Back To U

chapter Two

Artificial ingredients should be tossed.





She’d taped the parking permit in the back window of the car even though the whole thing was ridiculous, and she obviously wouldn’t be staying. It was a good thing she’d packed the office supply kit for Missy. Tape was always handy, and if Missy changed her mind and showed up in the morning, Gwen had the tools she needed to white-out her own name and swap the registration back from Gwen Melissa to Melissa Gwen.

At the dorm entrance she took a deep breath, relieved it hadn’t been the same dorm she’d lived in at eighteen. That would have been weird. Thank god what she was doing wasn’t weird at all. She walked towards the front desk and decided that a wreck, the kind her life currently was, required a kind of triage. There were things she wasn’t going to worry about during the emergency she was experiencing.

She wasn’t going to worry about being nearly forty. She wasn’t going to worry about the next day’s orientation or the dorm mixer she could see the perky signs for across the lobby. She wasn’t even going to worry about the poor girl who would soon discover her roommate was old enough to be her mother. The roommate issue fell under the age thing, and she wasn’t going to worry about that. Her focus as she approached the guy behind the desk, who still struggled with acne and rightly so since he was a teenager, would be to worry about being nuts.





"Mother, I’m home." Gwen stood in the middle of the dorm room, holding her phone and studying the right half, already moved into by a girl who’d fled to a sorority party. The other side remained empty because she obviously wouldn’t be unpacking the car with all of Missy’s things in it. Why would she?

"Oh, good. I’m just going to pop on over. After I had my nails done, I picked up that chicken pizza you love."

"The thing is, Mom…" If she couldn’t say the words to her own mother, she definitely couldn’t stay the night. She glanced around the room. Even half empty it felt less lonely than her house. "I’m kind of in a dorm room. At the U."

"I knew Missy would change her mind. Thank God! I kept picturing the kind of waitress get-up a bar, for heaven’s sake, would put those girls in. She’s too young for that business."

Gwen rubbed her finger and thumb along the bridge of her nose, hoping the tension there wouldn’t flare into a headache and that someday her mother would remember her own past with some accuracy. "You worked in a bar for years, mother."

"Oh, just after my divorce."

"Divorces… es." Gwen gave up trying to rub her headache away. "Missy’s not here, Mom. I am. I’m…" She sat down on the bare mattress. "Here."

"Did you find another table, dear?"

"Kind of." She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry or just fall asleep on the second-hand bed like a lucky homeless person. "I found myself enrolled."

"Hmmm."

"Mom?" Gwen waited, but there was no response, no explanation of what her mother was thinking. "What kind of hmm was that?"

Ellen sighed and it sounded worried but warm. "Do you remember when Steve left?"

Did she remember when her husband left? How did anyone forget that? If there was a way to blank it out, she’d have done it. "Of course."

"Gwennie, the day he came for the rest of his clothes, when it was clear that he was really going, you walked into the kitchen and started making that rib roast you know I love. Remember?"

"It’s a little blurry, but yeah."

"You didn’t say anything, just took out that roasting pan and started cooking."

"And?"

"Right when you put it in the oven, you made a sound like hmmm. And I thought, she didn’t see this coming. It’s that kind of hmmm."

Gwen felt her eyes fill with tears. She hadn’t seen it coming with Steve. She hadn’t seen Missy’s defection anywhere on the horizon either. But what she'd really missed was her own mid-life disaster that gathered power like a storm that could rip up picket fences and tear the roof off.

"Good night, Gwen Melissa, enjoy that lovely comforter."

Gwen curled up on the bare mattress and looked around her side, blank. That felt about right. "Good night, Mom."





Gwen's Journal, September 3rd, 1989 - Saturday



Went out with Molly last night. So fun! The bar completely doesn’t card anybody, so it’s cool. I need to get a new pair of jeans. Maybe something acid washed. It was "get screwed" night. Super funny. Next week Alpha Delta’s having a toga party. Guess I need a sheet too.

Met a guy. Molly says he won’t call for a couple of days or sometimes ever. I told her I’ve got eighteen credits and no time anyway. She said I should get eighteen guys. She’s a really great roomie. The girl across the hall threw up last night. You could hear it in our room!!!





