Marilyn Horan
An
Education
One
of my biggest regrets in life was never having never gone away to school. So in the spring of 1994, I decided to
apply to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury, Vermont, thinking it
would give me an abbreviated taste of what I had missed by attending Brooklyn
College in my home borough. Lacking
confidence as well as the requisite body of work to qualify for admittance, I
applied to Middlebury as an auditor.
I could attend workshops and classes, stay in the dormitory, eat in the
students’ cafeteria—I just would not have my work discussed and evaluated by
fellow students and visiting writers.
It was fine by me. It would
be a short introduction to the work and techniques of others, readings by
famous authors such as John Irving, an opportunity to be independent from my
husband for a while, and most importantly, to feel what it was like to attend
school in another state, to meet with people from all over, to spend 14 days
engaged in intellectual discussions and social interactions—all that sorority
like, free-wheeling fun I’d missed.
My
husband, Frank, drove me to the campus and we carried my luggage to my assigned
room. While I never considered
myself a clean freak, I did have certain expectations of cleanliness and order
beneath which I would not drop. This was the first sign that perhaps, at 42, I
was too old for dorm life. The dirty socks strewn on the floor, and the untied
sneakers were the first signs that my roommate was a slob. Her running shorts
and panties lying, crotch up, greeted me as I entered what were to be our
shared lodgings, and solidified my judgment of her. Huge black flies were
zooming around the dorm room, whose wide-open windows emphasized the lack of
air conditioning. Shabby chenille
bedspreads covered, but could not camouflage mattresses that sank in the middle
and probably stank all over from years of absorbing human leakage. I decided to
get out of there immediately.
Unless you count my sister and my husband, I had never had to share a
room, let alone bathrooms and showers, with anyone and was not about to start
at this age. This scene shattered my idealized vision of dorm life.
“I’m
going home with you,” I said clutching my husband’s arm.
“Relax,”
he responded, understanding after fifteen years of marriage that I was
sometimes impulsive, and difficult to relax. “We’ll find you a hotel or inn.” So off we went to the housing desk whose manager found me a
peaceful and clean room at a small bed and breakfast about a mile away. On the
way to my new digs, we rented a used car, a wreck, that I drove to the
Bide-a-Way Inn with a suspension that could only have passed inspection
accompanied by a bribe, and whose moist insides reeked of booze, mold, and
floral spray. I relished the
solitude and cool air of the bedroom, kissed my husband good-bye, and prepared
to spend the next two weeks writing.
As an English teacher, I spent so much time talking about writing and
marking essays, but never had time to do any myself. This was my time to bloom.
I
drove to the Middlebury cafeteria for lunch where I introduced myself to a few
people. One woman about my age,
Kiki from Alaska, said she had seen me at the B&B where she, too, had
rented a room. The best way to
describe her was like a mushroom with a long stem. She was thin and bony with a Beatles’ haircut only much more
puffed out. Her skin was wrinkled
like leather that bespoke a life lived outside in nature or inside smoking lots
of cigarettes. The bones of her
arms looked like femurs rather that ulnas or fibias—all wide bone and little
skin. Her rough hands were sinewy
with knuckles like marbles; hands that had done a lot of hard work. She had a
ring full of keys on her jeans and walked like a cowboy. We talked for a while before joining
our writing groups and agreed to meet at the evening’s meal. At dinner we enjoyed the company of a
fortyish man, Jackson, who hailed from Texas. Conversation centered on our backgrounds, jobs, home states,
interests in writing, favorite authors.
After eating, we continued our chitchatting, made more fun and
interesting by the addition of the wine we drank with abandon at the “barn,” a
big, informal space with a bar and music.
So this was what I missed by attending a local university—meeting people
from all across the country, having semi-intellectual talks lasting into the
early morning hours, laughing it up, and, oh yeah, getting drunk. As I got up
to leave the glorious new world I had discovered, my inebriation was obvious to
me and everyone else sober enough to notice or care. I almost fell the minute I
rose from my seat and Jackson said something like, “Whoa, thar, Murrlin. You caint be drivin’ in yur
kindishin.”
“Don’t
worry, Jackson,” Kiki said. “I got
her. I’ll drive her home to our place.
She can get her car tomorrow.”
With that I was carefully escorted by Kiki and Jackson to the auto, and
I was grateful to my new found buddies, one from either end of our great United
States—a country that allows a woman in her forties to experience all the joys
and of college away from home. No
husband to cook for, no dogs to walk, no papers to grade. This was about me, me, and more me, and
I loved it.
