Unlovely (12 page)

For her part, Claudia was eager to start
the next chapter of her life. She believed she'd learned as much as the
teachers at
Mapleville
High School could possibly
teach her, and she needed to be challenged. Moreover, she was ready to move:
she was tired of her mother's moods alternating between anxious hand-wringing
and false good cheer. Claudia would miss her father, she supposed, but her
relationship with him had suffered on account of his infidelity. She didn't
trust him the way she wanted to, and it made her sad. It would be easier, she
hoped, not to live in the house with him anymore.

She would miss Melanie terribly. Claudia
had invested so much of herself into her relationship with Melanie, and Melanie
had been so important to her for so long, that she couldn't imagine life
without her constant presence. Still, she knew she had to concentrate on
herself and her own goals. It would probably be good for Melanie, too. They
would still be friends, no matter what. They would always be friends. But it
was time for new beginnings.

At the end of August Sylvia stood in the
driveway and wept as Tony backed the car out and turned south to drive his
daughter to the university two hours away. Sylvia had planned to go along, but
the car was packed to the roof. Plus, she didn't want to make things awkward
for her daughter. Claudia was so sensitive, Sylvia was afraid that it would be
too painful for her to have to say her goodbyes in front of all of her new
college friends.

Arriving in the early afternoon, Tony
and Claudia pushed through the crowded dorm lobby to register and collect the
room key. The residence was fairly new and was co-ed, with women living in the
east wing and men in the west. Members of the university lacrosse team were on
hand to help carry up boxes and suitcases, so in very short order Claudia was
installed in her third floor room. The place smelled like paint and Pine-Sol,
which Claudia found entirely agreeable, because it conveyed cleanliness. Tony
took her out to dinner at the student union, and having made sure she was
really and truly okay, kissed her goodbye at the door of the residence and
headed back to
Mapleville
with hopes of getting home
well before midnight.

Claudia, dry-eyed, went back up to her
room. There was a group of girls in the common area, introducing themselves to
one another and chattering excitedly. They were cute and fashionably dressed.
They seemed comfortable with one another already. Claudia carefully avoided
them and headed to her room. She went in, locked the door, and sat down on her
bed.

"I hope they're not always that
noisy," she thought, pulling a German book off the shelf to refresh her
vocabulary.

To make sure there wasn't a physiological explanation
for Claudia's psychological anomalies, she was subjected to a number of tests.
Twice she had to stay up all night so the doctors could perform sleep studies
at a nearby teaching hospital the next day. The technicians led her to a small
room with a cot. She lay down, and they attached electrodes to her head and a
blood pressure cuff to her arm, and then left her alone to fall asleep to the
rhythmic beeping of the monitors. After what seemed like only ten minutes of
rest an assistant woke Claudia up and handed her some paper towels and a
wide-toothed comb. Then she'd head back out to the van, still exhausted.

She also had an MRI done, presumably on
her brain as well, but she could hardly remember a thing about it. Mary Ann
gave her a football shaped pill about an hour before the procedure. After that
it was like a series of snapshots. Claudia could recall a video of John Glenn explaining
the space age technology involved in the MRI, then she remembered lying flat on
her back, her clothes having been magically changed into a hospital gown. She
had a vague memory of jazz music. The next thing she knew, she was back in that
van and headed to the residence again.

She was given an IQ test over the course
of several days. The doctor told her she placed in the very high superior
range. That was no surprise to Claudia. They also gave her a personality assessment,
which Claudia found almost laughable. Not that she wanted to, but it wouldn't
take a genius to thwart the personality assessment. The secret was to be
utterly consistent and to not try to make yourself look like a saint.

"Do you enjoy reading stories of
tragic events in the newspaper?" A person's initial response might be to
answer no, but the fact is that almost everyone enjoys reading about disasters
that befall other people. If you answer yes, then you appear transparent. Then
you just have to be on guard that you remain that way: answer the way a
transparent person would. Then the doctor who interprets the results will know
that it just isn't like you to lie. You are almost pathologically compelled to
be truthful.

As it turned out, regrettably, most of the girls on her
dorm floor were very talkative indeed, and it seemed to Claudia they were far
more preoccupied with their social lives than their studies. As fellow
residents of the honors dormitory, they were supposed to be intellectually-oriented,
but they certainly didn't act like it, and Claudia found it difficult to keep
pretending that they weren't driving her nuts. In time she wouldn't pretend
anymore, but initially she felt she must.

Although school policy dictated that Claudia
couldn't formally declare a major in her freshman year, she had every intention
of concentrating in German. She took a placement exam on the Monday after her
arrival, and discovered she could skip elementary and intermediate German and
go directly into conversation and composition, which she found engaging but not
especially difficult. Her adviser suggested that she take another language as
well, so Claudia signed up for elementary Russian. It had declensions, like
German, and it had a pleasing reputation as a hard language. Claudia found that
she loved it and she did well. Russian was challenging enough that most of the
slow students dropped the course before the end of the first semester. The
people who toughed it out tended to have temperaments more like her own (or so
she imagined), so it was a good fit. Claudia began to consider a double major.
As far as academics went, Claudia couldn't have been more content.

Socially, the first several weeks of
college were difficult. This came as no surprise to Claudia, but it was still
powerfully annoying. The freshmen in her building were forced to participate in
all sorts of games and activities to build camaraderie. There were tie-dye tee
shirt days, ice cream socials, flag football games and picnics at a local state
park, all semi-mandatory. Worst of all were the "getting to know you
games," held every Sunday evening at seven, when the east and west wings
would be herded into the common area.