Gwen's Life - the night before…





Billy Idol's White Wedding blasted out into the street every time the door swung open. A door, Gwen noted with some disgust, with a window that hadn't been cleaned maybe ever. She'd quit her job at Dairy Haven just a week before she left for Belmar, and she'd cleaned the glass door of that place three times a day. It gathered every sticky finger print from every sticky-handed child, and there were dozens and dozens and dozens of them coming in for ice cream. Although, mostly, they were so cute with their sun-kissed cheeks and fluffy kid hair that she could forgive the work.

She looked at the girls on either side of her. Molly, with a perm that took her light brown hair to impressive heights, and designer jeans, maybe even the same kind Brooke Shields had worn half-naked, although Gwen was pretty sure even Brooke Shields wore underwear. Who didn't wear underwear? And Molly’s friend, Gina, who had the coolest outfit ever. She wore two bright t-shirts, the lime one slashed so the pink one underneath would show. Her black leggings were so cute Gwen wondered if she could wear a pair. She rubbed her hand down her Levi's. She'd worn the same kind of jeans for years and didn't think she'd need to change that for college, but after the first day on campus, she'd begun to wonder. Maybe something acid washed. She didn’t want to look like she was trying too hard. God knew she didn’t want to look like her mother.

She took a deep breath. It was too late to change even if she wasn’t trying hard enough. The bar loomed in front of her, a sticky windowed bar that didn’t care what she was wearing. They weren't serving ice cream in there either, but she let the next blast of Billy Idol take her in. Sandwiched between Molly and Gina, she hoped they knew what to do. She knew how to make a really good dip cone, to make sure to leave the ice cream in long enough to get coated but not so long it would melt off into the vat of golden butterscotch. In fact, she knew all about staying in, but she didn't know squat about going out.





She held a silver nut between her finger and thumb, its hexagon beveled edges new and shiny. Why in the sam hill would a bar give out hardware? She turned it to study the inside grooves while the heat of the crowd and the ruckus from the band buffeted her. She felt someone grab her hand, and she took a step back, but he held on. Gripping her was a beefy guy who was a little sweaty and totally concentrating on her nut. He kept her fingers in his with his left hand and shot a bolt through the nut. "Yeah!" He smiled at her as if just noticing she was attached to her hand. "It's a match."

Her eyebrows came together as she jerked her hand away, easily disengaging the bolt and handing it back to him. "It's too small."

He cradled it in his palm and cupped his other hand over it. "Damn, that’s cold."

"What?" But he disappeared into the crowd, and she glanced around the room, trying to spot Molly and Gina who’d headed straight for the bar. There were people everywhere, drinks in their hands, bolts, nuts, attempts just like that guy had done to her when he'd put his too small...

Her face flamed. Oh, God. She… She… first, she’d just told a guy that his, uh, was too small, and then she'd let him, ugh, jam it in her... She was going back to Dairy Haven and stick with dipped cones. Damn, that sounded gross too.

Molly surfed through the crowd and handed her an iced tea. She put it against her right cheek. "Thank you." Molly didn’t blink at that but sucked her own drink out of a fiery pink straw. Gwen joined her, but it wasn’t iced tea, although sweet and "totally delicious."

"They make a great iced tea."

"This is iced tea?"

"Yeah. It's how they make them in Long Island."

"Huh." Gwen took another drink, felt her cheeks cooling from the inside out. "Well, don't leave me alone. I just did a stupid thing with my nut."

"Oh, I know. Licking it doesn't make it fit any better."

Gwen choked, swallowed some more.

Gina shrugged. "Some things just aren't meant to be."

That was the right attitude to have in a bar. She was definitely going to loosen up. Gwen fished her lemon wedge out and decided an orange slice fanned out against a wedge of lime would have been much prettier in the drink. "Some things just aren't."





As the night wore on, she’d avoided what she'd come to think of as the dolts with bolts. Maybe she wasn’t ready yet for a get screwed theme night, but she had danced and that was fun, even if it was mostly with Molly and Gina. And only after the second drink. Damn but the folks in Long Island really knew how to make iced tea. She’d finally been driven off the floor by a slow song. She couldn't take a spin around with Molly and Gina, even if she loved the ballads. There was something about those tough rocker guys singing about love that really got to her. Molly danced because she’d found a bolt that fit without spit, and Gina was just the kind of girl who always had her share of askers. Gwen had said no twice, so there was no reason to complain.