I
went to my room across the hall from Kiki and got settled into my pajamas when
I heard a knock on my door. It was
Kiki, also in bedclothes. She invited me into her room to have a nightcap and
to look at the 400 page memoir she had written about growing up in Alaska. The
clean Vermont air blowing in my face on the drive back had invigorated me, so I
accepted, enjoying the idea of a mini pajama party. Kiki handed me a tumbler of wine and pointed me to the love
seat. Once I was settled, she
handed me the tome about her life in the 49th state during the
50s. As she did so, a magazine
fell out of her Alaskan tale. She
picked it up, laughed and said, “Oops!
Look at this, will ya?”
It
was a sex toy/lotion/outfits catalog.
She sat next to me on the small sofa and murmured that she didn’t know
how that got in her book. She
opened the catalog to the pages of dildos and asked me if I had any of them, or
any of the vibrators and gadgets that appeared as she turned the pages. Through
the thick fog of alcohol and waning literary exhilaration came the realization
that I was being set up for seduction.
I froze in my seat, gulped down the wine, and said it was getting late.
Kiki
asked me what I was so nervous about as she began to massage my neck. I had never been in a sexual situation
with a woman before and didn’t know what to do: flight or flight.
I chose flight, and jumped up as if electrified and headed for the
door. She followed me saying,
“What’s the matter? I didn’t mean
anything. What are you so nervous
about? I was just trying to relax
you.” Being insecure I wasn’t sure
if she really did just want to give me a massage. Being polite, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She was, after all, paying me a
compliment in a way, by being either attracted to me or by wanting to take away
my stress.
“No,
no. It’s okay. I am relaxed,” I said. “But I am exhausted and must go to bed
now.”
“Here,”
she said, “Let me walk you to your room.”
Kiki
crossed the hallway opened my door and told me to just lie down and go to
sleep. Great, I thought, I’ll just
pretend to go to bed and she’ll leave. I got under the blankets, lay down on my
front, and the next thing I knew she was sitting astride my back, massaging my
shoulder blades under my pajama top with her incredibly powerful fingers,
gripping me around the waist with her equally powerful knobby knees. This went beyond a friendly
massage. She had me in a position
that more than suggested she was trying to immobilize me. “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “How do I
get rid of this psycho?” I could
buck up like a bronco and fling her sinewy body across the room. I could start snoring and maybe she’d
disappear. I could tell her to get
the fuck off of me. I started to
blame myself for letting it get this far. I should never gone into her room, I
should have said the catalog insulted me, I should have told her her behavior
was inappropriate, I could have laughed and said thanks but no thanks. Instead,
I just began crying, sobbing really.
That seemed to dampen her ardor not a bit. She continued the massage,
getting rougher, her voice demanding: “If you’ll just be quiet and relax, you and I could
have some fun. You never know
until you try.” “Stop! Stop!” I said. “I don’t want to do this.” She dismounted and I began wailing,
partly from guilt, partly from rage, and partly because I saw it as the only
way out of this situation. I said I never should have come for this conference,
I missed my husband, I was going to leave the next day, I was not cut out for
college away from home, I couldn’t write anyway.
“Calm
down,” she said, looking annoyed at what she perceived as an overreaction and a
complete rejection. It was
incomprehensible to me how a person, practically a stranger, had the nerve to
try to seduce me by showing me pictures of dildoes. It was ridiculous. The minute she left, I got up from the
bed, secured my door with the tiny latch, and shoved the dresser in front of
it, and wedged a chair under the doorknob. In the middle of the night when I needed to use the
bathroom, I had to first do lots of furniture moving. I unplugged a lamp to be used as a blunt instrument should
my would-be inamorata need to be further discouraged.
The
next morning I called a taxi and left the inn really early, hangover and all,
to avoid meeting Kiki. Once I got
to the cafeteria I saw Jackson and told him the whole story. He laughed and said, “I knew she was
going to try to put the move on you.
She was flirting with you the whole of last night.”
“What? Flirting with me?” I asked.
“You
mean to tell me a sophisticated lady like you from New York City can’t spot a
woman in comfortable shoes?” That
description was Jackson’s way of saying lesbian, and he used it often during
the rest of the week.
I
couldn’t help thinking that maybe I should have stayed with my original
roommate, the messy girl. That
situation might not have been so physically comfortable, but at least I
wouldn’t have to barricade myself in my room at night. The longer I stayed on the campus, the
more obvious it became to me that casual sex between the attendees was part of
the experience taken for granted.
And the truth is that once Kiki knew that I was not interested in sex
with her, we gradually became dinner buddies, although always accompanied by
Jackson, who, himself tried his luck with me, but failing that, took on a
challenge to change one of the ladies who wear comfortable shoes into a
heterosexual. He swore he was
successful
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