day the previous winter that I had visited Brown—also by train, also alone—as an applicant. That day, in an attempt at sophistication, I had worn high-heeled shoes, clearly a mistake, I had realized, navigating the hill. But the tough walking had not dimmed my enthusiasm, and College Hill had loomed since then, throughout the days of bitter arguments with my father, as the one place I wanted to be, the place where my intellectual life would begin.

  I wrote to my parents once a week. I told them that I had been exempted from the required “Freshman Composition,” that I had fulfilled the foreign language requirement through a proficiency test in French, and that I had passed the required swimming test. I did not tell them that I, along with every other freshman girl, had been photographed naked. (We were told—and we believed, preposterous though it now seems—that the college needed those photos to monitor our posture. The scandal of that crackpot untruth was finally revealed in the seventies.)

  My parents, even without being alerted to the so-called posture pictures, probably envisioned a dissolute future for the daughter who had steadfastly refused to embrace the cheery hugs-and-giggles existence of her sister, who that fall was among the nominees for Penn State’s homecoming queen. I fulfilled their every dread. Brown did its part in luring me to the dark side by distributing free packets of cigarettes—colorful little five-packs of Winstons. Their slogan was “Winstons taste good like a cigarette should!” We who were grammar purists knew that it should say “as,” not “like,” but we didn’t let faulty grammar keep us from scooping up the freebies and quickly becoming addicted. Classrooms were well supplied with small ashtrays and we became adept at arranging our notebooks, pens, cigarettes, and ashtrays on the small, flat desklike surfaces that unfolded from the arm of each chair.

  By the time I went home for Thanksgiving I had mastered the deep disdainful inhale and its follow-up, a slow, smoky exhale, reeking with attitude. I was also, by then, quoting T. S. Eliot a lot, especially Prufrock. Ah, the degradation of ideals. The futility of it all.

  A poetry text from that time—still in my bookcase today—contains a page with a small, singed circle caused by a dropped ash. It also has, in my adolescent handwriting, notes in the margins (embarrassingly, I misspelled humorous and judgment) along with the name of my new boyfriend in a decorative penciled circle. Scribbled beside the lines of Auden’s “For the Time Being” I see that I expressed shock, by a row of question marks and exclamation points—!!!! ????—at my professor’s commenting on what he called “the Christian myth.” Myth? Did that mean that Professor Andrew Sabol did not believe in the Presbyterian doctrine that I had been raised on? !!!!!! ??????

  Well, if he called it a myth, then so would I. Did I dare disturb the universe? Darn right. I did so during Thanksgiving vacation at my grandparents’ dinner table, somewhere between the saying of grace and the serving of turkey. Silence ensued. I may have murmured, as a follow-up, that I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  In retrospect I wonder how my family tolerated me when I was seventeen and a freshman at Brown. I wonder why they didn’t bonk me over the head with a carton of Winstons, stab me with one of my own knitting needles (because yes, I had taken up knitting, too: endless misshapen argyle socks for a boyfriend), or strangle me with the sleeve of the hideous army-surplus trench coat I had taken to wearing as a statement of some sort.

  They were waiting, I guess, for me to get beyond it. My grades—which were sent to parents in those years—reassured them that I was a good student, getting top grades even in the required courses (yes! Required courses in those days! But to my relief, not physics or chemistry). I yawned (and knitted and smoked) through courses in math and political science in order to qualify for my real academic life—the life of a would-be writer, the reason I had gone to Brown.

  Newly eighteen, in the fall of my sophomore year, I was admitted to Professor Charles Philbrick’s short-story writing seminar, an upper-level course intended for serious students of writing. On the first day, when I entered a smallish room and peered through the smoky haze, I saw a group of students, all male, slouched in chairs around a table. I instinctively pulled the folds of my too-big crummy trench coat tighter to conceal my schoolgirl outfit of plaid skirt and cashmere sweater. It wouldn’t have mattered. No one cared what I wore, or how I looked, or what fraternity party I had attended over the weekend (or that I had discreetly looked the other way while my drunken date, walking me back to the dorm
, vomited into someone’s rhododendrons on Prospect Street).

  They only cared about what I thought. And what I wrote.

  I remember the names of only two of those students and I will not use them here. But one was older, an army veteran; he had served in Korea and emulated Mailer and James Jones in his writing. The other was a Roth/Malamud wannabe, a brooding Jewish boy from New York. Some years later I came across a novel by him (in his author photo he was wearing an ascot) on a remainder table in San Diego.

  And I remember Charles Philbrick with great gratitude. As part of the course, we had private meetings with the professor in his office. He had rosy cheeks and an easy smile. Did he smoke a pipe, or have I imagined that detail, along with a tweed jacket? What I know with certainty is that he was never dismissive. He always approached my work—shallow, schoolgirlish stories modeled on Salinger—seriously. He told me gently that although I needed to experience more, there was time for that, and that after time had passed, if I kept thinking, and reading, and writing, and observing—I could be a writer. Each time I left his office and walked back to my dorm, it was in a state of exhilaration, of a yearning for experience, almost giddy with a love of language and its possibilities.

  My final story for that course was called “Train Ride.” Although Professor Philbrick was intrigued and impressed by it—and gave me an A for the course—it was a pretentious story with substantial flaws and credibility issues. But it was a first for me. It was different from the sardonic, sophomoric work I had been producing all semester.