She reached in her pocket and pulled out the nut, that after the first mishap, she'd lied to half-a-dozen guys about possessing. What she really wanted was another drink, but the possibility that the buzz in her head would only be louder if she ordered another iced tea made her wonder if she should. Still, it was a nice mental fuzziness she had going, like her brain was wrapped in a big pink sweater. She watched a cocktail waitress zip by but was too slow to catch her. When she turned her head back to the table, he was there.

Handsome and smiling at her, his smile was a little crooked, but it matched his handsome that also looked a little tilted. It was a hunter's humor in his eyes. She might not understand a bar game about bolts and nuts right away, but she knew charming boys were trouble. Her mother specialized in the grown-up version of them. She ought to get up and run, but before she could get the message to her legs, he held out his hand. She would have said no, but he tipped his head like he was amused, like he knew she wouldn't hand it over, like he'd made a bet with himself, and he was gonna win it.

She held the nut up, eyed it in the light like it was a diamond, and she understood its value and was reluctant to part with it. She saw him move and knew he'd given her one of those inside laughs that only shook the body an inch and was never intended to be out loud. But she'd heard it, so she met his eyes, daring green and aimed right at her. She smiled just enough so he'd understand she possessed knowledge he'd never have and that even though she was young and wearing the wrong kind of jeans, she was female, and he would always be the gender that came begging. With the nut held in front of her, finger and thumb, she slowly licked around the top of it, and dropped it in his palm.

He lost all expression, his mouth open just enough she knew he'd stopped thinking altogether. She felt a rush of power to have wiped the amusement from his eyes. And felt some surprise that she'd managed to do it and that he’d looked so much younger after she did. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, chin in her palms. "Does it fit?"

He swallowed. He swallowed again and nodded without even checking. Maybe the Dairy Haven girl could be someone different at Belmar. No one even knew her mother or all her mother’s exes, and a little adventure wasn’t going to derail her. Maybe Gwen would be a new Gwen. Bolder. The kind of girl who didn't dip cones so much as lick nuts. "I'm Gwen."

"You are." He seemed to gather himself and turn his attention to the hardware in his hand. He held the bolt and spun the nut right on. "Damn."

Gwen sat back in surprise. It had never crossed her mind that she had a match in the place. And when he looked at her, she saw something more than surprise. Interest, maybe. Worry for sure. But then he gave her the wolfy smile he'd sat down with. "I'm Max."

She laughed. "You are."





Back to U…



If the sound of someone vomiting hadn’t awakened her, the smell would have. It possessed the familiar awfulness of bile mixed with fake strawberry. She’d enjoyed a daiquiri or two on the deck of Steve’s favorite restaurant, but what kind of horrid beverages were minors being served that smelled like bad candy? She sat up on the bare mattress and swung her legs over the side. Rubbing her hands over her eyes, she smeared the remains of her make-up but could see better in the dim street light that came through the split in the curtain.

The girl who had run out of the room like a shot when she’d seen the age… maturity, of her new roommate, knelt on the floor with a metal garbage can obscuring most of her head. Apparently there had been a party at the sorority. "Can I get you anything? A glass of water maybe?"

The girl waved one arm in a no gesture and heaved again. It had twice the impact with the echo.

If Gwen stayed she would definitely get her own room and unpack the silver mesh garbage can from the car because she wasn’t going to use one somebody had thrown up in, and she wasn’t ever going to throw up in one herself. "Just let me know if there’s anything you need."

The girl lifted her arm…

The least she could do was put the girl a little out of her misery. "I’m going to move out."

The girl waved goodbye and threw up again.





The sun came through the curtain gap and ran in a strip across the built-in desk. In the daylight, Gwen didn’t want to even see the girl, poor thing, hair probably plastered to her face in some painful way. But a glance out of the corner of her eye assured her the girl was breathing. She rose and walked to the window, opening the drape just enough to see the campus she’d loved once, all green and early morning quiet. The criss-cross of sidewalks would fill soon enough. And there were squirrels. She was a squirrel. She shook her head, sad to think that she might have laughed six months ago when it seemed the world held things to be light about.

