The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [61]
Madeleine watched the march, waiting for a place to jump in. She scanned the faces for someone she knew, her friend Kelly Traub or even Lollie and Pookie Ames. At the same time, her apprehension at running into Mitchell again, or Olivia and Abby, made her hold back, standing slightly behind a paunchy father toting a video camera.
She couldn’t remember which side her tassel was supposed to hang on, left or right.
The graduating class had close to twelve hundred members. They kept coming, two by two, smiling and laughing, giving fist pumps and high fives. But each person who swept by was someone Madeleine had never seen before. After four years at college, nobody was anybody she knew.
Only about a hundred seniors had passed so far, but Madeleine didn’t wait for the rest. The face she wanted to see wasn’t here, anyway. Turning, she walked back through Faunce House Arch and headed up Waterman in the direction of Thayer Street. Hurrying, breaking almost into a run, holding her cap on with one hand, she reached the corner, where traffic was flowing. A minute later, she flagged down a taxi and told the driver to take her to Providence Hospital.
•
They had just finished the joint when the line began to move.
For a half hour Mitchell and Larry had been standing in the blustery shade of Wriston Quad, the midpoint in a long black line of graduating seniors that stretched from the main green down the long path to the ivy-covered arch behind them, and out along Thayer Street. The narrow sidewalks tidied up the line ahead and behind, but in the open space of the quad it bulged, becoming an outdoor party. People were milling around, circulating.
Mitchell blocked the wind with his body so that Larry could light the joint. Everyone was complaining about how cold it was and moving back and forth to stay warm.
There were a lot of ways to defy the day’s solemnities. Some people were wearing their caps at funny angles. Others had decorated them with stickers or paint. Girls opted for feather boas, or Spring Break sunglasses, or mirrored earrings like mini disco balls. Mitchell made the observation that such shows of disobedience were commonplace at graduation ceremonies and, therefore, as time-honored as the traditions they tried to subvert, before taking the joint from Larry and defying the day’s solemnity in his own commonplace way.
“Gaudeamus igitur,” he said, and took a drag.
Like an egg swallowed by a black snake, the signal to march was working its way, by a nearly invisible peristalsis, along the twists and turns of the assembled marchers. But no one appeared to be moving yet. Mitchell kept squinting ahead to see. Finally the signal reached the people immediately in front of Larry and Mitchell and, all at once, the entire line surged forward.
They passed the joint back and forth, smoking it more quickly now.
Ahead in line Mark Klemke turned, wiggling his eyebrows, and said, “I’m naked under this robe.”
A lot of people had brought cameras with them. Commercials had told them to record this moment on film, and so they were going ahead and recording it.
It was possible to feel superior to other people and like a misfit at the same time.
They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner’s hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one. Mitchell and Larry made their way slowly up from the leafy dimness of Wriston Quad. The ground was still coolish, unsunned. Some prankster had climbed the statue of Marcus Aurelius to place a mortarboard on the stoic’s head. His horse had an “82” painted on its steel flank. After ascending the steps alongside Leeds Theatre, they continued up past Sayles Hall and Richardson onto the green. The sky looked like something out of El Greco. Somebody’s program blew past.
Larry offered the roach, but Mitchell shook his head. “I’m stoned,” he said.
“Me, too.”
They were taking small, chain-gang steps, approaching the covered stage set