She almost started to tell Mendel about how anxious she was but saw that, after putting down the last box from the car on the floor, he was heading toward the door. He stopped before he reached it and hesitated; for a moment or two Lizzie thought that her father might, weirdly, want to shake her hand before he left. But instead he reached out and gave her one of the typical Bultmann hugs, a sort of sideways embrace that denied any concession to actually touching one another except in those places that absolutely couldn’t be avoided.
When he was gone, Lizzie closed her eyes and turned around a few times and pointed. When she opened her eyes she saw she’d selected the room’s left side, with its uniform and institutionally bland bed, desk, chair, and dresser. No matter what sort of person her roommate was, Lizzie couldn’t imagine Marla might possibly think one set of furniture was more desirable than the other. She began unpacking her books; she had a brief discussion with herself about the best method to arrange them on the bookshelves and decided just higgledy-piggledy in whatever order they came out of the boxes was fine. There were some of her favorite novels, books that she thought she’d better read if she wanted to be an English major, as well as books by the eclectic group of poets she loved most: A. E. Housman, Randall Jarrell, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Philip Larkin, and Dorothy Parker. Once she’d finished unpacking, she made several trips back and forth from the dorm to Mendel and Lydia’s (as she’d always thought of the house where she’d lived her whole life) to get clothes, sheets, and towels. By the time she finished the last trip, unpacked everything, and made the bed, it was early afternoon.
She’d just gotten to one of her favorite parts in Dodie Smith’s novel, the incident with the bear, when she heard voices at the door.
“Hi,” she said, getting up. “You must be Marla. I’m Lizzie.”
“Wow, you sure got here early. It felt like we left at the crack of dawn.”
“Well, I live here. I mean, in Ann Arbor. Easy walking distance. Practically on the campus.” She knew she sounded ridiculous but didn’t know what to do about it.
“Oh, that’s terrific; you can show me around.”
There was a slight cough from the woman who’d come in the door right behind Marla.
“Oh, sorry, Mom. Lizzie, this is my mother, Abby Cantor.”
Mrs. Cantor smiled at Lizzie, who gamely smiled back. “It’s nice to meet you, Lizzie. How would you girls like to have a late lunch or a very early dinner with me before I leave?”
Marla spoke before Lizzie had a chance to say anything.
“Can we wait till next time you come up? I want to get my stuff put away and then I want Lizzie to give me the grand tour. And you have a long drive home by yourself. You should probably get going before it starts getting dark.”
Mrs. Cantor nodded, admitting that her daughter’s observation was correct, but clearly not happy about the conclusion. “Well, if you’re sure you’ll be okay, I suppose I should really get started.”
“I’ll be fine, Mom.” Marla grinned at Lizzie. “Lizzie will take care of me, won’t you, Lizzie?”
Although she wasn’t quite sure what was going on, Lizzie assured Mrs. Cantor that, yes, she would take care of her daughter, although it seemed to her on not much evidence that Marla could take good care of herself.
Watching Marla’s mother envelop her daughter in a huge hug gave Lizzie a small, jealous pang. “Listen,” Mrs. Cantor said as she gently pulled away from Marla, “college is a new beginning. It’s a chance to start over. You’ll meet tons of new people and take interesting classes. You’ll discover yourself or reinvent yourself. It can be a way to outrun your past.” She stopped, her voice cracking a little.
For a panicked moment, Lizzie wondered whether news of the Great Game had somehow reached the shores of Lake Erie and she was now hearing the lecture certainly due her for playing the leading role in it. But, no, Mrs. Cantor wasn’t looking at her; it was Marla she was addressing these words to.
“Are you girls absolutely sure you don’t want to go to dinner?”
“Mom,” Marla said patiently, “I’ll be fine. You go. We can talk this weekend.”
“Just—” But Mrs. Cantor didn’t finish. She started walking toward the elevator, the heels of her shoes clicking on the wooden floor of the hall.
“God, I thought she’d never leave,” Marla sighed. “Well, I’m not entirely a liar, so how about if I put away some of this stuff first and then you can show me the campus? I came on a tour with my dad and stepmom last year, but since I never thought I’d end up here, I didn’t pay much attention.”
That was fine with Lizzie. For the next hour or so she continued paging through Dodie Smith’s novel, turning back to earlier sections whenever she came too near the end. And in between chapters she studied Marla.
She was taller than Lizzie, which was not saying much, since Lizzie herself was only a smidge above five feet. Her wavy shoulder-length hair was the color of wet sand, and her face and arms were dotted with freckles of the same color. She moved with a competent ease from box to box, sorting and arranging their contents on her side of the room, humming a song Lizzie didn’t recognize. She quickly made her bed, but, unlike Lizzie, Marla didn’t bother with hospital corners. Mendel was a stickler for them (neatness in general was second only to cleanliness in his pantheon of greatest goods), and it was the first habit Lizzie intended to break herself of, although it was now so ingrained that it might be a little more difficult than she’d originally thought. Lacking hospital corners, the blanket and sheets immediately came away from the bottom of the mattress when Marla threw herself down on it with a grand whoosh.
“Unpacking is exhausting. Worse than packing, I think. Well, come on, time’s a-wasting. Show me around the campus a little before we have to be back for dinner.”
They walked through the Law Quad to State Street and then turned right. Lizzie pointed out the Union, where John Kennedy gave his “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” speech when he was running for president and, farther up State, Shaman Drum, her favorite bookstore.
“Looks great,” Marla commented. “If they have a good section of art books, this’ll definitely be where my allowance goes.”
“Oh, they do,” Lizzie assured her, although she had no idea if this was true. “And this is called the Diag,” Lizzie told Marla as they reentered the campus. “There’s where most of our classes will be, I think, in those buildings,” pointing to Mason and Haven Halls. “And over there”—she gestured—“is the UGLI.”
“Ugly?”
“U-G-L-I.” Lizzie spelled out the abbreviation for the Undergraduate Library. “Although lots of people think it actually is. Ugly, I mean.”
“Mmm,” Marla responded absently, not particularly interested in the aesthetics of libraries. By then they were back at Martha Cook, just in time for an uneventful dinner during which Lizzie kept glancing around and thankfully failing to find anyone who looked even vaguely familiar, and then there was a seemingly endless orientation meeting.
Afterward, as they made their way through a crowd of girls up to their room, Marla nudged Lizzie.
“Well, that was all pretty sobering, I thought. Way too many rules; now I know why my mother wanted me to live here. So tell me, why are you here and not one of the other dorms?”