She spotted two college catalogs on the desk top like some tidy greeting from a recruiter and reached for hers. Not hers, the one meant for Missy. She sighed and sat in the molded plastic seat that tried to pass for an ergonomic desk chair, but she didn’t have an eighteen-year-old back anymore. Her back knew the difference. It was almost hard to believe she’d been eighteen once. She leafed through the catalog, scanned the smiling faces, the football team, the course requirements. She’d been an education major for reasons she couldn’t even recall, not that the declaring of it had changed much. The year and a half she’d been at Belmar, she’d taken what everyone had taken.

Turning to the list of general requirements, she remembered math, of course, and English. The rest had been listed differently when she’d checked them off, and they hadn’t been called Spheres of Study, which sounded a little fruity. Science was still science. She checked off Nutrition I and II. Social Sciences. She scanned the list of classes, not entirely sure the difference between anthropology and sociology, so she’d obviously not taken either of those. Psychology. There’d been a film, a VHS tape, a format nobody used anymore. There were monkeys taken from their mothers. They'd clung to a fake fur replacement but had to stretch out as far as they could to reach the milk that had been jimmied onto a monkey shaped from cold metal. What on earth had that studied been about besides creating a need for monkey therapists?

The girl stirred, and Gwen glanced over, pitied her inevitable hang-over and hoped she’d sleep the whole day. Sleep and learn to pace herself with alcohol spiked with artificial strawberries.

Cupboard love. That was the study. The monkeys were there to answer the question of why babies loved their mothers. Was it for soft comfort or the promise of food and survival? Was it cupboard love? It hadn’t been. It hadn’t been the milk at all. It was warmth. Had she given it to her baby? Had Missy loved the holding? She could picture those years, in the blurry way that might just be a memory from a photo, but still true, still true she knew. She’d carried her baby girl around, listened to her sigh before sleep, rubbed her back in circles when she’d cried. She’d done that. Not perfectly, never perfectly, but she’d given it. And she’d also been guilty of offering more cupboard love than anyone needed.

Maybe she’d scared Missy off with homemade cocoa and gingerbread at Christmas. Maybe she’d driven Steve away with one too many well-thought-out dinners. Hell, she didn’t know what ways she’d screwed it all up, but she did know she’d taken psychology, dammit. A history. A literature that was terribly boring, Russian maybe, and one that was better. French, two semesters.

It surprised her, the checks down each column, each Sphere. She had it all, all her general education done. She could file for an Associate’s Degree. Who needed a bachelor’s degree anyway? It wasn’t like she was going to be a teacher. What had she even been thinking at eighteen? Maybe Missy hadn’t fallen that far from the tree. Then she spotted the asterisk by the fourth Sphere. Really, Spheres? The Fourth Sphere sounded like a bad cable knock off of Star Trek. But in tiny print, print that required her to hold the catalog surprisingly far from her face to read, it said she needed to successfully complete with a C or higher a two-hundred level course in the same designation as the one-hundred level requirement for said Sphere. So, she was missing…?

She considered what she’d already checked off and how, for about a second, she almost felt good about something. She read the asterisk note again. She’d just have to take the next psychology class. Psychology II. Roman numerals were nicely impressive. If she did register for the class and stay another night, she’d call it night II. Could she live in the dorm for three, three-and-a-half months? She had everything she needed. She wouldn’t have to go back to her empty house until Christmas, and by then she’d have put her energy into something that would never leave her.





"I’m Mranda. The R.A." The short, perky girl she'd run into in the hall extended her hand with authority. "That stands for resident assistant."

"Oh," Gwen laughed. "I think I knew that. Nice to meet you, Miranda."

"No, Mranda."

"Oh. I’m Gwen. I guess my consonants already run together."

Mranda tipped her head, then perked up again. "You must be…" she noted the name tags on the door’s bulletin board. "Kaylie or Melissa’s mom." She smiled, shook her head. "The girls need to get passes for overnight guests. Dorm policy."

"Oh… I’m, well, I’m Gwen Melissa. I’m, I guess, living here?"

