Come and Join the Dance

CHAPTER ONE

A
WEEK BEFORE
, the privet hedges had been shorn, but the fences were still standing. And a green wooden wall shut the college off from the street where cars, unseen, rushed and moaned past. The world remained in order. Two old men marched decorously behind lawn mowers on the vast lawn that would soon be trod to death at Commencement.

The steel grillwork on the gymnasium windows divided the lawn, the old men, into squares. It was possible to find the precise number of squares to an old man. Susan counted eighteen. The Melville question was still to be answered though, and thinking about anything else was wasting time. The examination would be over at twelve, and it was eleven-thirty. There were sixty-three girls in the gymnasium. They were all on Melville. Susan wondered what Melville would have thought of sixty-three girls concentrating on him at once.

Sixty-two—she could not concentrate, although she had repeated “Melville” to herself so often that the name had decomposed. She had become frozen into a deadly laziness. If she moved she would shatter like glass.

A while ago, she had watched, far off, the smooth running of her mind, and had thought, I am doing that, but could not really believe it. But this was before she had forgotten to care about doing well. Elizabethan Shakespeare, Pre-Romantic Blake, Classical Pope, Romantic Keats—they had all been caught; pinned, labeled and laid dead upon the paper. Now there was only Melville to deal with—the last question in the Comprehensive Examination in English Literature, which was the last examination she would ever take. She had expected the occasion to be a kind of ceremony. At twelve o'clock, a heavy black line would be drawn and freedom would happen to her; there would be a life without examinations, no more childhood. But now she could feel none of the excitement of knowing that something was happening for the last time. This was probably because she was tired—she had stayed up studying until four in the morning; the excitement would come at twelve, she supposed. She wanted it to be twelve immediately. Melville was unimportant and all the other questions were unimportant and had nothing to do with what really was going to happen.

She found herself getting up from her chair and walking to the proctor's desk, placing her paper on it—unfinished. It was only twenty to twelve. But the doors of the gymnasium swung behind her. The hall outside with its marble floor was cool and smelled of soap. She had begun to walk very quickly. She wanted to run, but that might have looked peculiar. As it was, the loud click of her heels embarrassed her. There was a sign up:
QUIET PLEASE, AN EXAMINATION IS TAKING PLACE.

Outside, there was the sun and the bewildering, heavy smell of the cut grass, while beyond the green wall everything was moving much too fast in the street. She wondered why she had been in such a hurry, because there was really nothing to do but wait for twelve, after all—she had a date then with Jerry. He had insisted on seeing her, even though she had told him that she had always expected to be alone in her first hour of freedom. Of course, that had only been another one of her gestures, like running out before the examination was over. Jerry didn't understand gestures. Sometimes she felt that he had an unbearably literal mind.

I don't want to see him, she thought. There seemed to be something else she wanted to do, but she was too lazy to think of it. The laziness began to turn into pain, and she decided to go up to her room and change her dress, comb her hair. That would take up another twenty minutes.

The wall that ran around the college was flimsy, easily destroyed. One night a year, in fact, the fraternity boys from Columbia surged across Broadway, shouting and singing, and demolished it. This was a ritual. The girls would leave their beds and stand watching by their windows. As each green plank crashed, they would laugh harshly, uncertainly. There would always be one bold-voiced girl who would taunt the invaders: “Why don't you come up? What are you afraid of?” This would be answered by laughter and an eager cry of “Hey! What floor are you on?”

The boys never came up; when the wall was down, they would walk away, almost casually. The girls would one by one put out their lights, listening tensely as long as the laughter in the streets lasted. Then it would be quiet again. In the morning, there would be the sound of hammering. The boys paid for the new wall, of course—this was part of the ritual.

Beyond the wall, to the west, was the park and beyond that, the river. In the daytime, the park was noisy with children, and in the circle of benches around the fountain there were always the same old ladies sitting with black-gloved, restless hands. There were other places, as one went deeper into the park, where the bushes grew close and heavy and couples lay in the long, soot-stained grass. This was the area named “Down Below”—to the girls in the college it was a miniature wilderness, and it was somewhat of an adventure to be led by a young man down into it on a Saturday night, remembering the housemother's warnings that there were “incidents” there as well as rats.

No one from the college ever went down to the river. Occasionally a child was killed trying to dodge the speeding cars on the highway that ran beside it. And now and then, bums came to sun themselves on the strip of dirty grass that the park provided as a riverbank and tried to catch the polluted fish. The river was dark, foul. From the distance, it looked blue and could be admired from the west windows of the college. It was pleasant to watch the ships sailing past with all the little dots on them that weren't really people.

In ten more days Susan would be on a ship. She was going to Paris. Six months ago she had cashed in the bonds her grandmother had left in her name and made her reservations—it had seemed the thing to do. “Isn't it incredible!” she would cry when she talked about it. “Incredible” was one of her favorite words. So was “strange.” She had learned to say them with just the right amount of breath and wistfulness. Once a boy had said to her, “I love the way you always wonder at things,” and this had embarrassed Susan—it implied an innocence she knew she did not have. But the words came too readily, were too convenient to give up. And they really did describe the world as seen from a distance. She was detached, which was more sophisticated than being innocent, and therefore something to be proud of. So she continued to say, “I felt strange,” rather than “I felt sad,” and a great deal of what she saw around her was also “strange,” and she knew that after she had sailed on the incredible ship to Paris, she would find that Paris was incredible, too.