The apparent goal of the games was to
allow students to learn worthless information about one another. For example,
the resident assistants would ask a silly question ("What is your favorite
city, your favorite restaurant, and your favorite car?"), and each student
would have to answer the question, and then recite the answer of every person
whose turn preceded his. Invariably, no matter how innocent or innocuous the
query, the conversation would devolve from the banal to the coarse and lewd.
Claudia found these pow-wows silly and dull, so she skipped one on the night before
a history quiz. She'd hoped to catch some extra study time in the blessed quiet
of her hall, but the idea backfired. After the group dispersed, the R.A. came
knocking at the door of Claudia's room to see if everything was okay. She'd
stayed a while to be social, and the whole, lengthy interaction was worse than
simply participating in the game would have been. Claudia decided it was easier
just to go and get it over with.

Claudia did make a few friends. A couple
of girls on her floor weren't too bad, and some of her classmates in her
language sections were amusing. As the first semester progressed, Claudia found
herself gravitating to the international students as well. They were more
studious. She enjoyed hearing about their experiences as foreigners in America,
and she would even exchange classroom anecdotes with them over meals before
retiring to her room to study. Their friendship was perfect for her:
intellectual and non-intrusive.

Of all the things in dorm life that this small-town
honor student and only child had to adjust to, the most striking was an
apparent campus-wide obsession with sex. Back in
Mapleville
High School it was common knowledge that many of the students were doing more
than just making out in cars; there were at least three pregnant girls in her
class alone over the course of four years, not counting Melanie. Still, sex
with a boyfriend was whispered about with a best friend, not trumpeted in the
hallway. Here, the girls shared every detail of their dates while they were
brushing their teeth. It was tacky.

Claudia wasn't shocked that so much sex
was going on, but she was a little surprised at the extent to which it captured
the popular imagination. It was the only thing people talked or thought about.
Claudia hated it. She had come to the university expecting to be immersed in
her studies and to be free from adolescent drama. Instead, she found herself a
background character in a trashy soap opera.

It seemed that virtually every girl was
on the make, including the girls on the honors hall. Claudia was familiar with
the phenomenon of the sex-obsessed woman, but she hadn't imagined that pre-med
students and microbiology majors would be coming to dinner in tube tops. Their
clothes were tight, their hair was big,
their
heels
were high. They dressed to go to the library as if they were going clubbing.

And the men, if possible, were worse.
What happened to boys between high school and freshmen orientation to turn them
into satyrs? There they were: doing push-ups in the common area between the
wings, collecting women to set up back-rub chains on the stairs outside the
dorm's rear entrance, and openly gawking and evaluating every woman who walked
by. They'd come in drunk on Friday nights, shouting back and forth to one
another about their hook-ups while the girls giggled and murmured, "You're
so bad!" It was depressing. And worse, Claudia didn't feel that she held
up well under their scrutiny.

Claudia could no longer rely on her
reputation to make her immune from this scene. In high school she'd been a
smart girl; smart girls generally did not get offered booze, drugs or sex. It
just hadn't been an issue in her life. But now she was a free agent; she wasn't
signed with any team. No one knew Claudia or her intellectual abilities –
beyond the fact she lived in the honors dorm – and even if they did, she
suspected it wouldn't matter. Claudia was afraid she was expected to
participate in the bacchanal. She wasn't at all sure she wanted to, or entirely
confident that if she did, she'd know how. She felt outside the scene, largely
unschooled in these matters, and increasingly uncomfortable.

The girls in the restroom spent a lot of
time talking about "getting signals" from guys they were interested
in (or revolted by, as the case may be). Claudia began to worry that she might
be sending out nonverbal messages that she didn't intend. What if she
accidentally signaled availability? Would she be obligated to come across? What
would that entail? In an effort to avoid such tricky situations she dressed
even more conservatively and applied what little makeup she wore with a light
hand. She arranged her hair simply, often just pulling it back into a ponytail
like she'd done since middle school. She tried not to make over-long eye
contact or smile in a way a man might find encouraging, and she walked briskly
with short, purposeful steps, not with the long, languorous strides of a woman
on the prowl.

She felt that she was on exhibit every
time she entered a classroom. Western
Civ
was
especially trying; when she walked into the room she had to pass by a row of
desks occupied by dimwit football players. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday
she passed them, and subjected herself to their appraisal. Once one of them
winked and puckered his lips, throwing a kiss to her. She'd narrowed her eyes
to slits and stared at him contemptuously for several seconds, letting him know
that she wasn't enamored of him or his jock reputation, but she could feel her
face burning with humiliation.

And of course it wasn't just on the
streets or in the classroom that Claudia had to be on guard. She lived in a
coed dormitory, and this meant there was no real rest to be had. It was all
sex, all the time. Even in her home, a place she should be able to relax,
Claudia was forced to be self-consciously modest. There were men in the
cafeteria, men in the hallways. She made an effort to wear her bathrobe cinched
up around her throat when she dashed to the common bathroom, just in case one
of the girls was entertaining a boy or two in her room with the door open or,
heaven forbid, a boy who'd spent the night was taking a shower himself.

There was simply no getting away from it
– not in the dorm, not on the street, not in the classroom. And there was
nothing to be done about it. It was institutional. She learned that when she'd
tried and failed to create a moratorium in the campus's perpetual Saturnalia.
The situation that had spurred her into action had involved one of her
instructors.