"You’re…" the smile fled, and prior to watching it leave the girl’s face, Gwen hadn’t imagined she could feel worse about her life, but she did. Mranda lit up again as if sudden inspiration had struck. "You’re a grad student! You’re just on the wrong floor. Come on." She took off down the hall, her quite impressive breasts not even bouncing, which made Gwen like her even less. But the girl moved like she meant business and Gwen was unsure how not to follow her. She stepped back in the room, grabbed her handbag, and headed to the lobby.

Mranda had already darted behind the main desk and returned with a key. She held out her empty hand and waited until Gwen figured out she was asking her to return the key for the room she’d stayed the night in. Gwen dropped it in her palm, and Mranda released the new key and pointed at the two elevators. "Top floor."

The girl hadn't been very nice about it, but Gwen knew she didn't have anything more to lose, so she made her way across the lobby and punched the up button. Maybe she’d find a penthouse suite with caviar and champagne and a film crew waiting. They’d shout, surprise! This isn’t really your life." Missy would be there smiling, Steve beside her. They’d tell her she could go back home, and that building her life around theirs made her a winner. But the doors opened to quiet, empty quiet. There wasn’t even a welcome sign, or a name on a door, just a long corridor and carpet the color of concrete.

Not the penthouse.

Gwen checked her key and walked to room nine-twelve. The key slid in, and behind her she heard a door creak open. She turned, but it closed. She started to enter her room again and spun around, but she didn’t see anyone. Great. Her neighbor was probably a serial killer or worse, some kind of gopher, fearful and just popping up to check if the coast was clear of predators. She shook her head and entered her own room that smelled of disinfectant. The ninth floor was abandoned save for the serial gopher and her, but she had to admit it beat the pants off a roommate and strawberry vomit.





She’d scanned her student I.D. card, the one she’d had made just like the DMV lady told her to. If it didn’t make her official, it did, at least, fool the food service. The cafeteria smelled just like she remembered. It held a pleasant but thick mix of hot oil, coffee, and taco meat. The smell was the only thing familiar. She stopped on the stairs to survey the large room. There hadn’t been much of a salad bar before, and the long scarred tables had given way to clusters of round ones, new, given the solid state of them. Most were filled with students, and she could see more in the half-a-dozen lines. The greatest concentrations remained at the slice of pizza and the taco bar.

There’d been one entrée at a time when she’d last eaten there, and it nearly always floated in gravy. Conventional wisdom insisted that gravy could rescue food that was cooked in giant batches. It couldn’t. The gravy had driven her off campus her sophomore year. Her last year. The gravy and being fired from her work-study job in the kitchen. At least old man Jameson wasn’t there anymore. Or probably alive. She’d fought with him over her fancy pants addition to the school’s recipes.

The day he'd fired her, he’d said fancy pants like that was a bad thing in cuisine. She’d walked out so mad that she probably owed the university a shift. She’d like to imagine the cinnamon she’d put in the French toast batter had led to something better than just unemployment, like maybe that rogue moment had sent her on a path of trail blazing. But in truth, it had only gotten her fired and into a cheap apartment where she’d taught herself to cook by recipe and experimentation. By that Christmas she was gone from even that tiny apartment. For good.

She heard a guy behind her clear his throat and felt her cheeks redden. Mid-life, back in the cafeteria, and all she could do was hold up traffic. She scooted the rest of the way down the stairs, couldn’t think past the smell of taco meat, and gave into it.

She sat with her lunch at one of the new tables. Alone. That wasn’t entirely new, not for the past several months at any rate. She’d be alone in her house too. Or anywhere she went. No matter where you go, there you are. Wasn’t that some kind of greeting card or Zen wisdom? The mean kind. Still, the taco wasn’t half bad, even without fresh cilantro, but it could be because she hadn’t eaten since… the granola bar she’d found in her purse. It felt odd to not have planned the meal, grocery shopped, and prepared it, but the ease of having food made for her didn’t feel as good as it should have. It wouldn’t be much of a break for a golfer to have someone golf for them either. Cooking was her tasty hobby Steve had once called it.

She checked her watch. One o’clock. He’d probably be back at the office after lunch. Did he go to the same restaurant he always had or had he changed that habit of living as well? And Missy? She didn’t want to think about where Missy was. The girl would call when she was ready. Maybe Gwen would not screw things up anymore and just wait.