When she came into her room, she realized suddenly that she had been erased from it. She had not noticed it that morning when, before the examination, she had shipped the last of her books home to Cedarhurst. For weeks there had been an urgency in her to leave, to leave immediately, to rush toward the day when she would drive off in a taxi with her last suitcase, putting the college behind her. Now her pictures were taken down, and even most of her clothes were packed. It was too late to stop herself from moving. The room proved that she was going away. Only the maple furniture would remain, the same furniture the college loaned to each student. Next fall an unknown girl would come to take her place, sleep in her bed. She remembered Mr. Davidson, her advisor, complacently saying that the students never changed—the faces were the same semester after semester, the same things were said, thought, done. That had been a year ago. She had railed at him furiously: “People have no right to exist if they're replaceable.” He had smiled and said, “Well … my, my.” The rage had left her, and she had felt foolish. Now she felt replaceable as well—she was somehow no longer living anywhere. Outside her room, her trunks stood in the corridor with all the other trunks. They were very new and black and solid; in a week they would leave with her. Perhaps if she lived anywhere at all now it was with them—she and her trunks sitting in the corridor, waiting out a week that had not been accounted for.

She heard the bell ring in the gymnasium, and moments afterward the bright voices of girls on the path to the dormitory. It was twelve o'clock. She looked out of her window and saw Jerry on the porch. He was always on time. I'm late, she thought guiltily. She was always late for appointments—she had a horror of waiting.

As she stared at him through the window now, Jerry suddenly became someone she didn't know—a boy with light brown hair wearing a brown jacket, slouched against one of the white limestone pillars. Everything was so much easier when you abstracted someone. She could almost say “I love you” to the boy on the porch who was too far away to hear her; she wasn't able to say it to Jerry. Lately, she couldn't bear the way he waited for those words, his eyes blinking behind their glass lenses, his face positively yellow with unhappiness. “I love you,” he would say to her, and she would have to change the subject, tell him not to take things so seriously. Perhaps she simply ought to lie to him—after all, I'm going away, she thought. The terrifying thing about Jerry was that he was someone she could marry—she could marry him and never have to go alone to Paris—he was only waiting for a signal.

The boy on the porch looked up, spotted her at the window and began to wave. She was supposed to wave back. But she didn't want to. It would only be her hand flopping in the air and it wouldn't mean anything… . But she didn't want to.

He called to her. The window wasn't open; the word came blurred through the glass and sounded a little like her name. Then he began to wave so frantically that it embarrassed her to watch him. Her hands felt peculiarly cold. She moved away from the window. She had taken a freshly ironed dress from the closet; now she put it back and lay down upon her bed.

In a little while, the telephone in the corridor began to ring. It rang about ten times, stopped, then started to ring again, but none of the other girls were around, and she was too lazy to answer it. When the ringing stopped, there was a terrible stillness in the room. She wanted to fall asleep.

At two o'clock she went down into the street, out beyond the green wall. There were so many mirrors on Broadway. Her image floated ahead of her like a balloon, hovering in the windshields of cars, appearing transparent, ghostlike, in the glass doors of Henry's Pharmacy, blue and elongated in the chrome façade of the Riverside Café. She walked briskly, as though she had an appointment, and was careful to turn her head as little as possible. It was agony to be caught looking into mirrors.

People were so eager to detect vanity, to embarrass the vain: “Hey, stop looking at yourself once in a while. You look all right.” She knew she looked “all right.” She had an orderly enough face, although not one she would have chosen. It was too round for her taste and had green eyes in it and a short, straight nose. Her hair hung long, straight down the sides of her face, and was reddish brown. Whenever people told her she was pretty, she was a little surprised and wanted to ask them whether this was really true, but she was always able to manage a short, breathless laugh just in time. Somehow she never quite expected anyone to have thoughts about her—it was rather frightening to discover that you existed behind your own back.

What did others see when they looked at her? She would try to study her face as though it belonged to someone else. This was not vanity—she knew that. If you were truly vain, you were certain of what you saw, certain enough to love your image, delight in it. But her face cheated her. It had a way of rearranging itself when she looked into mirrors, as though it were giving a performance. She would feel her eyebrows rising slightly, her eyes widening, her mouth pinching at the corners as if it were trying to look smaller. The image in the glass always had the same perfect, terrifying blandness. It did not belong to her. Her face could not look that way.

If she could only rush past an infinity of mirrors, she might catch a glimpse of her face someday before it had a chance to freeze. Perhaps it would appear before her for an instant when she turned a corner on a street, or when she raced down a flight of stairs. She would recognize it immediately, even though she had never seen it, and would accept its beauty or ugliness. But it would not be bland. She wondered if she could ever run fast enough.