Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [61]
SUZANNE AND I discovered something called accelerated admission, where you could skip your senior year and go straight to college. I didn’t want to leave my friends, but the thought of leaving the high school was cool mountain water after a long, hot run, and I took a test and somehow got into Bradford College. Suzanne was already a student there. She’d stopped wearing hip-huggers and heavy black eyeliner. She spent most of her nights studying in her room, and she began to make friends over there with the kids of doctors and bankers, and sometimes she’d spend the night in one of their dorm rooms. Because our father was a professor she just had to pay for her books, one more thing our mother had to worry about.
Bradford College was a small green campus behind stone walls and iron fences, and it held over three hundred students from around the country and the world, many of them rich. The men were only a year or two older than I was, but they drove BMWs and sports cars with names I’d never heard of. They wore khaki pants and button-down shirts and spoke ironically in classes. “Yes, Professor, but does Aristotle speak to dramaturgy in that way? It seems to me he does not.”
“Yes, but how?”
“You see, Professor, that’s the question, isn’t it?”
There would be some appreciative laughter, a few sardonic smiles, the professor moving on to someone else.
For nearly two hundred years Bradford had been a women’s college, and now it had just begun to admit men and there were far more women, roughly ten to one. So many of them were tall and slim. They had long straight hair and straight teeth and straight postures from what I imagined were childhoods spent riding horses and swimming and playing tennis. They drove convertible coupes and laughed often. Very few of them wore bras and on cool mornings I could see their nipples under their sweaters and turtlenecks. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t not look. The first week of the first semester, I was sixteen. I walked around campus in a leather jacket, my hair shorter now, books under my arm I was actually reading, but around these women, who were eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, I felt like a poor and uncultured boy.
One morning between classes I cut through the student union building, its pool table and soft chairs, its serving counter where you could order a cheeseburger and coffee or hot chocolate. A group of them were over by the picture window which looked out onto the raked lawn. I heard one of them say, “That’s Dubus’s son. Look at him. He’s such a townie.”
I’d heard the word before. They used it for the men they’d see at Ronnie D’s bar down in Bradford Square, the place where my father drank with students and his friends. It’s where some men from the town drank, too—plumbers and electricians and millworkers, Sheetrock hangers and housepainters and off-duty cops: townies.
I enjoyed reading the books—even the biology and economics—and usually I enjoyed the class discussions and tried to be prepared for them, but I was surrounded by people who seemed reared from comfort, most of whom knew where they were headed, too: law school, medical school, business school, a few even to New York City where they would sing, dance, and act. In the smoke room in Academy Hall, a place I walked by often, I’d hear of their aims for the future, and I didn’t have any. All I wanted to do was bench-press 300 pounds and get so big I scared people, bad people, people who could hurt you.
The following May, instead of going to my sociology final, I shot pool in the student union with Sa’eed, a soft-spoken black kid who’d grown up in the slums of Philadelphia where people shot each other regularly. I’d just set up for the break when my sociology professor walked in for a Coke before class. He was heavyset with a beard and glasses, and I liked him. From the counter he smiled over at me. “That’s a good way to prepare for a final. Keeps you relaxed.”
I smiled back. “Yep. I’ll be right there.”
But I didn’t go and got an F in the course.