Besides, she had her own things to do. After lunch, she’d register for one psychology class. She’d already hauled her things, Missy’s things, into the room, which was over-kill for one class. She couldn’t imagine what she would do with her time. There was the mandatory floor meeting to look forward to. Maybe the perky R.A., who’d shooed her off like she was a crazy woman banned to the attic, would be there, but more likely not. Gwen was probably the only resident of the ninth floor. She’d just imagined the gopher. And if a virus came and wiped out all mankind, she alone would survive, although it was hard to imagine isolation could be any kind of survival.



She surveyed her fellow floor mates from the middle of a sectional couch. The large room echoed with their small presence. At the far end of the couch sat the gopher. She’d have to stop thinking about her neighbor that way, or she’d accidentally call her that. Annie, Annie, Annie. Annie sat so close to the edge that Gwen wondered how she stayed on it at all, given the laws of gravity. But being that thin probably helped. The girl looked lost in an enormous cardigan she’d wrapped herself in despite the room’s warmth. It hung over a blue striped skirt, her two knee knobs visible above gray socks. She was shoeless, expressionless, and with her hair hanging in a sad pony tail, she made Gwen feel a mix of motherly concern and the concern of meeting someone who would later be described by neighbors as having kept to herself.

To the left, in a club chair, an international student worked the giant television’s remote fluently. His name and country escaped her during introductions because nothing he said was in any language she could identify. And in front of them all, Mranda waited to begin the orientation because their floor’s population numbered a whopping four, and one was missing. Mranda waved to get the foreign student’s attention, pointed to the remote, and drew her hand across her throat. He hit the mute, and looked a little frightened, so he understood a few things.

"I really need to…" Mranda circled her finger around the group, not extending the motion or her eye contact as far as Annie, "get this going. I have a dorm mixer on my floor to host, and I need to sign in the catering from the food zoo." She smiled at Gwen, "that’s what we call the cafeteria."

"Oh," Gwen nodded, "I did not know that. Annie, did you know that?"

Annie’s eyes didn’t change expression, but she shook her head a little so that seemed good. Gwen would chalk that up to communication with her neighbor. Things were already looking up. The foreign guy knew one sign. Annie could almost shake no. And, no doubt, Mranda would only visit them when she had to. The entire lounge would be theirs. Gwen turned towards the wall to the right of the television. There were two burners, a mini oven, a refrigerator, and two feet of counter top. It was tiny, but it was a kitchen.

"Ty!" Mranda gave a bounce on the balls of her feet, and Gwen half expected her to clap once and rally the team with ready? Let’s go! Even for an R.A., the girl seemed over-the-top. Gwen turned to see the final neighbor and thought Ty! He had chocolate brown eyes and that mid-sized build that worked at any age. And he wasn’t eighteen either. He wasn’t forty or probably even thirty, but he wasn’t a teenager. Gwen felt the need to take a deep breath and mentally give herself a shake. She shouldn’t even innocently ogle him. She easily had ten years on the guy.

They all watched him come around the end of the sectional, Annie leaning towards him as he smiled a greeting until she'd tilted a couple of inches past defying gravity and was forced to commit a couple more to joining them on the couch. Next he greeted Mranda, which sent her into a nodding fit that crossed the line of yes, yes, yes and looked seizure-like. He gave the man-head-nod to the foreign student who responded by giving a boy-grin back. The two of them could have been an ad for Big Brothers and Sisters.

And then it was her turn. She sat up straighter in anticipation, and he held out his hand. "We haven’t met. I’m Ty."

She shook it. "You are."

He laughed as if she’d made a joke and wasn’t commenting on his effect on the crowd. "I’m Gwen."

"Gwen Melissa," Mranda jumped in. "It’s very confusing. I had her on my floor." Mranda laughed and waited for Ty to join her, but he didn't.

"Well, she’s with us now. Isn’t she, Annie?"

Annie jerked an inch off the couch.

"Guy?"

"Oh," Gwen looked at the international student, relieved to be able to call him by his name. "I didn’t catch that your name was Guy."

Guy nodded.

Ty sat down next to her. The dent wasn’t large enough to have her roll into him or for Annie to sail from her end, but she was sure they both wanted to. "It’s not exactly his name. He doesn’t speak any English and Guy is as close as we can come. He’s here for math."

