candidate ever for the site of a World’s Fair. The town is teeming with alumni of all ages, drunkenly toasting Alma Mater and imploring the gods of the gridiron to deliver victory tomorrow. Not that it will really matter if the justification for excessive alcohol intake is celebrating a triumph or mourning a defeat.
I’m sitting at the bar of one those classic campus rath-skellers, eating a hamburger and nursing a beer. A short woman, just shy of middle age and sporting a cascade of blond ringlets she should have cut years ago, sidles next to me.
“You shouldn’t be here all alone tonight. Come over and meet mah friends.”
She’s a type I know all too well. The aging Party-Hearty Gal. Tri Delt, everyone else has. She’s surrendered to her metabolism and forsaken calorie counts. She has to believe there’s at least one man out there who’s looking for a girl with a sense of humor and a head on her shoulders instead of a stick-thin, broomstick-up-her-ass debutante. She’d made sure there was no ring on my finger before she’d approached.
“Class?” she asks.
“I’m not an alumnus,” I say.
“That’s okay, tonight everyone’s a Volunteer!” she says.
I might as well be a gentleman and help her caddy the drinks she’s ordered to her table. Her friends eye me expectantly as we approach. I realize it’s been a setup, sending Little Gloria Bunker up to the bar, all alone. The men stand and shake my hand. The women nod politely, squeezing their chairs together, clearing a space next to Little Gloria.
Andy, Andy, Andy, Andy Nocera, Andy, I repeat as I’m introduced round the table. I take my assigned seat, next to Little Gloria. They whisper among themselves, talking about me, giggling when they realize I know I’m the topic of conversation. They’ve been drinking since five; they’re all a little toasted. The men make crude remarks; the women act offended. Someone belches and everyone pretends to be disgusted. I feel like I’m back in college. I guess that’s what a homecoming is all about.
I got to the party a semester too late. The dormitory alliances and rivalries had been etched in stone when I arrived at Davidson after the Christmas break. The other freshmen had already overcome their bouts of homesickness and laid the foundations of their new world. No one was particularly interested in a newcomer, particularly one who was shy by nature, unsure of himself, not the type to approach a table and introduce himself, a coward who would never make the first move.
So I would find a seat alone, at the far end of the dining room table, and hunker down over a plate of macaroni and cheese and a pint of milk, pretending to be absorbed in the run-on sentences of William Faulkner while I counted the minutes until Friday afternoon when I could run home to Gastonia for the weekend. Later she would admit she’d had her eye on me since the day I’d arrived and that she never got beyond the first thirty pages of the copy of The Sound and the Fury she’d bought as an excuse to strike up a conversation with me that February night. (Valentine’s Day, if memory serves.) And later still, she would admit she knew from that first night I was what she had been looking for.
A boy who had to be approached, who wouldn’t speak until spoken to.
And who would then never shut up.
Alice Atkinson McDermott arrived at Davidson College with one ambition. To be different. Just being here was the first step. She’d made her stand, insisting on matriculating at this small, well-regarded liberal arts college—a spawning ground for communists and sexual libertines, in her father’s certain estimation—instead of the small Catholic women’s colleges her older sisters had been forced to attend. As formidable as those Amazons were, they, unlike her, hadn’t had the good fortune to be born the youngest, the prettiest, and the favorite. And so her father, infamous among television-addicted insomniacs in both Carolinas
I’m sitting at the bar of one those classic campus rath-skellers, eating a hamburger and nursing a beer. A short woman, just shy of middle age and sporting a cascade of blond ringlets she should have cut years ago, sidles next to me.
“You shouldn’t be here all alone tonight. Come over and meet mah friends.”
She’s a type I know all too well. The aging Party-Hearty Gal. Tri Delt, everyone else has. She’s surrendered to her metabolism and forsaken calorie counts. She has to believe there’s at least one man out there who’s looking for a girl with a sense of humor and a head on her shoulders instead of a stick-thin, broomstick-up-her-ass debutante. She’d made sure there was no ring on my finger before she’d approached.
“Class?” she asks.
“I’m not an alumnus,” I say.
“That’s okay, tonight everyone’s a Volunteer!” she says.
I might as well be a gentleman and help her caddy the drinks she’s ordered to her table. Her friends eye me expectantly as we approach. I realize it’s been a setup, sending Little Gloria Bunker up to the bar, all alone. The men stand and shake my hand. The women nod politely, squeezing their chairs together, clearing a space next to Little Gloria.
Andy, Andy, Andy, Andy Nocera, Andy, I repeat as I’m introduced round the table. I take my assigned seat, next to Little Gloria. They whisper among themselves, talking about me, giggling when they realize I know I’m the topic of conversation. They’ve been drinking since five; they’re all a little toasted. The men make crude remarks; the women act offended. Someone belches and everyone pretends to be disgusted. I feel like I’m back in college. I guess that’s what a homecoming is all about.
I got to the party a semester too late. The dormitory alliances and rivalries had been etched in stone when I arrived at Davidson after the Christmas break. The other freshmen had already overcome their bouts of homesickness and laid the foundations of their new world. No one was particularly interested in a newcomer, particularly one who was shy by nature, unsure of himself, not the type to approach a table and introduce himself, a coward who would never make the first move.
So I would find a seat alone, at the far end of the dining room table, and hunker down over a plate of macaroni and cheese and a pint of milk, pretending to be absorbed in the run-on sentences of William Faulkner while I counted the minutes until Friday afternoon when I could run home to Gastonia for the weekend. Later she would admit she’d had her eye on me since the day I’d arrived and that she never got beyond the first thirty pages of the copy of The Sound and the Fury she’d bought as an excuse to strike up a conversation with me that February night. (Valentine’s Day, if memory serves.) And later still, she would admit she knew from that first night I was what she had been looking for.
A boy who had to be approached, who wouldn’t speak until spoken to.
And who would then never shut up.
Alice Atkinson McDermott arrived at Davidson College with one ambition. To be different. Just being here was the first step. She’d made her stand, insisting on matriculating at this small, well-regarded liberal arts college—a spawning ground for communists and sexual libertines, in her father’s certain estimation—instead of the small Catholic women’s colleges her older sisters had been forced to attend. As formidable as those Amazons were, they, unlike her, hadn’t had the good fortune to be born the youngest, the prettiest, and the favorite. And so her father, infamous among television-addicted insomniacs in both Carolinas
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