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By Root 362 0

the spring before I was supposed to go to college I had nowhere to go. I had gotten into George Washington University and Boston University but was partying too much to read my acceptance letters, which asked for deposits to secure a space. So I had nowhere to go. My mother and I drove to Washington, D.C., to convince George Washington University to let me in even though their fall class was now full. My mother’s version of “making a few phone calls” was to put in a physical appearance, as if she were a celebrity whose name the admissions committee failed to see on my application. “Perhaps you didn’t recognize the name? Doris Gissy Darst, child equestrian? Cover of Sports Illustrated, 1956? Youngest person ever on the cover until Nadia Comӑneci?” Surely there had to be someone my mother could take out for a drink that would “get it” about my situation. Apparently there was not. We drove home. A few weekends later, in late May, my mother took Eleanor with her to the State University of New York at Purchase, having Eleanor fill out an application form for me in the car on the way there. I must have been accepted because my parents dropped me and a few suitcases off there for Orientation Weekend in late August. I didn’t go shopping with my mom for new bedspreads and shower caddies and framed posters of Degas ballet dancers. As mother and daughter we made no lists of things I would need, picked out no special sweaters for the fall classes, we didn’t figure out how I would call home or when I would check in with her. My mother told me to watch out for the food, that it would have a lot of starch in it that would make me gain weight. That was about it for preparations and going-off-to-college bonding. I brought my old bedspread and my pillows and some towels from the bathroom and I got in the car. I was set up with a meal plan and given some money and then they gave me a hug and took off. College. No big deal. Just like I suspected.

CRABS AND REHABS

MY BOYFRIEND, Martin, pointed to the light on his desk, the twisty neck of which was pulled down, like a microscope, over a sheet of loose-leaf paper.

“Look,” he said.

Martin was twenty-four to my eighteen; we had begun dating in my junior year in high school and then he had followed me to college, although we never talked about this—one day he just said he was going to college also, my college. It wasn’t hard to get in, you could pretty much call the morning you wanted to come and start that day. So he did. And it wasn’t going well. I’m the youngest kid—I don’t like anyone following me.

“Get under the light. Really get in there,” he insisted.

I bent over the desk and looked at the light’s circle.

“What is that, a pube?”

“Yes, mine. What else do you see, Jeanne?”

I leaned in again, wondering why Martin had to act so bananas all the time. And then I saw it. A teeny little black creature on the pube.

“Is that a flea?”

“I wish it were, Jeanne.”

“Well, what is it then, Martin?”

“You don’t know what it is? You have no idea?”

“No.”

“It’s a crab, Jeanne.”

“A crab?”

“Yes, a crab. A louse. A pubic louse?” Martin yelled. His roommate, Mark, a Keene State transfer student who was a “nontraditional” student (read: older, loser), like Martin, walked in.

Martin glared at me, which was confusing. If he found lice in his mattress, shouldn’t he let Mark know their room had bugs?

“Let’s go,” Martin said, swiping the loose-leaf sheet of paper off the desk and dropping it in the garbage. Mark hung his coat up in the closet.

“Later, man,” Martin said.

“Later,” Mark said.

I was about to say, “Later,” but it seemed like it would have been too many.

Martin walked quickly ahead of me. When we got a little way down the hall he turned back and yelled, “You fucked somebody over Thanksgiving break. I can’t believe you fucked somebody!” A drowsy, bathrobed student walked past us to the hall bathroom with her little pink plastic bathroom caddie.

“I did not fuck anybody over Thanksgiving.” I had drunkenly made out with a couple people but they’d have to have a pretty bad case of crabs