"His country sent him," Mranda shook her head like that was a crazy thing for a country to do, and that attending a university in another language wasn’t impressive at all.

Gwen turned to Ty not just because he was far prettier than Mranda, who was nothing to sneeze at, but because he was already one-hundred-percent nicer. "What country is he from?"

"We think Taiwan."

"Doesn’t he…" What did she want to ask? Doesn’t he have a translator? Draw maps? Was the language of texting universal? Maybe they could hand him a cell phone.

"Keeps giving us his village’s name. We think." Ty laughed as if he’d tried hard enough that failure to understand was finally funny. "What are you studying?"

Oh, god, she didn’t know there’d be questions at the meeting. Who are you? What are you doing here? She wasn’t prepared for questions, especially questions from a late-twenties, beautiful man. Soap opera star beautiful man. In fact, the level of aesthetic skill he possessed had always seemed like an oddity to her. When she’d been in the presence of it before, man or woman, it felt like something was wrong. Too much of one thing had to leave a deficit somewhere else. But this man had smart eyes and a really nice smile. Not just a nice smile but a nice guy smile. And a… "do you have an accent?"

He shrugged in apology. "My family lived in Australia when I was in elementary school. It comes out in certain words."

Of course he’d have a hint of an Australian drawl. How many males had been short-changed to give all the good stuff to Ty?

Mranda shoved a folder towards her, and Gwen took it to prevent losing an eye. She noticed Mranda leaned very close to hand one to Ty but set one down next to Guy, who didn’t look up from his silent TV flicking. She dropped the last one as close as she could towards Annie without actually going near her. "Let’s go over some dorm policies. Rules are an important part of your fun here at Craig Hall."





Insomnia might be the other part of her fun at Craig Hall. Rules and sleeplessness, they just might describe a good portion of her life. Gwen rose from the well-appointed bed. She’d made sure of that for Missy. A new start, a new life ought to begin with well-appointed. She’d even bought new clothes for Missy, jeans and t-shirts, a couple of sweaters, some adorable flats, and a suede jacket. It felt beyond weird to see them hanging in the small closet and know that after another day in her own clothes, she would have to wash her one outfit while she was naked or wear the wardrobe intended for her daughter. Underwear even. Print, tiny ones.

She turned on the desk lamp, the halogen burning brightly. What would Missy be doing at… she checked the clock, a music docker, minus the player Missy had taken with her. Midnight. Missy would be closing down the restaurant if she had a late shift. Gwen remembered locking up a store or two, the Dairy Haven in high school and full-time retail selling housewares before Missy was born. Steve’s commissions were more than enough by then. And hadn’t the plan been to put their energy into his insurance career? Insurance. That’s what she hadn’t gotten.

He’d be over-insured and sleeping, snoring a little, with some woman beside him, a woman he hadn’t even given her the courtesy of naming. He’d claimed fidelity, as if men ever left a perfectly fine marriage for anything but a new woman, new as in young, no doubt. Gwen walked to the window and opened the drapes. No one could see into the ninth floor, and she was too old to incur the interest of a peeping tom anyway.

Below, the lights were surprisingly bright for only a mid-sized city. She’d always loved that glow at night, as if a white heat somehow flooded up and helped, helped anything that was cold, dark, or lost. Maybe Steve had always been lost with her and just righted himself with someone else. He’d found another path that changed her course whether she wanted it to or not.

She felt a wave of home sickness, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever had it before. She’d never gone to camp, hadn’t missed her mother the first time she’d gone to college. But the sadness that rose up in her, like a longing for something she couldn’t even name, made her wish for at least the familiar, maybe just her own bed. Even that made her wonder. With Steve not on the other side was it even her bed, or was it still theirs until some legal document divided it?

Everything in her life felt that kind of foreign. Things were new and unfamiliar at Belmar, but to be honest, they would be like that anywhere she could go. She felt foreign to herself. She’d like to step back into her kitchen and make a cocoa from scratch, just the way Missy loved it, but that kitchen was hours away, empty, and she didn’t know if she could be trusted to not just cry in it. She didn’t know anything anymore. She didn’t know the way to go or the way to be. She’d try to get some sleep and wake up to an empty alarm clock.





Gwen's Journal - September 3rd 1989 – Saturday



When I graduate I’m going to teach in California or Alaska. And then when I’ve done that for at least five years, I’m going to get married. Love is like getting a piece of the pie, and since it’s just one piece of the whole thing, you’ve got to focus on the rest of, you know, the pie, to make sure the whole thing, the pie, comes together just like you want it to.





Gwen's Life - the night before…



Molly steadily led the way down the dorm hall, unscathed by the night's outing. At two a.m. with a couple of iced teas, like they make in Long Island, floating in her bloodstream, Gwen felt a bit scathed. She had to concentrate going past the R.A.'s door. The lime green poster tacked to it outlined the twenty-seven rules for Good Neighbor Behavior. The R.A. probably thought the butterfly stickers softened the blow of twenty-seven ways to hear don’t, but it just made the prison policy creepy.

When Gwen made it past the gauntlet and into their room, she sat down on her bed with her back propped up by a Care Bear pillow. Molly sat cross legged on her bed, like she could stay up the rest of the night with no trouble. Gwen felt more tired than that but still buzzed from her first night in a bar, first drinks consumed in public like a real adult, first night on the dance floor, and the first time she'd given her phone number to a guy. She'd dated once or twice in high school, but those were people you knew well. Most of them you'd known since they still ate glue and got the occasional bean stuck up their nose. There was nothing mysterious or exciting about the dating ritual when you held a decade-old memory like that.

"Think he'll call?" Isn't that what women asked each other after a night out?

Molly shrugged. "They do. They don't. Mostly they do."

"Really?"

"Well, they call me."

Gwen wondered if she'd be the girl who would get called. God, she didn't want to be the kind that didn't, the perpetually waiting-for-him kind. She was going to be an elementary school teacher. She'd be too busy to wait for some guy. Maybe she'd teach in the inner city for a year or someplace where teachers were hard to come by, and she could be really useful. Alaska. Or L.A. Someplace people didn't want to go.

Molly leaned against a pile of pillows, all a great paisley print that matched the comforter. She had a ruffle that went along the bottom of the mattress, something Gwen had never seen before. "He'll call. He's really cute."

"Do cute guys call more?"

"No, less. Way less. But he liked you. I could tell."

"You saw him for, like, a second before he left with his friends."

"Yeah, but he didn't want to go. I could tell because of the backwards walk."

Gwen worried that she should know what that was. She was definitely going to take a psychology class, biology too. What animal walked backwards, a crustacean?

Molly pointed to the door. "When they really want to get away…" She jerked her head that direction, "they whip around."

"Oh-kay…"

Molly got off the bed and crossed the room to stand in front of her. "But that guy kind of stepped back and then walked a little backwards towards his friends." Molly inched towards the door.

Molly was a good roommate. She knew just when to lie. Gwen shook her head anyway. "He did not moonwalk."

Molly laughed and slid her feet across the floor back to her bed. It was a fair attempt at Michael Jackson. "Plus. It's meant to be."

Gwen tried to laugh. She wasn't going to fall for any girl ridiculousness. These were years to be bold, maybe, but not romantic. Romance, or its poor imitation, the deadly mix of lust and wildness, had given her two step-fathers and more maternal boyfriends than could be counted.

"His bolt fit."

"I'll never know."

"Oh, you'd say no to," Molly shook her hair, "green-eyed hair guy?"

"I'm holding out for--"

Molly's eyes popped wide. "Marriage?"

"No. But, you know, the whole package, when I'm ready. I want a relationship that's good and sex. You know, it’s like icing on the cake."

"The relationship is the cake, and sex is the icing?"

"Yeah, exactly."

"When I make cake, I never have enough frosting 'cause I ate most of it before the cake's even out of the oven."

Gwen pointed across the room at the lively girl she was lucky to tag along with. "That’s why guys call you back. I will be call-less from green-eyed hair boy. He's looking for icing."

"They all are."

"Well, when I'm ready… not now, but later, I’ll find cake with just enough frosting."

Molly stared at her in confusion, and Gwen felt compelled to recover some semblance of college coolness. She could name the perfect example of what she was talking about. She baked a lot. "Like a pecan pie."

Molly’s confusion turned to pity. "Shit, Gwen, pie doesn’t even get any frosting."





Back to U…